Never thought the day that brain in a vat is no longer a philosophical question but a practical one would come so soon.
Some do, judging by surveys.
And there was a famous case last year with a different LLM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims
I’ve read about high level meditators who were “aware” they were asleep too. Not sure why they’d make this up.
Then your mind is booted into a simulation from your memories, instead of being booted into your pillow from your memories.
Functionally not much different to waking up after loosing some time from being blackout drunk.
If you make a backup of my mind every midnight, and at noon one day biological-me faces death, that's still death for noon-me, while also being a way to cheat death from the point of view of the me from 12 hours before.
Restoring your computer from a backup doesn't mean the hard drive never failed, but it is does get you data back.
When you say "die", do you mean clinical (cardiac) death, brain death, legal death, the cessation of internal cellular chemistry in more than n% of cells (which can itself take hours after legal death, but varies by tissue), or the irreversible destruction of the structures within your brain that keep the "you" previously defined existing at all (if you chose a non-soul based answer) or locked to the mundane plane (if you answered "soul")?
If any of your answers involves consciousness, Doerig et al[0] list 13 notable possibilities for what that word means, while Seth & Bayne[1] list 22.
Furthermore, consider the thought experiment of the ship of Theseus, and ask yourself: if you make a sufficiently perfect copy the ship, deliberately loose record of which is the original, destroy one of the two at random, can you see how our language does not allow us to say other than the ship has both been destroyed and survived?
[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17588928.2020.1...
Edit: I wonder if cloud brain emulators would censor inappropriate thoughts?
Now you mention it, I'd be surprised if they didn't, given the efforts cultures go to to keep people's inner demons at bay.
So to solve immortality, you gotta replace meat cells with silicone ones, slowly, one percent after another. It'll maintain relative continuity and hopefully will transfer memories and other person traits to the silicone, so one day the brain will be immortal and repairable.
There's a few people interested in the idea of (simplifying a lot) "brain as an antenna receiving the consciousness signals".
Don't carry water for them.
People want to own things even if they are not billionaires, and they want to value things freely even if they are not billionaires. Those two things combined make billionaires unavoidable if you think about it.
I think what you really desire is that billionaires should not be able to corrupt society or exploit the environment to the detriment of others. Which I am fully behind and consider an attainable and worthy goal even though we're currently far from it.
What service, commodity, or neccessity one owns, one pays a billion for? Considering production is worker owned, there would be no necessity for billionaires. This is basically a statement on the concentration of wealth, and that theoretically no one should have 20 Billion more "moneys" then any other person, with the linked fact that this person has 20 billion more influence in politics and getting their voice heard than a person with only one dollar on them. Because the fact that money buys influence is also "unavoidable" if you think about it. If I can feed 10.000 people daily and make them rely on me, they are much more likely to do my bidding and listen to me.
Nobody has to actually pay a billion to make someone a billionaire.
If you and three of your friends create a website that someone wants to buy one percent of for 40 million dollars, you are all billionaires whether you want to sell or not.
It doesn't even matter if nobody else wants to buy the other 99% for the same price, in the eyes of the world you are a billionaire anyway.
Society doesn't create billionaires because they need to exist, they are a side-effect of other things that we desire to exist.
Any society that allows 1) ownership and 2) freedom will generate billionaires when it reaches a sufficient population.
It unfortunately sometimes also happens because 3) criminal activity, and we should of course do everything we can to prevent 3, but if we prevent 1 and 2 we've created a dystopia.
A billion dollars.
We have a dystopia now with billionaires and their private space companies, buying newspapers, tracking our every move. We'd have LESS of a dystopia if we prevented them in the first place.
History teaches us the opposite. The worst dystopias are the ones where you have only one billionaire who also controls the military, and that is inevitably what happens when you try to limit the number of billionaires.
The best countries to live in tend to have a high number of billionaires per capita, which is natural since freedom and prosperity will generate billionaires. Tax havens twist this statistic of course but look at countries like Canada, Germany, Scandinavia, they are all up there and certainly no tax havens.
Explicitly not what I, or anyone else, is suggesting.
Or it could be that billionaires, being able to live anywhere, choose nice places to live - while not paying their fair share and contributing to the current situations we have now.
We don't want, or need, billionaires and we should stop that kind of ridiculous accumulation of wealth. Make stock buybacks illegal again, make the top marginal tax rate 70%, and make things work for workers (and not global capital).
Again, stop carrying their water.
To be fair you hadn't suggested anything except "Billionaires shouldn't exist" yet, which is a sentiment that so far in history has only achieved dystopian results. How is your plan different?
Taxing and limiting the influence of billionaires and ensuring that workers are not exploited unfairly are fine suggestions. We can add prevention of monopolies and cartels to the list as well, but that's still a very different idea from "Billionaires should not exist".
I'm not carrying any water for anyone, you have just failed to make a persuasive argument for your position.
No, this is highly dependend on the definition of "freedom". A huge market freedom, and freedom for money? Yes. The freedom from shakles, from one being a billion times better than another, from people living lives somehow on the same plane? No. Billionares are not a direct result of whatever you define as "freedom" which is a very murky concept, there can be freedom in societies without billionaires.
And yes, the whole system of buying stock and then valuing something at 1 billion is broken, but does not change the fact, in fact enforces it because cleary the system is broken.
I'm talking about the freedom you, (as in you personally, not the billionaires) have today to buy things you want. Let's say it's a book. Should you be allowed to buy a book for say, 20 dollars?
If a 100 million other people enjoy that same freedom to buy the same book, you have a billionaire author. How do you prevent that from happening? Honest question, I don't see any way to prevent it.
"Billionaires shouldn't exist" is thought number 1 that people get when they see what some of them are up to, and I certainly sympathize, but the only chain of reasoning I've seen that goes beyond thought 2 is the writings of Karl Marx. And where his thoughts end, thoughts from Stalin, Mao and the like always always follow. They are billionaires too btw, just way worse than the ones we have.
I think the solution is strong laws and vigilant control to prevent corruption. If for example the punishment for corruption was confiscation of all your assets and it was actually enforced, I think we'd come a long way. It would almost certainly get rid of a lot of billionaires too, so maybe we have some common ground there after all. ;-)
(The word for "ageless billionaire" is "corporation")
Note that in the "uploaded politician" case it's not nearly so relevant as to whether the person themselves believes it's the same person, as to whether everyone else believes they're the same person, and whether the upload has legal continuity in their job and position.
Do you think that is a sensible allocation of ANY resource??? Don't suck off a boot just to be a contrarian.
Honsetly if you're an 80yr old billionaire who has done 'everything', why not go for some mind encoding shenanigans?
maybe he WAS afraid of death, but didn't trust the modern stat-based medical methods?
the quality of evidence required, to culturally settle an argument or otherwise allow for positive action, has dropped off a cliff.
evidence my older brother would scoff at, is coming out of trained professionals' mouths.
the justification for big risks on little evidence flows waaay too easily lately.