X-Message-Number: 15140 From: "Brook and Helen" <> Subject: Re: Psychological Survival & Values; and the non-survival hypothesis Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2000 22:32:48 -0800 In Message #15128, Mike Perry and Bob Ettinger trade exchanges on the characteristics that each think is important to survival. Perry (who's book I am currently enjoying) says that if Ettinger does not highly value memories then perhaps another survival criterion is appropriate for Ettinger. To quote, Perry says "This is because basically (as far as I can see) you don't value your memories. So for you another theory of survival will seem right than for me." But there is another view of survival that nicely covers all of the hypotheticals that both Perry and Ettinger raise. That other view is that survival, in a strict, unambiguous description of how an entity continues through time, is simply impossible to define and survival is impossible to realize in the real world. Any definition of survival can be shown to be inadequate through the use of appropriate thought experiments. Copied people, split and merged identities, identities that are discontinuous in time, etc., all form a set of inconsistent, irreconcilable thought experiments that indicate that survival is undefinable, and in fact I propose (though I'm sure not the first to do so), nonexistent. It is very simple and straightforward to suggest that all things in the universe, including conscious entities change over time. Some changes are gradual, others very rapid. Period. There is no reason to hypothesize that entities possess a special "identity" that "survives". The survival hypothesis is a further complication that yields no more accurate experimental results than does the non-survival hypothesis. If you accept the non-survival hypothesis as probable, then thought experiments with copied persons, many-worlds, etc are all consistent in that they can all be explained as a state at time t1 changing into a new state at time t2. Period. No gnashing over whether someone "survived" from t1 to t2, just the acknowledgment that they changed. The non-survival hypothesis implies a very different approach to cryonics and the pursuit of happiness. A discussion of these points was in one of my CryoNet messages a few months ago. That discussion touched on the fact that we have evolved with the concept of survival because it is an effective way for our genes to be continued through generations. But I'll cut that discussion short here without further explanation. Brook Norton Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15140