[extropy-chat] Death is irreversible v.1.1

[Ian Goddard]

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

> My argument is valid if I can show that two things 
> and only these two things are true:

 Keep in mind that argument validity is a matter of
syntactic form irrespective of the semantic truth
values of its statements. As such this argument is
valid:

 1. All cats have five legs.
 2. Patches is a cat.
 3. Therefore, Patches has five legs. 

But since cats do not have five legs, the argument,
while valid, is not sound. So what you want to show is
that your argument is also *sound*. However, the
problem I see there is that it's based on how one's
chooses to define facts... If I choose to define x as
'death', then...


> In practice, this means that anytime subjective 
> experience ends, it ends forever. And since 
> subjective experience is the only means by which, 
> we, as sentient beings, can experience reality, any 
> absence of subjective experience means permanent 
> inability to access reality, or, simply 
> death/nonexistence.


 But all you seem to show is *your* definition of
'death.' Someone else can have another definition.
When I had surgery, sodium pentathol turned me off
like a light bulb. Apart from a brief instant of
blackness, there was 100% of nothing. Then I awoke. By
your definition, I died then. Fine. That seems to
support the view John advances about reanimation such
that if my mind is uploaded into a computer, 'death'
will be nothing more terminal than the surgery I had.
Hay, I'll take it, where do I sign up! ~Ian



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