A view on cryonics (was Re: [extropy-chat] Bad Forecasts!)

[Hal Finney]

It's interesting how we talk past each other in these discussions.

I think most people agree about the facts.  If you made a perfect copy,
it would feel "from the inside" indistinguishable from the original.
If you had somehow made the copy in secret, perhaps while the original
was sleeping, and then revived it without telling it about the process,
the copy would not know or suspect that any such thing had happened.
All of its memories and personality traits would be consistent with the
hypothesis that it was the same person as the day before.  No amount
of introspection and self-examination would reveal that the process
had occured.

I don't mean to imply anything about the copy's reactions if and when
it were presented with evidence about the process - some people would
react very differently than others.  But without that evidence, just
based on its internal mental state, it would not suspect anything.
Not everyone agrees with this, but most people in this discussion do.

"Identity" is a slippery word.  Many arguments devolve into debates
about its meaning.  But arguing the meaning of a word is pointless.
Words are arbitrary strings of letters and there is no major problem if
different people use a word with somewhat different meanings.

What really matters is not the meaning of the word "identity".
What matters is how people would react to these various kinds of
transformations.  People disagree about whether or how much they should
be happy to be destroyed and have a perfect copy made.  Some people are
perfectly happy with this; others would only be happy if it were done
in a certain way; and still others would be unhappy in any such situation.

Many people believe that there is an underlying truth to this question - a
"fact of the matter" about how someone should regard the prospect of this
event.  They argue and try to convince each other about what the truth is.

But the strange thing is that, based on the agreed-upon facts above,
it is very hard to know the truth.  Even the copy who comes out of the
experiment does not gain any knowledge about the truth.  He knows no
more coming out than the original did going in.  If he was convinced
of one position, presumably he still holds it.  If he was uncertain,
he will be no less uncertain afterwards.

Given a situation where the truth is unobservable even to the person who
is most intimately suited to observing it, I have to question whether
there is really a truth to observe.  I strongly suspect that there is
no "fact of the matter" here about how one should view the prospect
of destructive copying.  It is ultimately a matter of taste.  That is,
there is no more objective truth here than there is in the question of
whether coffee tastes better than tea.

We have a strong instinct to preserve our lives, burned into us by
billions of years of evolution.  This gives us an overwhelming need to
judge how safe various potential actions are.  It may seem inconceivable
that the most significant question of all, will we live or will we die,
is not only unknown but unanswerable.  This philosophical agnosticism
violates our deepest instincts.

Yet we did not evolve in a world where such copying was possible.
This is something entirely new, something that our instincts about life
and death were not adapted for.  Never in the past would there have been
any question, after some event, whether you had survived it!  It is a new
kind of transformation which does not fit into the neat categories of the
past.  And when we try to cram it into those groupings, it doesn't fit.

I suspect that if we did live in a world where copying were commonplace,
for a long enough time for evolution to exist, people would come to
general agreement about how to view it, just as there is general agreement
today that death is bad and living is good.  The actual outcome might
depend on the circumstances of how the copying worked, and other details.
But I think we would see general philosophical agreement.

Hal Finney