seems hardly worth the trouble. don't flatter yourself your brain needs to stay around - highly unlikely and very un-ecological to power up a machine to maintain a presence of virtualitzed shit for brains. -Just saying. Next Question?
Assuming it works well why not keep in touch with the loved ones. Funerals are so gloomy. Why not an upload party? You could make the virtual environment like the versions of heaven in the various religious books and have that stuff for real rather than make believe.
It could not properly deal with the problem of my moral imperfection.
Also, a computer would have only finitely many states, so it would only delay death, not prevent it, as having the same exact mental state an infinite number of times would, I think, be indistinguishable from having it only once.
Feel free to skip it, then, but many others want the option.
> It could not properly deal with the problem of my moral imperfection.
Morals depend on the ability to empathize, evaluate the effects of your actions on others, and act accordingly. So, you can indeed give yourself the tools to become far more moral.
> Also, a computer would have only finitely many states, so it would only delay death, not prevent it, as having the same exact mental state an infinite number of times would, I think, be indistinguishable from having it only once.
There's a huge amount of theory on how fun and novelty work with enhanced cognitive ability, with many potential solutions to that problem.
Beyond that, long before we deal with the finite number of interesting mental states, we'll have to deal with the heat death of the universe. Given a few billion years to work on both problems, I think we'll manage a solution. I'm far more concerned about whether we can solve mortality before the next existential threat to humanity than about whether we can solve problems like the heat death of the universe in billions of years.
Also, I'm not a consequentialist; I don't think morality is entirely determined by what impacts the choices have on others.
I'm not saying that it would be bad to extend life in this way, only that it would not be the same as what I believe is after life here.
And it would not be an end to death.
> There's a huge amount of theory on how fun and novelty work with enhanced cognitive ability, with many potential solutions to that problem.
I am not speaking of becoming merely bored. Mere entertainment is nothing much.
I am speaking of one's experiences ceasing to have an after which one can distinguish from one's before.
I am speaking of death, of ceasing to be * .
A finite state machine must either reach the same exact state more than once (in which case it cannot distinguish whether it is the first time it has entered that state or not, as that would be part of the state), or it must halt. And if it does reach the same exact state more than once, there is no difference for it whether it reaches a state a third time or not. If its experiences map 1 to 1 with its state, then its experiences have a finite length corresponding to something not more than its total number of states.
(If you don't find this convincing, I expect I could provide a more convincing argument based on secret sharing schemes.)
Current understanding of physics includes the Bekenstein bound. I see no justification for your apparent belief that a problem with the Bekenstein bound will be found. If the understanding of the Bekenstein bound is correct (and I see no reason to assume that it is not), then to have an unlimited lifespan in the universe, one's volume must increase without bound. This is of course, a very slow rate of expansion, with the lower bound being something like, your radius has to be at least sqrt(log(age × K_1) + K_2), where K_1 and K_2 are some constants.
I see no reason to expect that the Bekenstein bound will be broken, and not replaced with something at least similar.
* rather, ceasing to be/live in the universe as it is, which I think you would consider to be what death is.
This goes beyond consequentialism. Purely saying that the ends justify the means can lead to some really broken morality, mostly because people don't normally count everything as "ends" that should be.
Of course, knowing all the consequences of an action doesn't, prevent you from knowingly doing something wrong anyway. And I certainly agree that increased cognitive function does not automatically imply increased morality, let alone perfect morality. (Assuming the value system in use can usefully define the latter at all.)
> A finite state machine must either reach the same exact state more than once (in which case it cannot distinguish whether it is the first time it has entered that state or not, as that would be part of the state), or it must halt. And if it does reach the same exact state more than once, there is no difference for it whether it reaches a state a third time or not. If its experiences map 1 to 1 with its state, then its experiences have a finite length corresponding to something not more than its total number of states.
I understand your argument. First, however, note that that applies to an entirely self-contained system, devoid of external stimulus; you can't necessarily evaluate a single mind in isolation, so you'd have to account for the state of the entire state machine that handles all consciousnesses and their interactions. Second, your consciousness and continued awareness/existence does not depend on having novel states in a state machine; if you've ever re-read a book purely for fun, without expecting to get anything new out of it, you can perhaps imagine finding the same state satisfying more than once. And third, the sheer number of states here dwarfs the age of the universe by myriad orders of magnitude; beyond just "age of the universe" problems, you'd have to start asking "what form does life take when it spans the course of that many eons?".
While I can see a parallel between this problem and the existential failure mode of becoming a wirehead, I see massive and fundamental differences there as well.
In short, I don't find this even remotely problematic compared to not existing at all. And given the current rate at which we permanently lose sapient minds, I see a strong argument for fixing that now and taking eons to think about some of the other problems, rather than using it as a reason to not improve the situation due to lack of perfection in the solution.
> Current understanding of physics includes the Bekenstein bound. I see no justification for your apparent belief that a problem with the Bekenstein bound will be found.
That a finite space can contain only a finite entropy seems obvious. We don't, however, yet know that the universe is finite, or self-contained, in either space or time.
Have you seen religious beliefs about the afterlife? Actually attempting such a virtual environment will wind up being the nail in the coffin for religious belief in a bodily afterlife, because it will be unenjoyable and ridiculous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_Transhumanist_Associati...
Why's that?
To demonstrate the nonlinearity of these models there was an experiment http://www.pnas.org/content/105/9/3593.full where researchers excluded a single spike from the large scale brain simulation. The global state of simulation has diverged after 100 timesteps, compared to the version where this spike was present.
Thank you for your response.