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Showing posts from February 27, 2011

On Cryonics, and a dystopian future of obsesive compulsive mind backuping

That the meaning of "Death" will be changed by Cryonics research goes without saying. However, we don't realize that Cryonics will actually reverse the meaning of these words. And that the process will be a stressful one. Let me explain. To start with, the standpoint of cryonics researchers is that the divide between being alive and being dead will be determined by the amount of memory retention from one particular time to another. Losing information is equated to death, and since memory lost is not an all/none process, the state of a person cannot be longer described in Boolean logic - as dead or alive. It will be a variable, fuzzy quantity. But the most interesting ontological change may be the following: it won't be a state anymore. It will be a differential measurement in time . For if we equate death with "forgetfulness", we may say that we are alive or dead only with respect to a previous point in time (and by the way, this measurement can be taken at