X-Message-Number: 11327 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: more replies, to Mike Perry and Jan Coetzee Date: Sat, 27 Feb 1999 23:37:44 +1100 (EST) Hi everyone! To Mike Perry: I meant it when I said that I did not know about the Bekenstein limits. Please either explain or refer me to an accessible source. As for the possibilities of resurrection, your image of monkeys pounding away on typewriters provides an apt description. Whether or not there are multiple universes, I do not doubt that if we create enough versions of Lucy then we will also resurrect the real Lucy --- not that we will have any means of telling just which one is the real Lucy. But really now! If that is to be our algorithm for resurrecting everyone, then it begins to look rather pointless. Resurrecting the real Lucy would be interesting and valuable; resurrecting quadrillions of versions merely hands us the job of dealing with quadrillions of semi-human apes. If you want to do that, you're welcome, but please don't ask me to help. Or even pay much attention. We learn nothing by this exercise, and saddle ourselves with lots of responsibility besides. For that matter, why bother with the question of whether or not these recreated creatures ever existed anywhere in ANY universe? We have no way of proving that they did not, and hence we should not bother with Lucy but recreate any person or object that takes our fancy. It is one thing, and highly worthwhile, to truly resurrect someone who once lived. But only one of those quadrillion versions has any real claim on our morality or our attention, and we do not know which one. Imaginary beings have no clear moral right to become existent beings. Merely to say that they might have existed in some other universe does not increase that moral right: let the inhabitants of those other universes resurrect their own Lucys. If we someday work out how to resurrect the Lucy of OUR universe, that will be enough. As for multiple past histories, there may be some sense to that notion. But as we learn more through archaeology or other means, the multiplicity goes down. To say that we truly have multiple past histories, you need to establish that our processes of historical investigation (both those we use now and those which we may someday develop) show no convergence towards a single past history. That may be true, but you have not given evidence to that effect. (If, say, quantum effects cause us to have a past history in which --- to make a caricature to explain what I mean --- Hitler both won and lost his European war, then so far no sign of such effects has been shown). Even with multiple histories, the only thing that would happen in my mind would be that the moral advantage in truly resurrecting someone of the past would become diluted. Moreover such resurrections could not be done at random: we would somehow have to distinguish those pasts for which future study would not make them purely imaginary, and those pasts which are genuine pasts. In effect, resurrection would also involve predicting future abilities at historical investigation. (Clearly some pasts turn out to be imaginary when we can look at present evidence with new tools --- witness what is happening to our ideas about the relationships between different species when we look at their DNA). To Jan Coetzee: While the journal MEDICAL HYPOTHESES does have a certain value in making us realize possibilities, many of the papers in it really tell us almost nothing. Sure, we can speculate, and speculation is good. But speculation must be followed by experiment. The author of the article you describe (by Adams, MEDICAL HYPOTHESES 44(5)(1995) 419-427) seems not to have considered all the work of the last 15 years by neuroscientists on just how memory works. If their work is basically on target, then his ideas mean nothing at all. If their work is not basically on target, then his ideas count as one set among many others which might explain our memory. Best and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11327