Sorry to go off topic so soon :-) but at first glance the answer to this would appear to depend completely on the answer to Bruno's "yes doctor" - if one's consciousness is the result of computation at some level, and assuming Bruno's chain of reasoning is correct, then a destructive upload should be possible, and a conservative upload would give you a 50-50 chance of finding yourself uploaded. If there is something wrong with comp, e.g. non Turing emulable processes are involved, then it seems unlikely that any type of upload will upload you - unless you have a soul or something, in which case there is a 50-50 chance that a conservative upload will either kill the original anyway, or turn it into a zombie, or that the uploaded version will be soulless, whatever that means.
Another take on this is Tipler's, as used in "The Physics of Immortality", which is to assume that a simulation of the quantum state of your brain will be you (and hence we could be in an ancestor simulation, or wake up in one at any moment - if such things are possible, and are of high enough fidelity to reproduce simulated quantum states, and will actually exist somewhere, at some point in time - this is similar to a "Boltzman brain" argument, I suspect). I don't have enough knowledge of the relevant physics to comment on that one. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
