[ExI] Mind Uploading: is it still me?

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Dec 24, 2025 at 1:58 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Dec 24, 2025 at 3:47 PM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > I have considered this.  I think there should be a restriction or
>> custom of one at a time.  You can either be an active meat body or an
>> upload, but not both at the same time.  And copies are not permitted.
>>
>> Otherwise, the population gets entirely out of hand.



> I don't think that will be a major problem because it's very unclear to me why, even under ideal conditions, an upload would want a meat body, and the more overpopulated the physical environment becomes the more unpleasant it would be and so there would be even less reason to want to download.

Do you buy cars without test-driving them?  I don't and am not
interested in destructive or one-way uploading.  Now, I suspect that
uploaded life will be so attractive compared to the physical state
that it will result in a population crash.  I used a figure of 99% in
the story I wrote because you need characters for a story, but I don't
know.  The fraction might go as high as cell phone ownership.  Will
the AIs try to preserve a small human population?  They did in the
story, but why is never explained.

Rather than unpleasantness from overpopulation, I suspect that what
drives late-stage uploading will be too few rather than too many
people.  However, I could be completely wrong on this point

Keith
>>
>> > Robin Hanson and I differ on this point.  He thinks uploaded copies will be made in
>> large numbers, driving the value of each one to near zero.  Lots of scope for dystopian SF.
>
> I agree with you on that. Back in 2016 when it was still unclear if AI or uploading would come first Robin Hanson gave me the first draft of the book he was working on called "The Age of Em" and asked me for comments. He thought (incorrectly as it turned out) that uploading would come first. He figured if there was a task you needed to do that would take about two weeks you would make a temporary upload of yourself that he called an "Em" that would accomplish the task and when it was finished the copy was supposed to just kill himself and let the original carry on with his life. I thought that was unrealistic and blatantly unfair because the copy never asked to be made, the original is the one who decided to cause it to come into existence and so should be responsible for it. I suggested a slight modification in the plan, the original would accomplish the little two week task and then the original would terminate himself and the copy would carry on. But I don't think Robin liked my suggestion very much.

Heh.  A good copy would be identical to the original.

Keith
> John K Clark
>
>
>
>>
>> Keith
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 24, 2025 at 4:06 AM John Clark via extropy-chat
>> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On Tue, Dec 23, 2025 at 9:41 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> >
>> >> > You are all your copies.
>> >
>> >
>> > All my copies have an equal right to call themselves John K Clark, but all of them would insist that only one of them is "me" because all the copies would start to diverge at the instant they were made, assuming they were exposed to different environmental conditions, because then they would all start having different memories.
>> >
>> > John K Clark
>> >