3 ms·
> immortal > will have their consciousness mapped What you mean by consciousness and immortality - what you want to preserve indefinitely - is the waking expe
by consciousness6 13d ago
> immortal
> will have their consciousness mapped
What you mean by consciousness and immortality - what you want to preserve indefinitely - is the waking experience of being alive.
Strangely, we don’t mind that we weren’t here in 1737 BC, and we don’t mind and we even crave plunging into the nothingness of deep sleep each night, but we have a big problem with not being here tomorrow.
But experience might not be encodable. Can you encode pain? Could a computer ever be programmed to feel pain? Not detect damage or report on it, but feel the pain associated with it?
What is “the aroma of coffee” or the “sound of a violin in middle C”? We can define them objectively, in various ways (some having nothing to do with each other).
But if the experiences we have are not encodable then we can’t map consciousness onto a medium. It must be experienced (whatever it is/means - nobody knows) in the here and now.
It’s not magic, but it might not be something that is printable to disk anymore than the “brisk inhale of canyon air” that I can play that back and have that experience, is printable to disk.
- tim333 12d agoIt remains to be seen how the experience of “the aroma of coffee” works but I expect there will be progress there. That stuff probably came about through evolution as a kind of situation summary so we can make decisions critical to survival and replication like whether to grab coffee. >we don’t mind that we weren’t here in 1737 BC This is true. Probably just an evolved instinct not to die. Even so I think it would be cool to live on in some form.
- throwaway63467 12d agoThey will settle for what’s available at the time, I dont think it makes sense either but they will come up with something that is good enough for their purposes and as long as the copy parrots the original well enough it will pass.