*muses* past lives, so to speak... would be kind of
interesting to wake up and wonder if you were really
the same, or if the person you remember being is dead,
or... half a dozen questions.
--- "Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury@www.aeiveos.com>
wrote:
>
> Some of the discussion between Eugene and Jim have
> got me
> to thinking...
>
> ... Off in the distance, the Japanese vistors
> furiously begin
> to snap photos as the 60 meter, 10,000 ton gears of
> the Bradbury
> Mind slowly begin to rotate, spewing out a cloud of
> idea dust....
> Godzilla was fiction, but this is *real*...
>
> Now, lets assume that nanobot enabled freezing
> damage repair
> is imperfect. But lets assume that they repair
> process can
> produce a *functional* breathing human being (that
> seems
> pretty doable, even if you have to regenerate every
> neuron).
> So the real question is how much of your "mind" is
> left after
> the reanimation process? Presumably there could be
> states
> that lie between complete reanimation (i.e. memories
> intact)
> and clean-slate reanimation (functional w/o
> memories).
>
> The question becomes, *what* could people do while
> they
> are still alive to assist your reanimated self to be
> "reborn".
> These have a wide range. They include NMR scans of
> the neural
> activity of the brain -- e.g. Doctor says "Think
> about ice cream",
> scan, "Think about love", scan, "Think about
> snakes", scan, etc.
> These images of mental activity could provide
> "clues" as to how the
> nanobots should re-wire things (so your reanimated
> neural activity
> matches your pre-cryo activity). At the non-medical
> level, there
> are presumably many things you could do to provide
> information to
> oneself about who you "were". (Financial records,
> diaries, etc.)
> Now, if you only get partial functional reanimation
> these "hints"
> could prove very useful for recovering or
> restablishing those
> connections that produce a satisfactory reflection
> of ones former self.
>
> So, lets assume reanimation is imperfect -- What can
> we do to augment
> the process and what are the relative costs and
> benefits?
>
> And now the $20 question -- how many people would be
> happy without
> any direct "recall" of their former selves, but only
> a warm and fuzzy
> "recognition" (deja vu) feeling, of "yes, that was
> me"? Or would it be
> ok if you "know" your stories because you read about
> them (in your diary)
> but you don't actually "remember" them. Finally,
> would you be unhappy
> if the nanobots can't "recover" things and so they
> engineer in either
> the "memories" or "recognition" based on your
> pre-suspension recordings.
>
> I think these questions are quite significant,
> because in the reanimation
> era, who you are could quite probably be
> "synthesized". I believe too
> few people are specifying the detailed conditions
> under which they wish
> to be recovered (do these things, but don't do
> those...).
>
> Anders might want to comment on individuals who
> undergo similar
> disconnects due to mental illness or trauma that
> could be representative
> of the types of losses that might occur during
> freezing/reanimation.
>
> Who are we anyway???
>
> Robert
>
>
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:04:21 MDT