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.

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