[ExI] Destructive uploading.

[spike]

>. On Behalf Of Florent Berthet
Subject: Re: [ExI] Destructive uploading.

 

2011/9/9 Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>


>>.Just think to your everyday Islamic suicide bomber.overcoming of his
knee-jerk survival instinct...

 

>.And that, ironically, may be the reason why religious people could turn
out to be the most enthusiastic about uploading: "Maybe this is what was
meant in the Book! We will just be souls up there, living forever in a
heavenly place!"  I wouldn't bet on that, but that'd be comical... Florent

 

 

Bet on it Florent, it's already that way in at least two major religious
subgroups with over ten million followers worldwide.  These two sects (that
I know of) view the human as a mechanism, rather than some kind of
transcendent being with a soul.  The two groups reject the notion of a
separable soul or a spirit.  Rather they hold that the human body is
analogous to any machine or any other beast: an exact copy theoretically
could be created, and the new copy with different atoms in an identical
configuration would have all the same outlooks, ideas, memories and so forth
as the "original."  

 

This is yet another take on the tired old identity debates we started here
within minutes of the creation of the Extropy chat group, and which continue
unabated to this day.  The notion follows that given cryonic preservation
and sufficiently advanced technology, a human theoretically could be
resurrected or recreated in the indefinite future and could exist in
something perfectly analogous to the original form.

 

But wait, there's more.  

 

In both of those religious groups, there is a widely held belief that only
those who remain faithful to the end are to be given immortality (in a body
of flesh, on a planet with a 1 G field, with a better but perfectly
analogous everything to what we have now, minus the suffering and death.)
Both those schools of thought reject the notion of assured salvation.  If
any true believer apostatizes, even in their senile dotage or in agony on
their deathbed, that person is considered lost.  (Damn that is a cruel
notion.)  

 

Sooooo.  What happens if such a believer opts for cryonics, then sometime in
the indefinite future the clever scientists figure out how to upload, then
the upload subsequently apostatizes, even though the original carbon unit
was faithful right up to the last breath and the cold bath?  The believer
must assume the late apostates are lost.  Therefore cryonics would introduce
a theoretical risk to eternal salvation for any Jehovah's Witness or Seventh
Day Adventist who chooses it.  

 

Oy freaking vey.

 

spike

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