Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Sure, that would suck, but would you actually say that the sum of that loss weighed against the gain of N more happy and healthy years with your wife be negative?

I don't think so, I'd sign up for it. Do you not think you could cooperate with yourself like that?




That's my point though. It's not me. It's me, but it isn't in me.

To your earlier question: am I a different person than I was in the past.

No. My body and consciousness continued.

The other new me will be me, but the me that is inside my body right now will cease.

That is the flaw.


In realistic replication your body probably would not be continued, at least for a while. You'd have a digital clone that shares some memories, most values and is cognitively at your level or above. If the preservation part is well-enough and you continue to hold it important to actualize your past wish of getting a realistic clone, one day they may be able to use the cryonically frozen body & the scans of you that were taken when it was alive to re-anime it or to create a digital clone that would be much closer to you.

A commenter above pointed above that the body changes all the time. Getting replicated and having the old body die is almost the same what you had already gone through your whole, first biological life, but only at a larger scale. It does entirely replace the "hardware" (body) but most humans would agree that "they" are made of "personality, dreams, ideas, algorithms, memories, knowledge, logic, thinking, emotions, feeling, values" more than what computational medium these exhibit as long as it emulates what they have had in the past to some degree.


Our bodies and minds get replaced bit by bit over time. We're ships of Theseus[1] -- changing all the time, but still the same entity throughout.

Mind-scanning your consciousness and pouring the resulting Copied Intelligence[2] into a computer and / or a cloned body[3] is not the same thing. That's more like building a copy of Theseus' ship, nailing the name-plate from the original onto it, and claiming it's still the same ship.

It's not.

___

[1]: Or for simple guys like me, George Washington's axes.

[2]: CI may exist some day; about "AI", I'm still in doubt.

[3]: Or an android body, or a pickle-jar on Mr Burns' desk.


This isn't a problem if you've integrated non-duality.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: