X-Message-Number: 4154
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: SCI.CRYONICS Meaningless To Whom?
Date: Thu, 6 Apr 1995 10:35:11 +1000 (EST)

Mike Perry's excellent exposition concerning Goedel seems to me to remove the
need to treat the topic much further here, so I'll just make a couple
of quick replies and get out of the pool.

>Peter Merel's cute example (#4140) was no different really, and no better,
>than the barber or the Cretan, as far as I can see.

I think you've missed a little something. You can dismiss "Robert Ettinger
cannot find this statement to be both true and meaningful" as a relative
to the Liar's paradox, but for me it is neither related nor paradoxical.
I can find it to be both true and meaningful. 

The point is that no matter what criteria you specify that we are to
use to junk Goedelian statements, someone can always create an
enclosing context within which your criteria, as above, are
inconsistent. If you accept this, it gets your argument back to 
faith.

>As to Peter's question about the statement "Every person contains a self
>circuit that cannot be uploaded into a computer"--yes, I am sure it is
>meaningful, although of uncertain truth. As to the statement "Every person
>posseses an immortal soul that survives after death"--the meaningfulness of
>this is problematic, depending on agreement on the meaning of "soul." Nothing
>mysterious here, and nothing contradictory.

Does meaninglessness require contradiction? I see little difference between
the "self-circuit" and the religious "soul". Neither has been demonstrated
by any empirical evidence, nor implied by any theory based upon empirical
evidence. I discount here the Penrose/Eccles business on the grounds that
the biological/quantum mechanisms they posit haven't been demonstrated to
be beyond our ability to transmit as information. Since I know of no 
description of the self-circuit or the soul that is grounded in an 
empricism, I think I can describe both of these terms as meaningless.

>Incidentally, about Peter's habitual sign-off: "Accept everything. Reject
>nothing." Does this mean ideas, or information, or what?

Basically it means to attend to everything, to treat no ideas
or people with disdain, to open your eyes and drink in the whole world,
deal with everything and everyone and leave no loose ends.  It's a
quote from my interpolation of Lao Tse, which you can find at

http://www.usyd.edu.au/~pete/gnl.html#gnl

Pete.


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