[ExI] Midazolam, Memory Erasure, and Identity

[Lee Corbin]

Stathis writes

>> Would you part with all of this and last week's memories you
>> have for $10M?  I would.
> 
> I probably would, but when I think about the implications of this, I
> think that *death is not such a big deal*. If I can agree to die so
> that my copy of some time ago lives, I may as well agree to die so
> that other people who bear no resemblance to me live, since in neither
> case can I anticipate my "successor's" experiences.
> 
> Fear of death and the definition of survival cannot be derived a
> priori: they have been programmed into us by evolution.

Basically, yes, I'd agree.  But Marvin Minsky is reputed to have
pointed out that there is no "death instinct" as commonly supposed,
though forgive me if I've mentioned that before. Among the things
that in the broadest sense evolution does appear to have programmed
into us is a high regard for our own general welfare.

> If you start adjusting the programming why stop at defining survival
> as survival of a copy whose experiences you cannot anticipate,

Actually, it wasn't me who first defined death as information loss.  :-)
In http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theoretical_death
Wikipeida quotes our cryonicist buddy Ralph Merkle as first---though
I'm pretty sure that Mike Perry coined the phrase "Information theory
of death" a number of years earlier.

Besides, in general I avoid definitions like the plague. As you may know,
Korzybski distinguished between "extrinsic" and "intrinsic" definitions,
the latter being an "Aristotelian definition" the best example of which
is "Man is a featherless biped".  In other words, a categorizing sort
of definition.

An extrinsic defintion, by contrast---and which I just used right here
to "define" intrinsic"---is definition by example or an operational
definition.  Anyway.

So since I believe in the information theory of death, i.e., that one is
not dead until the information constituting one is thoroughly and 
irretrievably destroyed, I am forced to regard any surviving sufficiently
close copy of me to be sufficient for my survival.

I agree with the rest of your remarks.

Lee

> There is an evolutionary argument - if copying becomes
> commonplace, those who regard copies as selves will thrive - but this
> is neither a logical argument nor a prescriptive argument. Evolution
> would also favour those who have thousands of genetically identical
> offspring, but that doesn't mean we should pursue that end if the
> means became available.