[ExI] The second step towards immortality

[Adrian Tymes]

On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 11:27 PM, Martin Sustrik <sustrik at 250bpm.com> wrote:

> I've written a short article about how to get closer to immortality by
> perpetuating your will beyond the point of your death.
>
> I believe it's a novel idea. At least, it's using Bitcoin gears under
> the hood so it could not possibly be around before 2009 or so.
>

The only thing that's really new here is using Bitcoin instead of other
currency.  What you're talking about is akin to setting up a foundation
that invests, gets a return on investment, and spends the proceeds as your
will dictated.  The Nobel Foundation is one famous example of this.

Also your analogy to teleportation is bogus.  The teleported "you" could
completely pass as you for all purposes; if someone didn't know you had
teleported, they would be unable to tell.  However, the program you
describe can not change itself, or react to unplanned circumstances;
practically nobody would consider it to be "you", for good reason.

Unless you are talking about uploading, as in creating a purely software
entity that can think (and act, if provided a robot body with roughly human
or better perception, range of motion, strength, endurance, and so on) in
essentially the same ways you can, in which case why bother with the
complications of "inheriting" money?

(Exception: as a legal dodge if society won't grant your uploaded self
personhood - but if it won't, you need to double-check and see what are the
cognitive limits of the upload and how they differ from the person it was
made from.  If there are substantial cognitive limits beyond what the
original human had, it wouldn't count as uploading using the definition I
have supplied here.  It helps to consider someone else doing this, and then
whether you would consider the result a person, because if you only
consider yourself doing this then of course you'd always consider yourself
a person, but your self-perspective is irrelevant here.)

TL;DR: This isn't new.  Go read up on "foundations" and "living wills".
Your teleportation analogy is so bad it insults readers who think logically.
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