X-Message-Number: 9279 Date: Fri, 13 Mar 98 16:16:48 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Re: CryoNet #9268 - #9272 Billy R. Maher, #9270, writes, > > This may be a stupid question, but if you can only freeze people when > they are dead how are you going to bring them back to life? What I mean > is do you think that we could ever find the cure to death? > A person can only be frozen when they are legally dead. But it is clear that legal "death" does not always imply real "death." Legal death can be pronounced when heartbeat and respiration have ceased, but resuscitations from such conditions are known too. In fact, often a terminally ill patient is not resuscitated when they could be, because the doctor thinks its time to give up. We think that in the future more serious cases of "death" will be reversible, including people that were frozen but with their brain information reasonably intact. A human body is a machine, rather like a car only more complicated. If preserved in good enough condition, even if it won't "start," it ought to be repairable in the future, when more advanced technology is available. Thomas Donaldson, #9272, writes, > For Mike I will have this to say: Mike claims that if we could store > ourselves in a computer then it would follow that we could make that > stored person run in a computer. Here is the hiatus in his reasoning: we > do not just run autonomously, EVER. This "running" would not have to be autonomous either; of course the computer should have some sensory contact with the outside world, information which would be conveyed to whatever entities were supported inside it. > We are always responding to something > in the world, and incommensurability is essential in the world. In the > first place, it would take far more processing power to run a human being > in a computer than simply to have the human being there in the world, > responding and acting. Actually, I contemplate a more-than-human existence. We don't want to stay merely human forever, just as we would not want to remain eternal infants, for example. So I think our housing will have to change. You might say, "whatever it changes to, it isn't at all likely to be computers." And this may be so, by current thinking of what a "computer" is. But I maintain that all our processing, and all events in our world, are basically digital in nature, thus could be emulated, if inefficiently, on various computational devices, even including a humble Turing machine (allowing an infinitely inscribed tape if you want to model a big enough chunk of real, interacting events). You have to provide for randomness too. Make your machine probabilistic, or have one machine produce copies of itself as needed, to handle the different realities that may be involved. These are "in principle" arguments that will not necessarily find practical use. Probably though, our actual housing will eventually take the form of artificial devices of some sort; indeed, it's hard to imagine otherwise if we live far longer than people do today and make ourselves far more intelligent, etc. The devices we are in will be doing information processing--that's what we do today--and thus will be "computers" in some sense. I think too that they will be more like today's "digital" than today's "analog" systems. Following Perry Metzger, I don't see that analog has the upper hand over digital, mainly because of imprecision. With digital you have more accuracy, and can simulate an analog device, including inevitable noise, to as many decimal places as you like. > Secondly, whatever equations describe our behavior, > they are highly likely to NOT converge to some single solution, while > the computer, because it is digital (I believe we still need a good > definition of that, Mike) can only produce some values of the person, > not all those a real person would produce if that person were in the > world. Basically, the person as I see it would still be very much "in the world" just not housed in the particuar meat machine that we are in today, and probably not in anything closely resembling it. It has served its "purpose" with some distinction, but it's hard for me to imagine it being the best vehicle for our future, hopefully immortal existence. When we have the necessary knowledge and means, I think we'll replace it, probably pretty soon on the scale of history, if nothing bad happens first. > Running someone in a computer would ultimately fall into the > same resolution problems that computer graphics does: sure, you can get > finer and finer resolution, but since the world is not made up of small > distinct locations with given colors etc. your picture will always have > limits below which it becomes quite false. This would not follow if you went all the way to the quantum level, at least I don't think so, and as a final resort allowed an infinitely inscribed tape or equivalent--which again is an "in principle argument" not necessarily to be implemented in an actual sytem. On a more practical level though, again I'm really talking about going beyond the human level, which makes eminent sense if you want immortality. Perhaps this could be done in stages, starting with a simple augmentation. With nanotechnology, you might unobtrusively strengthen your fragile brain cells, to make it harder for them to be destroyed by strokes, tumors, etc. But eventually, you'd consider improving their function too. In time you might have little left of the original structure, though your memories, etc. would still be there as information. If you assume the "improvement" also involved the ability to *transfer* your information to another processing device where it could also be "run" like you are being "run" then essentially you have uploading. True, to do this, you would have to reduce all the brain's function to the kind of informational or possibly structural changes that could be done with standardized components-- but I'm sure that could be accomplished with mature nanotechnology. I don't really see a fundamental division between "informational" and "structural" changes either--the one shades into the other. We will choose whatever type of system best suits our needs, but I think probably the "informational" will dominate simply because it will prove so much easier and more convenient. For instance, if people "run" on standardized devices and their individuality is captured in a stored "program" rather than physical hardware, it should be feasible to make frequent backups in case of hardware failure. The old idea that eventually accidents will kill us even if we don't suffer the aging process will lose force. Curing "diseases" will be a matter of software engineering not medicine as we understand it today-- you could say all ailments will truly be "in the mind." And "the mind" could be conveniently put on hold and minutely inspected to see what ails it, and how to fix the problem. On a different level, it should be easier, faster and cheaper to travel as a message than a physical artifact. Endless best, Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=9279