[ExI] Let's play What If.

[Alan Grimes]

chrome://messenger/locale/messengercompose/composeMsgs.properties:

> And yet another way to say the same thing is "no possible evidence would
> make the copy-original distinction scientifically relevant"; theological
> relevance is a different matter entirely, but as I've said before I
> don't believe in the soul. 

Actually, it's much more interesting than that!

The central dogma of science is that any given experiment will produce
the same outcome regardless of where or when it is performed as long as
the starting conditions are the same. A corollary of this is that the
scientist is impartial to the conditions and outcome of the experiment,
that he is an independent and only casually interested observer.

Now when we consider uploading, we can readily support all suppositions
about the scientifically testable features of uploading. You should have
noted that I have not argued any points based on this kind of science.
What I have argued is the metaphysical interpretation of the results.

Science has not, and cannot make any claims about metaphysics. Science
can erode some of the edges of what was previously metaphysics by
weeding out some of the more-wrong understandings of the world, but it
can't do much more than that.

The identity issue in uploading is precisely the type of question that
science is utterly mute about. To see why all one has to do is go back
to the central dogma of science -- on the repeatability of experiments.
Just as each brain is unique, each uploading will be unique. It is
logically impossible to repeat the experiment of destructively uploading
someone. In studying people, science is forced to extrapolate from
statistics of similar but not identical sets of people. So for physical
processes, science can measure things out to ten decimal places, for
people the best science can do is probably around 5%.

Furthermore, when contemplating the uploading of yourself, the only
relevant viewpoint is your own. Because you are a human being, you do
not have the privilege of selecting your point of view. You are not the
[mad] scientist but the guinea pig, and it would be foolish to think
from any other perspective. Even worse, because you value your life, you
are not indifferent to the outcome but an intensely interested party. In
the standard definition of uploading, you are left with two possible
outcomes. You will either be in a bio-disposal bag in the back of
somebody's office or you will be running in a visual-basic based
simulator on somebody's Windows Vista machine.

((( This is an inevitable outcome because I don't recall ever reading a
post by an uploader saying "lets work on developing an operating system
and suite of simulation software that will be safe and pleasant to live
in. Indeed, the only person who has made mention of the subject of
operating systems is myself. Such posts were rejected on the grounds
that vi is the ultimate text editor. This is one of the stronger pillars
supporting my distrust of uploaders. )))

Let's assert that the former will be less pleasant than the latter.

Once again, **BECAUSE YOU DO NOT HAVE THE PRIVILEGE OF SELECTING YOUR
POINT OF VIEW** (It is tautologically impossible to consider any
alternative) you must therefore, necessarily and inevitably, be the one
ending up in the bio-waste bag. And thus ends any rational consideration
of destructive brain uploading. (Discussing what happens to the
bio-waste bag is uninteresting for obvious reasons.)

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