A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

It's non-falsifiable, which is the actual standard of science, because we don't have a test for it yet. We'd have to have something to observe and measure, something to test. As some quick examples for this specific case:

* There are mental disorders, drugs, experiences that seem to imply dualism; those are entirely inside those people's mind with no way to prove those experiences are true, or simply products of the brain.

* Damage to a brain seems to change consciousness (this is falsifiable, and proven) which seems to suggest that it is where our consciousness is; damaging the receiver damages the connection, it's obvious that something must bind the consciousness.

This is a well thought about topic. If you have some sort of falsifiable test, please suggest it, otherwise, far wiser people have tried and failed to think of one (and as a note, it's up to you to prove that your hypothesis can be falsified, it's your claim).

> If I merged the bash logs where I nuked rm -rf / on a given computer into the logs of one where I have not ran that command, the result is not the same.

What if you had 2 git repositories, and merged changes from one to another? Or 2 disk images?

Why would memories be logs and not contents of the repository in this analogy? And if you care about changes to the brain state that aren't memories - just add these changes to the brainstate. You argue that no matter how perfectly we merge these brainstates, it's still not "me" after the merge. I argue - if there's no difference after the split, then the question is meaningless.

> This would not be the same object since you can do that, but not delete the object.

So what? Why would existence of a copy change anything? In programming it doesn't, yet you seem to argue it does.

You can make a clone of a disk or a memorydump, and restore it on another computer. Why would the uniqueness matter? You can run 100 copies on 100 computers and use that for redundancy.

When a program is running on modern CPU it executes code predictively, going both ways on some ifs. Does that split identities into 2 and immediately kills one of them?

Let's say for a moment that universe is a simulation, and there is a backup. Does that make "us" suddenly not "us" because there is a copy? Why?

Because of all these corner cases I don't think programming is a good analogy.

Even assuming that it is an antenna, then if your antenna is the only one receiving your consciousness then it is the seat of your consciousness or equivalent, i.e. its reasonable to assume that if you restore the antenna you will restore the consciousness in place (I am leveraging the fact that you called it a seat). On the other side of the coin, with embodied consciousness you could raise other potential issues with preservation of the brain alone. Connection between gut bacteria and mental conditions are being researched with some results confirming hypotheses there.

That's not really a rebuttal of my point.

I have a serious medical condition. I frequently suffer somatopsychic side effects. It's incredible what chemistry can make you feel.

I happen to also believe in a lot of woo stuff. But the reality is that no known cause is not proof that there is a spiritual explanation or cause.

I'm torn about this, I agree that in a world without death we'd view it as meaningless and tragic. I worry about what our path there would look like.

Let's say we find a way to eliminate death or aging. It's expensive at first so only the very wealthy can afford it. Now you have a set of rich people in positions of control that won't age out of them. They'll live forever so they'll continue amassing wealth, if they don't give up control then a new generation with new ways of thinking about the world won't be able to take the helm. I mean, lots of people aren't able to really internalize new ideas in their own current lifetimes, let alone these hypothetically endless ones. The people in control get wealthier, inequality increases, new ideas have a harder time taking hold. Even if this life extension eventually trickles down to the rest of humanity would they ever be able to catch up? Would they want to live an eternal life subjugated by the elite?

Also, assuming this life extension is biological and not digital all of a sudden we have lots of people. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that so hopefully we figure out a way to move excess people to other planets/space colonies, but what if that takes too much time? What if we increase the number of people faster than we can solve the scaling problems? Food, energy, waste, ways of transporting these excess people elsewhere. If we don't solve all of them we're talking about periods of extreme pain and tumult. What happens if we need to put a cap on the number of people while we figure some of them out? Are some people now not allowed to have children? Are some people not allowed to live forever? Who decides the answer to these questions? Hopefully not the ultra rich & powerful class that's formed - that might not be good for the average folks.

Anyways, maybe I'm being pessimistic and on the time scales we're talking about we'd figure out reasonable solutions but it still feels like this whole area feels pretty hand-wavy today when I hear people talk about eliminating death. Death, for better or worse is a sort of equalizer, remove it and a lot of the problems that exist today could get worse.

This is even putting aside questions about what happens to a hypothetical brain that lives forever. Do we run out of space for new memories? Do we start forgetting things after enough time? If so, is the person we are 500 years from now that can no longer remember it's first 100 years the same person as us today?