4 ms·

This is my hypothesis as well, but I think if you were to shut down the "old you" (e.g. goto sleep and never wake up) you really wouldn't care. You didn't expe

by ahnick 9y ago

This is my hypothesis as well, but I think if you were to shut down the "old you" (e.g. goto sleep and never wake up) you really wouldn't care. You didn't experience any pain and you don't exist anymore, so you have nothing to be upset about b/c by definition you don't have any feelings. It's basically the equivalent of a Move operation across two computers. Such a Move operation can be decomposed into a Copy + Delete. First copy the existing file to the new location, then delete the old file from the existing location. Do we feel bad for the old bits? Are we really fundamentally special just because we are carbon based life-forms with an electro chemical implementation?

pmoriarty 9y ago
"if you were to shut down the 'old you' (e.g. goto sleep and never wake up) you really wouldn't care. You didn't experience any pain and you don't exist anymore, so you have nothing to be upset about b/c by definition you don't have any feelings." You could pretty much say the exact same thing about ordinary death. In fact, I can't figure out how it'd differ from ordinary death in any way, except that hypothetically there'd now be an extra entity inside a machine, and that entity would resemble me in some ways. If you tried to tell most people they wouldn't care about dying, that they'd just go to sleep and never wake up, and they wouldn't feel any pain, few would be comforted by it and take your proffered suicide pill.
- ahnick 9y ago
  I agree that by our current working definition here that it would be no different than death. Which is to say then that death is not really to be feared. (Maybe the manner in which death occurs should though) The comfort or lack of comfort is really all in the perception of death. If it was sold as a transference of conscientiousness from your old body to your new body would people accept it differently? (Even though the fact remains that death is occurring)
- philipkglass 9y ago
  If I knew that I'd die painlessly while asleep and that my behaviorally-identical duplicate would seamlessly take over my body in the morning, that's about 95% of my worries-about-death already taken care of. I don't fear nonexistence (much). I fear pain and disability, and I worry about the effect of my death on other people. Gradual-replacement-by-machine would solve those problems nicely. Likewise, you'd get more shrug than horror out of me if I were told that my sister isn't really my sister, "merely" an entity with the same appearance, memories, history, and behavior as my sister.

by ahnick 9y ago

pmoriarty 9y ago

"if you were to shut down the 'old you' (e.g. goto sleep and never wake up) you really wouldn't care. You didn't experience any pain and you don't exist anymore, so you have nothing to be upset about b/c by definition you don't have any feelings." You could pretty much say the exact same thing about ordinary death. In fact, I can't figure out how it'd differ from ordinary death in any way, except that hypothetically there'd now be an extra entity inside a machine, and that entity would resemble me in some ways. If you tried to tell most people they wouldn't care about dying, that they'd just go to sleep and never wake up, and they wouldn't feel any pain, few would be comforted by it and take your proffered suicide pill.

ahnick 9y ago
I agree that by our current working definition here that it would be no different than death. Which is to say then that death is not really to be feared. (Maybe the manner in which death occurs should though) The comfort or lack of comfort is really all in the perception of death. If it was sold as a transference of conscientiousness from your old body to your new body would people accept it differently? (Even though the fact remains that death is occurring)
philipkglass 9y ago
If I knew that I'd die painlessly while asleep and that my behaviorally-identical duplicate would seamlessly take over my body in the morning, that's about 95% of my worries-about-death already taken care of. I don't fear nonexistence (much). I fear pain and disability, and I worry about the effect of my death on other people. Gradual-replacement-by-machine would solve those problems nicely. Likewise, you'd get more shrug than horror out of me if I were told that my sister isn't really my sister, "merely" an entity with the same appearance, memories, history, and behavior as my sister.