On Cryonics

[MikeDC]

Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson are debating cryonics and immortality.

I've always found this interesting, and not just in the Ted Williams' head sitting on a tuna can way. Would you agree or disagree with the idea that having (for lack of a better term) a “chain-of-consciousness” is essential for life?

I look at it as follows. Suppose I were cloned or uploaded, but I, MikeDC, remain alive as I’ve always been within this body. I wouldn’t consider my clones or uploads to be me. We may share unique memories and capabilities up to the moment of upload, but after that we grow apart. We’re separate instances of the same program.

My instance of the program is the only one I care about as “my life”. I might think it’d be nice to have other instances of myself out there, but it’d be in the same way it’d be nice to have an identical twin. At the end of the day, a copy would be another conscious, sentient life. Not my own.

Thus, if immortality were a movement of my conscious mind from my living (but perhaps soon to no longer be) body to a computer simulation, I’d certainly consider myself to still be alive.

Perhaps problematically from a philosophical perspective, I think I must consider myself dead if (as in your hypothetical above), the power were totally shut off to my brain, and I was then I was totally “restarted”. My understanding is that much of what is “me” is stored in “volatile RAM”, and even if my body were brought back to life, or a way were found to access the” non-volative RAM” in my cryonically frozen brain, much of that would be lost. Thus, the new life created when I’m unfrozen and uploaded would be based on me, but not me.

 

[Denny Crane]

Deep stuff. LOL.

A clone isn't you, it's your twin. You share the same DNA and that's about it. I'm not seeing that we'll be able to upload our consiousness in some way; that's science fantasy as near as I can tell.

For the longest time, scientists and medical researchers believed there was something in our genes that causes us to age and die. Turns out there is nothing in our genes after all. We get old and die because our bodies are subjected to all sorts of damage over the years, from taking a fast ball off your foot to cosmic radiation damaging our cells. Over time, our bodies simply can't keep up with the repairs. Our damaged hair follicles turn our hair gray, and so on.

There may be something to using parts from a clone to repair our bodies, and it sure seems like our children might be alive at the point when they figure out how to chemically or genetically kick up our bodys' ability to heal itself. Life expectancy might well be around 150 years.

As far as what is "you," it's certainly a collection of synapses you've wired up through your experiences, but it's also to do with the chemicals in your blood and tissue as well as physical attributes and abilities (like the ability to see or see better/worse than 20-20).

 

[CelticKing]

Deep stuff. LOL.

A clone isn't you, it's your twin. You share the same DNA and that's about it. I'm not seeing that we'll be able to upload our consiousness in some way; that's science fantasy as near as I can tell.

For the longest time, scientists and medical researchers believed there was something in our genes that causes us to age and die. Turns out there is nothing in our genes after all. We get old and die because our bodies are subjected to all sorts of damage over the years, from taking a fast ball off your foot to cosmic radiation damaging our cells. Over time, our bodies simply can't keep up with the repairs. Our damaged hair follicles turn our hair gray, and so on.

There may be something to using parts from a clone to repair our bodies, and it sure seems like our children might be alive at the point when they figure out how to chemically or genetically kick up our bodys' ability to heal itself. Life expectancy might well be around 150 years.

As far as what is "you," it's certainly a collection of synapses you've wired up through your experiences, but it's also to do with the chemicals in your blood and tissue as well as physical attributes and abilities (like the ability to see or see better/worse than 20-20).

It's not exactly the same DNA though or am I wrong? (for twins?)

 

[Denny Crane]

It's not exactly the same DNA though or am I wrong? (for twins?)

Identical twins means identical DNA.