X-Message-Number: 25491 From: Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2005 14:04:10 EST Subject: potential existence etc. RBR writes in part: >It doesn't make sense to say my subjective inner life continues in >all duplicates, since the duplicates can be activated while they >are facing different views the universe Although I agree that survival of a duplicate is (probably) not your survival, this example doesn't prove it. The duplicates could perhaps be activated into a dreaming state without sensory input--no different views of the environment. At the moment of activation, there need not (as far as we know) be any significant differences, other than location, in the brains or their immediate experiences. RBR also writes in part: >While I sleep or if I am put under using certain drugs, I have no >experiences. Not correct. Certainly you have experiences in dreams, and probably unnoticed or unremembered or borderline experiences in other "unconscious" situations. And: >my brain, when sleeping, requires certain >changes in order to return me to consciousness, but the 'self- >circuit' as Robert calls it, remains intact I guess I haven't made clear my (admittedly still vague) postulate of the self circuit, the idea that qualia (defined as the objective phenomena that give rise to subjective experiences) consist of modulations of some kind of standing wave(s) in the brain. (I also postulate that the qualia constitute your essential self. They are not attributes of you or conditions in you--they are you. You don't have qualia--you are qualia.) If this is correct, then when the standing waves are absent you do not exist. RBR would say you do exist, because the biological mechanism to allow the phenomenon is still there, waiting to be activated, like a car waiting to be started. But now we are again up against the philosophical problem of potential existence. Is potentially to be, to be? No matter what the countless over-confident people say, no one has a clue. There are just too many unknowns, including the fundamental nature of matter, space, and time. When you are frozen, there is no discernible electrical activity in the brain, and presumably without such activity there can be no consciousness, no self circuit, and you exist only in potential. But if you still claim you exist, why stop there? If you are incinerated, in principle you still might have potential existence, if a sufficiently advanced technology could gather your atoms and restore you. For that matter, you obviously had potential existence for eons before you were born--so have you always existed? Does your future "self" exist now, just because one day it will exist? And remember that existence, identity, and survival--although related--are all different concepts. Incidentally, the Schrodinger wave equation of conventional quantum theory, which some claim to represent basic reality, postulates a kind of potential existence as prior to observational existence. It supposedly represents physical reality, and yet it displays only probabilities of particular observations. String theory has been mentioned, and quantum coupling, with the possibility that everything everywhere is in some kind of physical contact with every other thing, connected over both space and time. It is barely conceivable, after all, that the Oriental mystics have it right--you are part of me and I am part of you and we are both part of every cockroach and God forbid. Once more, while speculation has its place and every activity may be only basket weaving, as a practical matter we have to make decisions based on likelihood and feasibility. My claim is that it is plausible and useful to say we survive, at least in part, if there is reasonable physical continuity or overlap--in matter, space, and time--between your present self and your future self or selves. 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=25491