54 replies to this topic

[chubtoad]

I don't see a difference whether you are cryonically frozen, completely destroyed then replicated, replicated then have the first copy destroyed, asleep, passed out, or whatever else of that nature. I see no magic person that is continued from time to time. Just a lot of similar entities with memories. What evidence is there for this continued self?

[bgwowk]

Sense-of-self is a subjective fact of reality just as free will is a subjective fact (although objectively it probably does not exist). Being nihilistic about self is like noting the difficulty of isolating feeling among interacting neurons. Yet feeling exists.

Having said that, I agree that all scenarios you present are objectively equivalent in their end result. They therefore must result in the same subjective sense of self if experience is generated by objective reality (materialism).

---BrianW

Edited by bgwowk, 26 September 2005 - 05:00 AM.

[chubtoad]

I am not questioning the existence of subjective experience, it is the idea of continuation I have a problem with. To use the feeling analogy, it would be like saying the anger you feel now is somehow the same as the anger you felt earlier. We don't think of emotions as continuing entities, they are either there or they are not, we are angry or we are not. So why expect there to be some continuing self, a person is having a subjective experience or they are not, why say that this subjective experience is somehow the same as an earlier one?

[John Schloendorn]

Would you be equally satisifed whether it is you in particular or a vast multitude of persons other than you who get to experience an unending continuity of the beautiful process?

I cannot answer that, because it presumes a continuing, metaphysically distinct "you" entity, separate from the experiences it has (called above a "further fact"), which I know nothing about.

Do you have the same sense of loss when a person dies as you would if you personally encountered a devastating circumstance in which you knew that your life would certainly be finite?

Although I luckily did not have such an experience, I'll try to speculate. I do grieve for every sentient creature who dies involuntarily, but I think my sense of loss partially also depended on how much I appreciated one's inner beauty before they died, and also in (smaller) part how similar our values were (maybe a couple of other things, but you get the idea). Sorry if this is straightforward. Since I know myself best (speaking for the moment) and agree with my values most, I guess I would grieve about my own imminent death most. (Although I consider this formalism almost absurdly abstract, I hope it still coveys something that you can make sense of...)

[Clifford Greenblatt]

Immortalist Mike Perry wrote about the problem of memory being lost to deep time in either Cryonics or Venturist Monthly News more than a decade ago.  I remember him suggesting that beings might very well assign high weight of importance to early memories because they would be the anchor that held personal identity intact across great spans of time.

Assigning high weight of importance to the earliest segments makes much sense in something like scientific notation of real numbers in which digits quickly lose significance as they get further away from the first digit. However, a person's memories are somewhat different from this. How much do you remember from the first month of your life? Also, how much do you care about remembering exactly what you ate for dinner every evening for the first twenty years of your life?

[bgwowk]

Clifford wrote:

How much do you remember from the first month of your life?

Nothing consciously, from which an argument might be made that that person is a deceased predecessor.

Also, how much do you care about remembering exactly what you ate for dinner every evening for the first twenty years of your life?

I would give a lot to remember the first 20 years of my life in such detail. I grieve for the loss of those memories everyday.

Chubtoad wrote:

So why expect there to be some continuing self, a person is having a subjective experience or they are not, why say that this subjective experience is somehow the same as an earlier one?

Most people find comfort in a belief that self is immortal. My more modest religion is that self can be maintained over a corporeal lifetime, athough support for this belief is tenuous at times. Self is as self does. How's that for a summary?

---BrianW

[Clifford Greenblatt]

Does a healthy person lose a great deal of memory with time or is long term memory well retained but difficult to access?

Suppose you celebrate your quintillionth birthday. To ensure retention of historical memories without cluttering your brain, you have a basic means of sentient experience with you all the time and a gigantic memory archive storage that is physically separate from you. You offload all memories to the archive and keep in your brain only the memories that are essential to your present activities. You are free to download and access any of your old memories whenever you want.

Now, suppose you and your best friend decide to swap your memory archives for a day just to see what it is like to be the other person. The memory archives contain a huge wealth of memories from your first billion years of life. Those memories are so old that you make minuscule use of them in your present daily life. On the archive swap day, you and your friend spend the day reminiscing on each others’ early memories. Do you and your best friend actually swap personal identities for the day?

Edited by Clifford Greenblatt, 28 September 2005 - 09:40 AM.

[Infernity]

Aye Cliff. Well partially.

The thing is, is they swap all these memories, means they swap all the life experience. Now when they swap back- non of them shall remember the other's memories, because swapping means also the consciousness and the p;ace where you now think you'll remember with it his memories. But no, it will be total him, and total you. The only thing that will not make you two the other two, is that both are still genetic creatures, who look in a specific way, and will have the 'life experience' that the other don't of- genes.

You must Download someones information to know what it is like to be him, not swap, because then you will be in him, and won't record the him in you.

-Infernity

[bgwowk]

Now, suppose you and your best friend decide to swap your memory archives for a day just to see what it is like to be the other person. The memory archives contain a huge wealth of memories from your first billion years of life. Those memories are so old that you make minuscule use of them in your present daily life. On the archive swap day, you and your friend spend the day reminiscing on each others’ early memories. Do you and your best friend actually swap personal identities for the day?

To be clear, this is a *partial* (oldest memories only) replacement. Rather than a swapping of identities, it seems more accurate to say that two new identities (novel combinations of old and new memories) have been created for a day.

While early life memories are important to longevity in any memory-based definition of identity, it's still the totality of memory that would define identity. I suppose we also have to acknowledge a processing algorithm component to identity also, since at any given moment most of our memories are off line (not being consciously accessed) yet we believe (naively?) that identity still persists moment to moment.

By the way, Clifford, do you offer these thought experiments just to make us think, or do you have a particular personal view of identity you are defending? With every new experiment, you are turning me into a Chubtoad identity nihilist. Forgive me if you've previously expressed your views, and I don't remember due to the day-to-day morphing of my identity.

---BrianW

[bgwowk]

Like I said, cosmos, self is as self does.

---BrianW

[justinb]

I am afraid that when it comes to consciousness and identity, no-one has any clue of what they are talking about.

The only people that do are the neuroscientists that have been studying the brain for several decades.

Most of them have no idea what they are talking about half of the time either.

Anyone who thinks they know anything significant about identity is a fool.

To clarify, knowing that we don't have Free Will is not a significant fact. It is only significant to those that believe or used to believe in FW.

The fact is, we have no idea if cryonics is going to work or not. We may never know. You can argue about it until you are blue in the face, nothing will change that fact.

It is a shot in the dark, but it is better than no shot at all. [thumb]

[lancelot1700]

On a side note. Do we really loose memories? Hasn't hypnotic regression went back into peoples childhood with clarity?

[Clifford Greenblatt]

Brian, the thought experiments I posted were not for the purpose of defending a particular view of identity but rather for the purpose of helping me gain some insight into how others view personal identity. My personal view is that the key to personal identity is found in sentience rather than in memories, but I will not attempt to defend that position here. For now, I am grateful for the thoughts on the importance of memories that you have shared.

Infernity, if one person accesses another's memory archives, the data retreived could be facts about events in the person's life rather than the actual feelings that the person felt in the exact way that the person felt them. Visual memories may have to be reformatted somewhat to properly interface with the person's particular brain mapping. Even when a person of today recalls experiences from the past, the person may feel much differently about those facts today than the person felt when they were originally experienced.

[justinb]

Brian, the thought experiments I posted were not for the purpose of defending a particular view of identity but rather for the purpose of helping me gain some insight into how others view personal identity. My personal view is that the key to personal identity is found in sentience rather than in memories, but I will not attempt to defend that position here. For now, I am grateful for the thoughts on the importance of memories that you have shared.

Infernity, if one person accesses another's memory archives, the data retreived could be facts about events in the person's life rather than the actual feelings that the person felt in the exact way that the person felt them. Visual memories may have to be reformatted somewhat to properly interface with the person's particular brain mapping. Even when a person of today recalls experiences from the past, the person may feel much differently about those facts today than the person felt when they were originally experienced.

Clifford,

Do you know how memories are stored?

[bgwowk]

The fact is, we have no idea if cryonics is going to work or not. We may never know. You can argue about it until you are blue in the face, nothing will change that fact.

Justin, don't confuse the technical difficulties of cryonics with the philosophical issues, which are much simpler. What started this thread was somebody saying

It is not a suspended animation / sleep kind of thing.

which is wrong. Now if you want to say "we have no idea whether sleep works or not" or "we have no idea whether people that wake from suspended animation in medicine today are still the same people", you can say that. But IMHO that would be a bizarre thing to say. What I will not let people get away with is isolating and beating up on cryonics with standards different than they apply to conventional medicine, where people already wake from conditions that are qualitatively the same as cryonics.

---BrianW

[justinb]

What do you mean? People that are cryopreserved are not "just sleeping"! Their brain starts to die after about 6 minutes of lack of oxygen. By the time someone gets into a cryotank and is completely vitrified, a significant portion of their brain has been lost. Plus, if someone is asleep, their body is still alive, not vitrified. If I am wrong on this, and as of now I see no way of how I could be, then please correct me.

Edited by justinb, 29 September 2005 - 03:39 AM.

[bgwowk]

Justin, you misunderstand. I'm not saying that there isn't damage in cryonics as currently done, and that this damage doesn't create uncertaintly. What I dispute is what the original poster said, which quoted more fully was

It is not a suspended animation / sleep kind of thing.

Wouldn't it be like this? There are no neurons active for years, conciousness is completely turned off, unlike in sleep.

This is a criticism of cryonics not on the basis of damage, but on the basis that cryonics creates a unique philosophical state even if there were no damage. This is not correct. Cryonics, by turning people off, is not a unique philosophical state because medicine already turns people off and then back on. The only issue in medical resuscitation is DAMAGE and repair, not whether or how long function has been turned off. This obsession with function in popular culture is a relic of 19th-century Vitalism.

In summary, cryonics-- in concept if not yet execution --is a "suspended animation"-like thing because it is simply an extension of clinical suspended animation as already practiced in medicine, but to lower temperatures and longer times. Conconsciousness and electrical brain activity is completely turned off in both cases.

---BrianW

[justinb]

I think the damage problem brings in an enormous amount of philosophical baggage. The person is frozen. It is far more complicated then putting someout for a few minutes and then bringing them back. Resusciatation implies functionality, or the immediate potential there of, while vitrification does not. How are we to resuscitate a person that couldn't be resuscitated to begin with?

-Edit-
That, within itself, brings in an entire range of problems. Damage or no damage. And as we all know, there is a lot of damage done to the brain before a person is vitrified. Isn't it true that vitrification still produces a small amount of damage too?

[Clifford Greenblatt]

Clifford,

Do you know how memories are stored?

I know how memories are stored in computers but I do not know the details of memory storage in a person's brain. A research neuorologist would know much more about this than I would. Also, a number of Immortality Institute members and Conference speakers may be able to tell you much about memory storage in the brain. However, I think science is still a long way from fully understanding this. Your question reminds me about a dream I had about three years ago. Investigators extracted memories from the brain of a deceased witness to a murder in order to solve the crime. They knew where in the brain to find the latest memories.

[bgwowk]

Justin, forget damage for a minute. Imagine hypothetical perfect, reversible biostasis. The poster who started this thread was claiming that even perfect, demonstrably reversible biostasis would be a medically unique state because no one had ever been revived before after brain inactivation. THAT is not true. THAT is what I'm arguing against. People have been revived after brain inactivation.

How are we to resuscitate a person that couldn't be resuscitated to begin with?

When cryonics is done using good technology with a standby team, patients could be resuscitated during the early stages of the procedure

http://www.alcor.org...arySupport.html

It's the same situation with patients who donate organs under new "non-beating-heart donor" conditions. Just because you are legally dead doesn't mean you can't be resuscitated.

Of course cryonics is also done under conditions where resuscitation with current technology is impossible, and the end result of cryopreservation in any case is currently a state from resuscitation (at least any kind of resuscitation you would want) cannot be done with current technology.

Resuscitatation implies functionality, or the immediate potential there of, while vitrification does not.

You are again implying that cryonics patients have crossed a metaphysical line. There is no such line. In medical suspended animation or cryonics you have a brain in a state that is physically incapable of functioning. The chemistry is wrong. Specific steps have to be taken to restore normal chemical composition, chemical balances, oxygenation, and homeostasis. Brains can currently resume function after being stopped at either +38 degC, 0 degC, or -20 degC (brain pieces even lower than that). The specific things you have to do are different, but the theme of gradually restoring a normal physio-chemical state using whatever tools are necessary is universal.

I think the damage problem brings in an enormous amount of philosophical baggage.

Neurological injury always raises philosophical questions. After how much memory loss due to injury is a person no longer the original person? But these questions are not unique to cryonics.

---BrianW

P.S. I liked your old avatars much better.

[justinb]

People have been revived after brain inactivation.

Don't you mean heart inactivation? How can a person be revived if their brain is completely inactive?! Doesn't brain inactivation mean prevalent brain death?

Wouldn't freezing the individual cause many problems in resuscitation? Would there not be many issues involved in "bringing" a person back?

The chemistry, from my limited understanding, would be chaotic at best, would it not?

You are again implying that cryonics patients have crossed a metaphysical line.

I believe I have every right too do so. The person starts to loose neurons after 6 minutes of no oxygen. I don't mean to pry, but how long does it take until, on average, for someone to undergo vitrification and freezing? Isn't there a lot of damage being done because of our inability to stop brain decay until vitrification and freezing is complete? Wouldn't they have "crossed" the metaphysical line when key areas of the brain start to decay? Brain death brings in to focus rather dubious problems with cryonics. We are forced to stretch are knowledge and imagination to their limits.

P.S.

I like the statue. If I find a equally cool picture of a live woman to replace it, than I will.

[bgwowk]

Justinb wrote:

Don't you mean heart inactivation?

No.

How can a person be revived if their brain is completely inactive?!

If you restore a normal physical and chemical state inside a brain (the correct temperature, chemical constitution, oxygen and nutrients), a stopped brain will resume operating. That's what brains do. That's what all living things do. The operation of living things depends on physical constitution, not any mythical vital force. I give numerous clinical examples of stopped brains restarting in my Imminst book chapter

http://www.alcor.org...ltimetravel.htm

Doesn't brain inactivation mean prevalent brain death?

That's pure mythology. Brains don't die when they stop working. Damage has to happen. Quoting from the Alcor FAQ on this subject

http://www.alcor.org...html#braindeath

A. It is a myth that "brain death" occurs after only a few minutes without oxygen. In medicine, brain death refers to an irreversible loss of all activity of the entire brain, including brain stem, in a patient being maintained on life support. To formally diagnose “brain death” in a patient who has suffered cardiac death (stopped heart), it is necessary to first restart blood circulation and perform neurological tests many hours later. A diagnosis of brain death cannot be made in absence of blood circulation because the brain cannot reveal its true state unless it has access to a supply of oxygen and nutrients.

It’s true that a patient deprived of oxygen at normal body temperature for many minutes, and then revived, will likely be diagnosed as brain dead the next day. But this is not because brain death was caused by the period of time without oxygen. It would be more accurate to say that brain death was caused by resuscitation in absence of adequate technology to stop the injured brain from self-destructing in the hours following resuscitation.

You wrote:

The person starts to loose neurons after 6 minutes of no oxygen.

You mean like neurons go poof, poof, and disappear. Cerebral ischemic injury is much more complicated than that.

http://www.ncbi.nlm....1&dopt=Abstract

The main problem isn't acute cell loss, it's swelling and other problems that make blood flow hard to restore after many minutes of warm ischemia (stopped blood flow). This popular vision of the brain turning to mush after 6 minutes is completely wrong. Animals have been revived after much longer than that with experimental methods to reverse specific damage mechanisms. Remember the cardinal rule: IF YOU REVERSE THE DAMAGE (by whatever means), THE ORGANISM WILL REVIVE. Always.

I don't mean to pry, but how long does it take until, on average, for someone to undergo vitrification and freezing?

This can be highly variable. If someone goes down at a hospice in Scottsdale, you can ideally have them on life support within two minutes and the whole issue of warm cerebral ischemic injury goes away. Your phrasing of this question suggests that you still don't understand that cryonics procedures are designed to keep the brain biologically alive until vitrification procedures begin.

Of course in many cases the delays are much longer. But such delays are not part of cryonics. They are a CLASS OF CONDITIONS (advanced cerebral ischemic injury) that cryonics seeks to treat.

http://www.alcor.org...reForDeath.html

As an example, if we lived in a society where half of all people legally died from being shot in the head, you wouldn't criticize cryonics as being based on a foolish belief that gunshoot wounds to the head were reversible. You could criticize people for bothering with cryonics under such conditions, but getting shot in the head is not an intrinsic part of cryonics. Neither is long ischemic injury.

Brain death brings in to focus rather dubious problems with cryonics.

I trust that misconception is now disposed of. I'm not aware of cryonics ever having been done on patient with a diagnosis of brain death, and it would be of questionable value if it were.

---BrianW

[justinb]

Ahh, ok.

Thanks!

[armrha]

As I understand it, a frozen body would be more like a blueprint for building a new body, assuming all the information would be preserved. It is not a suspended animation / sleep kind of thing.

Wouldn't it be like this? There are no neurons active for years, conciousness is completely turned off, unlike in sleep.


In my eyes this implies, that the reactivated person would only be a copy of the frozen one. The nanobots used the frozen body as a construction manual for this specific person, this specific neural connection. The data for reconstruction could as well be stored somewhere else - electronically, after some sort of scanning procedure.


Of course the copy would have the same memories and would claim it is the person A. And all friends would notice the difference. But the originally frozen person A would be lost. It would serve as a construction blueprint for the copy. This is also because, after all, the nanobots could construct several copies from the frozen data, which one of them is the real person A? None of them, I would think.


This is as it seems to me right now. Maybe I'm wrong.

The human brain isn't like RAM. Many times has a brain been 'switched off' and then back on and been fine.