X-Message-Number: 5343
Date:  Tue, 05 Dec 95 14:10:47 
From: mike <>
Subject: revival of cryonics patients

Keith Lynch, #5318:

>In #5308, mike <> writes:
>> ... given a particular human mind as a starting point and reasonable
>> conditions for advancement, what sort of advanced intelligence would
>> develop? One way to answer that question, in the case of a cryonics
>> patient, would be simply to revive that patient ...  there might
>> be other ways of obtaining an answer without really "running the
>> person" ...
>
>No, there is no other way.  For any sufficiently complex system (and
>it doesn't take much -- the simple cellular automaton Conway's Life is
>sufficient) the only way to find out what will happen is to "run it".
>This is good news for cryonicists.
>

I think too that "this is good news for cryonicists." However there 
is a subtle issue here. I would say that *simulating* the person in 
some way or simulating their successive state transitions is the only 
way to find out how they might develop. In that sense we must "run 
the person" but we can still raise the issue of whether this would 
"really" be "running" a person, e.g. would the resulting, executing 
program be a conscious being, with feelings, etc? E.g. could we find 
out how a person might respond  to a painful situation without 

subjecting  any conscious being to pain? If the simulation could be done, say, 
by a 
Turing machine making marks on a tape, some might say that no "true" 
consciousness was involved, even though presumably equivalents of all 
the successive mental states would be traced out by the TM. My 
feeling, however, is to regard mathematical equivalents of "persons" 
as "real," even though their mental functioning may unfold in 
strange (to us) ways. In other words, I'm agreeing that you would have
to "run the person" even though more is involved than mere complexity. 

Another thought is that, in view of randomness, there is no unique 
way a person would develop from a given starting point. 
"Running the person" would, at best, provide *a possible answer* not 
*the* answer. To get more, you'd have to run them all over again! So 
I'll make a friendly conjecture: "Assuming revival is possible, it is more
likely that more than one copy of a frozen cryonicist will be revived 
than it is that no copies will be revived."

Mike Perry


Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5343