[extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?

[Heartland]

Heartland:
> First of all, there's no such thing as a resurrection. Things can only be
>> destroyed
>> or created.

Stathis:
> Yes, but an arbitrarily close to perfect copy is indistinguishable from a
> resurrection, and indistinguishable from ordinary continuous life.

It's an illusion of resurrection, not an actual resurrection.

Stathis:
> For all
> you know, you might be dying all the time.

A living thing can die at most once. It is wrong to think that death behaves just 
like sleep. If you're sleeping, you can wake up. If you die, you're never coming 
back.


Keith:
> It's not commonly called that, but in what respect does rebooting your
> computer in the morning after if being off over night differ from the
> description of "resurrection"?

By rebooting you can only "resurrect" the type of instance which expired yesterday, 
not the expired instance itself. If you wanted to resurrect that instance, you 
would have to go back in time and transfer it to today which is, of course, still 
impossible.

Each life is an instance. Once it expires, resurrection of that instance is 
physically/logically impossible unless posthumans figure out a way to upload from 
the past.

Stathis:
> So if the real Hitler had decided at the end of the war to mend his ways,
> should he have been punished?
> What if he had fallen into a frozen lake and
> then after being revived decided to mend his ways?

Punishment (especially physical) is so obsolete. It accomplishes nothing. Ideally,
I would vote for changing the type on this instance from Adolf Hitler to, say,
harmless John Doe - a holy grail of rehabilitation.

Punishment can only be experienced by the process/instance, not by a static type.
It's the Adolf Hitler type that is evil here, not the instance of life that carries
that type. And even though it is the type that should be punished, not the
instance, in practice it's physically impossible to punish an abstract symbol as
symbols can't experience anything. The only way we could "punish" it would be to
erase and replace it with something else.

H.