You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

private_messaging comments on Brief response to kalla724 on preserving personal identity with vitrification - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: Synaptic 16 June 2012 01:28AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (32)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: private_messaging 20 June 2012 05:53:16AM *  3 points [-]

You don't find your subjective self go somewhere else when you get drunk or something of this kind, do you? Why should death be different? Why if you are to be anaesthetised, then suffer some minor brain damage, you don't expect to be saved by vastness of the universe? If you end up in 'closest match', clearly the enormous spatial distance (where all the information within your head is encoded into spatial coordinates) should make those more distant from you. Are you sure they are closest to you when you die, rather than someone alive and well nearby?

I believe that such notions are easily falsifiable and have been already falsified in just about anyone's subjective history. If I had a subjective history of crazy rare coincidences happening to prevent me from ever bumping my head on anything, or indeed prevent me from any other changes in the brain such as maturation, then yes i'd be a believer in this. Alas, none of that was observed, so no.