[extropy-chat] You must be willing to give up everything - the self identity quest

[david ish shalom]

"*I see Robert's statement as very powerful because it highlights the very
general principle that there is no growth without change, despite
popular sentiment to the contrary.."*
**
Around three months ago I have posted to this list about a new strategy of
digital immortality through identity capture that can be performed now, to
achieve now a good backup copy of ourselves, to increase our personal
chances of survival to the transhumanist future. I brought a strategy backed
by  serious theories and research of the self, like Max More, W.S.
Bainbridge and Kurzweil insights, yet the final conclusions  oblige me
alone.  The argumentation raised was never  seriously related by this list
participants, not disputed earnestly, yet since then my postings to this
list has been placed into  the moderation list until now and basically the
method was ignored. Aren't some of you even here refusing to think outside
the box ? frightened by the innovation ? some participants reaction to new
scientifically based procedure of survival was conceit and unimaginative
refrain without even bothering to review the material.

 if it can be shown that by reliable self-identity capture, we can capture
now the salient information regarding the self- identity, in other words,
the identity-critical-information, that means that future information
technologies will be able to upload that information into
personalized-artificial-intelligence to the effect of your survival. This is
uploading, but not through full neural scanning but by way of identity
capture, the capture of your self identity, a process which it is claimed
that can soon be perfected and performed.

So the critical question is, can I  reliably and seriously capture my
identity ?

Max More in The Diachronic Self argue that the content of
self-transformation is itself a primary component connecting our former self
with our new self phase and that*  *transformation content will compensate
for the reduction in other connections it causes".  From this respect it is
clarified that a person is, for a large extent, a matter of self definition.
*Thus, I am not mainly what I am, but I am rather what I will be able to be.
*

*Please check seriously for yourself, before ignoring or ridiculing  that
opportunity, the material is clear and compelling. Death is our prime threat
and any rationally based strategy of self identity capture and survival
hopefully will not be totally overlooked by transhumanists*.  a revised
edition of this option of immortality.

*http://davidishalom1.googlepages.com/home *

 Jef Allbright"
Philosophers have been dealing with the question of personal identity
for thousands of years already. Anyone seriously interested in
discussing the topic should be familiar with previous thinking including
"ship of Theseus", Max More's thesis on the "diachronic self", and Derek
Parfit's _Reasons and Persons_ in order to avoid rehashing

…..two things about this topic remain interesting to me:
(1) Even after people have become quite familiar with the logical
arguments, they tend to stay with whatever belief *feels* right to them.
This has immense implications for effective decision-making under
accelerating change, and so is of increasingly practical importance to
our lives and well-being……some people have "moved up" beyond the
common-sense description of personal identity to embrace the broader
"patternist" definition but
have yet to embrace an even more general description based on agency
rather than physical/functional similarity. In my opinion this is where
our thinking graduates from the "aha, it should be possible" stage to
the more practical level of how we might deal with the social and moral
ramifications of multiple instances of a personal identity.

as to your point about the rigorous meaning of identity, I fully agree.
That being said, within the topic of "personal identity" we are
specifically allowing for the case when two objects, recognized as
…..persons, appear to be *effectively* the same within a given context.

Now, given the logical definition of 'identity', if there is a perfect
copy of my brain with all its encoded contents and possible states, that
copy still lacks at least: (1) the property of being 'the original', (2)
the property of being in the location that the original is, and (3) the
property of being encoded on the physical substrate that the original is
encoded on. Ergo, there exists at least one property that the original
has but the copy lacks, and thus, by the definition of 'identity', any
claim that "the original = the copy" is false

Don't let what you are being get in the way of what you might become.

   - Robert Bradbury wrote:
   > > *You must be willing to give up everything* you are for what you
   might
   > > become.

> Excellent statement!  Before I add this to my quote file with attribution
to
> Robert, can anyone tell me of the existence of a more original source of
> this powerful insight?

Jef Allbright" You must be willing to give up everything
.. *I see Robert's statement as very powerful because it highlights the very
general principle that there is no growth without change, despite
popular sentiment to the contrary.***

(1)  Note that this is logically consistent with what many of us have
been saying; that there can be a gradient of personal identity and that
there can be duplicates of personal identity.

 … the rate of change increases (the singularity) it is likely that only
> those who adopt the path of greatest flexibility will survive.
> You must be willing to give up everything you are for what you might
> become:  Unfortunately very very few individuals in the world today
> grasp this -- they are more concerned with being who or what they
> "are" than simply "being".



*"First they ignore you,**
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win."
Mohandas Gandhi*
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