X-Message-Number: 14701
Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 21:14:57 -0500
From: david pizer <>
Subject: Don't take me apart

To answer several replies.  

Saying the duplicate is the original, because of the memory information
alone, and not addressing the personal nature of the meat (whose meat -
mine or it's?)  that "feels" the memory when trying to demonstrate that all
a person is is memory, seems to me to be begging the question.  "All a self
is is memory, because all a self is is memory."   It can either be begging
the question  *OR* it can be a basic foundational belief that is so basic,
so true, there can be no further justification.  Which is it???  I guess we
just can't know at this early stage.

On the other hand, just as many of us are not comfortable with the patterns
of information only definition of selfhood, neither are we able to convince
the other side that whose meat does the feeling may be the critical thing
that establishes who is who.

As far as cryonics reanimation scenarios where the brain is taken apart
atom by atom to take mesurments to make a new device that is to replace the
original brain, that is not a way I understand that sounds like survival.
Hopefully in a hundred years or so, we will have the choice of just
jumpstarting our original brains and walking out the door; to make further
decisions after we have looked around in the new world for a little while. 

Dave Pizer

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