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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Immortality

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.

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?

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