[extropy-chat] Cryonics and uploading

[Damien Broderick]

At 07:00 PM 1/29/2006 -0500, Slawomir wrote:

>  The copy will be me in the sense that it will carry the same identity. 
> Still, I will not be experiencing the life of the copy. The original will 
> experience his own life.

Exactly. Or not, assuming destructive copying.

Good dog! I can't believe intelligent people still don't get this, after at 
least a decade of the same old same old.

Think about what's at stake, and for whom.

The mad scientists come to you in the night and tell you that you're about 
to be executed--killed, murdered, gone--but that it's okay, because they're 
going to make a perfect clone of you and raise it just right so that in N 
years it will be exactly the way you are now, at which point your life will 
continue on uninterrupted. (As in Theodore Sturgeon's 1962 story "When you 
care, when you love.")

For the rest of the world, this is great news. You've been absent for N 
years, but now you're back. Whoopee!

For *you*, here and now, this is a terrifying sentence of oblivion. What 
the hell's in it for you?

What a difference individual point of view makes!

Damien Broderick