[extropy-chat] Cryonics questions...

[Jef Allbright]

On 5/9/06, Heartland <velvet977 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> John:
> > And Anna, Eugen is right, Heartland is very very confused.
>
> Based on my own experience, the belief in resurrection after being frozen
> and dead
> is very comforting, but has nothing to do with logic. It's just a modern
> version of
> the belief in soul and afterlife and doesn't deserve respect. Everyday
> experience
> conditions us into believing in the illusion of continuity that
> effectively blinds
> us to the truth. It literally takes months or even years to develop
> necessary
> capacity to trust logic over intuition in this case. And when you do, you
> are no
> longer confused. Then, and only then, it becomes obvious why there's no
> such thing
> as resurrections after death. After Santa Clause, then God, cryonics will
> be the
> next thing you lose faith in.



It seems to me that at the root of this discussion there is confusion
between objective and subjective descriptions of
reality/experience-of-reality.  This same type of confusion seems to be at
the root of most of philosophy, as humans try to make meaning from an
ever-increasing context of interaction with physical reality of which they
are a part. It is inherently paradoxical for a subsystem to try to model the
larger system which contains it, and worse yet when a subsystem adopts a
model that assumes privileged observer status.  For describing reality, the
best we can do is strive for consistency and coherence and recognize that
our models are always subject to revision.

What is most fascinating to me about these debates is not "proving" right or
wrong, but understanding what it takes to update individual models of
reality to more closely match shared observations (distinguished from shared
interpretations.)  My interest is not idle; I think it is vitally important
to humanity's continued progress.

Slawomir has been arguing for years that there is something unique--and
crucially important--about the trajectory of a mind through space and time.


It appears that he began with the intuitive certainty that there is
something objectively special about any individual's subjective thread of
experience, and then he had an "aha moment" when he saw a correspondence
between the specialness of the subjective thread of experience and the
"indisputable fact" that the physical correlates of that subjective
experience can be uniquely specified.  He had found a physical explanation
for unique physical identity, and no need to invoke the heavily myth-laden
concept of "soul"!

Then, still harboring the intuitive certainty that there is something
objectively special about any individual's subjective thread of experience,
in an interesting twist, a further distancing from the usual "soul" concept,
he began emphasizing that if that "mind process" ever stops, then something
crucial is lost, even if a subjectively equivalent mind process continues
with a subjectively equivalent thread later.

Very recently, he appears to have seen that objectively, the mind process is
in fact stopped and restarted (or a copy of the process restarted) during
the course of everyday events.  But still harboring the belief that there is
something objectively special about the now hypothetical unbroken thread of
subjective experience, he laments its demise.

I don't know who said it first, but it's important to note that "a
difference that makes no difference, is no difference at all."

An increasingly accurate map of the territory leads to increasing accurate
decision-making for the course ahead.  Every belief contributes to the
accuracy of the map, either positively or negatively, to some extent.  I
sure would like to have some better tools for collaborative map-making.

- Jef
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