4 ms·
What's wrong with uploading to a robot body.
by hurryer 3y ago
What's wrong with uploading to a robot body.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoA copy of me isn't me, despite it thinking it is.
- hurryer 3y agoYour atoms are being replaced all the time, at some point none of your original atoms are still present, yet somehow you feel no discontinuity.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoI believe I am more than just the sum of my atoms, and part of me is spiritual. A scan of my physical makeup won't capture my immaterial soul.
- spartanatreyu 3y agoIt's just a faster Ship of Theseus
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoI hope they have Metroid style power armor in there!
- bobsmooth 3y agoExactly. No way I'm getting in a Star Trek teleporter either.
- GolfPopper 3y agoBut the you of next year isn't the you who is reading this thread, either. And the you reading this thread isn't 10-year-old you. You think you have continuity of experience, but do you really? If the copy of you thinks it has continuity of experience, what's the difference, really?
- throwanem 3y agoWe don't even reliably have continuity of experience between one day and the next! Are you sure the "you" who wakes from a dreamless night's sleep is the same "you" who went to bed the night before?
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoI can be reasonably sure when I have memories of laying down in the same bed I woke up in, while waking up in a digital world isn't likely to be something I'd find normal the first time. More scary would be the thought that the real me is out in the real world still while the digital version knows it's a fake.
- throwanem 3y agoAll it can tell you that you remember going to bed, and nothing between that and waking up, is that that's what you remember. Nothing guarantees that's all there is to remember, and memory editing has already been reduced to standard-of-care medical practice in the form of pharmaceuticals such as midazolam. Why assume nothing similar would be possible in the virtualized case?
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoThat may be true physically, but metaphysically? I'm Catholic so I believe I have a soul which is immaterial. Setting aside my belief that my soul cannot be inserted into a computer, this reminds me of a conversation I had with my brother in law about this topic in general. He eventually said as long as some version of himself lives on, he would be content with that even if "he" in his body doesn't live on. A digital soul, in that case.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- owyn 3y agoCool. Maybe souls are digital but the storage system hasn't been invented yet?
- CuriousSkeptic 3y agoAssuming a identity must be a continuous single path through spacetime It struck me, when pondering what it would mean for something like a LLM to have an identity, that this identity as a single path notion will have to be replaced with identity as something capable of branching of into different paths. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics also points towards such a notion of identity, even if just a philosophical notion In a sense most of us already identify as a composite of past selves all embedded into our current self, preparing for our future selves. Why is another copy, or branch, going to cause an identity crisis?
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoUnless my body is destructively uploaded, the me that wakes up in the robot body will not be the same me that wakes up after the upload since I'll still be in my body. Brain in a jar gets around this, but that's semi-destructive.
- bobsmooth 3y agoThe game SOMA explains it succinctly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUv7UNbJ34M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUv7UNbJ34M