X-Message-Number: 6631
From: 
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 1996 14:24:59 -0400
Subject: SCI. CRYONICS extended people

                     WHERE AND WHEN ARE YOU?

              The Spacetime Locus of Consciousness

BACKGROUND 

For cryonicists and immortalists, certain arcane areas of science and
philosophy have intensely personal and practical significance. In particular,
we want to survive--but the criteria of survival remain unknown. For example,
there is no agreement on whether you "really" share identity with a duplicate
or with a continuer or successor. 

Of course, most of us just blunder along and rely on intuition and "common
sense." But intuition is notoriously fallible, and if "common sense" starts
from the wrong premises then it isn't sense at all. Although most of our
choices in life result just from guesses based on imperfect information,
still we would like to clear away the haze as much as possible.

As just one example of the relevance of these questions, Arthur C. Clarke is
reported to reject cryonics because, to paraphrase his reported words, "Every
ten years or so I am a different person anyway." To be sure, ostensible
reasons for rejecting cryonics are seldom the real ones; nevertheless, we
have to take this seriously. Let's look briefly, then, at some questions of
existence in spacetime.

My starting point is that the ground of being is in feeling, which
constitutes or underlies the capacity for subjective experience, which is
being or LAWKI (life-as-we-know-it). Thus feeling also underlies
consciousness (which is the integration of feeling and computing), and
distinguishes beings from robots. The physical basis of feeling I call the
"self circuit" or the "subjective circuit"--although of course it may be
distributed over segments of the brain (and over time!) and does not
necessarily have much in common with an ordinary electric circuit.   

The one and only rock-bottom, physical/biological root of values is
FEEL-GOOD. Apparently the only things that can ever matter to
you--directly--are your own internal satisfactions or brain states. The only
valid criterion of choice is maximization of your personal future
satisfaction over time. Correct assessments and calculations are VERY
difficult, because of the many apparent internal conflicts, among other
things; but we are always concerned with the FUTURE, since the past and
present are probably beyond our influence.    

WHY YOU ARE DISTRIBUTED OVER SPACE AND TIME 

Obvious requirements of being are that your consciousness have non-zero
volume and non-zero duration. 

Spelling out the "obvious"--and for now leaving out of account the possible
complications of quantum theory--we note:

First, consciousness is a mechanism (or an aspect of a mechanism), and that a
mechanism requires detail. Since (by definition) there can be no detail at a
geometric point in space, you cannot exist at a point, hence must have
non-zero volume. Consciousness is space-binding. 

Second, consciousness requires mental events, and an event requires duration.
(Nothing can happen at a single instant of time, if there is such a thing.)
Hence your existence requires non-zero duration. Consciousness is
time-binding. 

In slightly less abstruse language, subjective experience depends on events
in your brain, involving communication between different parts of the brain.
Hence even the smallest experience must span space and time. To exist at all,
you require a non-zero volume of spacetime.

REMARKABLE IMPLICATIONS 

It seems fairly clear that, if we have extension in space and time, those
extensions may be flexible, even manipulable. 

Presumably you (or an incarnation of you) survive, in the ordinary course of
events, for at least about 1/20 second, which is roughly the limit of human
discrimination between stimuli. But unless you have something very close to a
simple film-frame existence, with no overlap between frames, it seems likely
that you (or parts of aspects of you) have objective and subjective
connections to somewhat more distant regions of spacetime. Quantum
conjectures reinforce such notions.

By extension and iteration, it seems to follow that YOU may exist, or partly
exist, in rather remote times and places. By arguments too long to include
here, it may even be possible that you share identity--in some sense and
degree--with "other" people in different times and places, as various
Oriental mystics have speculated or even insisted. Such results would be very
strange indeed--but as Clarke and others have noted, the universe is not only
stranger than we imagine, but probably stranger than we CAN imagine.

If we give credence to some of these far-out possibilities, then I could be
wrong in saying that nothing matters--directly--except what happens inside
your own skull. But we must be very careful to distinguish between degrees of
probability, and not treat all "possibilities" on an equal footing.

BACK TO COMMON SENSE 

What is suggested by the above brief discussion is that--perhaps--most of us
were right all along in our "inverse-square-law" attitude toward psychic
investment. I.e., we regard as more important those potential events, and
those people or objects or situations, that are closer in time and space,
other things equal. 

But we must strenuously avoid any too simple-minded applications of this
tenet. Too lazy an interpretation of this rule results in choice of
short-term gratification over longer term and more global benefit. 

In terms of cryonics, nothing is new. We try to save both material and
information as completely and reliably as possible. But the unknowns--while
leaving open the possibility of inexorable doom in a user-unfriendly
universe--also reinforce the possibilities for optimism, for hope in the face
of the bleakest "reality." We just don't know enough to make hopelessness
realistic in ANY situation.

R.C.W. Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society


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