X-Message-Number: 26636
From: 
Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2005 10:31:28 EDT
Subject: survival

This is highly repetitive, and as RBR  said, no one with an entrenched  

position is likely to change any time soon, but there may be some new lurkers  
who 
could find a brief summary interesting.
 
The most important question in science concerns the criteria of survival  and 
the justification (if any) for an interest in the future. There is no  

agreement, and few people even understand the question, but my tentative views  
may 
be summarized as follows:
 
The essence of the individual is feeling, the capacity for subjective  
experience, or the existence of qualia. We cannot yet characterize a quale in  

objective terms, but my guess is that it may be a kind of standing wave in the

brain, with extension in space and time. (You do not "have" qualia--you ARE your
qualia.) The "same" individual is one who overlaps his previous and future  
selves. You have little in common with your former infant self, and perhaps 

even  less in common with your possible far-future superhuman self, but there is
still  a physical connection, a continuity. Among other things, this fits our 
intuition  that the near future deserves more attention than the far  future.
 
This view--here highly compressed--does not answer all questions by any  

means, and it must be emphasized that our ignorance remains vast. Anyone who is
sure he knows the answers is kidding himself and blind to history. Some  

forefront thinkers suspect the whole universe is entangled both in space and  
time, 
meaning there are no independent or isolated systems, which has a  taste of 
the old Oriental notion that there is some of me in you and some of you  in 
me--perish the thought. 
 
Remember, after 80 years of furious debate by the biggest brains on the  
planet, the disagreements on interpretation of quantum theory are wider than  
ever. But we still have to place our bets and take our chances. Common sense  
tells us to try to save as much as we can of both our material and our  
information.
 
Robert Ettinger


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