X-Message-Number: 6353
Date: Sat, 15 Jun 1996 11:33:40 -0700
From: Tim Freeman <>
Subject: CRYONICS Souls, etc.

>I have a good question for anyone who cares to answere it.  Lets say you 
>freeze the brain or body or whatever so you can preserve it to revive the 
>person later.  If the person can be revived will it be the person 
>themselves or a shell of a person?  Your body may be active but wouldnt 
>your soul be long gone??  You may have the body but not what makes a 
>person a person, only a zombie.  Please correct me if I am wrong because 
>I am just learning about all this stuff.

Define soul, "shell of a person", zombie, and person.  Depending on
how you define these words, you can cause cryonics to fail by
definition even if it happens as hoped by the participants.  The world
does not tell you what definitions to use, and I can't either.

For instance, we can define a "person" by continuity of electrical
brain activity.  Then people who have taken lots of barbiturates and
recovered may not be the same person any more, because barbiturates
can turn off electrical brain activity in a way that can sometimes be
restarted if the person is kept breathing by artificial means long
enough for the barbiturates to pass out of the body.  But they
obviously remember, and they can even argue philosophy if they want
to.  Hypothermia can have the same effect.  Hypothermia is used in
some heart surgery, so we can twist things around to say that people
who have successfully undergone this surgery have by definition died
(that is, ceased to be the same person).

The only good way I can think of to decide what definitions to use is
to decide what you want to accomplish, then to give names to the
abstractions that you need to think about to accomplish the goal.  The
name is the word you are defining, and the definition is the
abstraction.  It helps if you choose the names so the definition is
similar to what other people expect, so they can remember it easily.

Some bad ways to decide what definitions to use are:
1. to choose them to support some pre-existing conclusion that was not
carefully thought out, or
2. to try to choose them "right" according to pre-existing
emotional attitudes that have not been examined to see whether they
are consistent with what you want to accomplish, or
3. to define things to fit with the stated opinions of some authority
figure, without first determining what goals that authority figure has,
whether those goals are consistent with yours, and whether they had
enough sense to choose useful definitions.

Tim Freeman


Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=6353