[extropy-chat] Cryonics and uploading

[Heartland]

> "Heartland" <velvethum at hotmail.com>
>
>> My original mind process has been continuously active since my birth to
>> this current moment.
>
> You never sleep?

Sleep is not brain death. Mind process continues during sleep. Only brain 
death stops that process.


>> Transfers only apply to situations where there have been breaks in the
>> continuity of the process.
>
> You could stop a mind for centuries and then start it up again and the 
> mind
> would never know as long as you supplied proper inputs to its sense 
> organs;
> you could speed it up a billion fold, slow it down or even make it run
> backward and the mind would never notice anything odd.

True, but what the copy thinks it is doesn't influence the objective truth 
of what it is. And the objective truth can only be found in the space-time 
trajectory log.

Sure, you can stop and restart a mind, but you can never recover the 
original mind process in the same exact space and time.


>> Copy is not the final arbiter here.
>
> Then you have no right to make your previous statement. You admitted that
> you could be a copy so your opinion that the you of yesterday has survived
> is of no value, he may be dead.

Okay, I had no right to be so confident that my original has survived. Does 
that prove that pattern view is correct? Not at all.

Again, you can't determine the truth by asking copy or original whether 
he/she feels he/she survived because, regardless of the truth, each one will 
say that he/she is the original. Only the trajectory log will show you who's 
who.


>> A log tracking space-time trajectories
>> of the original mind and copy would be.
>
> First of all a mind is not an object so it has no space time trajectory.

You're right. The phrase "space-time trajectories of the original mind" 
should have been "space-time trajectories of matter implementing the 
original mind."

I usually assume that readers know that "trajectory of mind" really means 
"trajectory of matter that implements mind." I won't assume that anymore.


> Second of all, even objects often don't have space time trajectories 
> because
> they are very fragile things easy to destroy. Just cool down a few billion
> atoms until they form a Bose Einstein Condensation and then warm them
> up again, the atoms reform but the individual atoms identity and unique
> path through space time before the condensate was formed is forever
> and irretrievably lost.

What you describe is a process of preventing space-time trajectory from 
continuing. What that process cannot do is to erase that trajectory from 
history.



>>> Me:
>>>  is the entire map territory business meaningless
>>>  when you're talking about information?
>
>>It's meaningless when you're talking about information but a mind is not a
>>piece of static information.
>
> Neither is a computer program. I wonder if Windows is a good program, I
> don't know because I've never seen the ORIGINAL in Redmond Washington.
>
>    John K Clark

I think this is the real source of disagreement. You and Ben seem to think 
that computer code is equivalent to the process (activity of matter in space 
and time) of running the code. They are not even remotely equivalent.

Think about this. You record a car crash on film. The original crash doesn't 
occur again and again whenever you look at the frames from the film, is it?

Sorry for bringing up the old cliché but the map isn't territory.

Slawomir