Selfness

Gregory Benford | January 1, 1997

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But if a body is grown for a defrosted and repaired head, what becomes of the body's head? Was it deliberately stunted from "birth", so that it never developed as a conscious human? It seems unlikely that anyone could grow a body in some chemical vat, no matter how sophisticated, without using the many complex functions that the brain provides for that body.

So even to envision cryonics proceeding, one must require that future society has solved both scientific and moral questions about selfness and its implications. This is not an easy future to foresee, not at all.

But remember that the future is infinite, or at least very long indeed. Note how primitive medicine was a mere century ago. A few more centuries of steady growth could yield a social and philosophical landscape beyond our present comprehension.

Suppose cryonics could work. You would have grabbed back from time's maw the pure raw stuff of Self. Cybernetics gives a digital model, one always suspect because it has to choose how to configure the myriad data points of any brain-readout.

Choice begets the particular, and to have the whole Self, you must have the true, full general Self, in whatever deep labyrinths it lies.