X-Message-Number: 25014 Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 15:49:23 -0500 From: Randolfe Wicker <> Subject: Personal survival Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT used language I don't personally agree with but put forth an idea worth debating: "Your pattern is irrelevant, since a pattern is open to interpretation---convert your brain to information form, and it is no longer a brain. It's whatever the interpreter makes of it, which may be a brain in some interpretive schemes but won't be in others. Personal survival cannot withstand conversion to a purely subjective interpretive form." I've often expressed skepticism about the idea of "uploading oneself" into a computer. I jokingly say that I really don't believe that the essential "I" could be "uploaded" and then perhaps sent somewhere else as "an email". Previous to the above key argument that: "Personal survival cannot withstand conversion to a purely subjective interpretive form", RBN makes arguments about one's "soul", invoking a religious concept not really appropriate in the rational free-thought conversations here. If we simply focus on the idea as to what "personal survival" really is, RBN's argument that it cannot "withstand conversion" is a really provocative one. Physically speaking, sand can be converted into glass. However, once converted, I'm not sure glass can be converted back into the original sand. More relevant perhaps are those experiments/games in which a simple story is whispered into one person's ear, then passed on time and again around a room, until the story the last person tells is quite different from the original. It shows how small changes on a repeated basis can really change the substance or the original message. It seems to me that "emotional contexts" will possibly be loss during conversions and interpretations. I know some cryonicists who are building large personal visual and audio archives about their lives in order to refresh their memories should they not be able to recall some nuances after reanimation. I think that is a very good idea. Of course, such archives should rely on acid-free paper (photographs, etc) more than on any digital or analog electrical memory system. Randolfe H. Wicker Founder, Clone Rights United Front www.clonerights.com Spokesperson, Reproductive Cloning Network, www.reproductivecloning.net Correspondent, Stem Cells Club, www.stemcellsclub.com Advisor, The Immortality Institute, www.imminst.org 201-656-3280 (Mornings) Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=25014