On Mar 17, 2:40 pm, thro...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Wayne Throop) wrote:
> : IsaacKuo <mech...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> : Also, there are nagging questions about whether the resulting being
> : is the same person as the one who got visciously murdered earlier.
> : Me? I'd rather not have my molecules scrambled around the
> : universe by some contraption. Maybe these god-like aliens have a
> : similar philosophy about continuity of identity.
> Does freezing and thawing preserve identity?
I don't know. It's not obvious that ANYTHING preserves
identity. I think I'm the same person as the person I
vaguely remember being when I first started typing this
paragraph a few seconds ago. But am I? Really can't
say for sure.
The continuity of identity is a fundamentally unprovable
assertion, so efforts to maintain continuity of identity
basically come down to different levels of paranoia.
Does freezing and thawing preserve identity? I don't
know, truthfully, but it seems like it's more likely to
preserve identity than making a copy. At least it's a
bit closer to falling into a coma, which is a bit closer
to falling asleep, which is a rather spooky thing to
begin with but one that's unavoidable.
> How about living through many years of trans****t; food will end up
> replacing lots of your mass; are you the same person? The atoms in
> the food are just re-arranged to fit into a template by digestion and
> incor****ation into tissue, so is that different than having the template
> be more etherial (and thus robust) than just accreting onto pre-existing
> gelled goo?
Again, I don't know. It's a matter of different levels
of paranoia. Maybe consciousness is fundamentally
tied to specific particles, and the slow process of
replacing one's molecules really does involve a slow
leaking away/diffusion of one's consciousness. Or
maybe we really are all just one big consciousness.
Or whatever.
But this slow process of replacing one's molecules is
something which is unavoidable, so there it is.
> Thing is, hooman beans are "really" "just" dynamic patterns in a vague
> cloud of atoms, which are dispersing and accreting all the time. Making
> the dynamic pattern occur in a robust information store for a while
seems
> no more traumatic to the process than freezing.
It involves creating a copy which seems less likely to
preserve identity. For example, suppose advanced
aliens scan your body right now, and create a perfect
copy somewhere in Paris. You don't notice any of
this, and your consciousness simply continues where
it is unaware of this alien activity. Obviously, your
consciousness stays in your current body and the
copy is someone else.
....or is it so obvious? As I noted above, there isn't
even any guarantee that your consciousness stays
anywhere at all. And given how little we can say
about consciousness, it's not at all a given that your
consciousness can't "branch" into the copy as well
as your current body.
So again, it boils down to different levels of paranoia.
In a story I'm working on, there are a lot of virtualized
humans--computer simulated human brains. They
don't have any hangups about consciousness
continuity. The nature of the shared digital computer
hardware makes time and space discontinuities
pervasive and as unavoidable to them as breathing
is to us. Making extra copies of a mind is routine,
including creating tem****ary copies for convenience.
For example, one of the characters lives in a robot
body and is capable of processing at six-fold speed.
But her essentially human mind still needs to sleep
regularly. Rather than leave her body vulnerable to
attack, she forks off a tem****ary copy so while one
copy sleeps in a virtual environment at five-fold speed,
the other copy stays awake operating the body.
The copy which stays awake essentially commits
suicide after a couple hours so the sleeping copy
can take over after she awakes, well rested.
> But still, as you say, the spacebats may have a religious taboo or
something.
> Or the passengers might, and the spacebats just indulging them.
Isaac Kuo
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