Vera Verba

I recently came across a book review of “God Wants You Dead” by Robert Ettinger - a man who is sometimes known as the ‘Father of Cryonics’ and who is actually mentioned in the book. Here is the link:

http://www.cryonics.org/immortalist/january08/god%20wants%20you%20deadBR1pg.pdf

The review is a mixed one. I think he generally liked the book - found it interesting and amusing. However, he did think that there were some “technical errors.”

This is what he wrote be way of criticism:

The technical errors as I see them include flawed understanding of the problem of personal identity and criteria of survival, as well as the questions of intelligence, life, and Turing Tests, and the nature and centrality of qualia. They misinterpret the undecidability theorems. There is a bit of confusion in the discussion of free will. Their political opinions are of course arguable, and for some people will weaken the appeal of the book. They appear to use the “meme” concept uncritically. They define “identities” as “predictive models of behavior,” which doesn’t really fly.

So I went through the book again with these limited statements in mind, and tried to see Ettinger’s side of things. With just one notable exception, I did not find his criticisms to be very valid.

I think that some of what he labels as misunderstanding on our parts - for example Turing Tests and Godel’s proof - are actually situations where these ideas are being deliberately stretched or used as analogies. This does not indicate a lack of fundamental understanding of the base ideas, but rather an attempt to apply these ideas in new ways. I will be the first to admit that we might be wrong about how we are applying them (and would love to see more specific criticism on that score) but believe me, we understand the base concepts very well.

His issues with our definitions of personal identity and his concepts of survivability seem to originate with his attempt to constrain the definition of identity to one that will survive cryonic revival through molecular repair (the horse he has backed for immortality) but to specifically exclude a concept of identity that would survive uploading, or even rebuilding a body molecule by molecule from a recorded pattern - the later only because he is probably not comfortable with multiple copies of a single identity being possible. These complaints seem to me to be just a case of him wanting to defend his own ideas about how immortality might be achieved from competing ideas about paths to immortality, rahter than any well founded criticism for these posibilities.

He says that the political ideas expressed in the book are “debatable.” Well, of course they are, anything and everything is “debatable.” But I think what he really meant was that he found them to be extraneous - unnecessary to the theme of the book. On this I could not disagree more. The nature of collective idea organisms that we are trying to expose is manifest in the structures of all organizations, and the political views we express (that of the virtues of personal freedom over central control) strike directly to the nature of the types of systems perpetuated by collective ideas and the damage they do. While Ettinger may be more interested in the more specific theme of the nature of religious ideas battling newer ideas about possible immortality, the more general theme of the book concerning collective ideas is the greater truth the book is trying to shed light on. I believe that libertarian political theory helps make these more general points about the nature of collectivism more understandable.

I am not sure I even understand the complaint that we use the meme concept uncritically - perhaps because I have know way of knowing what his unvoiced criticism is. Does he not believe that the behavior of human beings is the result of two different types of information systems? Or does he want us to continually point out that memetic structures are not life in the same sense that biological structures are? Not sure what the gripe here is, except maybe again, that he may not like to think that electronic information systems might be capable of encoding intelligence, and giving too much credence to ideological replicators as a type of life might lead in that direction.

Identities being defined as predictive models of behavior is one of the core concepts of the book, so I wish his criticism had been more verbose than just “doesn’t really fly.” Having to guess, I think that he is considering the concept of his own identity - his self - and thinks that the phrase “predictive model of behavior” is too confining to put himself into. However, if he were to step one level back, and stop conceptualizing a specific identity, and consider what his brain is doing when thinking about any identity, I think he would see what we mean here. His concept of anyone else’s identity is a mental model of what that person is, and its express purpose is to consider how that person will react in various situations - it is a model for predicting the behavior of another. His own concept of self, is also simply an understanding of his own thoughts and behaviors - a predictive model about how he will think or feel in any given situation.

Perhaps what is going on here is that we are using identity to mean what he would refer to as the “idea of an identity” in much the same way as when we are talking about God we are talking about the “idea of God.” The self can be just as much an icon as any god

This becomes a very interesting distinction that points right at the nature of our thought processes. Is “the rose”, and the “idea of the rose,” the same thing? Since the rose that you perceive to be real and hold in your hands, is still only a model in your head, in some sense there is no difference. However, we still like to draw the distinction between the rose we hold in or hands and the one we imagine we will buy for our wife tomorrow - call one a real rose and the other just the idea of a rose.

Likewise, the concept of our personal identity seems more real than that of an imaginary character. However, the internal model we have of an imaginary character must be as real as our concept of the mind of another real person. In both cases we have no direct tangibility, but only an internal model to work with. We know we can be wrong about another persons mind and we point out in GWYD that we can also be wrong about our own mind. So how different is our sense of personal identity from that of our sense of another person or even an imaginary characters identity? Is there ever a real identity? or are all identities just “ideas of identities” - that is to say - predictive models concerning some person or thing - real or imaginary?

Finally, the criticism that there is “a bit of confusion in the discussion of free will” I must admit to as being entirely valid. I re-read that section, and it didn’t really catch the concept I was going for at all. So I intend to change it. I will go into this further in my next post, which will take the form of a rewrite of that particular section of GWYD.