[ExI] after upload, what?

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 09/02/2024 22:48, bill w wrote:
> I am assuming that an uploaded person can change the programming - the 
> parameters.  So how can that work?
> Suppose one could change the enjoyment of chocolate to the most 
> intense pleasure possible - like dumping a ton of dopamine into a 
> brain.  What would happen?  A biological body would adapt and inhibit 
> extreme reactions and probably develop an addiction and tolerance.  
> Not in an upload. You could presumably make every pleasure as intense 
> as possible.
> If you read the news and there was a disaster you could turn off any 
> negative emotions and just note that news cognitively - no empathy at 
> all. No feeling bad.
> Is that what people want?  bill w

Ask the opposite question: Suppose an uploaded person could not change 
things like their level of enjoyment (or its opposite) of specific 
things, and they couldn't modulate their emotional responses. Would that 
be what people want? Being stuck with the way you were as a biological 
brain?

I envisage something like an 'emotional control panel' that allows you 
to change your emotional states, with the ability to create a whole 
bunch of macros that could, for instance, record the previous settings 
and revert to them when needed, so you could try out different settings 
and have them return to 'normal' after a set period of time, for 
example. This would enable you to safely experiment with changing 
things, and decide what you want to be like without risking diving down 
a rabbit hole with no way out. There is tons of potential with that kind 
of thing. Naturally, the potential for bad outcomes is huge if you could 
just change these things at will, so safety mechanisms, automatic backup 
and restore, that sort of thing, would be needed to make sure you don't 
accidentally turn into a hopeless junkie, a psychopath, etc., etc., and 
could make deliberate decisions based on temporary experiments with 
various states of mind.

Personally, I think that an upload without these kind of capabilities 
would be crippled, in terms of disabling a lot of the potential benefits 
of being an upload.

In addition, this kind of thing will probably be necessary for taking 
the next steps beyond just replicating a biological human's mentality. 
Part of the whole point of uploading would be to enable us to go above 
and beyond being merely human, if and when we want to.

Ben
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