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


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