X-Message-Number: 25018
Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 22:14:56 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Nature of the Soul

Richard R writes in part,

"Essentially, your 'soul' is what experiences your subjective inner life. 
The sensation of red, the sensation of sound, the sensation  of 
consciousness; whatever subjective thing you experience...."

Your soul, then, is what "you" really are, and does not necessarily refer 
to anything mystical or supernatural. I think it is a good term to use. 
Richard argues that the soul is what we might call tightly bound to a 
material construct, thus cannot be "saved" through duplication (in case the 
original should suffer sudden destruction):

"Duplicating your brain will produce a duplicate 'soul'; i.e. a duplicate 
thing experiencing qualia. From the point of view of personal survival, a 
duplicate is useless."

It seems to me, though, that this is but one of many views of the soul, and 
that no scientific experiment, even in principle, will ever be able to 
single out one viewpoint or definition as the "true" one over and above all 
the others. The soul could perish every instant of time, and a new, 
duplicate soul, similar but different, take its place--how would you tell? 
The soul may persist so long as consciousness is present, but dissipate and 
vanish when consciousness is lost, to be replaced by another soul (the "day 
person" hypothesis). The soul may in turn survive sleep and other presently 
reversible unconsciousness, but die if the brain is truly "shut down" as in 
cryonic suspension, however well-done. Expanding our horizons, the soul may 
be more robust, not less, than the body that contains it. It may be 
possible for it to simultaneously inhabit more than one physical construct, 
if all were functioning equivalently in some reasonable sense. This more or 
less is the premise of uploading. The soul is not localized to a particular 
body, but is (in principle and quite possibly in practice) multiply 
instantiated. If some of the instantiations become different in some 
self-discernible way, the soul splits into two or more. So, while there are 
difficulties with this position, they can be managed, as far as I can see, 
to maintain logical coherence. The robust soul, captured in information 
rather than matter, has tremendous appeal for some of us, myself included, 
though by no means is it universally favored among immortalists. Indeed, I 
wonder if a majority don't favor "one soul to a body" (the body criterion 
of identity).

The uploading premise, though, does imply that you could survive bodily 
destruction and, given an ample enough universe or multiverse, certainly 
will. So in particular it means that there is hope for raising the dead who 
were not cryopreserved, at some future time, through the creation of 
replicas or other constructs that would house appropriately functioning 
souls. The alternative that follows from the body criterion (excluding any 
mystical element) is that these people are gone forever, so their lives, in 
some sense, were so much wasted time and effort. I for one find this 
conclusion most unpalatable and one that raises serious questions about the 
whole enterprise we call living, mainly, is it really worth it? These 
difficulties diminish considerably with the information-based criterion, 
and life becomes an exciting challenge. On the other hand there are, I 
think, still considerable advantages in choosing cryonics (or some other 
form of high-quality preservation) over alternatives that destroy 
identity-critical information. You may awaken again in that event, but 
probabilities come into play, and you can expect a different and, in my 
view, less favorable outcome, even if fully restored. This subject is a 
subtle one, however--I devote a chapter to it in *Forever for All*.

Again, I think different theories of the soul are on an equal footing as 
far as any scientific experiment to verify or invalidate them is 
concerned--there isn't any and probably never will be, in the important 
cases. One is free to choose. What you are doing by choosing is not an 
attempt to redefine reality in the face of what is "really" so and should 
be considered immutable. Instead you are defining what you choose to 
consider important, and that seems reasonable to me.

In particular I could not accept the idea that a soul could persist if the 
memories and such are sufficiently altered, even if only gradually. Derek 
Parfit, in his book, *Reasons and Persons*, considers a thought experiment 
in which he is gradually changed into an exact copy of the actress Greta 
Garbo. To my thinking the soul of Derek does *not* survive (is not 
instantiated) in the copy of Greta. So actually the information criterion 
is sometimes less robust than the body criterion--for what I think are 
eminently good reasons. This could have some consequences for cryonics. Say 
there are two procedures for resuscitation. Procedure A will destroy much 
of the original brain but in so doing obtain a very accurate record of it, 
from which a functioning person with memories and personality just like the 
original can be constructed. Procedure B will retain much more of the 
original material, but memories and other subtly encoded features will be 
hard-hit, so the patient will suffer massive amnesia and other major 
changes. Faced with the choice for myself I would certainly pick A over 
B--what would you choose?

Mike Perry

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