X-Message-Number: 3801
Date: Tue, 7 Feb 1995 02:44:15 +1030
From: Nexus User floeber <>
Subject: BRANCHING IDENTITY

I have been following the discussion about uploading.
I very much agree with Robert Ettinger about the rel-
ationship between the brain - or whole persons, in fact
- and computers. When electricity was first observed to
be able to re-vivify frogs legs it was associated with a
"life force". Its origins in nature, its invisibility, its
uses for communication via the telegraph - analagous to
the "wiring" of the brain...all supported this belief. But
it is more scientific superstition than science, analogy
and poetry...but not theory. This is what "uploading" has
also, as a concept. Regardless of its practicality it has
undertones of being "saved" - and I don't mean in the "file"
sense! The gramaphone was electrically driven, and didn't it
store information, just like the brain. Communication, memory,
and now thought as well. This analogy between electricity and
the brain - (consider Mary Shelly's novel "Frankenstein") -
held back the realization that the brain was biochemically 
driven. Many people still say that the brain is like a comp-
uter. But it is only like a computer as a tape-recorder is
like "memory storage" - in an analogous way. The electrical
activity that can be measured using electrodes attached to
a person's scalp measure the effects of the brain's function-
ing - not the cause of it.

If a whole and exact duplicate of a person -their
cloned brain AND body is what I consider is needed -
were produced, then that person would still need to be 
"uploaded" to produce that duplicate. And remember, if
such an "upload" were possible then so would a "copy"
command, rather than a "move" command. What would be
the value of that?....But I would still like to know how
John Clark would achieve it...surely a cloned body is
the perfect receptacle for whatever it is that it is
intended to upload!

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=3801