I’ll raise an issue here, without taking a position on it myself right now. I’m not saying there is no answer (in fact, I can think of at least one), but I think one is needed.
If you sign up for cryonics, and it is going to work and give you a very long life in a posthuman future, given that such a long life would involve a huge number of observer moments, almost all of which will be far in the future, why are you experiencing such a rare (i.e. extraordinarily early) observer moment right now? In other words, why not apply the Doomsday argument’s logic to a human life as an argument against the feasibility of cryonics?
If I (the Furcas typing these words) lived in 3010, ‘I’ would have different memories and ‘I’ would be experiencing different things and thus I (the Furcas typing these words) would not exist. Thus there is no likelihood whatsoever that I (the Furcas typing these words) could have existed in 3010*.
There may be something left of me in 3010, just as there is something left of the boy I ‘was’ in 1990 today, but it won’t be me: The memories will be different and the observations will be different, therefore the experience will be different. Asking why I don’t exist in 3010 is asking why experience X is not experience Y. X is not Y because X does not equal Y. It’s as simple as that.
*Except, of course, if I were put in a simulation that very closely replicates the environment that I (believe I) experience in 2010.
I’ll raise an issue here, without taking a position on it myself right now. I’m not saying there is no answer (in fact, I can think of at least one), but I think one is needed.
If you sign up for cryonics, and it is going to work and give you a very long life in a posthuman future, given that such a long life would involve a huge number of observer moments, almost all of which will be far in the future, why are you experiencing such a rare (i.e. extraordinarily early) observer moment right now? In other words, why not apply the Doomsday argument’s logic to a human life as an argument against the feasibility of cryonics?
Because that logic is flawed.
If I (the Furcas typing these words) lived in 3010, ‘I’ would have different memories and ‘I’ would be experiencing different things and thus I (the Furcas typing these words) would not exist. Thus there is no likelihood whatsoever that I (the Furcas typing these words) could have existed in 3010*.
There may be something left of me in 3010, just as there is something left of the boy I ‘was’ in 1990 today, but it won’t be me: The memories will be different and the observations will be different, therefore the experience will be different. Asking why I don’t exist in 3010 is asking why experience X is not experience Y. X is not Y because X does not equal Y. It’s as simple as that.
*Except, of course, if I were put in a simulation that very closely replicates the environment that I (believe I) experience in 2010.