[ExI] Fwd: after upload, what?

[Travis Porco]

>From: Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com>
>To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
>
>> I'm more looking for
>> "good enough, right now". I'd like to see as much of the 'narrative
>> self' preserved, in any format, using
>> any substrate, with a hope of further growth or regrowth later. What
>> are the limits on the "minimalist" side?

>Minimalist with hope of regrowth back to the full self?  Right now, that's
>just cryonics.  Nothing less expensive than that gives something that
>future technology can theoretically build on (short of time travel to
>observe and/or extract from you while you were still alive).

I'd say regrowth back to _a_ full self.

Cryonics is noteworthy but to me it seems like a higher-risk, higher-cost,
higher-reward option.

Of course as they say, undergoing cryopreservation is the second worst thing
that can happen to anybody. The choice is not between staying in ones' human
body and undergoing some sort of preservation, but rather between undergoing
preservation and stepping into the black sack to vanish forever.

If one takes the view that the person can somehow be separated from the
body, and the view that there is no essential self (but only an ongoing,
ever-changing process), then the question is where one draws the line. "Is it
really you" is in my view not a useful question, since it has to do only
with how to extrapolate our current verbal conventions into the terra
incognita to come.

>Minimalist without that hope?  Let someone else tell your story.  It's not
>just free, but people will do that anyway.  It's what a lot of people
>settle for, when they speak of "immortality", but I say it doesn't deserve
>that label.

I'm with Woody Allen: I want to achieve immortality by not dying. Though here
the death of the body is unavoidable for all of us for the forseeable future.

>I
>> suspect that the insect connectome work will lead someone in
>> the right direction.

>So do I.  Probably the best hope for someone about to die today, is to get
>frozen with the best preservation affordable on the budget available, in
>the hopes that future technology extending from this research will
>eventually make restoration from said frozen archive possible - and that
>whoever maintains the archive will follow through on their ancestors'
>promise to restore you once it becomes possible.

I'm hoping that preservation of the narrative self through current AI
models will be possible.  It's not really mind uploading, and it shouldn't
even be called reincarnation.  The hard question is how to get help from others
once one has become little more than an appliance.

--tcp