X-Message-Number: 33469
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2011 20:20:46 -0800 (PST)
From: Luke Parrish <>
Subject: Personal Identity Challenges

Will the personal identity wars never end?

Some people claim to be concrete objects. Others claim to be
patterns. Both groups appear to think they wake up in the
morning, and are able to "survive" for many years at a time
despite continuously exchanging atoms with their environment.
Both groups are adjusted to the fact that they go through
periods of complete unconsciousness, forget entire sequences of
events, and change in terms of personality and personal
preferences.

I'm of a mixed mind about the matter. Part of me is a pattern,
and part of me is a concrete object. But I'm not saying "part"
in the sense that a cake cut into two pieces is two parts, I
mean something more abstract than that. It would be more
accurate to say that all of me is a pattern, and all of me is a
concrete object -- depending what perspective is being used.
Yes there is a valid perspective from which I am a concrete
object, and yet this concrete object itself is not "the same"
over an extended period of time. My desire for survival hence
seems to come more from the pattern side of me, so to speak.

What does it mean to be a pattern? Well, a pattern is an
abstract, like the color red or a particular temperature. It's
a property of matter, an arrangement of a particular nature
that can be expected to produce particular results under
particular conditions. Those results are not necessarily
deterministic -- nondeterministic patterns can also exist, and
apparently do. For example diffusion in chemistry is an
essentially nondeterministic process which nonetheless follows
particular statistical rules quite rigorously. Thus a
pattern-identical me would not be guaranteed to have the same
thoughts and future as me, even if it were placed in
indistinguishable circumstances. This is particularly the case
when the butterfly effect is taken into consideration, whereby
small changes can have a large impact on chaotic systems.

As cryonicists we don't have much cause to fight even if we
decide to take different sides of the fence here. Cryonics --
if practiced sufficiently well -- preserves the physical object
and the pattern. Yet there are limits to what it can do in both
respects. Part of the physical object (including many millions
of dendrites, neurons, etc.) will be destroyed, which will lead
to the loss of part of the pattern. This is the sobering
reality faced regardless of your philosophical position.

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