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

[Heartland]

> "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.

Let's focus on the meaning of "come back from death" which should illustrate why 
cryonics tries to offer something that is logically impossible. To come back from 
death means that a person experiences death as something that is similar to sleep 
where you lose consciousness and then wake up few hours later. In other words, the 
process responsible for subjective experience hasn't stopped running during sleep.

There's a common and false expectation that this continuation of subjective 
experience would take place after death also but there is a huge difference between 
sleep and death. The whole mind process no longer exists after death which makes it 
impossible for any technology to restore that original instance of the process.

A revived person would obviously *feel* similar to what people feel after waking up 
and outside world would agree that you really "came back from death." But the truth 
is that revival merely *creates* a new mind process that happens to be of the same 
*type* of mind process while the original *instance* and original subjective 
experience process is gone forever. What this means in practice is that when you 
die you will never experience sensation of waking up. It's the other created 
instance that will but you will "feel" eternal nothingness instead.

In light of this I suggest that preservation of one's instance is infinitely more 
important than preservation of one's type.


> Ever been under general anaesthetic? It would be similar to that.

Anytime mind process stops running a person dies. It doesn't really matter that the 
newly created process can be created within the original hardware or not. It's 
still death.


> (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)


What you feel is a copy's illusion. If your mind process really stopped execution 
then your original instance has died. Sorry.


>> 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?

Death is a cessation of a mind process.


> 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.

Can you point me to it? Thanks.


>> 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!

If you consider the state of your subjective experience after death there is no 
difference at all. You wouldn't feel anything more than nothingness even if people 
created 1000 copies of you.

It's a difference between type vs. instance. No approximation of type can ever 
restore instance so photographs (approximations of type) are logically equivalent 
to a perfect copy of your mind (perfect approximation of type).



> 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?

I mean instance of the original mind process. No continuation of subjective 
experience. Death.


> 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.

Don't rely on memory to make that determination. There is an objective way to do 
this. A theoretical log of space and time trajectory of your mind hardware would 
always tell you if you are indeed the original or the copy.


> 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.


No. I'm saying that the mind is a dynamic information processing. It's just physics 
and logic.

S.