>
> What I find interesting is that in one statement he points out that we all
> experience a loss of continuity of consciousness (sleeping), but then goes
> on to suggest that uploading isn't as good as immortality.
Remember this is a guy who has lived his entire life with a genetic
duplicate (twin) and I think most of us singleton people can't imagine
exactly what that is like. I sure can't but I'm willing to buy that it
changes your whole perspective on "selfhood." when they were little kids
he and his brother were very hard for others to tell apart but each one
knew who he was as distinct from the other one. (Identical twins are often
extremely similar *behaviorally* as well as in looks!) So it's probably
intuition that makes him somehow have this very deep gut-level belief that
an uploaded copy is *not* the original, more like a clone. (Really creepy
suggestion: what if you duplicated someone who was still *alive*? Say by
putting their pattern in t he Star Trek transporter?)
anyway I don't think sleep is really that totally uncionscious, here
is awareness of time passing on some level, plus dreaming. as opposed to
something like a deep coma...or anesthesia, where you have no dreams or
memory of *anything* happening, from your point of view it is as if you
had been dead for awhile! however, people do come out of these with their
continuity/selfhood intact. however it doesn't involve total braindeath,
so perhaps there's a sort of 'continuity wave' (to coin a horrible and
really meaningless term but do you know what I am getting at?) that is
operating as long as there is *any* brain activity, and that's where you
get the continuity from?
>
> In short, I respectfully disagree. His copy is based upon a much older
> version of his state. It's as if saying, "we'll upload you, but then erase
> the memories and personality of the copy until shortly the period shortly
> after birth, and also send it backwards in time". That's not very useful
> continuity.
>
huh? why that assumptin? (I didn't read the article...)
> Contrast that with the this scenario - "you go to sleep, and then we'll we
> upload a copy of your current state and dispose of the body". Or this
> alternative - "we'll slip into your house and kill you in your sleep". The
> latter is disturbing, but I must admit I can't see how I'd care if it came
> as a surprise, given that I wasn't conscious of it happening. The former
> promises continuity which seems at least as good as that of the promise of
> waking up when you go to sleep at night.
>
I think there is such a thing as a deep primitive fear of dying in your
sleep, at least as a kid I tended to be afraid of it. my mom would say so
what? you wouldn't know the difference, but I intuitively *knew* sleep
wasn't death! i've read that patients about to be anesthetized may be
apprehensive because they're afraid they won't wake up; it's a pretty
common fear.
Let's look at another thing. some relgions believe in immortaility of the
soul, a Greek idea which may have been "rational" in Aristotle's day when
they drew a line between soul and body but much harder to believe in when
science says you can't separate the so called soul from the
mind/brain/body. other sects argue that dead is dead but when the
world/universe ends everyone will be resurrected (the day of judgment),
which is a bit less incompatible with science, you can say God has an
infinite-capacity computer and uploads everybody anyway! probably the
latter is more in line with the actual teachings of Jesus because
immortality of the soul is not really a Jewish idea, even though it had
kind of infected Judaism by Jesus' time. THe poet John Donne wrote "One
short sleep past we wake eternally/And Death shall be no more." of course
the two types of afterlife - with and without continuity? have gotten very
mixed in Christian tradition, and IIRC Catholic teaching believes in both.
(At the end of time you get your body back.) So we can say the notion of
uploading isn't really that new, just *calling* it that. (People in heaven
presumably don't split hairs about whether they really are their original,
having continuous memories from the moment of death...but then if you
could get into philosophical angst it wouldn't *be* Heaven.) It was/is a
theological rather than a scientific idea.
Nobody seems to have asked Jesus (or Lazarus for that matter) what it was
like being dead....their religious tradition seems to have viewed death as
just sleep you didn't wake up from.
Kristin
