[ExI] Uploads are self

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 16/03/2026 19:34, Jason Resch wrote:
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>     Ben wrote:
>>     But the main thing that's required to actually believe (small 'b' version) this, is a materialistic mindset (as in, a complete rejection of dualism), and that's not very common so far.
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> I think that is part of it, but even many materialists hold that destruction of the body means death, and that any later instances are mere duplicates, who are not you.


Then they are what I usually call 'crypto-dualists', not materialists. Completely dispensing with dualism is difficult, I struggled with it for a long time, but once you do, you realise that 'mere duplicates' are, necessarily, actually you, in every way that matters.

  

>>     This is more of an emotional issue than a logical one, so no amount of logical argument will persuade people who are determined not to believe it, that an upload of them would really 'be them'.
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> Yes I agree the resistance is largely emptional, which is why I included the section about the soul, and why the modern scientific view of functionalism, recovers a picture that is not so different from the popular, traditional ideas about the soul.
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>>     That will only change once uploading is actually a thing, and can be seen to work, I think.
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> The unfortunate thing, as I point out in the section "The Limits of Empirical Science", is that there is no objective test that can show someone has subjectively survived such a procedure (rather than a mere clone).

This is true, just as there is no objective test that can show that someone else is really conscious. It's the same 'problem' (I put this in quotes because it's not really a problem, we solve it all the time using the Duck test, and we will use the Duck test when uploads exist, and we'll conclude that they really are the person they are supposed to be, and really conscious. We don't go through life trying to prove that other people are conscious, we just assume that they are (provided they do actually pass the Duck test!), because that's the easiest and most sensible thing to do).

People won't read essays to decide whether that upload of Uncle Bob is really Uncle Bob. They'll talk to him (assuming Bob decides to hang around long enough to talk back instead of zooming off at a million times human thinking speed and becoming basically incommunicable).

-- 
Ben