[ExI] Cryonics for uploaders discussion: Video (John Clark)

[Ben]

Re Rose <rocket at earthlight.com> wrote:

"Since the agency of an individual is subjective we have to be very careful
we're not creating new beings with our uploading technology and still dying
as individuals - unless your goal is to make an animated library of people
patterned on existing people who died (or maybe didn't even die yet). We
might all agree it would be very, very great to have certain people's
connectomes preserved and reanimated - I'd have dinner with a reanimated
Feynman or Turing in one second flat while jumping with joy for the good
their re-existence would do the whole damn world while I'm at it, but if
the originals would still be dead and gone - well, if that's the case, we
should know that it is."


This whole concept of a 'me that is not me' baffles me. Leaving aside 
ideas like the 'soul' (which I hope we can all agree is nonsense), what 
is it that constitutes an individual? More importantly, what is it that 
constitutes an individual that is somehow inherently not reproducible? I 
can't think of a single candidate. There are several ideas about what is 
necessary for an individual mind to exist, but all of the elements 
involved are reproducible.

I don't think anyone would argue against the idea that a copy of a mind 
is not the same as the original, but the mistake lies in thinking that 
this means it doesn't recreate the /same mind/. Just as copying a CD of 
Beethoven's 9th Symphony recreates the same music.

Arguments centring around continuity don't work, and it doesn't require 
proof of the quantisation of time to show why. People have had all brain 
activity stopped for hours and been successfully revived (accidents 
involving falling into icy water and 'dying' before they drowned). 
Arguing that they therefore can't be the 'same person' is rather silly, 
and would be impossible to prove.

Ben Zaiboc