From: Heartland (mindinstance@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Apr 06 2008 - 18:16:49 MDT
Matt Mahoney wrote:
> I would like for my decision to upload or not to be based on real information
> and not faith, like the suicide bomber who believes he will go to heaven.
> However, that is not the case. All I can say with certainty is that after I
> upload, there will be something that claims to be me that is realistic enough
> to fool all of my friends and relatives. The relevant facts are my fear of
> death (therefore I will upload) and belief in consciousness (therefore I
> believe that my future upload will be "me" if I preserve my memories).
>
> But every thought experiment I do proves that my beliefs are wrong.
>
> Example: teleportation. It works like this. I step into a booth at point A
> and a copy of me is produced at point B. The copy at point A is slowly and
> painfully killed by being crushed between the soundproofed walls of the
> teleportation booth in a process that takes 24 hours. For $2 extra I have the
> option of having the copy at point A injected with an overdose of a narcotic,
> making the death fast and painless. But I have teleported hundreds of times
> both ways and can't tell the difference. I always come out at point B and I
> would rather save the money.
>
> Am I making the right decision? My tribal elders can't help me. They say
> that consciousness can't be copied.
That's actually not what the elders would say. They would probably say that copying
and transferring are two nonequivalent operations and, while consciounsess could
certainly be duplicated, transferring-by-copying operation will not exist as long
as 2 != 1. They would probably advise you to avoid teleportation and stick
exclusively to nondestructive uploading.
Slawek
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:01:02 MDT