Cryonics And The Zombie Problem
Thinking about Glenn Reynolds, Ray Kurzweil, and cryonics, I began to go back to the only undergraduate courses that I've been able to use throughout my adult life (though they've consistently also gotten me into trouble, too), my minor in Philosophy. The video embedded above is by Jeffrey Kaplan, a Philosophy prof at UNC Greensboro, whose online courses I've found useful in keeping my thinking active in the field. In this one, he discusses the philosophical concept of a "zombie", a being that is physically identical to a human in every way. It behaves, talks, and reacts exactly like a person, but there is "nobody home" inside. This is a thought experiment that is used against the argument of physicalism, which is roughly equivalent to materialism. It seems to me that this is the philosophy underlying cryonics: notwithstanding you have been legally dead for hundreds of years, if you were vitrified, properly frozen quickly enough after your death, ...