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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 09/02/2024 22:48, bill w wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:mailman.16.1707518880.1312.extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">
<pre><div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:#000000">I am assuming that an uploaded person can change the programming - the parameters. So how can that work?</div><div
class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:#000000">
</div><div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:#000000">Suppose one could change the enjoyment of chocolate to the most intense
pleasure possible - like dumping a ton of dopamine into a brain. What
would happen? A biological body would adapt and inhibit extreme
reactions and probably develop an addiction and tolerance. Not in an
upload. You could presumably make every pleasure as intense as
possible. </div><div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:#000000">
</div><div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:#000000">If you read the news and there was a disaster you could turn off any
negative emotions and just note that news cognitively - no empathy at
all. No feeling bad. </div><div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:#000000">
</div><div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:#000000">Is that what people want? bill w</div></pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
Ask the opposite question: Suppose an uploaded person could not
change things like their level of enjoyment (or its opposite) of
specific things, and they couldn't modulate their emotional
responses. Would that be what people want? Being stuck with the way
you were as a biological brain?<br>
<br>
I envisage something like an 'emotional control panel' that allows
you to change your emotional states, with the ability to create a
whole bunch of macros that could, for instance, record the previous
settings and revert to them when needed, so you could try out
different settings and have them return to 'normal' after a set
period of time, for example. This would enable you to safely
experiment with changing things, and decide what you want to be like
without risking diving down a rabbit hole with no way out. There is
tons of potential with that kind of thing. Naturally, the potential
for bad outcomes is huge if you could just change these things at
will, so safety mechanisms, automatic backup and restore, that sort
of thing, would be needed to make sure you don't accidentally turn
into a hopeless junkie, a psychopath, etc., etc., and could make
deliberate decisions based on temporary experiments with various
states of mind.<br>
<br>
Personally, I think that an upload without these kind of
capabilities would be crippled, in terms of disabling a lot of the
potential benefits of being an upload.<br>
<br>
In addition, this kind of thing will probably be necessary for
taking the next steps beyond just replicating a biological human's
mentality. Part of the whole point of uploading would be to enable
us to go above and beyond being merely human, if and when we want
to.<br>
<br>
Ben<br>
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