[ExI] Uploads are self

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 22/03/2026 22:35, Jason Resch  wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 2:05 PM Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com> wrote:
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>     On Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 10:02 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
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>         > Based on everything you have said about minds and illusory notion of self, I think your position fits best with open individualism, though I don't think you'll ever admit that.
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>         Hm, I'd have thought my position fits best with 'closed individualism' (I exist), based on the above. Even though it's totally silly, at least it's coherent, unlike the rest.
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>     I would have put you there, except that in several cases you acknowledge surviving beyond a single moment in time.


How is it possible to not? Surviving (let's say 'existing', to avoid ambiguity) in only a single moment in time is not possible, not detectable, not even remotely feasible.


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>     I agree that empty-individualism is more consistent than closed-individualism. It avoids most of the problems closed-individualism gets into. The primary advantage then that open-individualism has over empty- is the probability arguments.


Who are you agreeing with here? Certainly not me. I think that all of these 'individualisms' are daft, to various degrees, and none of them are consistent with reality.

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> Correction: I misread what you said above, I thought you said you would have put yourself in empty-individualism, but I noticed you said closed-individualism.
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> The reason I said you might fit best with open, rather than closed, is that you acknowledge material bodies don't matter for survival, duplicates (fission) doesn't matter for survival, and on a few occasions, you acknowledged perfect pattern preservation is not required for survival.


I shouldn't have said anything, it gives the mistaken impression that I take any of these categories seriously.

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> To me, this leads to what I call, a permissive survival theory. That is, the view that you could survive in all of the following situations:
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> Invasive brain surgery
Depends on the nature and extent of the surgery
> Partial and even total memory loss (amnesia)
Depends on the extent of the loss
> Personality changes
Depends on the degree of change
> Morphing into a completely different person
You're the one who's saying 'different person' here.
> A long term coma during which your body is metabolically replaced
> A teleportation to another location
> Destructive mind uploads into a robot brain and body
> Having your body assembled from a different pile of atoms
These would all result in the same person
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> When neither perfect bodily or psychological continuity criteria are necessary to survival, this opens the door to survive as *similar but not identical instances*. And those similar but not identical instances are similar to still other, more distant instances. And so on, leading to possible survival via any mind across the total spectrum of possible instances of conscious minds.

By this logic, if you take a banjo and make various incremental changes to it so as to turn it into a tambourine, it's still a banjo.

If you make lots of small changes, they become equivalent to one big change. I think the word 'survival' is causing problems here. You need to define what you want it to mean, as it's being used to mean several things, from 'the same as' to different degrees of 'derived from'. I think we'd get much greater clarity from ditching the word altogether, and in each case using a more exact term.
To see what I mean, consider the question "If you become a different person, do you survive?".

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> So we thereby reveal, that the contents of a conscious experience are a mere contingency, one of no more relevance to the question of your survival than the color of the shirt you are wearing. You can change it, and get you would still be there.

"Reveal"??
Telling language, there.

You are not 'revealing' anything, you are drawing a conclusion. A confusing one. We were talking about minds, not isolated conscious experiences, and the word 'survive' can mean many different things.
Taken literally, that sentence seems to be saying nothing more than that someone can have different thoughts or experiences without them ceasing to exist, but I'm pretty sure that's not what you mean to say.

-- 
Ben