[ExI] Destructive uploading.

[john clark]

 On Sat, 9/3/11, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
"What's proposed to be emulated is the intelligence, not necessarily the animal itself."  
What's proposed is the emulation of what we fear loosing when we die, not our left kneecap but our intelligence, our memories and our emotional behavior. None of those attributes are unique because none of them are nouns, all of them can be completely described by information and information can be duplicated. 
"Further, an emulation of a thing is, by definition, not actually the thing
that is being emulated"
Yes, but I'm not interested in things surviving, I'm not interested in nouns, I'm interested in a adjective surviving death, an adjective like John K Clark.
Thus, the silicon and wires that run the informational pattern are not the same
No, the informational pattern is identical, if I add 4 + 3 the 7 I get is the same 7 that you get when you add 4 + 3. 
"The original", in this case, refers to that biological network, which is replaced

by the silicon and wires - even if the informational pattern is maintained during
the transition from one to the other.
So even though the atoms in your body are being constantly replaced and even though science tells us that atoms have no individuality, individual atoms nevertheless  are the things that somehow confer individuality to us. This is absurd.  

"what about a ship, whose every part is replaced - again, one by one - over decades?" 

The atoms in the ship have been replaced but that matters little because one atom of iron is as good as another, the most important part of the ship, the arrangement of those atoms, is the same. You can call it the same ship or you can call it a different ship, its just a matter of linguistic convenience; the vital thing is that the information has survived and is still being used to do the same thing.   

"Almost all people will identify it as the "same" ship."

Yes, and almost all people, even most people on this list who should know better, are DEAD wrong; even their inconsistencies are inconsistent! Almost all people will say that if all parts of the ship are replaced over 10 years then its the same ship, but if you do exactly the same thing over 10 milliseconds almost all people would say it would not be the same ship. I've been arguing this point for well over a decade on this list and elsewhere and I have found the the arguments used against my position are weak, very very weak, and would never convince anybody unless they had already decided that the conventional prejudice must be true. I do not believe that first deciding what is true and only then go looking around for facts to support your opinion is good practice. 

"They exist in all four dimensions.  They are collections of things *and* their coherence through time, which allows the parts to be gradually replaced - and, by the same token, does not allow all the parts to be replaced at once."

So how fast can the replacement of parts go before this mysterious, scientifically undetectable but metaphysically important existential change happens?  When is it no longer the same? It must be longer than 10 milliseconds but less than 10 years but I want to know exactly how long, do you have an equation that would allow me to calculate that time for any ship or any given person? 

"You argue for and perceive a three dimensional snapshot.  This is where you
err.  This is why you are frustrated: you insist that these things are only that
which exists in one moment in time - but they are not.  They exist in all four
dimensions." 

Huh? Explain to me how making note of the arrangement of the parts in a person's body and then using Nanotechnology to make a duplicate body does not make use of the time dimension, but the normal biological process of replacing atoms does. 

  John K Clark 


 
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