[ExI] Destructive uploading.

[Kelly Anderson]

2011/9/3 G. Livick <glivick at sbcglobal.net>

> Well, yes and no...  That there is nothing special about us is clear.  We are made from the same atoms from which everything else is made.  However, with such a realization being of great value in other places, it doesn't help us in grappling with the main issue here: the mind is not made up of atoms, only the necessary correlate of the mind is constructed.
>
> As a follow-on to that,
>
> "As counter-intuitive as it is, there is nothing to be afraid of concerning
> destructive uploading, the pattern that makes your consciousness is the
> only thing that matters. Gradually transferring a mind is no different
> tha[n] destroying it [and] recreating it. Nobody else would make the
>difference and neither would you, because there isn't any."

I see the difference between replacing the atoms in your brain quickly
vs. slowly to be an issue of continuity of consciousness. While you
may perceive a me uploaded into a robot or VR to be the same as me,
I'm more interested in the internal perception. Do I, internally to my
thought processes feel as though I've had a nap, or just lived my life
day by day, and the pattern is continuous. If there is a big
discontinuity, then it will feel as though I've died. That would
inflict a certain amount of psychological damage on me (or my copy)

So the critical issue here is psychological. How does it feel to me,
and how does it feel to the people I love and work with? If I showed
up in a brand new metallic body at work tomorrow, then people would
not see me as me, at least not initially.

The current corollary is people who go through a sex change operation.
They first start cross dressing, then they get hormone therapy, and
only after a long period including a lot of therapy, do they snip and
tuck and do the surgery part of things. This allows the people around
them to get used to Bob being Barb, or Sara being Sam. Saying that
this doesn't matter at all is just a little naive.

>If we continued conscious awareness when doubled, or tripled if the process is non-destructive, which one are we aware of, or are we aware in multiple places at the same time?

I like to think of it as multiple threads of execution, perhaps even
distributed to different physical computers. When the threads are
merged later, you just have new memory of having done two different
things yesterday. It would be weird at first, but I think we could get
use to remembering two yesterdays, or twenty. It would probably be
percieved initially as yesterday, and the day before yesterday....
which would be confusing, but I think we could adapt to that pretty
quickly. If the new me looks like the old me, or is in VR only, then I
think others would adapt to that as well, but there would still be a
unique "real" you in the perception of most people.

>Trying to get my arms around going from me into two other simultaneous me's, and
>then having them immediately diverge due to dissimilar experiential development while
>still being me, makes me even more dizzy.

It is a little disorienting, that's the psychology part that needs to
be sorted out.

-Kelly