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

[Slawomir Paliwoda]

> > It is true that one cannot subjectively
> > verify his personal identity.
> > Slawomir
>
> What about the environment? It seems that
> the environment keeps records of your
> personal identity, and kicks back.
> And if there
> is not an environment ... you are also in trouble,
> because you're alone.
> s.


What you call "environment" (=other people's perception of who they think
you are), I define as a unique location of a mind process in space-time.
It's a classic grounding problem. You ground your identity in the society's
opinion of you which makes that identity, one, dependent on the existence of
other people, two, always unstable. My definition of identity is grounded in
the mind process and its unique location in space and time, which makes that
identity always stable and verifiable even if I'm the only person in the
Universe.

Our referents for what we both decided to call "identity" are simply
different.

Slawomir