X-Message-Number: 3624
Date: 07 Jan 95 02:01:35 EST
From: "Steven B. Harris" <>
Subject: CRYONICS Identity Problems

Ken Wolfe says:

    >>To me this sounds like a variation of the identity and
duplication issue.  We had a very interesting discussion about
this at the cryonics room party at the World SF Convention in
Winnipeg last September.  Basically, the issue is as follows: if
an exact duplicate is made of you,  presumably by nanomachines
cataloging every neuron, synapse and other cell 
(non-destructively) and then recreating you, and then for
whatever reason one of you must be destroyed, do you care which
one it is?  In other words, is that duplicate just as much you as
the original?<<  

   Comment: I don't have any good answers, but since you 
mentioned SF and this basic problem of object duplicators
and object "transmitters" (what Eric Drexler calls photocopying
and FAXing people-- a natural and disturbing result of 
nanotechnology not discussed in his books), I thought I might
remind everyone that one of the earliest treatments of this whole
issue in SF is Algis Budrys' novel _Rogue Moon_, which was
written in 1960 (!)   Most SF fans remember the plot from the
novel or the preceding short story: A lethal alien building or
structure of some kind is found on the moon, which kills 
astronauts who enter, in various strange and gruesome ways,
probably without "meaning" to (as exploring insects might be
killed in various human-made mechanical devices in various
gruesome ways, without any sadistic or even inimical intent on
the part of the builders).  Humans need to understand the alien
thing so badly they have to do the exploration anyway.  Now we
have a good psychological plot (readers will recognize the same
basic plot hook in Frederik Pohl's later _Gateway_ series, also
very fine).  It's a good plot because it is a microcosm of the
situation that ALL of us find ourselves in, in this nasty but
uncaring universe.  The machinery that somewhat mysteriously
kills us all in the real world has only been "artifactualized"
and personalized a bit in these novels, for the sake of good
story-telling-- but we humans tend to do that in our good myths.

    Anyway, in the novel, humans construct a matter transmitter,
and use it to break down a suited astronaut into information, and
send one copy to the moon for reconstruction, and reconstruct one
copy back on Earth.  The Earth copy is kept sensorially deprived,
for it is found that when this is done, he doesn't mentally
diverge from the moon copy, and stays in touch telepathically for
up to half an hour, until metabolisms diverge enough that the
telepathic link is broken.  When the moon copy is killed within
that time (as he always is), they take the Earth copy out of his
suit on Earth, and find that he has often been driven half-crazy
by the "memory" of the experience of being squashed, or cut in
half, or fried, or killed in some other way, by the artifact. 
This is too bad, since these memories are the only way they can
tell what not to do, to get through the artifact.

   During the novel, a volunteer (Barker) asks the transmitter
main designer scientist (Hawks) about duplication resolution
problems with people: "Ever had any trouble, Doctor?"

   "If we have, we don't know it.  As far as we could tell, our
preliminary scans have been perfect.  At least, the objects and
living organisms we've dealt with were able to go on functioning
exactly as they always had.  But a man is such a complex thing,
Barker.  A man is so much more than his gross physical structure. 
He has spent his life in thought-- in filling his brain with the
stored minutiae he remembers and reconnects when he thinks.  His
body is only a shell in which he lives.  His brain is only a
complex of stored memories.  His mind-- his mind is what he does
with his memories.  There is no other mind like it.  In a sense,
a man is his own creation.
   "If we happen to change him on some gross level that can be
checked against whatever is recorded of his life, we can detect
that change.  But we're not likely to be that far off.  Far more
serious is the possibility of there being enough error to cause
subtle changes which no one could find--- least of all you,
because you'd have no data to check against.  Was your first
schoolbook covered in blue or red?  If you remember it as red,
who could find it now to see what color it was?"
   "Does it matter?" Barker shrugged, and the suit groaned on the
table. "I'd rather worry about the duplicate being so screwed up
that it's dead, or turned into a monster that needs to die."
   "Well, Hawks said, wiping his hand over his face, "that's not
at all likely to happen.  But you can worry about that if you
want to.  What you worry about depends entirely on where you draw
the line on what parts of you are important to you.  You have to
decide how much of yourself can be changed before you consider
yourself dead."

    I think this 1960 discussion pretty much sums up the 
_sorites_ paradox/ fuzzy logic problem of identity-- it's a
*qualitative* thing which arises from the complexity of a
smoothly *quantitative* change, a bit like "life" itself.  Who's
to say if this qualitative thing is subjectively "real"?  Some of
it surely is not, since as the sequence above makes clear, some
of "identity" arises in the simple act of valuing, which (except
to Randroids, of course) is the epiphany of subjectivity (Mike
Darwin has long made this point with his example of the famous
violist who loses his musical ability after brain surgery, vs.
the tone-deaf man with the same problem).  Thus, if there's no
disputing taste objectively, to some extent there's no disputing
identity problems.  And if we insist on binary thinking about
identity (as we seem to need to about life, too-- <g>), who's to
say where to "draw the line," as the Hawks character says? 
Perhaps all this is a worthless enterprise to try to even pin
down in Aristotelian fashion, as all those Eastern philosophers
and their disciples keep telling us.  (I suspect that Ayn Rand in
Hell has nothing but Korzybski and Hayakawa to read...)

    Interestingly, the Budrys novel contains a substantial
element of alienation as penalty for experimenting without the
invocation of God's authority-- something that has been with us
at least since Frankenstein, and may go back to the Prometheus
tale, which is the book subtitle, and to Milton (as the monster
knows only too well in the book-- quoting the alienated Satan in
Paradise Lost all the time).  One cancerous researcher is
suspended in the transmitter for later reconstruction when a cure
is found, an action which Hawks (the scientist/philosopher of the
tale) notes hasn't done him any favors probably, since the man
won't know anyone in the future.  As for Hawks himself, he lets
himself be duplicated and beamed, then led through the structure
on the final proof run by the macho warrior-adventurer Barker
(many character names are descriptive in this novel), who has
learned finally (after dying many times) how to do it.  Hawks
comes out on the other end realizing that although he is alive,
he can't go back to Earth.  The novel's reason is that technology
is not good enough yet to send men on the reverse route with
lunar equipment, and by the time it is, people will have diverged
enough from their normal environments as to (again) not be able
to have their normal places in the world back.  Especially not
with somebody else (themselves) already having filled in for them
with their loved ones for years, which of course is what parents
who don't have their kids frozen are afraid of, in cryonics. 
Alienation again.

    I've long argued that the average person doesn't sign up for
cryonics not because of a belief that it won't work, but out of a
fear that it will.  The people who do sign up are people who are
already alienated from society for one reason or another, and who
it doesn't matter as much to, if they get a little more left out. 
It's probably no coincidence that cryonicists are people who like
to go to sea on their own boats, who like to go driving across
the country alone, etc.  If you have a constant need for people
underfoot in your life all the time, you probably are not going
to sign up, knowing that most of them will be gone forever when
and if you wake up.  If you find a large part of your *identity*
in other people (something that is a basic psychological outlook
and part of one type of common personality, and also gender
influenced), then cryonics horrifies you instinctively!  And
permanently!  Even _couples_ who sign up for cryonics are more
likely to be what Kurt Vonnegut in _Cat's Cradle_ calls "duprass-
es" -- sets of people who are perfectly tied up in each other,
like two halves of a hermit, but not too much in everybody else.

   It's an intractable problem in making cryonics grow, and it is
not going to change soon.



                                      Steve Harris





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