X-Message-Number: 20904 Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2003 21:00:54 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Francois' Problem, Relevance Francois, #20892: >Of course, what Francois A feels, perceives and thinks from that moment on >will not be shared by Francois B, and vice versa. The two will be separate >individuals, but they will both be Francois and, more to the point, think of >themselves as Francois. > >It is difficult to wrap one's mind around that conclusion and it took me a >while to do it. One feels a true repulsion when confronting it. This becomes easier for me with the thought that I am, today, only one possible continuer of myself at an earlier stage, not a unique continuer. (This same property holds, of course, for any earlier stage relative to a still earlier stage.) This will certainly follow if many-worlds is true, for then "I" am constantly splitting into different near-copies which then diverge (or very rarely fuse again). By now this thought is so familiar it just seems natural (and not repulsive at all)--and I don't give it much thought. The relevance of the duplicates issue to cryonics is often called in question but (agreeing with Mike Price) I think it is very relevant, and its relevance does not require that we must confront any actual duplicates in the future. For the real issue at stake is whether you can survive in a partial or complete copy, or whether "it's not you just a copy." In my view, it *is* you if sufficiently similar, even if the atoms are all different. Thus for me an adequate reanimation would occur if you just scanned my original, cryopreserved remains or otherwise extracted the information, destroyed the original, made a copy from the extracted information, and reanimated the copy. A further elaboration would be to use the extracted information to build a replica with appropriate upgrades such as aging and diseases eliminated. You would calculate the repaired structure first then proceed to build it and wake it up. That could conceivably be much cheaper, faster, and more reliable than trying to get the original functioning again with as little in the way of atomic dislocations as possible. If it is, then it seems clearly better than a slavish attempt to conserve my original structure. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=20904