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Comment by pbw | Hacker News Reader

> Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to die.

You get to do both. The concept of "you" changes once there is a copy, see the Ship of Theseus [1]. Each post-you entity has a legitimate claim to being pre-you. The copy woke up that morning, ate your breakfeast, went to the uploading clinic, and went to sleep as a digital being. The copy has perfect continuity. The biological you on the other hand stayed biological and will die.

A gradual replacement doesn't change the fundamentals, the biological you has to die. The gradual replacement just makes for an unusual twilight, its mind commingled with an arising digital being.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

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I think that the experience of continuity is what makes these things entirely different.

It is the experience of continuity that satisfies my hard-wired desire for self-preservation.

You experience discontinuities in consciousness every day: when you sleep.

Why is it that we feel like the same person after we wake up from sleep, from anesthesia, or even a prolonged coma? You could go to sleep, have arbitrary operations done to the neurons in your brain while asleep, and presumably will awake into the "same body".

This thought experiment leads me to believe that the most important consideration for mind-uploading is to ensure that the original body dies/is killed before bringing the copy online.

Considering the metamorphosis idea, by the time your whole brain was replaced, piece by piece, by devices simulating its behavior, you became an upload - it's just that all of your data is running inside your head (or that this illusion is maintained by very low-latency links to your root-self running elsewhere).

Still, the moment you move its dataset to a new device and deactivate the original, aren't you killing the original?

From a body-centric point of view the original dies either way, whether neuron-by-neuron or all at once. From a consciousness point of view it's less clear. Firstly because we don't understand consciousness.

But if we believe consciousness is some subjective experience that results from the functioning brain or similar physical device, what can we say?

Think of a vinyl record and a digital music player. The vinyl record is playing along when it is stopped suddenly, the digital player is started at exactly the right time to produce no break in the song.

If you insist that you are the record player, then you die, you stopped. If you think that you are the song, it continued without missing a beat. Instead of an abrupt stop you can cross fade the record out and the digital one in over a few minutes. Does this make a difference?

That's one wonderful analogy! Thank you!

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