----- Original Message -----
From: Chris Russo <extropy@russo.org>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Monday, December 04, 2000 11:01 AM
Subject: Re: Immortality
> >A backup would just be a copy- your consciousness would be gone forever.
>
> Could you define "consciousness" for us in the sense of describing
> what you would have lost by being restored from a backup?
The awareness of my self from a subjective point of view- my own existence.
A backup would only be a copy of me. To an external observer, it would be
identical, and to it, it would be consciously aware as myself, but it would
not be me. I would be gone, my conscious with me.
See the recent movie "The Sixth Day". I can't remember the name of the
character at the moment, but near the end of the movie, when he clones
himself while he's dying, he realizes that the new self is not him, it is
merely a copy, and he's toast. This is precisely what I'm talking about- a
copy is not the original. The original, "I", is what I'm concerned about-
not the data that is flying about, or the matter it's made up of. Since we
still don't understand the nature of the "I", we're a million miles from
truly duplicating it.
-Nicq MacDonald
"We do progress, but how? Not by the tinkering of the meliorist; not by the
crushing of initiative; not by laws and regulations which hamstring the
racehorse, and handcuff the boxer; but by the innovations of the eccentric,
by the phantasies of the hashish-dreamer of philosophy, by the aspirations
of the idealist to the impossible, by the imagination of the revolutionary,
by the perilous adventure of the pioneer. Progress is by leaps and bounds,
by breaking from custom, by working on untried experiments; in short, by the
follies and crimes of men of genius, only recognizable as wisdom and virtue
after they have been tortured to death, and their murderers reap gloatingly
the harvest of the seeds they sowed at midnight." -Aleister Crowley, "On
Original Sin"
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