[extropy-chat] Identity and becoming a Great Old One

[Bret Kulakovich]

This really is the old teleportation/"transporter accident" etc.  
argument all over again. Even Outer Limits milked this;

Which I will now mangle horribly.

If I could teleport you using the following method, would you go to a  
(point of interest, other planet, whatever):

You step into the matter transmitter at point A
You are scanned
Your scan is transmitted to point B
The scan is rebuilt into you at point B
The you at point A is destroyed

Would you "go"?
Are "you" dead?

I have always thought - If I am a virus, then this is great. Since I  
am conscious, no thanks.

Sorry if this over simplifies anything you are saying in this post.

Bret K.


On Jan 26, 2006, at 12:04 PM, Russell Wallace wrote:

> The thread view (identity is a verb, a continuing thread of  
> consciousness) and the pattern view (identity is an adjective; as  
> John Clark put it, "I am the way matter behaves when it is  
> organized in a Johnclarkian way") give the same results most of the  
> time; the one scenario that always gets adherents of the two  
> arguing with each other is destructive scan uploading (fine by the  
> pattern view, semelparous suicide by the identity view). (Happily,  
> gradual uploading is a potential way around this problem for the  
> thread view.)
>
> Another scenario in which the two views might give different  
> results is the wish expressed by some transhumanists that can be  
> summarized as "when I grow up I want to be a Great Old One"; that  
> is, over the next while - say, a million subjective years - they  
> want to continually modify and augment themselves such that the  
> result will be, as they see it, as far beyond the original as the  
> original was beyond an amoeba. (I don't personally accept the  
> analogy even given the premises, but it gets the point across  
> nicely enough that I did happily make use of it for science fiction  
> purposes.)
>
> To me, as a subscriber to the pattern view, this doesn't make sense  
> because said entity wouldn't be me anymore, so it would be a form  
> of suicide; one could still regard the future existence of such an  
> entity as a cool thing, but why would one have a desire to use  
> oneself in particular as a seed/raw material?
>
> But it occurs to me that it makes perfect sense from the thread  
> viewpoint; with appropriate care (don't discard so much that the  
> result, while incredibly intelligent, no longer has any feeling or  
> awareness so that it isn't anyone, etc) a huge change could be done  
> as a series of incremental steps, each small enough that the thread  
> of consciousness was unbroken; so a subscriber to this view could  
> reasonably believe a Great Old One _would_ be them, if it came into  
> existence by the right path.
>
> One should then desire to follow this path if and only if one  
> believes gradual uploading is better than destructive scan  
> uploading. I'm curious as to how many positive and negative  
> examples of this theory there are?
>
> (Meta: This is an SL3-4 topic, which people on the SL4 list have  
> been unhappy about the shortage of lately; it's also I believe on- 
> topic for extropy-chat, and is something of a followup to a  
> previous (lower SL) message I posted there, so it seems appropriate  
> for both lists; if the moderators of one or both lists disagree, or  
> if crossposting like this isn't the right way to go about it,  
> please let me know.)
>
> - Russell
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