X-Message-Number: 9201
From: 
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 1998 16:54:04 EST
Subject: memory

With all due respect to Mike Perry (and he is due a lot), his # 9195 seems to
me to be very much over-simplified. 

He seems to be saying, more or less,  that memory or memories should be
regarded as essential to survival. But this sort of criterion is at least as
vulnerable as others to questions of accuracy, duplication, fidelity,
continuity, etc. 

For one thing, suppose (as in the movie TOTAL RECALL) that false memories are
somehow substituted for your real ones. The protagonist in the movie says, "If
I'm not me, then who the hell am I?" If memory MAKES or defines the
individual, then the protagonist was indeed "me"--meaning the person
identified by those false memories. In other words, the memories were "false"
only by the historical criterion, and everyone knows history is bunk.

Certainly the example above is itself oversimplified; Mike did not say, and
probably no one believes, that memory is the SOLE criterion of identity or
survival. But if it is the main one, or even a necessary one, the problem
alluded to exists.

Another example of a problem shared by the memory criterion: Suppose "you" are
thawed out and repaired, or reconstituted, or duplicated, or whatever--but
with the memories you had at a much earlier date, not at time of freezing or
whatever. Have "you" survived? 

It isn't good enough to shrug and say it's a matter of personal opinion or
personal values, or that we can never know the "real" answer, or that there
isn't any "true" answer. It is certainly possible that the final answer, when
we find it, will be unpalatable, but there IS an answer. Every question,
SUFFICIENTLY WELL FORMED, has an unambiguous, objective answer. (That is my
"religion" at any rate.)    

I'm certainly not complaining about speculation--the more the better, provided
it is followed by analysis and experiment. But let's remember that speculation
should not be held as dogma or anything close to it.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

P.S. Our site now has some material about Dandridge Cole and part of his
discussion of "the mechanism of resurrection."

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