X-Message-Number: 3585 Date: Tue, 3 Jan 1995 21:47:50 -0500 From: "Bruce Zimov" <> Subject: SCI.CRYONICS: Uploading yourself In #3582 John K Clark <> wrote: > If I had good information about a neuron in your brain I could replace it with an artificial one, the 10,000 other neurons connected to it would see nothing strange; if my information is good the artificial neuron will act just like the natural one. When your satisfied the neuron is working properly and you are still you I get to work on another neuron. < This isn't going to matter until you solve the problem posed by Parfit in REASONS AND PERSONS p.474: "All of my brain cells have a defect which, in time, would be fatal. But a surgeon can replace all these cells. He can insert new cells that are exact replicas of the existing cells except that they have no defect. We can distinguish two cases. In Case One, the surgeon performs a hundred operations. In each of these, he removes a hundreth part of my brain, and inserts a replica of this part. In Case Two, the surgeon follows a different procedure. He first removes all of the parts of my brain, and then inserts all of their replicas......In Case One, the surgeon alternates between removing and inserting. In Case Two, he does all the removing before all the inserting. Can this be the difference between life and death? Can my fate depend on this difference in the ordering of removals and insertions? Can it be so important, for my survival, whether the new parts are, for a time, joined to the old parts?" Parfit wrote this in 1984. Removing and inserting is not the whole story. As Searle in Rediscovery of Mind points out, that during the upload process: "We imagine that your conscious experience slowly shrinks to nothing, while your externally observable behaviour remains the same" 1992 p.67 As a philosopher and a physicist interested in cryonics and uploading, I more than anyone want this process to work, but to date I have only seen this naive giddy enthusiasm about the upload process, including works by Merkle, et.al., without addressing the seriousness of the identity problem. The time, money , and effort of the cryonics organizations in preservation is evidence that they want to reverse suspension to return the same brain to consciousness, and not to preserve the source just to destroy it so that some clone may live. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=3585