I wrote:
Whether a brain is turned off or still metabolizing should be irrelevant. It's the prognosis that matters.
jaydfox replied:
And what is the prognosis, if it is no more technically challenging to make two copies of a cryonically suspended person than to make one?
And what is the prognosis, if it is no more technically challenging to make two copies of an axe attack victim than to make one? Or a gunshot victim? Or an advanced Alzheimer's victim? There can be injuries to fully active brains that are so severe that only advanced nanotechnology could fix them. Does this mean that people with such injuries are not really people, but only potential people?
Nice way to duck the issues I raised. Brian, why is killing a skin cell no more morally troubling than destroying a cryonics patient? Both are potential people, who, with the right technology (in fact, a hell of a lot more advanced technology in the case of the cryonics patient), could be turned from potential people to actual people. Neither, without such advanced technology, could be turned into an actual person. And in fact, the technology required to turn either into an actual person could easily be used to create multiple copies. The technology used to defibrilate the heart of someone having a heart attack can't possibly be used to create multiple copies, so there's hardly a moral issue there that's even remotely comparable to using advanced nanotech to create a repaired copy (in situ or in vitro) of a badly damaged cryonics patient. The technology used to restart a hypothermically "offline" brain isn't capable of creating a copy. But reviving a cryonics patient frozen or partially vitrified in the 20th century will have to involve advanced nanotech of some sort, either to repair partial or extensive freezing damage, or possibly to clean up toxicity and undo its effects. It'll amount to creating a copy in situ, under conservative scenarios. I'll ignore for the moment the desires of some to be scanned and copied into a virtual reality environment for being brought up to speed on the then-current society, and afterwards being reconstituted yet again as a physical copy.
As for axe murder victims: what if the only way to save them is to do a sub-micron resolution fMRI, then clone them a new body and use nanobots to build a new brain from scratch, wiring it up based on the fMRI? In effect, the only way to save them is to create a copy from a binary database. Is this saving them, or creating a new person with old person's memories? And at any rate, the database from which the person was created is still in the computer after the person has been "revived", and hence you are obligated to create another copy. After creating the second copy, you are obligated to create a third. Unless you erase the database while you're in the process of reviving the person, that database still has "human rights" that you are obligated to protect.
Then again, the database doesn't know you're reconstituting a copy, so even erasing it while it's in the process of being used to create a physical copy would be as if you were just erasing it in the absense of the physical copy. So yet again you are violating that database's human rights. In other words, once that database is made, the only way to erase it without violating its rights is to run it as a simulation (in the memory it occupies, for copying it into a memory space for simulation would leave the original, and that original would still have rights...), and either run the simulation to a "natural" end (via aging, I suppose), or to just tell the simulation it's a simulation and ask for its permission to be terminated.
Once you give that static, unliving database the same rights as a living person, you're kind of screwed. Yet by your passionate plea for the lives of future axe murder victims, you've made this scenario the only correct choice: if we can make such a database, we must, and once we do, we must reconstitute at least one copy, and we can never destroy the database. And if we are required to reconstitute the database once, we are just as required to reconstitute it again, for not reconstituting it the second time is just as morally wrong as not reconstituting it the first time.
But wait, you say, why is it just as wrong to not revive the person a second time? Well, after the first revival, that revived person begins living a new life, adding new memories, and becomes a different person. The database is no longer the same person as the person who was previously revived, and not existing in the physical world, we are just as obligated to create a physical copy. That is, assuming we're obligated at all. I say we aren't.
I mean, we might be obligated by a last will and testament. But that's not human rights, that's property rights. And as I've already stated, there are great intellectual and physical property rights associated with cryonics patients who must be copied in situ to be revived. But not human rights. No more human rights than a skin cell, passionate images of axe murder victims who I'm denying a second chance at life notwithstanding.
In any case, it is not relevant to suspended animation. Yes, theoretically you can duplicate someone in suspended animation. But theoretically you can duplicate anyone, suspended or not. It is a separate issue.
Theoretically, yes, we can create a duplicate of me as I sit here typing. I am trillions of potential people. Clones could be made from my skin cells, my heart cells, my kidney cells, etc., so I am hundreds of trillions more potential people.
I'm also a non-potential person, an actual, currently active, living, breathing, thinking, emoting person, sitting at this keyboard and typing rather slowly (60-90 WPM, hardly becoming of a self-proclaimed computer geek).
The cryonically preserved person is also trillions of potential people that could be made by copying the person, as well as hundreds of trillions of potential people that could be made from the cells of the preserved person's body. But, uh, not one currently active, living, breathing, thinking, emoting person.
Mere potentiality then, is not the issue. It is the means from turning that potentiality into a reality. Electrical defibrilation, adrenaline injections, CPR, etc., etc. All of these current techniques for reviving people who would otherwise die, they don't even have the remotest chance of creating a physical duplicate. There's the issue of whether one's observer is replaced by a new one, but ignoring this issue for the moment, there is no chance for these technologies to create a duplicate. There may someday be technologies that don't create copies, but could assist in making copies. And then there will be technologies that only make copies. We are no more morally obligated to use such technologies on the dying than we are to use them on people who aren't dying, because all we are is taking the potentiality of the living person, and creating a new physical copy.
Cryonics is in that grey area, because while past cryonics patients will almost certainly require a technology that amounts to physical duplication (in situ or in vitro), future cryonics patients may receive treatments that allow revival without technologies that are capable of creating copies. In those cases, they are equivalent to reviving someone who is clinically dead with CPR. So while the person's observer might be lost to oblivion and replaced with a new one (a separate but related issue), the revival process doesn't create a duplicate. In these cases, there is actually a case to be made that the potentiality of the person obligates us to revive them, at least as much as we're obligated to perform CPR on someone.
