121–130 of 188 posts
Under current laws, wouldn't the way the Terms of Service are presented be considered a contract signed under duress? I mean, they are saying that if you don't sign the contract, they'll kill you, which is kind of the textbook definition of duress.
While it does make for some entertaining fiction, and may provide some benefits to the living, I do not believe that 'uploading' is a desirable experience. In fact, I don't believe that one can experience it at all. Imagine the procedure (for a conscious person): your brain is connected to a computer interface and a copy of your mind is taken. Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to…
You could read about the Buddhist concept of impermanence and the five aggregates of being which sounds similar to the idea of a metamorphosis, only not just human but everything changing all the time.
While it does make for some entertaining fiction, and may provide some benefits to the living, I do not believe that 'uploading' is a desirable experience. In fact, I don't believe that one can experience it at all. Imagine the procedure (for a conscious person): your brain is connected to a computer interface and a copy of your mind is taken. Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to…
"Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it" I take it you would find it very hard to meet your copy, then? If for some reason your copy goes live and you don't die, I bet you two would get into a fight :-). As it is now, if I'm alive and I meet my exact copy, he'd agree to die ("just do it quickly") until I really die. And then the copy would become me - it's that simple. Maybe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I want to inject nanorobots into my body which will transform it gradually, cell by cell into an improved synthetic one. In this way, immortality and superhumanity can be achieved without loss of continuity. Just last night I thought about this and went to sleep in despair :> If someone scans my brain, builds an artificial copy, instantly cuts out my brain and inserts the new one, I clearly die (because I got my br…
You have an old car, and you want to renew it. If you buy it brand new and toss the old one, you are destroying the old one. If you keep changing pieces of it, testing them to see they work, and keep going until you have replaced the whole car, it's still the old car, just brand new. There's not much difference at the end, except that you can consider that the second way of doing things will let you still use the old…
However, the car of Theseus example allows for a worrisome wrinkle. What if you kept all the old parts during the process you describe, and then after, you re-assembled them? Which car has the superior claim to being identical with the old car? I think it obvious that the reassembled old parts have the superior claim over the car produced by part-by-part substitution of new parts.
There is a lot of the classical discussion on personal identity here. The argument about a copy being "identical to me but it's not me" is a very natural and intuitive reaction, but it's probably wrong. A very illuminating explanation is http://lesswrong.com/lw/pm/identity_isnt_in_specific_atoms and related posts. I'll try a personal approach: imagine a country with no computers, no photocopiers, no presses, and a ve…
Yes, of course both are. But still, you're only ever going to be conscious from the perspective contained within the original you. The copy may be mathematically identical, but it does not make sense that there would be any kind of a magical transition of consciousness from one to the other. The other "you" would have its own consciousness entirely separate from yours. I.e., if you copy yourself and kill the original…
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If you copy yourself, you will be creating two originals. They will both "wake up" and be "you".
Sure, but does your consciousness comprise of both you's or just one?
While it does make for some entertaining fiction, and may provide some benefits to the living, I do not believe that 'uploading' is a desirable experience. In fact, I don't believe that one can experience it at all. Imagine the procedure (for a conscious person): your brain is connected to a computer interface and a copy of your mind is taken. Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to…
How? Well, think of replacing a hard drive under a running process. Compare that to migrating a VM to another machine. In one, the process is truly continuous, it just begins using new hardware; in the other, the process is cloned and the original process killed.
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Unless you accept dualism (that there is some 'you' separate from the wetware in your head) you are always going to have this problem. A copy of 'you' would only sync with 'you' for an infinitesimal amount of time before you both diverged. The two 'yous' both have valid claim to everything before the Split but afterwards you are effectively two different people.
This is where the following thought experiment comes in: Imagine science advances to the point where medical science can replace individual brain cells with perfect robot replicas. These robot cells interact with surrounding cells in exactly the same way as the real ones and can be initialized with the state of the real cell they are replacing. They're small though, so all the real computation work they may need to d…
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You experience discontinuities in consciousness every day: when you sleep. Why is it that we feel like the same person after we wake up from sleep, from anesthesia, or even a prolonged coma? You could go to sleep, have arbitrary operations done to the neurons in your brain while asleep, and presumably will awake into the "same body". This thought experiment leads me to believe that the most important consideration fo…
Considering the metamorphosis idea, by the time your whole brain was replaced, piece by piece, by devices simulating its behavior, you became an upload - it's just that all of your data is running inside your head (or that this illusion is maintained by very low-latency links to your root-self running elsewhere). Still, the moment you move its dataset to a new device and deactivate the original, aren't you killing th…
But if we believe consciousness is some subjective experience that results from the functioning brain or similar physical device, what can we say?
Think of a vinyl record and a digital music player. The vinyl record is playing along when it is stopped suddenly, the digital player is started at exactly the right time to produce no break in the song.
If you insist that you are the record player, then you die, you stopped. If you think that you are the song, it continued without missing a beat. Instead of an abrupt stop you can cross fade the record out and the digital one in over a few minutes. Does this make a difference?
Under current laws, wouldn't the way the Terms of Service are presented be considered a contract signed under duress? I mean, they are saying that if you don't sign the contract, they'll kill you, which is kind of the textbook definition of duress.