X-Message-Number: 25043
Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 14:57:31 -0800
Subject: Cryonics Implications of Souls (to Mike Perry)
From: <>

Dear Mike:

You wrote:

"Richard R, #25026, replies at length to my posting on souls (in 
response to his earlier postings), and raises some very interesting 
points which I want to reply further to--a particularly busy part 
of my week is starting up so I will defer for a little while. To 
answer one question, Richard, yes, I do work for Alcor."

That's great, Mike! I have much respect for Alcor and their stated 
goal of improving the methods of cryopreservation, instead of 
assuming that future technology can solve any problem (because, no 
matter what technology can do, it cannot bring back the *same* soul,
 if it is destroyed; therefore, I consider it essential to develop 
technology capable of preserving the soul).

I am signed up for vitrification and eagerly await the development 
of high temperature storage.

I hope through these discussions (and writings that I will send 
separately to Alcor), I can influence Alcor to take an official 
stand on the uploading issue; and the broader issue, which is, what 
exactly can you do to the brain without destroying personal 
identity. Merkle's approach of disassembling and reassmbling the 
brain, atom at a time, using the exact same atoms, surely results 
in destruction of personal identity. People who undergo this 
process will never wake up again; it will be as if they were 
cremated.

You wrote:

"It might very well be convenient to split a cryopreserved patient 
into several or many pieces, work on the pieces separately (at low 
temperature, say, where unintended changes would be minimized), 
then reassemble the pieces and finally resuscitate the patient 
physiologically intact. Now, in your view, would such disassembly/
reassembly kill the soul within, so you'd just get a different 
individual?"

It is clear from trauma that we do not need parts of our brain in 
order to function. In fact, I expect we could do without even 
larger parts of our brain, if our intention was just to preserve 
the soul (the qualia experiencer within). Therefore, I would say, 
there are ways to split the brain into pieces such that the soul is 
not destroyed. Since we don't know very much about the brain, I 
would say, we cannot know exactly what divisions are possible 
without destroying the soul. The question is answerable, but 
probably not for a long time.

Being naive at this point, I would hazard a guess that you could 
probably split the brain into macroscopic chunks, repair the chunks,
 and reconnect them, without destroying the soul. But not knowing 
more about the brain, I would want to err on the safe side in 
reconstruction, and repair the whole thing as a unit, even if it 
were to take an additional few decades of computer-supervised work.

"If you so much as split a brain into two pieces then joined them 
back, with full recovery of function, you could say that there was 
a time when 'you didn't have the person' thus the original is 
irretrievably lost. Is this how you view the matter? We can also 
consider the idea of splitting the brain into parts which, however, 
are still in contact via radio, as should be possible in the future.
 Is the person still present (assuming consciousness goes on as 
usual), and if this contact is briefly shut down then resumed, does 
that kill the soul?"

Assuming there were a soul to begin with, my answer would be yes---
shutting down the communication kills the soul. However, I am 
fairly certain there is no soul to begin with.

The soul dies the moment you split it into pieces, and cannot exist 
afterward even with the radio communication. The reason for this 
involves the subjective interpretation of the radio signals. For 
each split piece, there is a piece of hardware that translates the 
radio signals to neural inputs, and translates neural outputs into 
radio signals. This conversion of neural function into pure 
information, which requires both a medium and a subjective 
interpretive scheme, prevents the emergence of a system-wide soul.

Now you might argue each little piece of hardware, combined with 
its neurons, constitutes or possesses a kind of soul, if the 
pairing of the two components is complex enough. But the whole 
system, consisting of all the split pieces, the hardware 
transmitters and receivers, and the radio waves propagating between 
them, is not and does not have a soul. The identity of the person 
whose soul is split is lost forever; from their subjective 
viewpoint, it is equivalent to them dying.

Best Regards,

Richard B. R.

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