From: dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu
Date: Fri Aug 01 1997 - 14:53:38 MDT
On Fri, 1 Aug 1997, Max More wrote:
> Clarke knows about cryonics, and has even written a brief for Alcor back
> when they were under attack by government agencies. He has no plans to sign
> up, and has some objection based on his view of personal identity, i.e., he
> thinks there is no point signing up because he will eventually become such
> a different person. I find it hard to see this as anything other than a
> rationalization for some fear he has.
>
> Max More, Ph.D.
> more@extropy.org
I've been told for the longest time that my attraction to technological
immortalism was dismissable as a kind of adolescent fear of the unknown,
that I simply couldn't bear the fact that one day this "I" would no longer
exist. It has always amused me inasmuch as (and this seems to be the very
thing which Clarke has grasped and which has made *him* afraid), it is of
course the immortalist who faces the more absolute unknown. It is indeed
likely that the "I" I will have become (more likely a whole cloud of us by
then) in a century or two will have a scarcely comprehensible
next-to-nothing in common with this "I" in the first place. Talk about a
bleak embracing of the *known* -- refuse to make arrangments in the face
of death and it is next to certain what you'll get. Best, Dale
_______________________________________________________________________________
Dale Carrico | dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu
University of California at Berkeley, Department of Rhetoric
_______________________________________________________________________________
It is impossible to make significant change by force.
The only way to make significant change is
to make the thing you want to change obsolete. -- R. Buckminster Fuller
_______________________________________________________________________________
"Death, where is thy sting-a-ling?" -- Noel Coward
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