I greet you, People of the Lila Squad.
I have read the available bios and scanned through the discussion on
cloning. It is a privilege to share your space and I hope to bring
some value to the discussion.
Scanning through the discussion history, I must admit that the large
number of unknowns involved leaves me with the impression of trying to
plot a course in the midst of a landslide. Though it seems that the
discussion has already abstracted the fundamental issues from the
technical issues involved in the original teleportation experiment, I
would like to suggest an adapted experiment for two reasons:
(1) It brings for me the reality of these issues closer to home (in
the sense that this experiment might very well be carried out while
most of us is still alive).
(2) It, maybe, extends the original experiment in a way that more
directly addresses the issues that have evolved out of the discussion.
The proposed teleportation process works like this:
1.1 'Freeze' the person.
1.2 Take the body apart atom by atom.
1.3 Move the atoms one by one to a new location (or alternatively,
only the positional information).
1.4 Re-assemble the atoms.
1.5 'Defrost' and revive.
Comments:
1.1 Lets assume for the moment that we can do this without disturbing
in any way the molecular arrangement of the body. A process that will
allow this seems to be known as 'whole-body vitrification' in cryonics
nomenclature. We'll come back to this point.
1.5 We'll come back to this point.
1.3 Taking the body apart and assembling it in exactly the same place
should not be any different from assembling it in any other place. We
can therefore omit this step without any loss of generality.
1.4 and 1.5 The moment the body is 'frozen', the BODY is ONLY an
assembly of atoms. It differs from the live body in that (i) there is
no dynamic component (in the conventional sense of the word), i.e.
changing potentials and current in the central nervous system (CNS),
fluctuating chemical concentrations (notably in the CNS), flowing
blood, etc. and (ii) any non-material components (soul, spirit,
consciousness, awareness, whatever) - even be they the product of the
synergistic whole that is the human being - are by definition not
frozen with that body. Since the body is only a collection of atoms,
taking it apart and putting it back together again cannot make any
difference to it. There is, however, the technical challenge of how
exactly to do this. We can sidestep this problem by simply not doing
it. Since it cannot make any difference, we simply omit these steps -
again without any loss of generality. Well, to be fair we must allow
for the fact that these steps would take time. Time, however, does
not mean much to the frozen body, and we can cut this to a couple of
seconds or minutes or whatever.
This leaves us with:
2.1 Freeze the person.
2.2 Defrost and revive.
Comments:
If you agree with my reasoning up to here, then it would seem you
agree that we can frame the original teleportation experiment (as
having evolved through discussion) in this context without changing
the questions or the answers involved. I find this very exciting,
because this is an experiment that might still (as far as the
technical aspects are concerned) be carried out in our lifetime. Is
this practical philosophy or what?
So, can we freeze and defrost a person and get that person back alive
and well?
An informative way to look at these questions might be to hypothesise,
say, three outcomes and see if it is possible to reach agreement on
what these outcomes will tell us about human beings.
I can suggest:
1. The person can simply not be revived - like a patient that has just
died on the operation table - some 'come back', some don't - our
cryonics subjects just never come back.
2. The person can be revived, but remains in a vegetable state.
3. The person can be revived and after two days is happily back to her
normal self.
There are, of course, other possible outcomes and any number of subtle
issues that are not addressed here - but I'll leave that to you.
On the nature of the human being - I find the analogy of a whirlpool
in a river particularly powerful (David Bohm, 'Wholeness and the
Implicate Order'). The idea is that the whirlpool consists only of
water (in motion), but is clearly more. Its existence transcends that
of the water (matter) and energy flowing through it. It is in a way
pure form, or information, that organises the matter that flows
through it, yet is influence by it. (It has already been mentioned
that our composite atoms, very much 'flow through us' with time.) One
day it appears in the river from nowhere and later it simply ceases to
exist - where did the whirlpool come from and where did it go - what
was it really? This also capture the idea of dynamic quality for me
beautifully. The whirlpool cannot have existence without the
continuous flow of water - its existence is intrinsically of a dynamic
nature. It does not have clearly defined boundaries - it is one with
whole river and yet it can be identified as a entity on its own. Can
one teleport a whirlpool by freezing it, inserting it at some other
point in the river and defrosting it?
I thank you for your attention.
Rikus
PS. For more information on cryonics, see:
[1] http://www.prometheus-project.org/prometheus/faq.html
[2]
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/tsf/Public-Mail/cryonics/html/0018.2.html
[3] http://www.kqb.com/
By the way, I don't really know much about cryonics - reading the
discussion history just triggered the thought that one way to make
'instantaneous' cloning more practical, would be to first freeze the
subject and then go about the cloning process at your leisure.
MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org
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