[extropy-chat] I keep asking myself...

[ben]

"Heartland" <velvet977 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Ben wrote:

>> So, in your scenario, the you that was vitrified, revived and 
>> repaired, then later died, is one you. The other copy is also you.
>> So 'you' do survive, but not the 'you' that was woken from 
>> vitrification. That one is just as dead as any of us who dies at 
>> present.

> Is there really any difference between death before vitrification and
> death after revival? There is none so a person who is dead before 
> vitrification "is just as dead as any of us who dies at present." And
> if so, then I must ask: "What is the point of cryonics?"


Well, i think there's a big difference (assuming that 'death after
revival' means permanent death, not death then another cyronic suspension).
The point of cryonics is that you *come back from death*. There is no
magical 'alternate you' created when the dead, vitrified, then revived
and repaired you wakes up again.
Ever been under general anaesthetic? It would be similar to that.

(As it happens, i did go under general anaesthetic recently. For about
an hour and a half, i didn't exist, as a running, integrated mind. i may
as well have been cryonically suspended or transcribed into a gazillion
bits in a digital memory. When i woke up, i was the same old me. Well, a
slightly improved me, actually. I'm not dead, though. The
post-anaesthetic me is the same person as before)

> The awful truth is that when minds die, they die forever, and there's
> nothing anyone can do about it.

Agreed. So, best not to let them die, eh? Of course, we now have to
define 'death'.

I define it as /irrevocable loss of information/. Some people define it
as /loss of the soul/. How do you define it?

Some people seem to think that a temporary cessation of processing
equates to death. I think that Eleizer has satisfactorily demonstrated
in an earlier post that this can't be true.

Cryonics (on a living person) is equivalent to a temporary cessation of
processing.

Death, followed quickly enough by cryonic suspension (quickly enough so
that no significant loss of information occurs) is also equivalent to a
temporary cessation of processing (so long as processing can and does
resume at some future point, of course).

A person who dies and is then cryonically suspended is not the same as
someone who dies and is say, cremated. The whole point of cryonics is an
attempt to make death non-permanent. You can only do that if you
preserve a certain minimum amount of information. We don't yet know what
that minimum is, but we know that it will be a hell of a lot.

> When I die, does it really matter to me if all that's left after my 
> death is a bunch of photographs of me or identical copies of my 
> brain? No amount of recorded information about me, including
> photographs, videos or structure of my brain can ever bring my
> original instance of mind process back to life.

There's a big difference between a bunch of photographs of you and a
detailed copy of your mind!

I hate to get into hackneyed old computer analogies, but it's still
probably the best we have. When you turn your spreadsheet program off,
is it somehow a different program when you turn it on again? Is there
any way of telling? Is there any difference in it's behaviour? As long
as all of the information it was using is correctly stored on disk
before it is switched off, then properly loaded again when it's
re-started, there is no difference. The only way there can be a
'difference' is if you posit some hypothetical non-physical component
which is lost then not restored. But, of course, this makes no
difference, anyway. A difference which makes no difference. In other
words, a nonsense.

I don't understand why you think that "No amount of recorded information
about me ... can ever bring my original instance of mind process back to
life". If enough information is recorded, how could it fail to bring
back the original mind process? We are of course, assuming that the
information can be recorded in sufficient detail, and that it can be
properly reassembled and 'run' in exactly the same was as before.

Saying "ah, but it's a different /instance/ of that same information" is
meaningless. How do you know you are you? Your memory tells you that you
existed yesterday, or two seconds ago. If that memory came from a
different body on a different planet hundreds of years ago, it makes
absolutely no difference. You are still the same you. Difficult as it is
to wrap your head around, this also applies to any copies made of that
mind, no matter how many or when. It also applies to any temporarily
suspended, and then later resumed instances of it. The 'different
instances are different people' argument is a red herring, equivalent to
arguing that the same DVD played twice produces different films.

You seem to be asserting that the mind is more than a dynamic pattern of
information-processing. In other words, something non-physical, that is
irretrievably lost at death. That's getting into metaphysics again.
Where, as i've said before, i refuse to go.

As Lee has already remarked, people don't seem to change their minds on
this.
I propose we drop it until some of us actually do upload or wake up
after cryonic suspension, etc. Or fail to, despite repeated attempts and
no apparent reason for them to fail. I'll be convinced that the
'patternist' view is false when an exact copy of a mind is made, and
there's NOBODY THERE! <cue Twilight Zone music>.

ben
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"There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary,
and those who don't"