X-Message-Number: 11336 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: comments to Dave, Mike, and Bob Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 22:49:44 +1100 (EST) Hi everyone! More discussion with Mike Perry: Basically, if we suppose that quantum theory will hive off worlds constantly, I'm saying that THOSE WORLDS will be the worlds in which their particular versions of people or animals should be resurrected. Not ours. (I remain skeptical of this theory, but that is a different issue --- and as I said before, neither general relativity nor quantum mechanics give us a complete version of fundamental physics, so that your ideas depend on a provisional theory justifying another theory which in detail will probably turn out to be wrong). Now given an infinity of time and space, no doubt it would be POSSIBLE to do the kind of resurrection you advocate. We are basically discussing its morality. I see the morality of reviving particular people, with whatever understanding of history we might discover. I just don't see the morality of reviving quadrillion quadrillions of people, some close but not identical copies of others, others entirely imaginary, etc etc. If you do so because you think these revived people will be grateful to you and therefore give you an advantage, then you are doing a calculation rather than a moral act. Some may well be grateful, others quite ungrateful, and a few may turn into enemies. If you revive all those people at once, as a kind of sweep of the arm, my own sense of how I would feel if I were revived that way tells me that I would not be at all grateful. I'm just one among uncounted quadrillions whom you revived to satisfy some drive within yourself. Yes, I'd try to make the best of it, but I'd hardly feel grateful to you for my existence any more than I feel grateful to my great-grandparents for my existence. After all, my great-grandparents had no concern for ME as an individual. They may at best have thought only briefly about the children of the children of their children. If someone revives ME, not as an example of 20th Century Man or any other extraneous reason, but because they want to have ME alive, I would certainly feel grateful. But that just does not seem to be the situation you are discussing. I will add that so far as the Pizers think of this revival as revival of particular persons rather than some kind of mass production of living beings for sake of mass-producing living beings, then I agree with the morality of doing so. To Bob Ettinger: Thanks for explaining the Bekenstein bounds. The ANU academic library did not have that particular book by Tipler; the public library did. I have already asked for it, but you've told me quite enough. Besides the possibility of becoming larger than the fixed limit of current human beings, there is another possibility: we may find out how to increase the number of possible states at such a fixed limit, while always keeping that number fixed. Think of seeing colors: suppose that I have an eye which can only see 3 colors, but can (over time) change the 3 colors that I can see to any color in the spectrum. Yes, this does violate the set of possibilities for known matter fitting within a given mass bound, but who says (when we speak of billions of years) that we now know a complete set of all possible states of matter? Without making particular assumptions, I will add that it's far from obvious that the number of possible states for a given mass is finite. How could that be so? Well, possible positions and velocities may remain with a number the same as the continuum. A lot depends on whether or not there is a single value of which all other values of position, time, velocity etc are multiples. My own understanding of quantum mechanics says not that position and momemtum are discrete, but that their PRODUCT is discrete. Best and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11336