X-Message-Number: 7919 Date: Fri, 21 Mar 97 23:21:21 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Identity & Survival Bob Ettinger, in reaction to some of my ideas on personal identity, and others that have been posted, appears to raise the issue of whether these ideas are "correct" (true) or "incorrect" (false). But I think we are dealing with a level on which this simple dichotomy does not apply, and yet still there are reasons to favor one opinion over another one. That is, we are dealing with different possible hy- potheses that all can be said to fit the "facts," and we would like to choose the "best." As an example we can consider the day-person concept again, that claims we die each time we lose consciousness, and a new person replaces us. (This is much like what Bob refers to in his last posting, hypo- thetical extraterrestrials who think any person survives for only a brief period in any meaningful sense, even though the body and mind may continue to exist and function much longer.) I don't think the "true or false" dichotomy really applies. The hypothesis can be made to fit reality and justified. On the other hand, barring possibly a few mental cases, I don't think anybody takes it seriously. This we might attribute to a selection process. As the human brain developed under evolution, people became aware of a "self" and formed certain ideas about it. Selection pressure would have favored certain ideas over others. A day-person advocate, I would imagine, would have felt much less stake in the game of species propaga- tion, since this involves a lengthy process (raising off- spring, etc.). Such persons, if they ever existed, should have instead been extreme advocates of "live for the mo- ment"--which would surely be selected against, even if part of this "living" involved reproductive acts or impulses. So instead today you find that most people are not overly concerned about "dying" every time they fall asleep. They have accepted that uninterrupted continuity of conscious- ness is not the important thing for survival and might accuse the day-person person of having an "inappropriate attachment" to this idea. People still have had to face mortality however--the kind we usually mean, not just temporary loss of consciousness- -and it hasn't been so easy. One of the approaches devel- oped in ancient times is Buddhism, which teaches a doc- trine of "non-self": "[F]inal liberation," we are told, "... can only happen if the ignorance of regarding oneself as a substantial permanent ego is dispelled" (quoted from "Buddhist philosophy," *The Oxford Companion to Phi- losophy*, 1995). In effect, one is required to give up ambitions of any ordinary notion of "survival" which would, in particular, involve memories of a past life. If these are considered unimportant, then perhaps what is left- -the meditation states of an "enlightened" Buddhist?--could be said to "survive" one's death--assuming they reappear later in other Buddhists! However, this sort of impersonal "survival" is not satisfying to me, and I would not accept the level of "detachment" that is called for. My "inappropriate attachment" (for a Buddhist) would instead call for personal memories of a past life, a feeling that "I was there." The Buddhist might say, "when you die, these disappear, forever." Then I would say, "but I'm a cryonicist!" Then the Buddhist might say (after much additional discussion & meditation) "Okay, I accept that cryonics *may* work--but only maybe--and after that, maybe we'll have aging cured and all that. But we have no guarantee: it might do any- thing but work. Then there's always the problem of those who weren't frozen, if you care about anyone but yourself and others who are still living and who, for all we know, may not ever die. Plus the fact that at some point in the future an accident could kill you or anyone else. So I don't think this is a satisfying approach to me, and I prefer my current state of detachment, in which the issues that moti- vate you are really unimportant and not a cause for worry." To which I would reply, "Well, I think cryonics is the right and best approach to take, but in fact I have a backup in case it doesn't or hasn't worked. In fact, your memories and personal details are never lost in an absolute sense, but could in principle always be restored, no matter what happened to you." If the Buddhist then said, "How so?" I would launch into a discussion of my theory of personal identity based on the concept of Interchangeability, and the possibility of resurrection that it holds forth (see my earlier posting). With this approach too there are certain things one has to give up--the idea of being made out of a specific collection of particles for instance; the idea that your memories *necessarily* form part of the "surviving historical record" of the world you happen to find yourself in, etc. But con- sidered as information, your memories, dispositions, etc. *would still be there* and you could still retrieve them and know them for what they were and are. To me that would be the important thing about personal identity--you might not want to sacrifice those historical connections if you didn't have to (this thought is the basis for my advocating cryonics) but if you had to "you" could still survive. So I would advocate a sort of middle ground between the more exacting ideas about what "survival" should mean, and the too-weak, in my view, idea that seems to be at the heart of Buddhism. I would say that the *pattern* that describes or characterizes the person must recur--but extra "connections" (e.g. historical connections--informational continuity with preserved records--or even the original material of the body) though possibly desirable, are not essential. Let's call my idea of survival "pattern-survival." It seems to me that pattern-survival is the best possible notion of survival, give or take lesser details. Why? Be- cause I think any weaker notion (e.g. as in Buddhism) is too weak--you *have* to have past information, to rea- sonably define and distinguish a specific person--and any stronger notion is unlikely to be feasible in the general sense it would need to be, to be satisfying to me. I would like to think that *anybody*--even those who perished in the distant past, has a prospect of eventual resurrection-- otherwise I have to allow that the world contains major, unrightable wrongs--*or*, that eternal death is acceptable-- neither of which I am prepared to do. Instead I will give up what I have to, to make the notion of survival as robust as it needs to be, knowing that, in thinking as I do of a person as having a finite description, I won't have to give up so much as to make the result untenable. A person could be "reinstated" once again, if you are lucky enough to guess the description, even if it has been lost. (For reasons based mainly on many-worlds physics I think "guessing" of this sort by advanced future beings will not only occur but be successful--every person should eventually be recreated or otherwise be present in some form.) A stronger notion of survival which is often advocated is that the historical connections must persist. This in fact is what we hope for in cryonics: from the frozen brain tissue we hope to completely recover what constituted the person at the time of death, all memories, dispositions, etc. plus biological information such as the DNA (which will in turn specify other organs of the body, glands, hormones etc--or perhaps these too are preserved directly). But in general I see little prospect for the recovery of the "hidden past" that would be needed to resurrect someone who died and was not frozen. (And we don't know if those who died and *were* frozen will be well-enough preserved to resurrect from their remains either!) The historical connections are worth it--if you can get 'em--that's why I think we should stick with cryonics. (And even if a full recovery from cryonic suspension is not possible but some information had to be restored through guesswork, more historical connection is better than less--so it's still better to be frozen than rot or burn.) But whatever the state of preservation-- yours or someone else's--there is always a fallback position. Bob also says, >At another point Mike says that two instantiations become >different persons when their experiences begin to diverge, >one person becoming two. This seems to imply that an >"instantiation" must be EXACTLY like you, which in turn >seems to imply that your successors (yourself at even >slightly later times) are different persons. From there one >might be led again to the "quantitative" survival >viewpoint, which has its own recalcitrant problems. In reply I'll say that yes, your instantiations must be exactly like you. (There is one slight complication, though. A person will have "sub-persons." A sub-person could be described as "the entity you are over a limited period of time." As an example suppose, over some interval of time, that you are barely aware or semi-consicous. Your sub- person then will be simplified and (we would expect) have correspondingly more instantiations--it should be easier, relatively speaking, to find others with the same experience since there is "less data to fit." More generally, some other person who, as a whole, is different from you, could still agree on many sub-persons.) *I* am not the same, right now, as a future version of myself. However, that self is not simply another person either, but what I call a "continuer"-- a more advanced version of me. (This terminology comes from *Philosophical Explanations* by Robert Nozick.) A continuer is not an instantiation but is vitally important for another reason: it is the only way "I" can survive to a (subjectively) later time. In general I--and everyone--must have an infinite sequence of increasingly advanced con- tinuers to achieve a reasonable version of immortality. These we might hope would occur at later and later times-- in one universe--without more than a finite number of "resurrections by guesswork" and other strange occur- rences. This may be possible somehow in our own uni- verse--only the future can tell. I've described a continuer as a "more advanced" version of myself, which means, ideally, that this more advanced being must retain all my memories and experiences, etc. and have some additional ones too. From the continuer it would then be possible to construct an instantiation of me, even though the continuer itself is not such an instantiation. On the other hand, though, should I forget something or otherwise lose some information, I become only an "approximate continuer" of my former self. This may be not good, but is not always bad either. For example, if I look at the carpet on my office floor I am briefly aware of numerous details. I really don't want to memorize every tiny thread and dust particle that I see (despite the fact that I value historical information in general) and it doesn't bother me that what I retain in memory will be only a hazy approximation. So some loss of information is both reasonable and desirable as I prog- ress and develop into successive continuers. But on the other hand there must be limits on this loss, for any reason- able claim that "survival" occurs. So as I see it, for a reasonable version of immortality, there would have to be a sort of "convergence" of one's continu- ers over infinite time to an infinite entity, a "limiting con- tinuer"--which is never actually extant but is more and more closely approached (in some sense) as time goes to infinity. The limiting continuer would contain an infinite body of memories and/or other experiental data covering an infinite stretch of time. Some data might have been lost on the way, but the rest would have to "stay in place" literally forever. The limiting continuer, properly speaking, would be a true (exact) continuer of all the past selves that could be reconstructed out of its memories. And these in turn should, generally, be reasonable, if judiciously edited, approximations of the past selves that went into their making. All of this, I realize, raises more issues--and more issues. I'm trying to deal with these in the book--more about this another time. Mike Perry http://www.alcor.org Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=7919