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> I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious territory. Actually

> I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious territory. Actually, I would say the opposite is deeply religious territory. Nothing fundamentally restricts this unless you think the analog nature of a neuron is a pre-requisite to consciousness, and no synthetic/digital consciousness could ever exist. But you have no reason to believe this. Such a belief is almost religious. > where there is no way for you to discern whether your experience actually comes from your sensors or some other source This is life today as well. How do you know you aren't part of some Matrix-style biological mind prison? You don't. It's pointless even trying to wonder. > Regarding "longevity", currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though Social problems can be fixed. Death is final. Tyrants existing is not a reason to promote the death of billions of innocents. If Putin lived for another 1000 years, I certainly wouldn't kill myself. You will experience more net social progress being immortal, though it may be slower, than dying after a short 80 years.

cess11 1y ago
I mean, you've given me an abused Russell's teapot in an attempt to mirror my position, just like a Jehovah's witness or charismatic christian would. At the very least you should hypothesise that you could anchor an argument in quarks and then pick a conceptual level of matter at which you believe you have enough control to be able to fully simulate human corporeality. If you could it'd be very, very slow, because your machine needs to embed more than the representation of the system you aim to simulate. Among other things to correct for the different complexity, similar to how you need to juggle ten extra decimals or rounding rules just to be able to compute 0.3 * 3 in the browser console. I know that I'm not in a Matrix style prison because I've experienced pharmacologically induced dissociation and other disruptions of the nervous system. If my brain was a tube floater hooked up to whatever machine you're fantasising about, then I'd have noticed, just like I notice that I'm dreaming if I for some reason turn lucid when sleeping. You could, of course, spend so much time being introverted and deep in your own fantasies, e.g. by stimulating your brain with screens, that you lose the ability to discern between real and virtual settings. Some might claim that this is an ideal and spend their lives practicing such techniques in cloistered, monastic environments. I did not "promote the death of billions of innocents". I claimed that watching the current trajectory play out isn't obviously attractive, to refute the opposite position, that it should be the "#1" priority of contemporary state administrations. But if you want an argument for death, sure, I'll give you one, because it's trivial. Death is part of the human condition, it is fundamental to who we are and always has been. If you take it away, then we are no longer human and lose our connection with human history and recorded experience. Is it better to be a human than to be a machine? I'd say yes, because machines cannot have liberty and freedom, they're dead already. The assumption that there will be "social progress" under conditions where people no longer die would need a very strong set of arguments for me to accept it. Currently, that we are born and die exerts a pressure on our rulers and injects volatility into our societies. If they instead could just say 'alright, we'll make things better, just wait a millenium', then they would. They are already very good at erasing dissent and the memory of previous dissenters, to a large extent by substituting for it with false ideas, or 'false consciousness'. The assumption that "social progress" is inevitable has a religious background, it has its immediate roots in Enlightenment deism, i.e. christian protestantism, which were inherited by liberalists and early marxists. This position has suffered a lot since then, mostly because of modern takes on science, but also the global effects of mass extinction, disruption of the atmosphere and so on, which is quite tangible evidence against this view. Whether eighty years is long or short from your perspective is up to you. Perception of time is highly elastic and especially under dissociative states you can feel like you've experienced centuries pass by. This is routinely exploited in televised media.

cess11 1y ago

I mean, you've given me an abused Russell's teapot in an attempt to mirror my position, just like a Jehovah's witness or charismatic christian would. At the very least you should hypothesise that you could anchor an argument in quarks and then pick a conceptual level of matter at which you believe you have enough control to be able to fully simulate human corporeality. If you could it'd be very, very slow, because your machine needs to embed more than the representation of the system you aim to simulate. Among other things to correct for the different complexity, similar to how you need to juggle ten extra decimals or rounding rules just to be able to compute 0.3 * 3 in the browser console. I know that I'm not in a Matrix style prison because I've experienced pharmacologically induced dissociation and other disruptions of the nervous system. If my brain was a tube floater hooked up to whatever machine you're fantasising about, then I'd have noticed, just like I notice that I'm dreaming if I for some reason turn lucid when sleeping. You could, of course, spend so much time being introverted and deep in your own fantasies, e.g. by stimulating your brain with screens, that you lose the ability to discern between real and virtual settings. Some might claim that this is an ideal and spend their lives practicing such techniques in cloistered, monastic environments. I did not "promote the death of billions of innocents". I claimed that watching the current trajectory play out isn't obviously attractive, to refute the opposite position, that it should be the "#1" priority of contemporary state administrations. But if you want an argument for death, sure, I'll give you one, because it's trivial. Death is part of the human condition, it is fundamental to who we are and always has been. If you take it away, then we are no longer human and lose our connection with human history and recorded experience. Is it better to be a human than to be a machine? I'd say yes, because machines cannot have liberty and freedom, they're dead already. The assumption that there will be "social progress" under conditions where people no longer die would need a very strong set of arguments for me to accept it. Currently, that we are born and die exerts a pressure on our rulers and injects volatility into our societies. If they instead could just say 'alright, we'll make things better, just wait a millenium', then they would. They are already very good at erasing dissent and the memory of previous dissenters, to a large extent by substituting for it with false ideas, or 'false consciousness'. The assumption that "social progress" is inevitable has a religious background, it has its immediate roots in Enlightenment deism, i.e. christian protestantism, which were inherited by liberalists and early marxists. This position has suffered a lot since then, mostly because of modern takes on science, but also the global effects of mass extinction, disruption of the atmosphere and so on, which is quite tangible evidence against this view. Whether eighty years is long or short from your perspective is up to you. Perception of time is highly elastic and especially under dissociative states you can feel like you've experienced centuries pass by. This is routinely exploited in televised media.