X-Message-Number: 17273
Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 22:00:19 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis Epstein <>
Subject: Replies to CryoNet #17262 - #17270

On 14 Aug 2001, CryoNet wrote:

> ----------------------------------------------------
> Message #17262 Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 09:43:22 -0400
> From: Thomas Donaldson <>
>
> God is worse than nonexistent. HE/SHE is irrelevant.

Compared to God,our existences are irrelevant.

WITH THAT PERSPECTIVE IN MIND,
let's extend them as long as we can.

> ----------------------------------------------------
> Message #17264 From: Transoniq <>
> Subject: good news / bad news...
>
> If these people are even a tiny little bit consistent, it should be obvious
> that this includes adults as well as embryos. In fact, they should have at
> least a little relief that in defending frozen adults at least they
> don't get into the "clump of cells" issue. The deeply religious could
> actually, very easily, become our most adamant defenders and strongest
> allies.

However,the religious groups that see
life as beginning before birth,have no
history of seeing it as extending in
the bodily realm beyond clinical death.
And alignment of cryonics with the
forces of anti-abortionism would
alienate many.

> And on a gloomier note... There is (at least) one reason why the folks in
> the future won't be giving suspendees the hero's welcome that a lot of
> people seem to expect: survivor's vilification. This is what happens in
> certain "life-boat" types of disasters where the survivors are sometimes
> looked upon with a "why you?" type of attitude. When biostasis is commonly
> accepted it's going to be really easy for folks to forget (if indeed, they
> ever knew) just how goddamn hard it is (was) to convince someone to
> consider cryonics. They may look at suspendees and say, "You KNEW this
> would work! You KNEW everyone else was dying! Why the hell are you here
> and not everybody!?"

I don't think so.
This isn't much like the Titanic.
There'll be no lack of evidence
that cryonics tried to sell itself.

> Eric
>
> -------------------------------------------
> Message #17265 From: 
> Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 15:57:18 -0400
>
> Mike Perry:
> > I don't have the original atoms I had ten years ago, and you don't
> > have yours either.
>
> Louis Epstein:
> >But our current sets of atoms are the organic successors to the ones we
> >had then.
>
> Comment: So what? "Organic successors" only means that your bodys'
> ribosomes and other machinery have chosen some generic atom or string
> of atoms out of stuff in your refrigerator, and used it replace one
> that was there in your body before.

A distinction of absolutely immense
importance.

> Epstein:
> >Not at all the same thing as discarding a former body for
> >a new one and calling the new body the same person as the old.
>
> COMMENT:
> It is, if you do it a piece at a time. Indeed, that very
> thing has already happened to YOU, as Mike Perry points out.

But the point is...doing it a piece
at a time makes a WORLD of difference.
The situations should not be treated
as comparable.What matters is the
process.

> Epstein:
> >Even in my wildest fantasies of having a wizardress of unfathomable
> >power as a lover,I permit nothing to be done to me that would have me
> >having a "former body".
>
> But that's easily arranged: if we be sure to destroy your old body any
> time we duplicate you.

I think you realize that this would only
intensify my objections to the process.
Bodily existence has to be continuous
and non-migratory!

> This can be done bit-by-bit,or all at once. I see no philosophical
> difference.

To me,that shows blindness on your part.

> I'm not even sure I see a moral difference if you're doing all this
> yourself with your own "permission."

Definite blindness.Normal life processes are
completely different from destructive external
intervention!

> Will you argue that is okay to kill your own sleeping template
> after you've been duplicated, but not if he happens to wake up first?

No.I will argue against the destruction of
any original body,or the treatment of any
duplicated body as if it were the person whose
body the original is.

> Epstein:
> >Nor would I ever use a matter-transporter that did not transmit and
> >reconstitute the atoms,rather than reconstituting their pattern and
> >disintegrating the person who stepped in.
>
> COMMENT
> I don't understand why you'd want to use the second
> kind, even, if you feel that way about it.

It's the first kind(which actually transports the
person) that I would use,not the second(which only
transmits the pattern,and kills the person).

> And if you consent to do it that way, why label each atom, like a block from
> some cathedral? [Purine carbon 3; basepair 103453;
> neuron 12315 (see diagram) hypocampus Louis Epstein.
>
> Why not just send email and Fedex 15 Kg of carbon, or whatever. If they
> mislabel mix up your  spleen and brain carbon atom, what do you
> care, so long as they do the job?

Mike Perry wouldn't care,

> In fact, how about the cheapo option of sending email
> only, and telling the other end to use local carbon.

...and would gladly do that...
but I WOULD care.

> And if you CAN, look into your refrigerator and be afraid. Be very,
> very afraid...

Not at all.What normal life processes do is
fine...it's the substitution of drastic
external intervention that breaks the
thread of body/identity whose preservation
should define survival.

> ----------------------------------------------------
> Message #17268 Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 18:20:54 -0400
> From: James Swayze <>
>
> Louis, St. Anselm once stated *the* ontological argument as: "God is a
> being which no greater than can be conceived". Now this was meant to
> point out the limits of the human understanding of god.

Yes.
And a definitional point that the people
who say "then who created God?" don't get...
God is INFINITELY First,etc....a greater,
earlier,etc. being is not possible.

If the visible universe IS somebody's computer
simulation,the programmers are not God...the
ultimate creator of the ultimate reality of
which they are an infinitesimal part is God.

> But how much does god understand? Can god conceive of a being
> greater than him/it/herself? Merely have the thought?

We can't know,we're not God.

> In response to my position that energy cannot, without the ordering
> effect of matter (something solid), hold information and hence I feel
> there are no *energy only*, spirit, ghost, etc. beings, Louis recently
> and hurriedly wrote that matter was merely super dense energy.

Actually,I merely wrote that this was
*possibly* true.

> I'm sure Louis expected this to be rebuttal to my position but Louis,
> wouldn't that be a solid and support my claim anyway?

Not exactly.
It would just be a different form of
the same thing...a difference of
degree,rather than the difference of
kind that you are citing.

> ----------------------------------------------------
> Message #17269 Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 21:56:50 -0700
> From: Mike Perry <>
>
> Actually, this is a mistake (another one! apologies once again, as with
> Ettinger's s.f.). In the early days, for about a year in 1976-77, one Allen
> McDaniels, M.D., was president of Alcor. He doesn't seem to have played
> much of an active role, based on the old newsletters, and he later dropped
> out of cryonics.

How many presidents has Alcor had?
Chamberlain,Chamberlain.McDaniels,
Darwin,Mondragon,Bridge,Chamberlain,
Chamberlain...has there been anyone
else in there who slips my mind?

(In any case,unlike the VPs,none
in suspension...while ACS seems to
have suspended most of its early
leaders).

> ----------------------------------------------------
> Message #17270 Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 23:20:50 -0700
> From: Mike Perry <>
>
> Louis Epstein, #17260:
> >... I know at least one vice president is now [neuro] suspended...if
> >Jerry Leaf ... was also VP that makes two).
>
> Jerry is actually whole-body.

I wasn't sure about him,I know Paul Genteman
is neuro.

> >But our current sets of atoms are the organic successors to the ones
> >we had then.Not at all the same thing as discarding a former body for
> >a new one and calling the new body the same person as the old.
>
> "Organic successors." So it makes a difference *how* the atoms were changed
> as to whether you would grant "sameness" to the new construct.

Yes.The means of preservation determine
whether it is preservation or just
imitation.

> This is not how I see it; the properly functioning structure is all
> that counts.

I think I've made clear that we differ on
this point!

> (For the case people like to bring up of more than one copy of the
> person being created, I allow that one person may fission into more
> than one who share a common past.) But at least you allow that
> sometimes the atoms are changed without changing to a new person.

If it's part of living as a person,
the body/identity survival is not
broken.See my response to Steve Harris
above.

> > > If some question a certain course of action that need not preclude
> > > others from taking it--unless you are contemplating totalitarianism.
> >
> >See the studies of Dutch euthanasia...legalization has led to
> >railroading of those who would not choose it themselves.
> >"It's perfectly legal for him to die,and rationally I think he should..."
> >
> >Its not being legal is protection.
> In the U.S. at least a laissez-faire tradition has some respect, and I hope
> it will continue and strengthen. The trouble with totalitarian approaches
> is they *could* be wrong, in which case everybody loses.

"Right-to-die" is closely connected to
"duty to die"...let one in the door and
the other will follow.Maintaining an
uncomparomising stand against death
protects life.

>  >> The absence of deep free will far from implies that we have no reason.
>
> >I think not.It reveals our reason as an illusion,and particularly the
> >idea that we make decisions is discredited completely.
> >If we have no choices,we have no choices.
>
> To me it doesn't cause a problem if on some deep level my actions are
> predetermined. (Actually it's comforting, for I don't have to worry about
> uncaused effects or the possibility that unseen, animistic forces are
> pulling the strings.)

What is comforting about realizing
that one is completely helpless?
To me it robs existence of meaning.
As long as there's a God,there's a
cause for all effects.

> I would consider even a deterministic (entirely predictable) computer
> program to have reasoning power if it can prove math theorems and the like.

I of course oppose the idea of
artificial intelligence...and it
seems to me that this notion
opens the doors to ascribing
intelligence to a lot of software.

> >... it is necessary for a God to exist for us to exist.
>
> Well, you could define God as "all that exists" as a pantheist might, and
> then be quite right--but only because something must exist for us to exist.

God is also the reason-anything-exists.

> And what evidence do we have that there *must be* a vast being behind
> all that is?

For it to be otherwise is both
impossible and ridiculous.

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