Date: Tue, 4 Apr 1995 13:52:03 -0400
From: SBronzell-AT-aol.com
Subject: Re: human body transformation


Oh right, I wasn't saying editing isn't or wouldn't be possible.  I was just
considering the implications.

As for what wouldn't be preserved.  What is not preserved now already?  I
have a sense of myself.  Still there is a lot about me that is not what I was
when I was a kid.  And for instance I have no desire to go back and change
his life.  It is gone.

The phoenix is an interesting consideration here.  The phoenix, as portrayed
mythically, doesn't just change.  It dies.  It's gone.  No hope.  No future.
 Ashes.  And then, life.  This utter devastation seems so beautiful to me.
 It seems to me that it is in the *utter* devastation that something happens,
or, is uttered. 

I have been meaning to see that movie sometime *Ground Hog Day* where Bill
Murray gets to redo and redo his life.  I wonder how they handle this
question.

It is interesting to consider the implications.

What would not be preserved if my body in toto was reproduced somewhere else
would be my body right here.  And still there are also interesting questions
about to what extent life or what is lively about us is just form, just
structure.  I'm not suggesting a spirit inhabiting the form, but I think
there are interesting questions or cracks to the notion that we are *just*
mechanisms or whatever.

Say the human is just the pattern, the mechanics, the structure.  Then I
think there is something inhuman going on which is untrappable.  It might not
be me, but it is hanging around, so to speak.  And I wonder what the
untrappable would do with such "perfection" as we're discussing here. 

I think we can sanely say, perhaps absolutely (quick!  duck!), that there is
something untrappable going on.  And that that has strong implications for
how we go about living.

Sean

****  

Previously:

Sean writes:

>>But preserve my pattern and what is preserved?  And can I start 16-track
editing of what I am?  I wonder if this would be the fast track to articicial
intelligence?  :-}
>>What is going on here with these bodies of ours and lives isn't just
pattern.
 >I would venture that what is most important or lively about our lives is
that which can't be preserved.  In other words, it is not the shapes and
>patterns of nature as scenery merely which are interesting.

Patrick responds:

>I don't know what it would be about you that would not be preserved if your
body, in toto, was reproduced somewhere else.  Maybe we have a metaphysical
dispute.  I don't think its phenomenological, for as I see it, the 
phenomenal is neural.

>And re: editing, of course that would be possible. Right now Prozac lets 
people edit their serotonin reuptake capacities which changes their 
>emotion/experience, etc.  Self-editing is the goal of a dynamic life.

>Patrick




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