[ExI] Uploads are self

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 22/03/2026 18:25, Jason Resch wrote:
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>     > Drawing unique personal boundaries around minds then becomes rather difficult.
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>     Ben Wrote:
>     Nonsense. You're saying that rewiring someone's brain so as to turn them into someone else makes it difficult to distinguish between different minds?
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>     This is a new and exciting brand of nonsense.
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> But it follows from your earlier (strong) insistence that all 5 uploads, despite each ending up with very different final mind states, would all be you.
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> Jason:
>  >> Have you have become these 5 different people?
> Ben:
> >     Of course.
> >     What other possibility is there?
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> So I would ask you for a resolution, or at least an explanation, of this inconsistency, since above you deny the cases of survival in situations where ones mind has been modified to equal another.


There's no inconsistency.
The five me's will all remember their past as me. The overwritten me that becomes Bob, won't. That one will remember Bob's past, not mine.

Tinkering with someone's brain to re-wire it so that it becomes a copy of someone else is effectively uploading that someone else over the top of the original brain, destroying its original pattern. In that case, the atoms remain (which is irrelevant), but the pattern is overwritten completely.

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> To clarify (or muddy) the situation, consider that Bob could in principle be arbitrarily close to you. (E.g. an identical twin with the same upbringing and same education and hobbies/interests).

Not possible.
You can have 'arbitrarily close' in maths (and philosophy), but not in real people. There will be a practical limit to how close two people can be, because they will have to have different experiences and memories, arbitrary differences in brain wiring, etc.

> These are just classic fission/fusion cases of personal identity. Given they have revealed an inconsistency in your predictions, we must now attempt to identify the source of this inconsistency in your assumptions or reasoning. (We are now doing philosophy)

There's no inconsistency, and no need for any philosophy. These are matters that can be decided with science. It doesn't matter what kind of wild thought-experiments can be dreamed up, in reality it's neurology and physics that will determine these things.

-- 
Ben