[ExI] Mind Uploading article in Wikipedia

[Damien Broderick]

At 09:38 PM 4/4/2009 +0200, Dagon wrote:

>on rationalist moments (and I say rationalist, not rational)  i know 
>there is no sensible,
>sustainable alternative to a world without vitalist or spiritual 
>energies, and matter being a
>mechanical process.

I recall John Clark's claim that "free will" is an illusion based on 
the fact that we are blind to our own workings until we see the 
result, which seems correct to me. I'm not sure if the following is a 
good analogy (I don't mean homology), but even a totally 
deterministic, matter&energy computer can deliver the next largest 
prime number (an abstraction) without *anyone* having in advance any 
detailed idea what it will be. Brains in bodies do something similar 
all the time, although other people can sometimes make shrewd guesses 
at what each of us will do in a situation where a given choice 
remains far more uncertain to the actor.

As I wrote many years ago in THEORY AND ITS DISCONTENTS:

"Our scientific worldview places us, at bottom, in a universe of 
non-local quantum fields, whose gravitational ensembles are 
constrained by the highly counter-intuitive principles of relativity 
theory. Is this a `materialistic' account? Clearly it is; or if it 
isn't, then no materialistic account can any longer stand."

Damien Broderick