[extropy-chat] Altered genes let roundworms wiggle longer

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2004 at 04:12:05PM +1100, Brett Paatsch wrote:

> At this stage we can't even freeze organs like hearts and reanimate
> them and these are organs in which no sense of self resides. So
> there's currently technological limits.

The reanimate part is irrelevant. Most damage occurs during organ
devitrification. Degree of damage occuring during vitrification alone is
sufficiently high to require nanoscale scanning and/or reconstruction. This
might not be necessary for robust, simply structured organs, but we don't yet
have experimental proof of that (but that proof might soon be forthcoming).
For the same reason agent toxicity is irrelevant (unless it destroys
structures).

It does make sense to use bioviability as a hard validation criterium, simply
because it's trivial to screen for. There are no equivalent measurements for
degree of irreversible information erasure due to structure denaturation,
neither an agreement about which degree of damage is acceptable for identity
preservation.
 
> Even IF we had mature nanotechnology and could rebuild a
> new brain exactly as the old brain was, (ie. an atomic level copy)
> there would still be real doubt in my opinion as to whether this
> amounted in practice to reanimating the self from the standpoint
> of the self.

You're entitled to you opinion, of course, but it's a rather strange point of
view to take. You're routinely suffering far greater changes in course of
your life, and still live with that.
 
> Let me be clear, I come to consider this question without any belief
> in souls or supernatural whatsoever.  I think I *am* my living changing
> growing brain so I'm looking at this question from a very materialistic
> standpoint.

You claim to be a materialist, but you aren't. You just rejected that
preserving your biological substrate down to the atomic scale (while
technically feasible, a rather absurd requirement) conserves your identity.
How could a materialist claim that?
 
> So far as I can see there is absolutely no evidence anywhere that
> *I* can survive the dismantling of my brain.

No one can survive the destruction of your substrate if accompanied with the
destruction of structural information encoding the you-process. If you erase
the information, you can't rebuild it. Trivial.
 
> Seems to me the idea that the self as experienced in the first person

This is a very weak criterium to take. It merely takes a perceived
consistency, which doesn't take any external references.

> can be reduced to patterns and information that could then be replicated
> as information and patterns can is pure speculation. Pure faith.

You keep claiming stuff, but given that you're avoiding any technical details
it's difficult to tell what exactly you're claiming. So I'm claiming you're
operating on pure faith, unless you're willing to disclose more detail of
what exactly you're claiming.
 
> If there is any *evidence* to the contrary I'd like to see or hear it.
> 
> Seems to me that cryonics requires a sort of intensely reverse solipsicm
> where one does not accept that one has a self - a conscious subjective

It seems to me that you're projecting based on no evidence whatsoever.

> at all. One has lost the first person and sees oneself only as others can
> see one - separately and from a distance. Ironically a person who thinks

While there are some pretty strange beliefs amongst cryonics practitioners, I
haven't heard of many who adhere to that notion. I.e., you're addressing a
straw man.

> they are no more than information and pattern would think that going
> into a teleporter and think it coming out as the patterns would be the
> same in both cases but what is lost is one self and what is replaced
> is another self.

Ironically, if the teleporter is cloning quantum state the only information
allowing to tell is encoded outside of the system. You can't devise a
measurement principle allowing to tell which system is the original or the
clone, without referring to external information storage.
I.e., you've just fallen into the fallacy you're accusing others of 
(see your above "separately and from a distance" straw man).
 
> What constitutes one's self may not be fully explicable currently in
> scientific terms but so what - from the standpoint of being one's self -
> that there is a self of some form IS the bedrock experiential certainty,
> even if the exact nature of what one is is unclear.

While our knowledge is not perfect, one's self is encoded in the physical
system, and that process can be recreated by making a sufficiently accurate
reconstruction of the physical system. If you're denying that, then you're
obviously not a materialist, despite of your claims.
 
> One reasons and practices the scientific method well or badly as a self.
> One relates to others from the self. Perhaps the self is a high level
> construct
> of simpler phenomenon from the standpoint of outsiders looking in
> (even scientifically) but not from the first person position of the self.

You want your 30X homeopathic Coke to go with phlogiston, or with vis vitalis?

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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