I am honestly really surprised that you believe this, Jay. I kind of got what you were saying, with the black knight and all that, and have been thinking a great deal about both sides of this issue, even before had been leaning more towards Brian's position but was still concerned enough by yours to raise fairly serious issues.
But that last post, what you're saying, I just don't see how you can defend THAT as making any sense. Sure, you can't KNOW for certain that an objective observer has survived, but that leads me into my philosophical background, you can't exactly know anything, (the whole branch of epistemology, Descartes' deceiving demon, The Matrix and all that) especially when perspective is concerned - but in science and, basically, in life, we concern ourselves with things that we can observe to be true. As someone else said, if that was the scenario, you basically would die every Planck instant, indeed, "you" would never really be "alive" in this super-demanding sense you are suggesting, we would never be there long enough. I think we're more like a piece of animation, in that sense: we only seem to have a continuous existence because the moments or individual "frames" pass much faster then we can ever register: as long as all the frames are preserved, the cartoon can always be played again.
To me, your belief seems to be of a somewhat backwards, almost religion-like nature, really what your talking about more or less is a fundamental "soul", whether or not you are careful to avoid use of that word- your soul is kind of an opposite of the traditional idea of a soul, instead of being immortal and fundamentally indestructible, you seem to posit a kind of "supermortal" soul, one which is so fragile and impermanent that any minor bump or bruise in flow of continuity extinguishes it, a soul that can be destroyed even within the case of a normal, living lifetime, albeit under rare circumstances, but the basic concept is no less unprovable or unrealistic than the judeo-christian soul, and probably even more unreasonable. Assigning arbitrary significance to individual portions of nature, which are more complex but no more "special" or operate on no different fundamental principles than anything else. Look at where we came from, unless you don't believe in evolution, either. I really don't mean to, like, persecute you, I know you were expecting that, but it just seems like, perhaps without meaning to, you are progressive on many issues but still cling to outdated lines of reasoning, though by other names, on others.
At what point does intelligence begin, and where does it end? The answers are vague and imprecise, not absolute and defining. I agree that perfect duplication raises more difficult and harder-to-resolve issues, and I do see how the two scenarios could be compared, BUT, they are not the same, even in theory, and even with duplication, I am not at all convinced that they wouldn't both be you at the exact moment of duplication, as to which one's "eyes you would be seeing out of", I don't exactly know- granted it boggles our minds because such a thing is hard to conceptualize, maybe split-sceen awareness
, but I think that if and when such a thing actually happened (quantumality might make it impossible, --ed.), I think the actuality of the situation would be something self-consistent and necessarily rational, without the complication of many possible yous inhabiting a messy phantom neverland between actually being the person they think they are and sort of not. And to say that awakened coma patients are already living there, as someone who has extensively studied science, philosophy, and life, I can with some authority say that's just dumb, and more important, I can't see it being true, no matter how you slice it. If you think I'm wrong, can you offer any more compelling evidence?
P.S. When I started this thread, and up till now, I remain more interested in the hard science and social viability of cryonics than the philosophical conundrums, I think that whole thing deserves it's own thread, and probably belongs more on Philosophy. Any chance I could get you all to focus more on those aspects, and worry about "subjective survivability" or not ONCE we're sure we know how to, technologically and actually, survive it at all? I realize that to those in the camp that are convinced it isn't aren't worried about this if they think it won't save them anyway, but, I mean, that is just, to me, so irrational that it holds up legitimate work as to be considered dangerous. Then there's the people who think that even with continuous survivability, you lose yourself slowly because you change over time and lose old memories. Where does it all end? If you look hard enough, you can always find ways of twisting it to describe even successful processes as failures in some way, shape, or form, but at the end of the day, electricity either turns on lights or it doesn't.
Edited by manowater989, 12 August 2005 - 01:16 PM.
LongeCity
