X-Message-Number: 14111
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 16:53:39 -0500
From: david pizer <>
Subject: What do we save?

We want to know what we are, so we know what to try to save.

Robert Ettinger has said:

>My own tentative view is that there is a (yet unidentified) 
>anatomical/physiological subsystem in the brain, time-binding and 
>space-binding, which I call the "self circuit," that creates or permits 
>feelings, and it is only this that makes us alive at all in the human sense. 
>(It might be based on some kind of modulated standing wave.) This is the 
>essence of the "knower." 

I think I agree with him but state it a little different.  I think the
knower might be a piece of the brain I call the self-awareness-continuer.
This part of the brain senses awareness of being alive and processes the
information contained in other parts of the brain (internal thinking - or
talking to yourself) and information that arrives through the senses like
seeing and hearing.

For some reason, I can't explain why, if someone were to completely
dissassemble your self-awareness-continuer and then reassemble it even with
the same atoms, I don't know if you survived.  That is the reason for
"continuer" in the name.  If you freeze the thing mostly intact and repair
it, where is was slightly, partially damaged, it is probably still you.  

If this (or something like this is true), then to survive one has to save
this specific piece of brain and one's information in the rest of the brain.  

It may be the case that your information being "felt" in a different
self-awareness-continuer would have the effect of someone else thinking
they were you.


Dave

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