Re: Cryonics and uploading as leaps of faith?

From: Jef Allbright (jef@jefallbright.net)
Date: Mon Jun 30 2003 - 23:14:02 MDT

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    Lee Corbin wrote:
    > Well, our course of action is clear! We need only reform our
    > notions of "I", "me", and "self" so that the inconsistencies
    > disappear. Now it has appeared to many thoughtful people that
    > this cannot be done without doing excess violence to what those
    > tokens conventionally mean. The same fate has befallen "free
    > will".
    >
    > But I, and also a number of thoughtful people, think that (unlike
    > "phlogiston" and "soul") all of the above can be used to usefully
    > communicate, and that all of the above can refer to objectively
    > evident pieces of reality.

    As is often the case, I agree with Lee's logic, but not necessarily the
    direction in which he aims it. For example, Lee's concept of multiple
    instances of Lee corbin is logically consistent as he defines self, but to
    me it is simpler and more aesthetic and practical to consider all those
    multiple instances of Lee Corbin as individuals who go off on their own into
    the world becoming more and more their own selves as time goes on.

    Before anyone says "Hey!, you just said in an earlier post that the self
    doesn't exist." Well it certainly does exist -- at the particular context
    level where we're talking about individuals and society, but not in the
    bigger picture where we go looking for its origin.

    The same thing is true of consciousness, self, altruism, and free will. At
    the context level of the human and society, they can usefully be said to
    exist, but in the wider and more inclusive picture these concepts no longer
    apply but are seen to fit together perfectly within their lower level
    context.

    - Jef



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