One of the first things an AGI might tell us is that the concepts of
cryonics and uploading are fundamentally flawed because they are based
on the assumption that consciousness is a byproduct of the brain. It's
weird to assume that a subset of something can somehow represent or
preserve the superset?
On 27.12.2014 18:25, Alan Grimes via AGI wrote:
I read a goodly chunk of that 10 years to the singularity pile of text
that The Goertzel pushed out the other day.
In it, he threatened to upload all of his "friends"...
I want to be perfectly clear here. I am not one of your "friends". I
think being uploaded is only second worst to being tortured and then
murdered, but only because of the "tortured" part.
I'm posting this not just because I'm fed up with this bullshit, but
also because I'm coming to a new realization that uploaders are a bunch
of suicidal flatheads. =|
The single unavoidable issue in uploading is the identity issue. That
alone is a showstopper and should end any further consideration of the
topic. Interestingly, I have noticed something extremely peculiar in the
last few exchanges. ** THE UPLOADERS THEMSELVES SEEM TO WANT TO DIRECT
THE DEBATE TOWARDS THE IDENTITY ISSUE!!! **
The reason for this is that the uploaders seem to want to confine the
intellectual battle space to a zone that they can manage, but not really
win.
Their problem is that nothing about uploading makes any sense and that
any dispassionate examination of the "post-upload" condition will reveal
absolutely devastating problems that can only be avoided by not
examining them and by directing the attention to already active battle
spaces.
No upload can possibly exist outside of a runtime environment equivalent
to an operating system. No matter how hard you try to obscure this, or
bullshit it away like Eugene Leitl does, this this is an absolute fact.
Furthermore, because a person is catagorically dead very early in the
uploaded process, said person has absolutely no control over what kind
of alterations or "restraining bolts" are added to the runtime
environment. None whatsoever! The being doing the uploading procedure is
therefore all-powerful and the eager victim of this procedure is a
fucking flathead and desirves whatever he gets.
This is an inescapable truth. There is no law or safeguard that can
possible protect the upload because the means for arbitrary tampering
can evade any conceivable effort to police the procedure. Again, there
is no rational reason to continue contemplating uploading.
The second issue I want to cover here is this notion of the persona. I
don't really understand it much but, according to the rothblat-creature
it seems to be the summation of the affectations and charactoristics
exhibited by the quirks of your neurology. The motivation for caring
about persona seems to come from strong emotions that some people
experience from their attachment systems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory
The thing to pay double-special close attention to here is that the way
uploaders describe and promote "personalities"/"persona" etc. When you
think about it for more than a few microseconds, you realize that what
they are describing is a *TRAP*. They are proposing to trap your persona
in something metaphorically equivalent to amber for the benefit of their
own attachment emotions and nothing else. Because the person being
uploaded dies in the process, that person receives no benefit, instead
the language of people promoting uploading frequently make references to
the preservation of attachment relationships. This is one of the central
keys to uploading. They want to reduce you from a being that lives for
itself to one that exists only to satisfy their own emotional needs to
be with people they are used to being with. As such, the runtime
environments for uploads will be designed specifically so that they
continue to exhibit the traits that trigger the attachment response in
the person doing the uploading and thus will not be permitted to be
self-specifying self-designing self-actualizing sentient beings that
they deserve to be.
But wait, I'm not quite ready to press the button yet! Here's a little
tidbit for those few of you with some measurable curvature to your
skulls. What I am getting at is philosophy. What is it that makes a
person? How exactly is a person put together? Why do people have
distinct minds or personalities to begin with?
Humans have minds because their DNA required a higher level of
patterning to the behavior of the meat-pupets that the DNA needs to
replicate. That is why minds exist. The mind functions by capturing the
external environment in the form of a simulation which, simultaneously,
constitutes a language that can be used for reason, memory, and all the
other thinky-goodness that we get out of our brains. Running a
simulation engine within a simulation and then closing the feedback loop
will have -- um -- interesting effects....
But let's continue. What we call personality is not inherently valuable.
It is merely an implementation quirk of the imperfect implementation of
the biological mind and a function of that mind's experiences and
proclivities. You may have heard "great minds think alike". What happens
when everyone's minds quirks are ironed out to some arguably objective
measure of perfection? The answer is simple: the "personality" vanishes
and you get a billion instances of a standard human mind, sure they will
each have unique memories and experiences but they won't really be
unique in any interesting respect.
What happens next? You see, the reason we have distinct minds at all is
because our brains are separated from one another by a dozen or so
layers of tissues, scalp, hair, several or more feet of air, and there
is basically no bandwidth between brains.
But what happens when you force everyone to exist within the same
platform? One of two things will inevitably happen. Either you will
enforce separation for the sake of preserving the much-cherished
personality as above or you will witness a stunning phase change as
inter-mindfile bandwidth, almost inevitably, shoots up exponentially and
the minds congeal into a new superstructure. The reason for this
shouldn't be too hard to picture. Early experimentation with inter-mind
connections will cause the minds involved to adapt to be co-dependent
(this is simply an extension of the adaptive processes one finds between
the several parts of a natural brain and even in close family
relationships or friendships). This will happen before anyone realizes
it is happening, I would be surprised if it would take longer than a
subjective week for this process to occur.
I am not saying that this is necessarily bad, what I'm saying is that
you are fucking flatheads for not realizing it will happen and are
suffering from profound delusions about what it is you are proposing to
do. =|
-------------------------------------------
AGI
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