[extropy-chat] What should survive and why?

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 01/05/07, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:

> After all, mind uploading involves teaching a computer to believe
> > it is you, and the computer ostensibly has less in common with
> > you than you have in common with a madman.
>
> Well---if that is going to be the case, I do not want to be uploaded,
> because it would not constitute survival.  An upload machine would
> not need God-like knowledge of what to fiendishly include (just
> enough to fool people) and what to omit. I would settle for a fairly
> mechanical process that made an electronic version of me that
> passed insofar as everyone I know.


I don't really understand your objection here. Taking a general purpose
computer and programming it to be Lee is equivalent to taking some person
off the street, wiping his mind, and programming him to be Lee, isn't it?
Whether these procedures are technically possible is a separate question.

To summarize, I disagree with your extra or alternative criterion
> expressed in your remarks to Heartland:
>
> > Because that's how people define survival, as in not dying. If someone
> > did claim that sleep was death, the response would be, "No, I went to
> > sleep last night, and I don't feel dead; so whatever evidence you show
> > suggesting that everyone does die when they fall asleep, that just means
> > your definition of death is wrong,
>
> Don't you agree that in truth that would be an inadequate response?
> Would it not---as you wrote to me later---have to be accompanied
> by better evidence than that, namely objective knowledge that the
> memories of the yesterday person were incredibly similar to the
> today person (as in actual fact in daily life they really are)?


The objective evidence would rapidly impinge on the subjective evidence, if
the two did not match. If everyone recognised you, things were in the same
place you put them yesterday, letters you wrote years ago are as you
remember them, and so on, then you can say you have survived. I think this
much would be evident within moments of waking up. The alternative situation
is to have memories removed and false memories implanted while you are
asleep. If this were to happen to a sufficient extent tonight, then it would
be equivalent to death. So you could physically die but survive mentally, or
physically survive but die mentally. It doesn't matter what happens to your
body as long as your mind continues.

-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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