X-Message-Number: 25192 From: Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 10:04:08 EST Subject: clarifications It gets a bit tedious, but these discussions have been going on for millennia, or in a modern context for decades, so what's a few more days? Thomas Donaldson asks what I mean by the physical continuity criterion of survival. It means the system never undergoes a change so sudden or so drastic that it would be fatal if unremedied. Deconstruction, if unremedied by reconstruction, would be fatal, hence deconstruction followed by reconstruction is not survival, but is only death followed by duplication. Brook Norton concludes that we (probably) never survive from day to day, or that "survival" is without meaning, since every system changes over time and we must take the "quantitative" view, viz., that the only meaningful statements are those describing physical conditions and changes. He appears to believe that survival is an illusion, or misleading language, and the validity of our interest in the future is questionable. I have said that our interest in the future (and the past) may be validated by the fact (?) that physical systems have extension in space and time, so that I overlap my predecessors and continuers. Robert Ettinger Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=25192