X-Message-Number: 5815 From: Joseph Strout <> Newsgroups: uk.legal,sci.cryonics,sci.life-extension Subject: Cryonics & Personal identity Date: Fri, 23 Feb 1996 11:38:50 -0800 Message-ID: <> Paul Burridge () wrote: > So your corpse 'wakes up' after x years in suspension and finds his > long-term memory substantially unimpared. What makes you think the > conscience of this person is still the same? His essential > identity: his soul? The most plausible, consistent (internally and with other notions) and "intuitive" theories of personal identity are all based on memory, or more generally on mental attributes. Locke got the ball rolling by asserting, in essense, "if I remember doing an act, then I am the same person as he who did that act." The act could involve thinking; thus if you remember thinking that cryonicists were a bunch of loonies, then you ARE in fact the same person as he who had that thought. Modern refinements of memory theory tend to be fuzzy (as opposed to Boolean) and incorporate other aspects of personality as well, but the basic idea is good. This is what makes me think that if a cryonic patient wakes up with long-term memory intact, then he will indeed be the same invididual, with the same identity/soul. Conversely, what makes you think he would NOT be the same person? It is hard to imagine what takes place during cryonic suspension that might change one's identity, that does not also take place during deep anasthesia, stroke, etc.; yet we consider that people survive these things. How would cryonics (assuming it works) be different? (Note: I have no vested interest -- I'm not even signed up for cryonics yet. But I have done a bit of study in personal identity, and I hope my comments prove useful.) ,------------------------------------------------------------------. | Joseph J. Strout Department of Neuroscience, UCSD | | http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/ | `------------------------------------------------------------------' Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5815