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just a copy?


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#1 roof01

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Posted 24 September 2005 - 12:03 PM


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.



(Sorry for my english)

#2 John Schloendorn

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Posted 24 September 2005 - 12:21 PM

Hi Roof01,
Why do you think none of the copies would "be" the "real" person? In other words, what is actually the fact that goes further than neuronal information that you have, but your copy doesn't and that the "nanobots" must fail to capture in principle?

Furthermore, how strongly do you value the further fact? Would you think that your technically flawless reconstruction according to cryopreserved info is as good as death, somewhat better than death or as good as ordinary survival?

#3 roof01

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Posted 24 September 2005 - 01:17 PM

They way I think right now, it would for me (as the frozen one) be as good as death. If I would be frozen, I'm already "descended into darkness", my conciousness is totally turned off. When they rebuild roof01 in the future, they create a copy of my conciousness.

So my model of conciousness is that it is a process, that is never allowed to go out completely. Because if it is totally out, you can only spawn a second process, which is not the same.

The fact that goes futher than neuronal information would be the uninterrupted continuosness of neuronal activity.

#4 John Schloendorn

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Posted 24 September 2005 - 02:01 PM

Hmm, so does the further fact survive fully or partially in the case of...
- Dreamless sleep?
- Waking after a good party and not remembering much?
- Coma?
- A dozen of your neurons being preserved firing to each other in a petri dish, while you the rest of you gets cryopreserved for a century?

In other words, when the continuity of neuronal activity holds only to a degree, would you say these cases are somewhere in the middle between "as good as death" and "as good as ordinary survival"?

If you think the further fact can survive to a degree, then would you think that surviving to a degree many many times could add up to not surviving at over long times?

If you think the further fact is all-or-nothing, then where do you draw the line?

#5 roof01

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Posted 24 September 2005 - 03:15 PM

I would say in the first two cases there is no interruption. There is a lot of neuronal activity going on in sleep.
But when somebody wakes up from a coma, there could be. The problem is, we can't find out by asking, because the awakened person has the same neural structure, the same memories.
(I have to admit, that I don't know how much brain activity there is in a coma. Maybe there is always a high enough activity)

Preserving a dozen neurons is most probably not enough. Maybe there is something inbetween "as good as death" and "ordinary survival", but let's just focus on these two extremes, because even in the "survive to a degree" case there are still those extremes. At one point neuronal activity gets too low.

To find the line is very hard, but i suspect that between "most brain subsystems active" and "all neurons inactive for years" there must be a line.

#6 John Schloendorn

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Posted 24 September 2005 - 03:28 PM

"Maybe there is something inbetween"
"there must be a line"


So is the further fact all-or-nothing or can it have degrees?

I am just interested in what what exactly it is that you are postulating, so that I can make up my mind what to think of it.

#7 roof01

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Posted 24 September 2005 - 03:43 PM

I tend to say that it is all or nothing. But there may be some wierd "degree" phenomena (what do I know?). But even if the latter is the case, there still would be a line between somewhat interrupted conciousness (some neurons active, no idea if it is still the same person when reconstructed) and totally interrupted conciousness (no neurons active, copy when reconstructed).

I think if there is "degreeness" to the fact is unimportant for the point, I would like to focus on the all-or-nothingness of it. Because this is definitely there, i think.

#8 Infernity

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Posted 24 September 2005 - 03:57 PM

[sad] If it's not the one and only, it's not worth going for...

-Infernity

#9 John Schloendorn

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Posted 24 September 2005 - 04:33 PM

Fair enough, let's not care about all-or-nothingness. I have yet another question though. Consider a scenario where your further fact would hold, and nothing but the further fact:

The local malevolent demon decides to turn you into what he thinks is somebody else (what does a demon know of "further facts"?). He therefore makes a small change to your neural circuitry, so minuscule that you would not even notice it. Say in sum the change is about as big as the change done by a good night's sleep. It could be a memory becomes slightly paler, or an aesthetic perference becomes slightly distorted, you get the idea. He does that every five seconds, as demons are in a very purposeful way and he gives you a break while you are sleeping.
Since you are placed in social isolation (what a nasty demon, is he not?), at every point your life's history seems perfectly consistent to you. However, after just a few months (stretch that time-frame arbitrarily if you need to), you will be as different from the person you are today as Infernity is from Napoleon Bonaparte. The further fact though, "uninterrupted continuosness of neuronal activity" was perfectly preserved at all times. Again, do you think this is as bad as death, as good as survival or somewhere in between?

#10 Infernity

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Posted 24 September 2005 - 05:44 PM

[huh]
Napoleon Bonaparte?


However, if it is not THE YOU- it is as bad as death.............
Damn, we must work fast so people won't have have to e cronycized!


/ "Aging is bad and it kills peope..."
At this point the girl was crying so hard..........

...................
........................
.......
..
err...
But the king answered in a broken voice: “Yes, we did it, we killed the dragon today. But damn, why did we start so late? This could have been done five, maybe ten years ago! Millions of people wouldn’t have had to die.”

-Infernity

#11 roof01

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Posted 24 September 2005 - 06:23 PM

In my view this would be survival. Although I would think and view the world very differently, I would never have faded out.

#12 Infernity

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Posted 24 September 2005 - 06:53 PM

...Other self... is being dead and another one born.

-Infernity

#13 John Schloendorn

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Posted 24 September 2005 - 07:58 PM

Thank you Roof01,
I find that a very interesting point of view. I now realize that should have put my question more succinctly though: If the demon changed you in such a way as described, would you think this is exactly as good as ordinary survival, or would you prefer to change to a much smaller extent during that time? If you have such a desire, then I suppose it is not as large as your desire to keep the further fact alive. But how large would it be in comparison?

Infernity,
You seem to differ from Roof01? Suppose the demon were about to change you in such a way. However, it is well known that the demon, as a fiery creature, will not touch your brain structure when you have yourself cryopreserved. I'm told that due to their high metabolic rate they age rather rapidly. Give it a few years and he'll be gone. How do you choose? Cryo or slow but complete personality change?

#14 Infernity

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Posted 24 September 2005 - 08:46 PM

I'm losing you...

-Infernity

#15 roof01

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Posted 24 September 2005 - 09:46 PM

Thank you also, for discussing this.

If the demon changed you in such a way as described, would you think this is exactly as good as ordinary survival, or would you prefer to change to a much smaller extent during that time?


It would not be as good, because I would have no control about the personality and abilities I would end up with. So I have a desire to direct my development, yes.

If you have such a desire, then I suppose it is not as large as your desire to keep the further fact alive. But how large would it be in comparison?


Yes, the desire to change at a smaller rate (in a more controlled way) is not as large as to keep the uninterrupted experience (the further fact) alive. Because there is the theoretical possibility to undo the drastic changes. Or the possibility, after a long existence as someone very different, to find out which personality one was before the change. And other possibilities.

The other alternative would be blackness/nothingness.

But it is possible to construct existences much worse than that. Something unbearable, with no chance to change it. Or someone very destructive and unethical.

So I would not try "keep the further fact alive" in all cases, but in most of them.

#16 bgwowk

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Posted 25 September 2005 - 02:32 AM

roof01, you are laboring under a 19th-century Vitalist prejudice. Brain electrical activity is now turned off and back on almost routinely in medicine. There are tens of thousands of people walking around today who've had brain electrical activity stopped at some point in their lives (most commonly by cardiac arrest). Ultimately it's the information content of your brain that keeps you you. There's nothing else to hang your hat on.

This idea that cryonics somehow involves a unique turning off of the brain is such a common misconception that I deal with it at length in my Imminst book chapter

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

Alcor also has this textbook quote on their website

“We know that secondary memory does not depend on continued activity of the nervous system, because the brain can be totally inactivated by cooling, by general anesthesia, by hypoxia, by ischemia, or by any method, and yet secondary memories that have been previously stored are still retained when the brain becomes active once again. Therefore, secondary memory must result from some actual alterations of the synapses, either physical or chemical.” — Page 658, Textbook of Medical Physiology by Arthur C. Guyton (W.B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia, 1986)

If biostasis disturbs you philosophically, then there is much already done and accepted in medicine that should disturb you equally. I myself made my peace with these issues long ago.

I've long maintained that the reason medicine already accepts recovery from ametabolic states as survival of the original person is that having a physically and more-or-less mentally equivalent person wake to hug their family renders all philosophical objections moot. There is not a bioethicist in the world today who argues that brain inactivation survivors are not the original people, and cryonics is just a continuation of that ethic.

---BrianW

#17 John Schloendorn

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Posted 25 September 2005 - 07:26 AM

Roof01,
so in reality (no thought experiment this time ;-), if you are dying now, you are facing the following choice:
- Death: Upsets your desire to keep the further fact alive, plus upsets your desire to keep your memories and character traits alive (which you apparently do value, too. Or why else would you want to control them).
- Cryopreservation: Upsets your desire to keep the further fact alive, but fulfills your desire to keep your memories and character traits alive.

Would you now concede that cryopreservation is, by however small an amount, better than death?

Brian,
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. (E.g. I would not submit that because most actual humans believe that after physical death, the further fact goes to heaven, mourning is absurd.) Though I would be very interested in Roof01's opinion on that matter.

Infy,
Losing me? On what exactly? I am not asking about the metaphysics of survival or anything, just very simply which of the two "deaths" you would choose if there were no other choice. Be changed by the demon as specified, or cryopreserved? (I'm merely trying to detect small differences between how people value the two types of changes, like with Roof01.)

#18 Infernity

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Posted 25 September 2005 - 11:24 AM

Cryopreserved.

I want to be me, even if I'll have to go through a couple of centuries frozen.

-Infernity

#19 roof01

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Posted 25 September 2005 - 01:31 PM

Would you now concede that cryopreservation is, by however small an amount, better than death?


Yes. Also there is the probability that I'm wrong.

But even if I'm right, I would not advocate against bringing people back from deep coma or cryonics. This would be totally the same person, only with a freshly started subjective experience. If it would be a friend or a relative I would love him/her exactly the same.
I just doubt that my personal subjective experience would continue, when my body is rebuild after freezing.


I'm very sceptical about immaterial souls and I know very little about vitalism. From what I've heard about it: it's oldfashioned, sentimental thinking. (Nothing against sentimentality sometimes, but it does not belong there)

I'm coming mostly from a computer science perspective (nearly finished with my comp sci/bioinf studies). In my view some basic activity of neurons needs to be preserved, or reconstruction would be like starting a new process.

#20 bgwowk

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Posted 25 September 2005 - 04:24 PM

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#CRITERIA

is 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.


#21 John Schloendorn

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Posted 25 September 2005 - 05:43 PM

Roof01,

Yes. Also there is the probability that I'm wrong.

Cool, I think I just understood something. Perhaps I can now try to communicate something about myself: I don't believe in any further fact, due to the lack of felt or measurable evidence that Brian points out so eloquently. Thus, the difference that preserving my neuronal info makes, however small it may look from your point of view, is all that matters to me in my persistence, even in ordinary survival. Due to this general absence of further facts from my self-image, I'd expect to save essentially all my personal values via technically flawless cryopreservation. So I'm not arguing that dying and being recreated were as good as ordinary survival. I merely do not feel that ordinary survival is any better than dying and being recreated, giving credit to the originator of this eloquent formulation. Does that make any sense?

Brian,
I completely agree with your complaint and love your creative illustrations. I too am very used to people's double standards as soon as one brings up life-extension. But "driving me mad", I don't know. What do you expect from "people" after just one look into the history books? Sanity?!

#22 bgwowk

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Posted 25 September 2005 - 06:55 PM

So I'm not arguing that dying and being recreated were as good as ordinary survival.

Indeed. They ARE ordinary survival! From moment to moment (with all the complex contortions and diversions of our consciousness), from day to day (with all the nighttime interruptions of our consciousness), from year to year (with all the turnover of atoms that make our body and brain), recurring patterns of information processing are the only things of any durability upon which to rest any concept of personal identity.

---BrianW

#23 Clifford Greenblatt

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Posted 25 September 2005 - 07:51 PM

... recurring patterns of information processing are the only things of any durability upon which to rest any concept of personal identity.

Exactly what are these "recurring patterns of information processing." How could one person's "recurring patterns" be so durable that they remain unchanged by a million years of gradual modification and continue to be the unique constant that distinguishes that person from all other persons?

#24 bgwowk

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Posted 25 September 2005 - 09:34 PM

Clifford wrote:

Exactly what are these "recurring patterns of information processing." How could one person's "recurring patterns" be so durable that they remain unchanged by a million years of gradual modification and continue to be the unique constant that distinguishes that person from all other persons?

I think it's naive to expect that anyone with a human brain as currently designed could survive a million years of life experience while remaining the original person. It's just as naive as roof01's belief that he'd still be roof01 if nanomachines transformed his brain into Napolean Bonaparte's.

That's not say that a person ("person" interpreted broadly) couldn't survive a million years. But for this survival to be mentally equivalent to the way we think of ordinary survival today would require a truly transhuman mind.

Already I intellectually fear that some of the person I was in my youth is dead. We just don't feel as much angst about these things as perhaps we should because there has never been evolutionary incentive to develop emotional fear of gradual transformation and creeping amnesia.

Most likely mode of death for transhumans: Death by self-transcedence.

---BrianW

#25 John Schloendorn

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Posted 25 September 2005 - 10:05 PM

I sense no unique, eternally recurring pattern in me, and I have no reason to desire one. Persons change and evolve. That is a large part of what I like about them. Conversely, what I dislike about death is that it is the sudden destruction of this beautiful process. I utterly fail to see what the process of self-directed personal evolution would have in common with its sudden end.

#26 Clifford Greenblatt

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Posted 25 September 2005 - 10:09 PM

Thanks Brian, for clarifying the nature of long term survival and transformation. From your description it would appear that the only way to avoid loss of present identity would be to avoid transhuman transformation and to keep recycling the same old memories, refusing to let any new memories, knowledge, or experiences to enter in to corrupt the present complex of mental patterns.

#27 bgwowk

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Posted 26 September 2005 - 12:25 AM

From your description it would appear that the only way to avoid loss of present identity would be to avoid transhuman transformation and to keep recycling the same old memories, refusing to let any new memories, knowledge, or experiences to enter in to corrupt the present complex of mental patterns.

I'm not that cynical. I really believe that there are a small number of people living today who may still exist eons from now in some form that will have a justifiable claim on continuous survival. Their vastly augmented minds will remember their first centuries of life as we remember and value our memories of early childhood.

---BrianW

#28 Clifford Greenblatt

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Posted 26 September 2005 - 01:26 AM

If you live to be a billion trillion years old, how significant do you think personal memories of the first thrity years of your life will remain? Would they be much more significant than the history of life in general? Would the details of those thirty years become lost in a gigantic forest of so many newer and greater things?

#29 Clifford Greenblatt

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Posted 26 September 2005 - 02:15 AM

I sense no unique, eternally recurring pattern in me, and I have no reason to desire one. Persons change and evolve. That is a large part of what I like about them. Conversely, what I dislike about death is that it is the sudden destruction of this beautiful process. I utterly fail to see what the process of self-directed personal evolution would have in common with its sudden end.

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? 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?

#30 bgwowk

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Posted 26 September 2005 - 02:33 AM

If you live to be a billion trillion years old, how significant do you think personal memories of the first thrity years of your life will remain? Would they be much more significant than the history of life in general? Would the details of those thirty years become lost in a gigantic forest of so many newer and greater things?

Well, that really depends on how an individual chooses to organize their mind, doesn't it? The natural biological tendency of human memory storage is to disproportionately weight young adulthood memories stronger than all others. Perhaps some transhumans will choose to keep that propensity. If a future superbeing chooses to weight memory importance and sense-of-self by giving the strongest weight to early life memories, no matter how humble, then true survival across eons may be possible. Beings motivated by survival as a primary sense of purpose, and who believe that early memories are important to long-term survival, certainly have motive to do so.

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.

---BrianW




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