5 ms·
Why do you want to upload, at best, a copy of your consciousness?
by jonny_eh 4y ago
Why do you want to upload, at best, a copy of your consciousness?
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoImmortality
- jdpedrie 4y agoBut you're dead. Digital copy of you != you.
- philipkglass 4y agoIt won't do anything to solve the dread-of-nonexistence problem. But a copy that behaves just like you is still useful if your motivation is something like "ensure that my line of scientific research continues" or "take care of my extended family."
- ycombobreaker 4y agoBut even if it's a copy of your essence, it's not a slave. Mortal-you has goals and family to care about. Mortal-you has been living and planning with the constraint of mortality for its entire life. Immortal-you will eventually develop different motivations.
- mlyle 4y ago> Immortal-you will eventually develop different motivations. Yah, well, mortal-me also eventually develops different motivations. There's still continuity and connectedness. It's just fork(2).
- johndough 4y agoThe digital copy can be kept alive long enough until we figure out how to download it back into a body again, at which point this is basically the ship of Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus Also some people might disagree with "digital copy of you != you". Personally, I do not care since it is close enough to immortality imho.
- undersuit 4y agoI do care about the fleshy me, but maybe the digital me could figure out a way for fleshy me to not die and fix my bum knee for sentimental reasons.
- anonymoushn 4y agoHow are you certain that you can survive a night's sleep?
- batch12 4y agoTo be fair, it's not you that becomes immortal, just your copy. From your perspective, you still die.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoBut not today! And consider: if I can upload, perhaps I can download. Perhaps my digital copy can live life 'faster'? In that case I live 1000 lives digitally and download that. Now I'm essentially immortal, in my physical body, because I've lived for millennia! At the very, very least its no worse than living this one life and dying anyway.
- batch12 4y agoIt isn't you living those lives though. What is the difference between this and downloading someone else's memories?
- undersuit 4y agoWhy isn't it me? Upload at night, sleep, download in the morning the self that has been running at 1000x speed in the cloud.
- batch12 4y agoIt isn't you because the experiences didn't happen and weren't actually observed by you. They'd be implants of false memories at best. That would give the illusion of experience but that's all. Definately nowhere near immortality. This is closer to a dream or delusion.
- undersuit 4y agoWe're talking about uploading our consciousness into a digital realm and then downloading the resulting consciousness back into a brain. Ignoring that we have no way to do that right now, there is nothing that says we can't. It would not be a dream any more than yesterday wasn't a dream.
- officeplant 4y agoTo leave the flesh husk behind.
- TremendousJudge 4y agoThe flesh husk is you. You can't provably leave it behind without dying.
- cdelsolar 4y agoas soon as you copy yourself you're both, and indistinguishable to anyone else but your flesh husk.
- TremendousJudge 4y agoYeah but I don't think you'll feel that you're both. You'll still feel like yourself, and the other will feel like another. You won't feel as though you have left anything behind, only the other will feel like that.
- dymk 4y agoThere’s an entire subgenre of science fiction exploring just that question! You may enjoy authors Greg Egan or Dennis E. Taylor.
- trollied 4y agoI recently discovered the Bobiverse series. Very entertaining:)
- donio 4y agoTo me they tend to answer the question of why you wouldn't want to do it.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoYeah but the bots would so there's that.
- mlyle 4y agoWhat about the whole Ship-of-Theseus thing? What if you add something to you that's knit into and augmenting your brain by 10%, and then as a little more of your brain withers, you add another chunk. Ultimately it reaches a point where your existing brain is doing none of the work and it's all machines, but there was arguably never a precipice crossed where it wasn't "you".
- debacle 4y agoSuch a strange thing, that a comment like this on a Friday afternoon would completely blow my mind.
- mlyle 4y agoThank you :D
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoStories have been written! On this very subject. Back in the day.