X-Message-Number: 9211
From: Ettinger <>
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 15:31:07 EST
Subject: survival

Joe Strout's comments on memory and survival or identity (#9203) seem to
reflect the "quantitative" criterion. Sliding past questions of continuity,
you have survived, with respect to some particular characteristic, to the
extent that the characteristic persists (or is renewed) unchanged. 

That was my very first stab at resolving the problem, these many, many moons
ago. (See THE PROSPECT OF IMMORTALITY, chapter on identity. If you don't have
the book, it is available from the Immortalist Society, and is also available
in full on our web site.) That "solution" seemed reasonable, however
uncomfortable. It seems to me now still a possibility, but less acceptable
than before, for a variety of reasons.

Joe asks, if your memories and personality are different, how could you not be
a different person? This question is somewhat misleading, in that it assumes
in advance that change = difference. It does, by definition--but the whole
issue concerns the APPROPRIATE importance to be assigned to various types and
degrees of change. 

My memories and personality change in the ordinary course of events, so I am
undoubtedly a "different" person every day, and the old fart is a far cry from
the toddler. But is that kind and degree of difference sufficient to deny
survival? 

Joe says he doesn't see the problems I alluded to. They are the same old
questions of continuity and duplication, among others. As a far-fetched
example, suppose I am reconstituted 200 years from now--not as I am now or as
I will be on my deathbed, not as I was at an earlier age, but as I WOULD HAVE
BECOME 200 years from now, if the antiaging breakthroughs had arrived in time.
In other words, I just skipped some intervening experience, as a matter of
historical fact, although the reconstituted person "remembers" all of that
ghost interval.      

Or suppose that, in a galaxy far, far away, in a time long, long ago, there
was a planet almost exactly like ours, and a person almost exactly like me,
who through happenstance lived considerably longer than I am destined to live
before freezing. Was that past/future person me? Have I ALREADY survived many
years past my natural death? Did I survive my (first) death long before I was
born? Should I therefore have less reason to avoid death?  

Joe doubts that false memories can be implanted, perhaps because of the
difficulty of making the implants compatible with the other explicit and
implicit memories. But, as Thomas Donaldson mentions, we are already full of
contrary-to-fact memories, as well as other types of personality
inconsistencies. We are, in fact, very messy constructs. Some of us hope
eventually to be cleaned up and straightened out, which might not be as
radical a change as Alfred Bester's fictional "Demolished Man," but would
still be a huge leap. 

I will certainly be interested to see Dr. Perry's book, but from the hints I
have I suspect that--at a minimum--his version of survival criteria will not
be comfortable, nor comforting, for the average person. 

For myself--without dragging this out any further or repeating myself too
often--I simply say two things:

1. We do not know the anatomy and physiology of feeling or subjectivity (nor
whether an informational isomorphism would be just as good); we do not know
the nature of time; and we do not understand some fundamental implications of
quantum theory or its successor. Possibly every system overlaps every other
both in time and space, in some sense. All of this information may be crucial
to any rational criteria of survival.

2. From a practical standpoint at present, and for those not addicted to
philosophy, we can and must assume that we do indeed survive from day to day
and year to year in the ordinary course of events; and that a formerly frozen
patient will be the same person, even if there are some changes. 

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

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