X-Message-Number: 14290
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 18:39:16 -0500
From: david pizer <>
Subject: To be, that is the question.

To Be or Not To Be  --  Whether it is more important to save ones memories
or awareness, or both, that is the question,.  

>From: Thomas Donaldson <>
>Subject: awareness and memories
>Hi everyone!
>For Dave Pizer: we need both awareness and memories. The difference is
>that recreating awareness may be simple, while (at least now) recovering
>memories does not look simple at all.

snip.............

But the awareness you recreate may not be the same person that originally
felt the memories and therefore if you recreate old memories and put them
in a new awareness, the original person may not have survived.  We want to
survive as the original people.  If it were memories alone, one could write
down everything one remembered and everytime a new person read it, the
original person would be surviving.  That does not seem to work.

My point is that the "awareness" that is feeling the memories may be what
is central to being a person; Or, *Who* is doing the feeling is critical
not *what* each separate person is feeling.  Awareness seems more like
"who."   Memories seem more like "what."

If Thomas and David are feeling different memories in two different brains
(two different areas of awareness in space), we would agree they are two
different persons.

If Thomas and David are feeling the same memories in two different brains,
we would still agree they are two different persons.  (In fact there
probably are times when two different people are thinking the same thing.)

Therefore, it seems to me, what constitutes the difference in these two
persons is where they feel the memories (each separate brain with each
separate awareness), not the memories themselves.

Dave Pizer 

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14290