[lbo]

The notion of so-called uploading is an interesting one. From a philosophical and practical point of view, I think it's actually pretty simple. If you uploaded my brain into a robot and we both woke up, he'd say he was the real me and I'd say I was the real me. An outside observer could not tell the difference--it would be theoretically impossible to. If you killed one of us, one of use would feel like he died, the other wouldn't. Both of us would feel like we'd lived an entire lifetime before this moment because we'd share the same memories. This is the farthest one can ever dig into this problem. An ego is a side-effect of a functioning mind, it's not something with a unique physical location or material continuity. I think it's highly unsatisfying from our ego's perspective to think of uploading like this, but our ego also wasn't designed to think of itself in these terms any more than it was designed to visualize 4+ physical dimensions.

[batista]

>This is the farthest one can ever dig into this problem.

No, I think the whole problem can be bypassed, check my answer above.

[lbo]

Amazing the lengths we'll go to just to satisfy our simple evolutionary incentive to live, no matter how ludicrous from an outside perspective :)

[batista]

>Amazing the lengths we'll go to just to satisfy our simple evolutionary incentive to live, no matter how ludicrous from an outside perspective :)

"Lengths" like, err, making a thought experiment like the above in a HN thread? I've went further than that just to get a bag of Pringles.

And it's not like it's a "simple evolutionary incentive" anymore. That might hold true for a lizard or a deer, but a human has more complex rational to want to live. It might be evolutionary still, but it's far from "simple" when you can think about it.

[lbo]

I don't mean discussing it, I mean that doing it would be. In particular, it seems like a dramatic length to me because an outside entity would never be able to tell the difference between your theoretical swap and a 'standard' upload/copy in terms of the resulting individual. The only difference would be that the person would go into it perhaps more confident that his ego wouldn't 'die'.

But no, I don't agree with you that humans' desire to live is any more real or special than a lizard's, or a tree's, or a rock's desire not to break apart for that matter. It's a natural extension of physical laws combined with the circumstances of our evolution as a system--in this case linked directly to our basest subconscious instincts. To say that your desire to live is fundamentally stronger or more complicated than that of a deer reeks of geocentrism of the ancient world to me.

[batista]

>But no, I don't agree with you that humans' desire to live is any more real or special than a lizard's, or a tree's, or a rock's desire not to break apart for that matter. It's a natural extension of physical laws combined with the circumstances of our evolution as a system--in this case linked directly to our basest subconscious instincts. To say that your desire to live is fundamentally stronger or more complicated than that of a deer reeks of geocentrism of the ancient world to me.

You say "more real or special" here, though, whereas you said "simpler" in your previous comment.

You get back to the same argument at the end though: "To say that your desire to live is fundamentally stronger or more complicated than that of a deer reeks of geocentrism of the ancient world to me."

It might not be more "real or special" or "stronger" (I never argued that it was anyway), but it SURE is more complicated.

And to deny that reeks of obsessive reductionism to me. The desire to live as expressed and felt by some billion (trillion?) neurons of a human, is more complex than the desire to live as expressed by the primitive brain of a lizard, or even a "rock's desire not to break apart" (!). I don't even think we can call the latter "desire".

We can feel everything a deer can feel about the desire to live (horror, survival instinct, etc --we're animals after all), but ON TOP OF THIS we can write poems, sing songs, make movies and have deep conversations about it. Including massive institutions on the matter, such as religion.

I'd call that more complex --calling it anything else would be delusional.