John wrote:
I think your argument has some credibility but is no brick-wall for the soul-theorist: If you believe in the further fact, then all those patients might indeed have "died" and been replaced by another further fact. How many people believe something is not always well correlated with its actual truth.
Let me be more explicit. My main complaint with objections to cryonics because it involves interrupting a process is that these objections invariably emanate from a DOUBLE STANDARD. Cryonics is a very esoteric context in which to bring up the process continuity issue because almost nobody is doing cryonics, and the people who are doing it have no alternative except death. But in ordinary medicine, nobody gives a darn about process continuity. Brain activity is a freely maleable parameter manipulated at will to achieve whatever end medical result is desired. In some contexts, complete suppression of brain activity is DESIRABLE and deliberately induced because it is neuroprotective.
Do you see where I'm coming from? In ordinary medicine, doctors and patients' families (as far as I know) don't give a second thought to brain inactivation
per se if a therapy requires it. Yes, side effects and incidental damage are always issues, but nobody questions the basic idea of inactivation. But bring up cryonics, and suddenly brain inactivation is a big philosophical issue. It's a double standard, and it's very frustrating. Companies will sell Automatic External Defibrillator units by the thousands, and nobody cares that practically everyone who is saved by these units are being saved from a state of NO BRAIN ACTIVITY. But bring up cryonics, and people demand proof that they will not wake up as copies. It's enough to drive a sane man mad.
Getting to the actual philosophical question, as far as I'm concerned once waking consciousness is wiped out, the whole process that is me is wiped out until the process is reestablished. Once a person is unconscious, all attempts to designate which of the constellation of processes that may or may not exist during unconsciousness as "essential" for remaining an "original" person are entirely arbitrary. Think about it. Is electrical activity required? What kind of electrical activity (What frequencies? Is burst suppression fatal, or are somatosensory evoked potentials enough?)? Is activity of certain receptors or ezymes required? Is molecular diffusion required? Is molecular vibration enough of a process to preserve personhood, in which case liquid nitrogen preserves life, but liquid helium is fatal? What about quantum zero point energy? Maybe absolute zero is survivable afterall? Once you abandon the conventional medical criterion of restoration of a waking state of substatial neurological similarity to the patient when last awake, everything else is like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of pin. Pointless.
Ultimately Ralph Merkle's "information theoretic criterion for death"
http://www.alcor.org...in.htm#CRITERIAis the only one that makes sense because it's the only one based on measurable parameters.
---BrianW
Edited by bgwowk, 25 September 2005 - 06:29 PM.