[ExI] teachers

[Stuart LaForge]

On 2023-08-25 23:50, Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat wrote:
> On 25/08/2023 20:11, Darin Sunley wrote:
>> 
>> An important component of what a lot of people want out of immortality 
>> is not so much continuity as it is not-experiencing-discontinuity [And 
>> no, they're not the same thing].

I do not think it is possible to subjectively experience discontinuity. 
For example, I do not experience any passage of time between when I 
decide to surrender to anesthesia and when I wake up from it. Death is 
no different.


>> If I'm dying of cancer, and you do a brain scan, the resulting upload 
>> will remember being me, but /I'm/ still gonna experience a painful 
>> death. And no, killing me painlessly, or even instantaneously, during 
>> or in the immediate aftermath of the brain scan doesn't solve the 
>> problem either.
>> 

 From the point of view of the new you, that wants access to your bank 
account, instantaneously killing you would definitely solve the problem.

>> If "me" is ever on two substrates simultaneously, you may have copied 
>> me, but you haven't moved me, and a copy, by definition, isn't the me 
>> I want to be immortal.

If your material pattern is sufficient to be you, then you are already 
immortal and there are already universes out there where you are the 
last surviving life form or even a Boltzmann brain quantum mechanically 
summoned into existence to witness the heat death of the universe.

> 
> So this 'me' that you are talking about, must be something that, when 
> copied, somehow changes into 'not-me'. I don't understand this. If it's 
> an exact copy, how is it not exactly the same? How can there not now be 
> two 'me's? Two identical beings, in every way, including their 
> subjective experience, with no discontinuity with the original singular 
> being?

Again, your position  and momentum in space are properties of yours. 
Since you are constructed of fermions, Pauli's exclusion principle 
prevents another you from having the same position and momentum as you 
do. If you could somehow write your pattern to a Bose-Einstein 
condensate, then you could have copies of you that were all truly you.

> 
> When I hit 'send' on this message, everyone on the list will get a 
> copy, and I will keep a copy. Which one is the real message? If they 
> were conscious, why would that make any difference?

The real message is the one that has the most meaning to you in a given 
context. A child calling for help in the jungle is sending a message 
that means something completely different to his parents than to the 
hungry tiger. Every message is composed of symbols that have differing 
degrees of correlation between the sender and the recipient. The meaning 
conveyed by the sender is the purport, the meaning understood by the 
recipient is the import.

> 
> You say "you may have copied me, but you haven't moved me". But how do 
> you move data? You make a second copy of it then delete the first copy. 
> So destroying copy 1 when copy 2 is made would be 'moving me', yet you 
> say it wouldn't. Can you clarify why? I can't see (short of a belief in 
> an uncopyable supernatural 'soul') how this could be.

Lagrangian and quantum mechanics says that particles have two main 
kinematic properties: position and momentum. By virtues of the molecules 
that comprise your body, you have a position. Your position is a 
property of you, unless you postulate that you have a soul property that 
somehow magically makes all the copies of you the same person. Identical 
twins are not the same person and neither would a perfect copy of you 
be. The position and momentum of all the instances of you would be 
unique, and therefore not you. If you believe that a copy of you can 
truly be you, then you can relax because you are already immortal. You 
don't need to copy yourself because there are already plenty of, if not 
infinite numbers of, you strewn about the multiverse.

Stuart LaForge


> This is a crucial point, for those of us interested in uploading, so I 
> think we should really understand it, yet it makes no sense to me. 
> Would you please explain further?
> 
> Could you also please explain the comment about continuity and 
> not-discontinuity not being the same thing?
> 
> Ben
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