X-Message-Number: 26630
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 23:48:48 -0400 (EDT)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: Re: continuity and the lack of it
References: <>

I'm arriving late in this discussion, so maybe I missed
something previously stated, but it touches an area of
special concern to me.

> Suppose I am copied while suspended, then destroyed, and
> sometime later my copy is revived. From my subjective point
> of view (where 'my' refers to the original, from whence the
> copy was derived), is this scenario equivalent to
> annihilation, or a deep sleep?

rbr says "annihilation" and so do I. But where does rbr draw
the line? Suppose he is cryopreserved imperfectly and then
resuscitated after some repairs that were necessary as a
result of incomplete cryoprotection. Suppose half his brain
is accurately rebuilt as a copy. Has he been annihilated or
not? Suppose only one-quarter of the brain is rebuilt ... or
three-quarters ... or 99 percent ... or 1 percent.

rbr says these are not fuzzy questions, but they look fuzzy
to me. If I am revived after 3 minutes of cardiac arrest at
normothermic temperature, or 60 minutes of surgery involving
cardiac arrest with mild hypothermia, or 100 years of
vitrification, I think these are likely to be three entirely
different subjective experiences and probably can be
objectively differentiated too, in terms of what we could
measure in the brain.

Do "I" care if "I" am revived after 3 minutes? Yes.  After 60
minutes? Probably. After 100 years? Not so sure.

Everyone has a visceral, subjective idea of when the period
of downtime or the process of repair becomes so extensive,
the break in continuity is unacceptable. Trying to define
this as a universal principle does not make sense to me,
because the sense of self itself is entirely a subjective
thing.

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