[ExI] Essential Upload Data

[Re Rose]

Hiya Ben,

Hm, I didn't mean to change my mind LOL. Thanks for the link, I'mm familiar
with the Carboncopy site and also their weekend online seminars, which are
very interesting. I just don;t agree that the technology will result in the
initiating agent's reanimation. It certainly has the ability to create a
new agant, no question. But the new agent is not the person whose brain was
copied. Its an entirely new type of derivitive being, in pssision of your
memories and all your data. It will be interesting, and that's all I can
say  :)

You are not at all a copy of who you were 2 seconds ago, you are one
integrated agent and time has passed. You have more experiences, 2 seconds
more. But you are safely you.

A perfect copy of your mind is not at all necessarily you! You are not only
your mind, you are an integrated agent with a mind, and agent whose mind is
tuned and accommodate to the body it inhabits. It may seem simple to rewire
the cortex to a new body (and in fact I am excited to see how
Carnavaro's head-switching surgety goes, as that can give insight into the
rewioring of a cortex into a new body with many new senors, new hormonal
cycles, and new system construction - withut dealing with lossy upload
isses) but as I positied in previous posts I don't believe it is. In fact
I think  it may be too much for a human cortex to handle, and may induce
mental issues due to the overwhelming nature of a mature brian re-learing
all senosory input. Like a multi-year exposure to a non-ending LSD trip.
Sounds awful to me.

But, as I've alluded in prevoiuus posts, we are not close to understanding
a copy of the data in the brain, and I belive it may be difficult or maybe
impossible to reconstruct. So a "perfect copy" is a glib supposition. Its
not a harddrive.

An amoeba is a different system. Much simpler, and of course you are
correct, asking which one of a split amoeba is the "real" one is
meaningless. However an amoeba is not a brain, or a person. It's not even
self-aware because it does not have any neurons, nor any memory. It's just
a nice little machine - a reactive cell.  I had a train when I was little,
it had these bumbers on it and when it hit a wall or the furniture (or my
Dad) it reversed. In this way it looked like it was exploring the room, and
I loved it. But it had no memory, even though every exploration it took was
different, that was so because it was iteritive and mechanical. It seemed
alive but it was too simple to be so. An amoeba is similar. So a copy of an
amoeba is fine, because the amoeba-biological-machmie is not really
self-aware in the first place. IMHO!! YMMV! Of course   :)

--Regina


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Message: 3
Date: Fri, 8 May 2020 10:40:05 +0100
From: Ben Zaiboc <ben at zaiboc.net>
To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
Subject: Re: [ExI] Essential Upload Data
Message-ID: <adea0973-3ecf-c006-f843-d858f2339a28 at zaiboc.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed

On 07/05/2020 16:56, Re Rose wrote:
> I don't think an uploaded copy of my brain pattern in any way will or
> ever can be "me". The slow-replacement theory isn't persuasive, as
> each component acclimates to the surroundings slowly which I think is
> ok. That's not a massive uploading event. The thought-experiment I
> trust the most, which is against uploading,? is the one where you
> consider uploading a copy made before you are dead into a new body. If
> you aren't "in" that new agent animated by your copy (since you're
> still alive) -- well, how will you ever be able to be "in" that or any
> other copy ? IMHO, you can't. Not ever. A copy is a copy. Fun and
> maybe comforting for your surviving friends and family, and to be sure
> it is an agent in its own right - its just not you.
>

You seem to have changed your mind about uploading. I recommend reading
"A Taxonomy and Metaphysics of Mind Uploading" by Keith Wiley, and
having a look at this site: https://carboncopies.org/writing/

You assume that there can only be one 'you'. So far that has been true,
but there's no law of physics that says it will always be true. A
perfect copy of your mind would necessarily be you, unless you subscribe
to some form of dualism, and think people have 'souls' in the way that
religious people mean.

You say 'a copy is a copy'. True. But what does that mean? I'm a copy of
the me of 2 seconds ago. I'm still me. A copy of Beethoven's 9th
symphony is a copy. It's still Beethoven's 9th symphony. As long as the
copies are identical, it doesn't matter if after the process, there are
two items or still one item (in the case of destructive copying). Or a
hundred. There's nothing inferior about 'a copy', as long as its
fidelity is high enough (a thing we don't yet know about brains is just
how high the fidelity needs to be, for an upload).

When an amoeba splits into two daughter amoebas by copying all of its
parts, which is the 'real' amoeba, and which is the copy? Not only is it
not possible to tell (even by radiolabelling its food), the question
doesn't really mean anything. It has branched into two identical
amoebas. Each has as much claim to be 'the real one' as the other. I can
see no reason the same thing wouldn't be true of a copy of a mind.

--
Ben Zaiboc
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