X-Message-Number: 9234
From: Ettinger <>
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 1998 10:21:02 EST
Subject: memories, values

Very quick responses to posted questions:

1. Mike Perry (#9231) asks whether any amount of knowledge can decide certain
issues, such as criteria of survival. 

Almost certainly, in my opinion. Eventual knowledge, with appropriate
analysis, should reveal the answer to any meaningful question. Again,
candidates for relevant information about survival include the
anatomy/physiology of feeling and the physics/biology of time.

A reminder of a rather strange omission by Perry, Strout, Donaldson and others
who emphasize the importance of memory: WHETHER OR NOT memory is important,
surely survival of the physical basis of feeling is essential! It is not
possible to have memories in the full human sense without feeling, but
certainly an automaton (lacking feeling) could have at least our "historical"
memories. Which would be closer to "you"--an automaton with most of your
memories, or a person with few of them? 

2. Thomas Donaldson (#9233) asks how a VALUE can be "wrong."

Very, very easily.  Have you never changed your mind about what you want, or
what you ought to want, Thomas? 

Values are needs or wants or drives or instincts or habits etc. Two values,
shared by most people in various degree, are the tendency toward self-
preservation and that toward self-sacrifice, each with an obvious evolutionary
basis. But we, today, as individuals, don't give a hoot about evolution in the
traditional sense. Therefore the tendency toward self-sacrifice, hard-wired
into us to some extent, is a WRONG value (with certain qualifications spelled
out elsewhere). 

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

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