X-Message-Number: 14243 From: "Brett Bellmore" <> Subject: Re: Personal identity Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 17:35:44 -0400 James Swayze says, "Mere lack of a test proves nothing. Except perhaps our current lack of imagination." I'd respond that in the usual philosophy of science, lack of a test is not "mere", it's central to determining whether a claim actually has some meaning. If you've got no way of telling the old "Pizer" from the new, what basis have you got for claiming they're different? James continues, "Here's an experiment for you. We put you in the disintigration chamber and flip the switch. Something happens and instead of instant disintigration and copy generation you get to watch the creation of your copy. Oops! Cries a technician and comes over to you apologetically. I'm very sorry, the system glitched. We'll get right to destroying YOU now. So, do YOU sit there and trust that the copy over there looking back at YOU already having divergent experiences from YOURS is actually YOU and will be YOU, so YOU take it like a man? I sure the hell don't! It seems to me just as religous to have faith that because our atoms turn over every so many years that this is the same or can justify the copy paradox we've been mulling over this last week or so. For me, no copy of me will ever BE me, just a very close brother." Actually, James, I think I already covered that one; Causality, so far as we know, proceeds in only one direction in time. In the copy "paradox", you have generated two individuals, both of whom have a claim to "being" the earlier you. But they are NOT causal decendents of each other, so of course neither of them will be consoled by the fact that the other will continue, if they get killed. This, in fact, is central to why I advocate abandoning the use of the term "personal identity"; Because personal "identity" does not obey the law of identity, that if A=B, and C=B, then A=C! Rather, personal "identity" admits the posiblity of two or more people existing, who all "are" a previous person, but aren't each other. **************************************** Yvan Bozzonetti says, "Tortoises have a slow metabolism, so they can have a long life with no trick to overcome senility. It is quite another matter for mammals such whales. One of the longevity determinant is the repair capacity of mitochondrias, if this is what give whales their longevity, we could use them in a cloned man." Yvan, whales have slow metabolisms, too. If they didn't, they'd basicaly explode; Cube vs square law, you know. The larger an organism gets, the slower it's metabolism must run, because it's volume is increasing as the cube of it's size, while the surface area it rejects heat from increases only as the square. Whales get a bit of help from living in frigid water instead of air, but not that much. Now, it's been a while since I studied this, and most of my books on the subject are packed up in a box, but I do recall a log-log chart somebody constructed, showing the lifespans and weights of various organisms. It was pretty much a straight line, excluding the animals which hibernated. (And so spent a good deal of their lives in a slow metabolic state.) Well, there were one or two exceptions; It turns out that HUMANS have anomolously long lifespans for our mass! Seems that we're unlikely to find the key to long life outside ourselves... *********************************************** Fred, thanks for your kind remarks. I personally don't think I've broken any new ground here. I just spent a long while lurking, while I boiled down my thoughts. ************************************************* David Pizer says, "If I understand him correctly, Brett seems to be saying - .... if we can't tell the difference, there may not be a difference." That's a fair summation of my response to you; Not that if we can't tell the difference there certainly isn't a difference. Our capabilities to tell differences are rather limited at the moment. But if we can't tell the difference, we've got no BASIS for claiming that there's a difference! This may change, with improved technology. Then again, if the "duplication" or "splitting" technology is sufficiently advanced, it may not change. David, I don't think that we're as far apart as may appear. I'm specifically not asserting that if you make an identical copy of someone, they are both the same person. See my remarks to James Swazye above; What I'm saying is that personal "identity" doesn't work like logical identity, that there could be in the future two people with valid claims to being David Pizer, but who are NOT each other. Personal "identity", in the sense of causal continuity, is not a case of being David Pizer, it's more a case of having been David Pizer at time T-x. And let's face it, we can all picture scenarios where you end up with two David Pizers, and even if you followed the whole process from start to finish in atomic detail, you'd have no basis for deciding which was the "copy", and which the "original". Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14243