Going under anesthesia is a similar discontinuity in subjective experience, along with sleep, situations where people are technically dead for a few moments and then brought back to life, coma patients, and so on.
I don’t personally regard any of these as the death of one person followed by the resurrection of a new person with identical memories, so I also reject the sort of reasoning that says cryogenic resurrection, mind uploading, and Star Trek-style transportation is death.
Eliezer has a post here about similar concerns. It’s perhaps of interest to note that the PhilPapers survey revealed a fairly even split on the teletransporter problem among philosophers, with the breakdown being 36.2%/32.7%/31.1% as survive/other/die respectively.
Yes, that post still reflects my views. I should point out again that sleep and many forms of anesthesia don’t stop operation of the brain, they just halt the creation of new memories so people don’t remember. That’s why, for example, some surgery patients end up with PTSD from waking up on the table, even if they don’t remember.
Other cases like temporary (clinical) death and revival also aren’t useful comparisons. Even if the body is dying, the heart and breathing stops, etc., there are still neural computations going on from which identity is derived. The irrecoverable disassociation of the particle interactions underlying consciousness probably takes a while—hours or more, unless there is violent physical damage to the brain. Eventually the brain state fully reverts to random interactions and identity is destroyed, but clinical revival becomes impossible well before then.
Cryonics is more of a weird edge case … we don’t know enough now to say with any certainty whether cryonics patients have crossed that red line or not with respect to destruction of identity.
Going under anesthesia is a similar discontinuity in subjective experience, along with sleep, situations where people are technically dead for a few moments and then brought back to life, coma patients, and so on.
I don’t personally regard any of these as the death of one person followed by the resurrection of a new person with identical memories, so I also reject the sort of reasoning that says cryogenic resurrection, mind uploading, and Star Trek-style transportation is death.
Eliezer has a post here about similar concerns. It’s perhaps of interest to note that the PhilPapers survey revealed a fairly even split on the teletransporter problem among philosophers, with the breakdown being 36.2%/32.7%/31.1% as survive/other/die respectively.
ETA: Ah, nevermind, I see you’ve already considered this.
Yes, that post still reflects my views. I should point out again that sleep and many forms of anesthesia don’t stop operation of the brain, they just halt the creation of new memories so people don’t remember. That’s why, for example, some surgery patients end up with PTSD from waking up on the table, even if they don’t remember.
Other cases like temporary (clinical) death and revival also aren’t useful comparisons. Even if the body is dying, the heart and breathing stops, etc., there are still neural computations going on from which identity is derived. The irrecoverable disassociation of the particle interactions underlying consciousness probably takes a while—hours or more, unless there is violent physical damage to the brain. Eventually the brain state fully reverts to random interactions and identity is destroyed, but clinical revival becomes impossible well before then.
Cryonics is more of a weird edge case … we don’t know enough now to say with any certainty whether cryonics patients have crossed that red line or not with respect to destruction of identity.