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Comment by asojfdowgh | Hacker News Reader

uploading yourself doesn't mean you transfer across, its just another you, except you gain nothing from the other you, because only the original you is you.

So, are you willing to kill yourself, to live forever? You will never experience anything ever again, for an life of infinite experiences that arn't yours except in name.

I wouldn't!

The potential of "sliding" one's mind (replicate the brain's work piecewise to maintain ~1x consciousness at all times) besides.

Easier to just cure brain degeneration.

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I do kill my consciousness every night to get some sleep (and for a surgery or two), and it felt weird as a kid (I remember wondering who or what would wake up in the morning) but now I am used to it. Persistence of memory helps a lot, and is probably the real thing that people worry about when thinking about cloning/uploading/teleporting. We identify ourselves from what we remember as familiar, which is why dementia is so awful. It's not like our consciousness somehow exists in the past, present, and future all at once as a single object; we are always migrating with the present into a new experience and whether that is precisely at the time or place we expect it to be doesn't matter in the long run. An alarm clock or light streaming in the window teleports me from last night without any conscious choice of mine.

This is a philosophical assumption, and one that should be open to challenge, despite how intuitively sensible it seems.

For instance, I could equally well argue that when somebody undergoes deep general anesthesia and all measurable activity in their brain stops, that person is "dead". The person who awakens from anesthesia is a different conscious individual, who happens to share the memories and personality of the original.

If it's not necessarily true that anesthesia is death, why should it be necessarily true that mind uploading is death?

> when somebody undergoes deep general anesthesia and all measurable activity in their brain stops

that's news to me. Is that literally true ( in the literal sense of the word "literally")? If so, that's very interesting and something i never thought about before.

It definitely doesn't always happen, but my understanding is that when the anesthesia is extremely deep, the brain's electrical activity can be so low as to be undetectable ("isoelectric").

> If it's not necessarily true that anesthesia is death, why should it be necessarily true that mind uploading is death?

I think you guys are saying the same thing… Mind uploading is a duplication process, like a fork. The emulated mind has continuity with the original, with possibly some small gap, so yes it's exactly the same as for anesthesia, sleep, etc. they didn't "die" in the process.

But now there are two different entities that have continuity with the original branch. Both can subjectively claim to "be" the person that initiated the procedure. What the grand parent is saying is that the variant that stayed in the flesh is not magically synchronized with the emulated one so they don't have any incentive to suddenly kill themselves just because there happen to be a fork moving on on a different substrate.

There are now two people sharing the same memories up to the fork point, and diverging afterwards. Neither of them should be killed without their consent and neither of them should have any a priori will to kill themselves.

The simple solution here is to make mandatory during the upload process for the flesh version to be anethetised during the transfer, and destroyed after verification of completion.

https://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2021/1...

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