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Comment by jonny_eh | Hacker News Reader

Why do you want to upload, at best, a copy of your consciousness?

What about the whole Ship-of-Theseus thing?

What if you add something to you that's knit into and augmenting your brain by 10%, and then as a little more of your brain withers, you add another chunk. Ultimately it reaches a point where your existing brain is doing none of the work and it's all machines, but there was arguably never a precipice crossed where it wasn't "you".

Such a strange thing, that a comment like this on a Friday afternoon would completely blow my mind.

Thank you :D

Stories have been written! On this very subject. Back in the day.

There’s an entire subgenre of science fiction exploring just that question!

You may enjoy authors Greg Egan or Dennis E. Taylor.

I recently discovered the Bobiverse series. Very entertaining:)

To me they tend to answer the question of why you wouldn't want to do it.

Yeah but the bots would so there's that.

To leave the flesh husk behind.

The flesh husk is you. You can't provably leave it behind without dying.

as soon as you copy yourself you're both, and indistinguishable to anyone else but your flesh husk.

Yeah but I don't think you'll feel that you're both. You'll still feel like yourself, and the other will feel like another. You won't feel as though you have left anything behind, only the other will feel like that.

Immortality

But you're dead. Digital copy of you != you.

It won't do anything to solve the dread-of-nonexistence problem. But a copy that behaves just like you is still useful if your motivation is something like "ensure that my line of scientific research continues" or "take care of my extended family."

But even if it's a copy of your essence, it's not a slave. Mortal-you has goals and family to care about. Mortal-you has been living and planning with the constraint of mortality for its entire life. Immortal-you will eventually develop different motivations.

> Immortal-you will eventually develop different motivations.

Yah, well, mortal-me also eventually develops different motivations. There's still continuity and connectedness.

It's just fork(2).

The digital copy can be kept alive long enough until we figure out how to download it back into a body again, at which point this is basically the ship of Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Also some people might disagree with "digital copy of you != you". Personally, I do not care since it is close enough to immortality imho.

I do care about the fleshy me, but maybe the digital me could figure out a way for fleshy me to not die and fix my bum knee for sentimental reasons.

How are you certain that you can survive a night's sleep?

To be fair, it's not you that becomes immortal, just your copy. From your perspective, you still die.

But not today!

And consider: if I can upload, perhaps I can download. Perhaps my digital copy can live life 'faster'? In that case I live 1000 lives digitally and download that.

Now I'm essentially immortal, in my physical body, because I've lived for millennia!

At the very, very least its no worse than living this one life and dying anyway.

It isn't you living those lives though. What is the difference between this and downloading someone else's memories?

Why isn't it me? Upload at night, sleep, download in the morning the self that has been running at 1000x speed in the cloud.

It isn't you because the experiences didn't happen and weren't actually observed by you. They'd be implants of false memories at best. That would give the illusion of experience but that's all. Definately nowhere near immortality. This is closer to a dream or delusion.

We're talking about uploading our consciousness into a digital realm and then downloading the resulting consciousness back into a brain. Ignoring that we have no way to do that right now, there is nothing that says we can't.

It would not be a dream any more than yesterday wasn't a dream.

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