X-Message-Number: 26587
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2005 07:01:54 -0700
Subject: The Otter Deaths
From: <>

Plastination, freeze drying, chemical fixation, perma frost burial, 
and other attempts to preserve the 'information' of a brain are 
exactly equivalent---from the perspective of personal survival---to 
annihilation. It therefore greatly disturbs me that Otter is 
suggesting these methods be used by cryonicists, and supported by 
cryonics organizations.

I have previously remarked that my own subjective valuation of the 
odds of surviving current vitrification procedures are somewhat low 
(but much higher than straight freezing). However, the odds of 
surviving any one of the aforementioned techniques are zero. That 
is, barring the existence of a deity who can 'force' these 
techniques to work, or an immaterial soul governed by certain 
supernatural laws (Mike's 'patterns'), they will not work.

The jusitification Otter et al use is, These techniques are better 
than nothing. Incorrect. These techniques are exactly equivalent to 
nothing. And promoting them may cause some people to choose them, 
who otherwise would have sacrificed some material pleasures to 
obtain a higher quality suspension (one with, at least, a non-zero 
chance of enabling survival).

Consider this. The 'information' in your brain is already 'stored' 
in a toilet, according to some (wildly complicated) interpretive 
scheme. Indeed, choose an appropriate interpretive scheme, and your 
brain is being simulated inside of a virtual world, all within the 
confines of that toilet. So if you are crazy enough to think you 
are a 'pattern' and not a hunk of matter, then there is no need to 
do anything: you cannot stop existing no matter how hard you try, 
since there will always exist patterns that can be interpreted to 
be a simulation of your brain in a virtual world. So you are 
already immortal, without even lifting a finger! May as well cancel 
your cryonics membership and spend the money on earthly pleasures.

At this point Perry will say, 'Not fair, you can't choose any 
interpretive scheme you want, it has to be one decipherable by an 
alien civilization!' What is this, proof by assertion? It may well 
be the case that one or more interpretive schemes exist that all 
'intelligent' beings are able to figure out; after all, to be an 
'intelligent being', you must satisfy a set of properties numbering 
in the thousands or millions. Which is to say, you must be a very 
specific kind of thing, sharing many properties with everyone else 
in the class to which you belong. This truism proves neither the 
absolute nature of the 'alien' interpretive scheme, nor the 
invalidity of all other possible interpetive schemes. The Perry 
Hypothesis---and the religion that is based on it---must be 
accepted on faith. 

The rational, scientific, and empirical position is that we are 
exactly what you see in the mirror, or find under a microscope: a 
collection of attoms arranged brainwise. Destroy that arrangement, 
and we cease to exist. Construction of duplicates or simulations is 
meaningless to the survival of the original.

Ettinger has often said, what has existed, can exist again. I 
submit this is not true. What has existed, and no longer exists, 
can never exist again---barring some form of time travel. A copy of 
a thing that once existed is not that thing, for if it were, you 
could create a copy of the copy, and obtain the original yet again, 
but surely the word 'original' loses all of its meaning if it is 
possible for two 'originals' of a thing to exist simultaneously. A 
copy of an original is a copy of an original, possibly atomically 
identical with it, but it is not that original. Nor is the original 
the copy. That is why we call them 'original' and 'copy', and count 
two things, instead of counting one.

Your only hope for survival is the preservation and eventual 
reanimation of your brain, where 'your brain' refers to a brainwise 
arrangement of atoms delineated by the confines of your skull. 
Should that arrangement change, such that it no longer constitutes 
a 'brain' (which, for purposes of survival, is a word implying the 
ability to experience), then 'you'---being a word that merely 
stands for that brainwise arrangement---cease to exist, and shall 
not ever exist again.

So, you had better choose vitrification...and spend your money to 
improve the techniques of vitrification, so that your odds of 
survival are maximized when your time comes.

Richard B. Riddick

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