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I've never understood this. Even if we would have perfect mind-uploading capabilities, this doesn't help the billionaire who is afraid of death, right? It'd jus
by Version467 3y ago
I've never understood this. Even if we would have perfect mind-uploading capabilities, this doesn't help the billionaire who is afraid of death, right? It'd just be a copy of them. An immortal one, sure, but the original person would die just the same, no?
- falcor84 3y agoThere's the philosophical argument that we have no continuity of consciousness in our meatbag bodies either - e.g. when you wake up, it's rebooting your consciousness from suspended memories.
- freilanzer 3y agoLucid dreaming would like a word.
- ben_w 3y agoEven then it's not continuous over all your sleep.
- mofunnyman 3y agoNot to mention that nearly all of the atoms in your body are replaced every decade, meaning most of you went into sewage treatment long ago.
- kyleyeats 3y agoWe actually breathe out most of our previously-us mass.
- ChatGTP 3y agoIf you weren’t conscious when asleep, how do you explain dreams and memories? I’ve read about high level meditators who were “aware” they were asleep too. Not sure why they’d make this up.
- OttoVonBizark 3y agoyeah normal sleep is a bad example of rebooting. heavy general anaesthetic is a better example
- ChatGTP 3y agoYou conscious thoughts might be asleep but some part of you is still "there" and operating or else you wouldn't be able to wake up and remember anything?
- v4dok 3y agoThere would be no way to find out if that would be true however. The person in the vat might say they are the same person but you don't know if they really are. Also what happens if you create a copy? Is that two people or is there some kind of shared consciousness? If it is, how do they communicate?
- gat1 3y agoSame with teleportation, you cannot know for sure if the person after the teleportation is the same as the one before, they can just be a copy.
- caskstrength 3y agoBut once they pay $$$ and turn on the uploaded consciousness won't they be like "Hey, why I'm still here in my meat body and not in Amazon Brain Cloud(c)"?
- bratbag 3y agoDaily backup with a final scan after death, if possible. Then your mind is booted into a simulation from your memories, instead of being booted into your pillow from your memories. Functionally not much different to waking up after loosing some time from being blackout drunk.
- caskstrength 3y agoI thought the the fact that your mind is not magically booted into simulation while you are still alive (during sleep, backout while drunk or just pressing the power button on the server running it) should be a clue that you won't suddenly wake up in simulation after you have died.
- Aerbil313 3y agoYou are still dead tho. That thing is a clone of you. Nothing can help this fact.
- ben_w 3y agoOur language can't fully represent the possibility, as it doesn't currently exist and language is learned by mutually shared experiences upon which we then agree terminology. If you make a backup of my mind every midnight, and at noon one day biological-me faces death, that's still death for noon-me, while also being a way to cheat death from the point of view of the me from 12 hours before. Restoring your computer from a backup doesn't mean the hard drive never failed, but it is does get you data back.
- Aerbil313 3y agoNo, our language is perfectly capable of expressing this simple fact: When you die you die, no matter how many clones or backups of you are up and running.
- vbezhenar 3y agoThere's physical continuity. You can be sure that most of your neurones will be the same tomorrow. So to solve immortality, you gotta replace meat cells with silicone ones, slowly, one percent after another. It'll maintain relative continuity and hopefully will transfer memories and other person traits to the silicone, so one day the brain will be immortal and repairable.
- Kerbonut 3y agoThe movie Dark City (1998) explores this concept somewhat.
- paulluuk 3y agoIt's probably not a fear of death, but a fear to cease to exist. And uploading your mind does mean that you continue to exist.
- viraptor 3y agoIt probably depends on your idea of what the soul/consciousness is and how it interacts/integrates with the physical world. There's a few people interested in the idea of (simplifying a lot) "brain as an antenna receiving the consciousness signals".
- Borrible 3y agoThe belief of being no one can be a truth, the belief of being someone an advantage.
- xialvjun 3y agoShip of Theseus
- sparrowInHand 3y agoIf you do battle with the scramblers and you blow up your anti-matter stockpile, do you even have any ship left?
- Version467 3y agoAfaik Ship of Theseus is replacing parts incrementally until eventually no part is from the original ship. This is more like taking the ship, building an exact copy of it and then throwing away the original ship. Not sure that thought experiment is applicable.
- GoblinSlayer 3y agoIntegrate your brain into a machine then gradually replace it.
- rokkitmensch 3y agoThe Altered Carbon books explore this line of thinking decently.