[extropy-chat] What should survive and why?

[Lee Corbin]

Stathis writes

On 02/05/07, Heartland <velvethum at hotmail.com> wrote:

> > Stathis to Damien:
> > > And yet you leave your fortune to your tomorrow-self, rather than blowing it
> > > all before you go to sleep tonight. How do you know that tomorrow-self isn't
> > > just some guy who happens to have all your memories?  If someone claimed 
> > > that criterion X is a sure sign of death, and it so happens that criterion X
> > > occurs every night to every person, wouldn't you answer that - even without
> > > knowing the details of criterion X - it must be a load of crap because you 
> > > know you *don't* die every night?

(Actually, I agree with Stathis, but see below for why.)

> > It seems that you first assume, "I don't die every night" and then tailor your
> > definition of death and all the other statements about survival to fit that 
> > assumption. It should be the other way around. Only after you find out what death
> > is first you can begin answering questions such as, "When do I die?"
> 
> That's the very question I'm asking: how would you define death?
> Given that we can agree on whether or not criterion X has occurred,
> how do we then move on to decide whether or not X is a good
> criterion for death? 

To me, this is a lot of math-envy.  Following Euclid, we must define all
our terms and prove all our propositions.  Rubbish.  So-called "definitions"
in philosophy (which are not neologisms) need to be extensionsal, not
intensional.  (Go look those words up for their philosophical usage.)
In other words, we *must* start with what death ordinarily means to
everyone in the world, and work backwards for any attempts at
refinement.

Consider a historical analogy:  What is temperature?  Well, originally 
people knew that there is hot and cold, warm and cool, etc., and knew
that it was a linear matter. They later, with scientific instruments, 
attempted to elucidate more of the meaning of "hot", "cold", etc. 
It would have been folly to have reached into their nether regions
and *defined* temperature as this or that.  Can you hear sensible
people at the time refusing to go ahead, challenging each other 
with "What do you *mean* by temperature?  How do you *define*
it?"

Now we *all* know what we mean by death in daily life!  It's absurd!
Suppose that there is a really evil organization that you know of that
does kill people. (Pardon me for being circular, but this really is 
elementary!)  If you get a call tonight just before retiring, and they
say "By the way, we are killing *you* tonight.  It will happen while
you are fast asleep?''  Would any of these crazy philosophers reply
"Oh, that's all right.  I die every day anyway".

OF COURSE NOT.

Notions such as "maybe we die every instant" or "maybe we die
whenever our EEGs go flat", are misconceived, and very harmful
for understanding.  Let's get serious!  You can't get out of paradoxes
by making up definitions!

If doctors today are---surprisingly---able to save the lives of people
that we formerly thought were dead, then we have to realize that 
they weren't really dead!  It should *not* be a matter of struggling
for some asinine definition!

Stathis goes on 

> The arbitrariness of the definition of death - yours and mine - is what is at issue. 

That's just inviting the wrong approach.  We all know what death is!
We should *not* be trying to *define* it!  We need simply to try to
understand when it has occurred and when it has not---which, given
memory erasure, duplicates, cryonics, partial memory loss, etc., is far
from trivial. But it is putting the cart before the horse to *define* it.
We need instead to understand, like I say, whether it has occurred,
or to what extent it has occurred.  And if that proves fruitless, then we
simply eventually have to abandon the term altogether, and use paraphrases.

Lee