X-Message-Number: 15178
Date: Sun, 24 Dec 2000 22:28:37 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Platt, Donaldson Postings

Charles Platt raises some good issues in his posting #15168, "Lack of
Communications." The problem with many of us is we are not in a position to
report on current developments in cryonics. I can say that for myself
because, even though I work in a cryonics establishment, I am not an
official spokesperson for my organization and can really say little beyond
what someone on the outside could relate. Of course there are such
spokespeople, but they will have to be the ones who comment. (It's worth
adding that it often takes a lot of time and effort to give a really
informative rundown of events. Resources to do this are limited, though this
consideration must in turn be balanced by the obligation to provide some
reasonable indication of what is going on.)

In addition there is the contention that, besides there being too much
scarcity of good, cryonics-related material, there is other stuff here that
should not be. I presume this refers to or includes things like discussions
of identity, uploading, Turing machines, and so on. And my feeling is that
yes, we are dying, yes, we must focus on that problem, but the other topics
do have some relevance too, and should not be excluded. One difficulty is,
of course, that if you admit that some topic or topics should not be
excluded altogether, it/they might come to dominate the discussion. It's
hard to partially ban something, probably much harder than to totally ban
it. There have been attempts to set up alternate sites either for "real"
cryonics material or its complement, but so far they haven't gone very far.
I don't have the answer, except to urge that people put in some effort to
make your subject headers informative as to the content of your posting, so
others can more easily decide if they want to read it or not.

With that in mind, and with some feeling of "walking on eggs," I'll continue
with a comment on Thomas Donaldson's posting #15165 relating to
computational issues. First, I should say that I think this at least
qualifies as "on-topic" because it relates to "philosophy of identity," one
of the subjects Kevin Brown mentioned as appropriate (at least in some
measure) years ago, and something that does arise if you try to promote
cryonics and the scientific conquest of death.

I'll try to be as brief as possible:

Thomas says:
...
> ... an imitation of the entire
>Universe requires more than the Universe itself. In that sense it
>is NOT possible.

What the heck does this have to do with life extension?--some will ask. But,
after all, we want to be immortal. What does that mean? One consequence is
that the universe will have to be able to support immortality. It (by
reasonable if not universally accepted arguments) will have to permit
generation of an infinite amount of information over infinite (subjective)
time. An infinite set can be put into one-to-one correspondence with a
proper subset of itself, as mathematicians will know. This can be turned
into an argument that a part of the universe could imitate the whole, if,
again, immortality is possible as we'd like. Argh! I hope we don't dwell too
much on this subject here. See ya in Y1M!

> Furthermore, when we look at how things work, it
>looks quite impossible to make such an imitation with only one
>computer because everything is working at the SAME TIME. That's
>quite important, not a side issue at all. If single atomic events
>must occur in some order, then the results will depend on the order
>in which they occur, something quite different from those occurring
>at the same time. 
>
The results still *need not* depend on the order, though certainly they
*could*. Two matrices can still commute, even though otherwise it matters in
which order you multiply them.

> Computers have proven
>quite useful for many purposes, even SINGLE computers.

From a theoretical perspective, there is no fundamental difference between a
single computer and a system consisting of, say, 10,000 or ten billion.
Indeed some computers today have many processors running in parallel. All of
this is relevant to realtime operations, but not, I think, to such issues as
whether consciousness can be decomposed into discrete events with nothing in
between or indeed requires some sort of continuous process. And that in turn
is relevant to the issue of what forms of "reanimation" would be reasonable,
which is a topic cryonicists should at least be thinking about. If you--or a
very complete description of you--could be expressed in a computational
device of the future that *could* run in realtime, would it have
consciousness and feeling and, in addition, possess your identity, or should
you be insisting that only your reinvigorated meat body will fill the bill?

Mike Perry

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