[ExI] Coherent vs. Incoherent Fears of Being Uploaded

[Lee Corbin]

Stefano writes

> Lee wrote
 >
>> The central question, of course, is whether one would
>> *survive* the uploading process.
> 
> I am under the impression that this betrays a more general fear which
> probably originates from the inapplicability of evolution-encoded
> reactions to novel scenarios.

What are some examples of evolution-encoded reactions
to novel scenarios?

> But what about teleport? The truth is that the death of the original
> individual and the birth of a copy, or the continued existence of the
> former, are both plausible ways of describing an hypothetical event
> the nature of which does not change in the least depending on our view
> thereof.
> 
> Another classical Gedankenexperiment: what about an operation where my
> neurons are replaced one by one by other, functionally equivalent,...
> carbon-based neurons, until none remains? Do I die? And when?

While I agree that people who adopt certain views
about these novelties are often unshakable in their
newfound beliefs, they're also being extremely
reactionary in the following sense: it's perfectly
clear that if one grew up teleporting here and there,
and knew many people whose neurons had been successfully
(i.e. functionally) replaced, then ONE WOULD HAVE NO
SUCH CONCERNS.

> This is why I think that the curious idea that the interesting thing
> in organic brains would not be the kind of information processing they
> perform and their performance in such task, but some other, undefined
> and elusive, quality, is a matter of fear which cannot be overcome
> with rational argument.

And don't forget the "day-persons". These are people whose
philosophic intuition is so backward and rudimentary that
upon being exposed to materialism and the fact that they're
made of atoms, and the fact that they must concede that
they lose consciousness during sleep HENCEFORTH MAINTAIN
THAT THEY ARE NOT THE SAME PEOPLE FROM DAY TO DAY.

It just goes to show that if folks have sufficiently bad
taste and poor intuition, then they can be capable of
believing almost anything.

Lee