X-Message-Number: 32857
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2010 08:59:15 -0700
Subject: To Dave Pizer and Robert Ettinger
From: Keith Henson <>

On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 2:00 AM, david pizer <> wrote:

> Robert
>
> 'Been reading your posts about why uploading is not survival of a person.
>

> You are still (after all these years) the smartest person in cryonics in an 
all-around way. (and by the way, unsurpassed in ethics and morality also).  I 
think the point that uploading lovers are missing is that - yes information can 
someday be loaded into a computer that mimics a natural person, but - no that 
thing is NOT the person that it mimics.

Couple of days ago I posted how a person could take completely
reversible, no memory loss, not even consciousness loss, steps from
unmodified human to being a disembodied upload and reverse all those
steps back to an unmodified human state.


> You are arguing about what it is that makes a person a person, they are 
arguing that uploading will be able to create something that seems like a 
person.

Assume the technology I described works as stated (it's only a slight
upgrade of what's needed to get you back from the frozen state), where
in the process does a person cease being human?  When the biological
brain resumes functioning do they become human again?  If they keep
the memories about what they experienced while an being an upload are
they less of a human than if the memories were discarded and their
brain resumed functioning without memory of their experiences in the
uploaded state?

I am just an engineer.  The philosophy of these arguments is really
hard for me to parse.  I will say that Han's Moravec's one way trip to
becoming a bush robot does not appeal to me, in fact I find it
downright repellent.


> Having existed with Uploading Lovers (heck some of them are even my friends) 
for many years now, I believe they are as firmly entrenched in their beliefs as 
traditional religious persons believe that their souls are going to Heaven after
death here on Earth (I have some of these friends too and I hope they are 
right, but I am not canceling my arrangements for cryonics suspension at legal 
death).

I am not canceling either, but it would be really nice to just live
into the era when medical technology gets good enough to avoid being
suspended at all.

I have a lot of sympathy with your position being (as some people
deride) a "matter chauvinist."  But the way I describe to upload is
such a smooth and reversible path that I really have no idea of where
you could put in a stake and say:  "Beyond this point he did not
survive."

Best wishes,

Keith

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