[ExI] Is a copy of you really you?

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 1:25 AM Keith Henson via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:


>
> * > What concerns me is giving a human mind copy vastly more power in an
> artificial brain. Humans seem to have evolved psychological mechanisms that
> detect "looming privation," resource shortages, and for good evolutionary
> reasons respond by attacking neighbors and taking their resources. (After a
> perious to build up xenophobic memes.) Consider a raw human mind mapped
> into a powerful AI with substantial enhancement. *


I have doubts about your theory but even if it's true I don't see it or
Darwinian Evolution in general playing a significant part in the future;
the evolution of memes will be more important than the evolution of genes
because minds are involved thus it's vastly faster. And the faster minds
become the faster memes will change.

Rather than worrying about outmoded behavioral programming inherited from
our stone age past I'm much more concerned with what will happen when we
have full conscious control of our emotional control panel. Suppose there
was some task that you knew you should do but don't want to because you're
naturally lazy and the task is dull, so you just turn one knob on your
emotional control panel and now you're no longer lazy, now you love nothing
better than hard work, and you then turn another knob and now you find your
job of putting thousands of caps on thousands of toothpaste tubes to be
utterly fascinating, fulfilling, and endlessly enjoyable. It seems to me
that having too much self control would lead to a positive feedback loop,
and those things tend to head for extreames and rarely produce anything
productive, they usually end up producing either no output or an explosive
output. Sometimes literally explosive.

* > if you, yourself, are duplicated by the thousands, millions, or
> billions and there is some limit on the number of poker chips that can be
> made, then a large numbers of copies of you are going to make you poor in
> terms of chips.*


If there is a consensus among the many copies of me that there are just too
many of us then we could decide to merge back together. The resulting being
would then remember doing different things in different places at exactly
the same time, but that would be OK with me.

John K Clark
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