A view on cryonics (was Re: [extropy-chat] Bad Forecasts!)

[Brett Paatsch]

Slawomir Paliwoda :

> > I think you and I are in agreement Slawomir. I think youR
> > system is cogent and has better explanatory power and
> > utility in that it suggests ways by which progress may be
> > made.
> >
> > I suspect that this recommendation will be unnecessary, that
> > you will probably do it anyway, but I think you should write
> > down in one place your own view of cryonics defining your
> > key terms "identity" "mind" "person" etc
>
> > I'd also suggest you keep the questions that you have been
> > asked in a sort of FAQ.
>
> It's a good idea and I've thought about doing something like that
> for few years now. The reason why I haven't done that yet is
> people's apathy when it comes to thinking about PI, perhaps
> developed over the years of frustrating and noisy discussions
> about identity.

It could be that people who agree with you are not communicating
agreement. It could be a consequence of the internet medium.  I am
used to not being agreed with. And in meat space if I find someone
I agree with on something nontrivial I am usually pleased enough to
have found someone like that that the temptation to go exploring
further using the platform of shared agreement is so strong that
usually I'll find some development of the original agreed idea such
that the person I agreed with and I no longer agree. We, myself
and that other-type, may not disagree but we are both likely to be
independent thinkers that like to chew before we swallow and are
likely to be wary of premature agreement. But whether voiced as
agreement or not when a good idea is communicated the peanut
has still been pushed forward (unless the only folk that know about
it die before passing it on). We me and other-type thinkers both
have better worldviews as a result of intellectual discussion. And
as a social being I feel better for having encountered another
intelligent life in the local part of the universe. Intellectual agreement
feels good, but it doesn't happen much between people who are
predisposed to exploring spaces not yet already explored.

> It seems like whenever the issue is  raised,
> people are convinced the topic is too difficult and messy and
> that no solutions exist.

The bell curve of understanding does not superimpose over the
bell curve of noise.

> And, to my amazement, this applies to
> transhumanists too. How do you talk to a person who claims
> "identity is an illusion"?

In my opinion one should do what you have been doing. Have
confidence that your view is right until it is refutted but recognize
that that is probably also how rabbits look at the world. And
there are a lot more rabbits.

When you post to a list or write a paper you are not only talking
to the people who disagree with you and say so. Others are
listening.  People do pursue truth. Not everyone gets it but most
of us pursue it because our worldviews serve us better when they
contain less error.

Beyond having confidence though, put the meme down, so its
not lost.

Darwin might have died with the Origin of the Species unpublished
if others like Wallace didn't come along and cause him to want to
go public to get credit for work done.

People who are good with ideas are not always good politicians
and implementers of ideas. I doubt Darwin would have been the
man to take on Wilberforce. But because he'd written his ideas
down they were transmitted to Huxley. And Huxley could take
on Wilberforce. And the fight made good theatre and the meme
got propagated further.

> I may think that, if given few hours with
> any rational person, I would have an excellent chance of explaining
> the concepts, but if I know I can't make that person even agree
> to really listen in the first place, my chances of explaining anything
> to anyone will be very small. When I figure out how to make people
> pay attention, that's when I'll commit to writing it *all* down. Right
> now I don't think my ideas about PI would have enough audience
> to justify my future effort to write them all down. I'm not going to
> commit to writing something that would need to be the size of a
> small book if I know people won't read it, though maybe an
> evolving FAQ model will work. Thanks for the suggestion.

Your welcome but be careful I might be a sort of Wallace and
guzzump your idea if you don't get it down ;-). And then the
Huxleys will be my bulldogs not yours ;-).

Or to be more practical, if you can deal a good memetic blow
to the lingistic nonsense about what the hell is identity and mind and
person and where does it fit in a discussion about cryonics then I will
not have to do that work but can work on other stuff perhaps like
getting people focussed on implementation and working towards building
stuff that can actually be built and I could be helped in that by pointing
people who otherwise might have gotten bogged down in the quagmire
of words by pointing them at your work.

Or maybe I'm lazy and do nothing. But someone else does. My point is
that you doing your bit well helps. It doesn't just help (get you kudos)
it helps others who also get frustrated at how often these discussions
get stuck in words and so people don't move on to implementation
strategies in the same sort of numbers.

> > Now about your above comment. I want to get clarification.
> >
> > The time parameter is clear necessary and I agree. Your x, y, z
> >  3D spatial parameters are point spaces I presume?
>
>
> Yes.
>
>
> > Even though
> > the mind is not a point. It may have some conceptual spacial
> > midpoint. The centre point of an inflated balloon actually has no
> > balloon there. But the balloon boundaries like a brain's boundary
> > delimit the balloon.
>
>
> Mind is indeed not a point. What I mean by a mind process is the sum of
all
> the little processes inside the brain that contribute to emergence of
mind.
> My conceptual model of an overall mind process is a cloud of bubbling
> electrons in space delimited by the space occupied by the brain.
> (Incidentally, you may notice that this model focuses on the activity that
> will always be substrate-independent).

As a conceptual model yes. But I suspect you will trip some folk up with
the word conceptual. Its not wrong. We are just on slippery terrain here.

> Therefore, mind is not a point, but, conceptually, a symphony of points
> that these electrons map in space and time. By tracking the trajectories
> of all the matter points in space-time that contribute to the emergence of
> mind, I'm able to track the trajectory of the overall mind process, i.e.,
> the location of mind itself.

I'd encourage care when arguing by analogy - using words like "symphony".

Sometimes the worst thing one can do when trying to propagate a new
meme is to try and propagate it in language that is too simple. If you try
and popularise too much (if you look for too much popular agreement
and understanding) you poison the meme before it gets established. Why
is that bad? Because pedants like me will sometimes attack an over
simplified analogy to try and get a deeper grasp and sometimes others
reading pick up on the success of the attack and mistake a mere flesh
wound for a fatal wound.

Then they revert back to knocking over straw men again as though there
is unity in disagreement.

So often in discussion about cryonics someone will throw out the assertion
that anybody that doesn't subscribe to the information theoretic dogma
must subscribe to a belief in souls. Its nonsense but it keeps coming back.

I find it useful to remember that a tendency to religiousity probably
resides
in all of us. We have to guard against it actively. We have to try to be
objective to get the benefits of being objective but should bear in mind
that religions and illusions and believing are all natural phenonomon too.

They can be understood as doing something that confers and advantage
dispite being wrong.

> > That is, it is not each atoms that it is relevant to track they can come
> > and go (and indeed each atom could have an identity and trajectory
> > of its own in and out of the personal identity but that's the identity
of
> > an atom not the identity of the "person"). Dito synapses.
>
>
> Exactly. This is where the benefits of grounding identity in a mind, and
> defining that mind as a process, come in. I track the trajectories of only
> what's relevant to the process because it is that activity of matter that
> causes a mind, not the inactive matter itself.

I dunno. Actually I do know. You can't track the trajectories at this stage
in fact, you can only track them conceptually. That doesn't ruin the
explanatory utility of you theory.

> >
> > You cannot say exactly how large the mind is spatially (volumetrically)
> > can you?
>
>
> The issue of size is orthogonal to what matters the most for defining
> identity, namely, where and when that mind is in the Universe.

Yes. Agreed.

>
> >The mind process will always by spatial definition run in some
> > positive volume of space.
>
>
> ..and time.

Yes.

> >
> > There may be some parts of what we understand to be the brain
> > which are actually superfluous spatially to the region in which
> > the mind process works. As we discover what these are we may
> > scientifically reduce the space of the mind-process but never below
> > zero.
> >
> > Agreed? Or is some of the above a misunderstanding of your
> > position.
>
>
> I agree completely. Since I only care about identity of the mind, as
> opposed to the identity of a kidney or leg, I only care about the
> identity of things that generate that mind.

Me too for purposes of this discussion and for purposes of considering
what I'd want to preserve in the contexts of any cryonics process I'd
be interested in either signing up for or working towards the real world
implementation of.

> What causes a mind to
> emerge is an overall mind process (=the sum of all the little processes
> defined by the flow of matter in space-time inside the brain or future
> computational mediums suited to perform mind processes), so I only
> need to focus on those *particular* flows of matter that contribute
> to that mind process.

Your theory of mind has to be compatible (i.e. not incompatible) with
what we know about developmental biology. Biological beings
grow brains.

>  For example, if an electron at, say, X, Y, Z,
> and 477th femtosecond position moves to X, Y, Z, and 478th
> femtosecond, and that flow turns out to be contributing to a
> non-mind process, then neither that particular flow, nor the electron
> in it, need to be considered during identity verification (because
> maybe that particular flow occurred inside the heart muscle).

Agreed. And that is why your model is useful. We can explore what
within the brain can be done away with without loosing the critical
mind process. We can try and hone in on what exactly is the mind
process as a scientific endeavour.

Regards,
Brett