Hacker News Reader

The gradual replacement approach (as you describe it) is a useful thought experiment that gets people more comfortable with the possibility of mind emulation but the end state is the same for both approaches. One just intuitively feels more you than the other, but as you said, it's likely all an illusion so doing it while you "sleep" is probably enough to make you sufficiently happy to be alive when you wake up non-biologically.

View on HN

This would be like Bicentennial Man in reverse. Call me skeptic but it sounds like a good foundation for a new novel and not like a good basis for Foundation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bicentennial_Man

With the gradual replacement scenario it might be easier to detect any fundamental differences between start and end states. Like if the end state is actually a p-zombie. But I haven't really thought this through.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com