X-Message-Number: 25444 Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 05:33:16 -0800 Subject: Survival through Cryonics, and the Utility of Qualia From: <> Dear Scott: You wrote: "As I understand it, your premise is that our brain must continuously have the ability to experience qualia or the qualia experiencer dies. In other words, any significant alteration to the brain that would prevent it from being able to experience qualia would result in the irrevocable destruction of the original self." This is correct. You wrote: "So given that the brain is clearly incapable of experiencing qualia in the cryonically preserved state, does that mean we are all lost?" In a perfect vitrification, there is no ice damage, no fracturing, and no use of toxic cryoprotectants. In this state, only the motion of the molecules has slowed. Therefore, a brain capable of experiencing qualia prior to perfect vitrification would be capable of experiencing qualia during perfect vitrification. In fact, such a brain could validly be regarded as experiencing qualia, albeit at a rate immeasurably slow. When you are in deep sleep or are anesthetized, you do not experience qualia. However, you survive because the neural circuits in your brain responsible for the experience of qualia remain preserved, even if during this time they do not happen to be changing in ways that elicit the experience of qualia. Similarly, an experience of qualia requires a non-zero interval of time to occur---the minimum amount of time necessary for a conscious event. If you were to examine your brain on an interval of time shorter than this minimum, you would not see any change that correlated with experience. Perfect vitrification merely greatly increases this minimum amount of time. You wrote: "These brains are significantly damaged and will need repair before they are capable of generating a QE again. In addition to being damaged, one would have to admit that, given the cracking that takes place (less now than before), the brain has been at least partly disassembled. Have the identities of these damaged and partly disassembled brains been destroyed for all those currently in stasis?" I do not know for sure. But I would highly doubt that frozen patients survive, and I am not even confident in survival with present day vitrification protocols. Robert has indicated some frozen neural samples have shown electrical activity after thawing; whether such activity would correlate with any experience (indicating preservation of the brain's ability to experience qualia), I cannot say, but I prefer to remain skeptical and urge cryonicists to opt for vitrification and demand better vitrification protocols. You wrote: "Your arguments seem to suggest that you think the brain is a machine. OK, fine. But taking a machine apart and putting it back together just as it was results in that machine doing exactly what it did before it was disassembled." Yes, but it is a different machine. That is the whole point. You wrote: "Your (somewhat disturbing) analogy of changing the properties of a dog with a flamethrower is a poor one since that involves 'damaging' the dog machine. Disassembly does not imply damage." The universe does not know about 'damage' or 'disassembly'. The bonds break, and the system loses properties. That is the only thing that matters, from the point of view of survival of those properties. You wrote: "I maintain that it doesn't matter how many pieces a frozen brain is broken into if those pieces can be properly reassembled through some future technology." You cannot maintain this view without going beyond strict materialism. You can theoretically disassemble the brain into atom- sized pieces, in which case, there is no need to use the original atoms, since they are indistinguishable from other atoms, and if you don't need to use the original atoms, you can 'reassemble' multiple brains. Clearly the subjective inner life of the patient cannot continue in multiple brains, but can continue in at most one brain. So under this view, you need to invent a mechanism to decide which brain (if any) gets the subjective inner life of the original. Not only is this mechanism supernatural and ad hoc, but it requires the subjective inner life to be not a property of the system (which it plainly is) but instead, to be a property of an abstraction, which makes no sense in reality, inasmuch as abstractions do not exist. My view has no paradoxes, is alone compatible with both strict materialism and the fact of qualia, and is, I believe, a consequence of both reality, and the relationship of language to reality (since, after all, I am expressing this view in language). Why would you hold to a supernatural view that requires the creation of many non-physical mechanisms, leads to paradoxes and absurdities, and seems completely arbitrary (or rather, constructed for the express purpose of giving some hope to cryonicists)? In my view, cryonicists need to face up to the problem of identity, abandon the 'information-theoretic' criteria of death, and acknowledge it is possible that even if a person's brain can be restored to operation through statistical inference or creation of memories from external sources, this does not mean the person's subjective inner life will continue, from before his suspension to afterwards. This doesn't mean we should abandon cryonics, or our current patients, who are all preserved using inferior technology. Even if the odds are lower the earlier the patient, I still think it is worth pursuing. A non-zero chance is better than a zero chance, and the chance may be somewhat higher than I estimate (just don't count on it). [snip] You wrote: "In the same way that your mind is a word that describes something that happens, not something that exists? Neurons exist, neurochemicals exist, but minds don't?" Both minds and rainbows happen to brains. We talk as if rainbows exist, because they appear to us like other existing things, but while photons exists, there is no such object as a rainbow. There is such an object as a tree. You wrote: "Perhaps you'll say now that rainbows are purely epiphenominal while the mind is causal in nature since evolution would never have allowed such a complex thing to develop if it had no value. But that is clearly a debatable topic (see Crick, Blackmore, and others)." Look at this sentence that I will type out: I EXPERIENCE QUALIA. Now, answer the question: how did I write the sentence, if the experience of qualia were unable to affect my behavior? The answer is that I could not have written the sentence under that assumption. Therefore, the assumption is false, and the experience of qualia can affect behavior. In this example, it caused me to engage in a discussion with you that ultimately led to me writing the preceding sentence. The experience of qualia is numerically identical to certain ways the brain changes. Without this experience of qualia, the brain would not change in those ways (tautology), and behavior, if it would be possible at all, would be fundamentally different. For one, assuming we could talk, we would never talk about qualia or experience. Crick and Blackmore never would have written their books. And you and I would not be having this conversation. Qualia are primarily used by evolution to direct our behavior toward reproductive success. Evolution gives us pain to discourage some behavior, and rewards us with pleasure to encourage other behavior. If you block the experience of qualia through drugs, it causes marked alteration of our behavior. So without question, the experience of qualia *DOES* affect behavior. That is not to say the experience of qualia is responsible for all that we are. As I type this now, words are forming in my head, and I experience them. But how did they get there, how did they form? Their formation is influenced by my experience of qualia (see above), but they have other influences and origins as well, which are not conscious in the least. [snip] Best Regards, Richard B. R. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=25444