X-Message-Number: 14762
From: 
Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 13:57:44 EDT
Subject: Smith's puzzles

George Smith (#14759) writes in part:

>I enjoy reading in the Cryonet the efforts to narrow down the field of the
>subjective sense, the effort to identify a "self circuit" or deal with the
>horrid questions of mental clones of one's personality and what that could
>practically mean.  These are fascinating puzzles.

>But there is another direction which I do not see anyone here exploring.
>What exactly IS the sense of "being there" that we are all so interested in
>preserving and extending via life extension and cryonics?

>And when you look for the actual experience of what you are, there are some
>incredibly weird paradoxes which result.

I don't have a tabulation of all the puzzles on record, but some are in THE 
MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT. 

Mr. Smith's puzzles are interesting in their own right, and in the context of 
cognition generally, but I think not directly related to the self circuit. 

There are levels of awareness and cognition. My main concern is with the most 
basic level, the ground of being, the ultimate physical (biological) basis of 
feeling or sentience. Mr. Smith's puzzles, I believe, relate to a higher or 
more derivative level, the way we represent "ourselves" to ourselves. Space 
and time preclude my pursuing this further here.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

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