X-Message-Number: 14936
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 18:03:45 -0500
From: Jeffrey Soreff <>
Subject: Re: Moving closer to agreement on identities vs persons.

>What if there was another person in another universise living a life just
>like your's and thinking exactly what you are thinking from your day one to
>now.  What if you were to be destroyed now and you know that other person
>in that other universe is not going to be destroyed.  Would you still mind
>being destroyed?

In short, no I wouldn't mind.  The longer answer is:
I'd have to be sure that the other instance of me
actually existed and actually matched that closely.
If me#2's universe was completely decoupled from
this one, how could I actually be sure of that?
If, on the other hand, me#2 was produced here by a
copying process that I understood, controlled, and
launched (say some nanotech synaptic level scan),
no problem!

>We, in cryonics, want to survive as people.  We are talking about the
>survival of a person, not the survival of identities.  My main purpose as a
>cryonicist is for, David Pizer, the person to survive, not an identity of
>him. An identity of me could be a well-written description of every thought
>I ever had, but that alone would not cause me to survive.

I agree with the distinction, but am quite satisfied by survival
of my identity.  Over the long term, as atoms are replaced in
our bodies, only our identities survive anyway.  I've been having
a very similar debate with Mark Gubrud over on nanodot in response
to Kurzweil's keynote speech at the Foresight nanotech conference
http://nanodot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/06/2013235&mode=flat
Mark, however, is so squicked by the possibility of copying
memories or uploading to nonbiological hardware that he wants to
use government power to prohibit those possibilities.  Dave,
what do you think of other people choosing to make backups or
copies, even if you find the prospect unattractive yourself?

                               Best wishes,
                               -Jeff

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