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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

> Here is the crucial question:

> Given that running a brain scan still costs money in 1000 years, why should anyone bring you back from the dead? Why should anyone boot you up?

I don't think that's really the crucial question. In my view, the crucial question is why would you want to be booted up?

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"Do you want to be alive" is, for most people, not all that complicated a question.

But "you" aren't alive. It's a fantasy. Even a perfect recreation isn't going to be "you". You don't experience it's experiences.

"You" won't even be alive in by the time you finish reading this paragraph. You will cease to exist, and someone else will have your memories.

We aren't teenagers smoking weed anymore. I hope we can be better than that.

And can we at least look at other comments before responding? I'm not going to reply to 30 copies. I know there's collisions but this argument is one I think you can assume most people are aware of. Snape kills Dumbledoor kinda thing. Book and movies have been out for so long it's not a spoiler.

to be fair, the you that wakes up in the morning isn't the same you that went to bed.

citation needed

To the version that gets booted up it is a continuation of your experiences though. If we start drawing lines between a perfect copy of your thoughts, brain and whatever makes you think and act like you, taken at for example the moment of death that says that's somehow not you. A lot of normal things like cell replacement and unconscious periods or other things that change your mind like brain damage look very similar to the death and digital copy divide.

I think you're fighting to make these things look more similar than they are.

In the case of a copy or upload, there is a clear disjoint process. Both entities can exist at the same time. For both of them to be "you", "you" have to be simultaneously experiencing both experiences (that doesn't sound very fun...)

As for the sleep/unconscious/etc stuff. I think people should read into this more before bringing them up. There's a lot more going on than a discrete "on" and "off" state. Brain activity does not cease. There are definitely cases where brain activity ,,appears,, to cease, but that is a distinctly different phenomena and is the result of precision of measuring devices. This stuff fits more under the Ship of Theseus argument though.

That's not the question being posed, though. It's really "do you want to live forever?"

I don't think that's an easy question for most people to answer when they really think about it.

The real real question is: "Do you want to live forever as a program that any pimple-faced kid can run, poke and debug for fun?"

We're used to have our mind as an inviolable private resource, not something that can be copy-pasted, edited and experimented freely with. Your last instance went insane in an interesting way? Let's keep it and run another. Make them interact for extra amusement.

The idea of essential immortality or at least a version of you getting immortality (as far as the version that conceivably gets booted up is concerned it worked, it's the reconstructed body that came out the other end of the teleporter not the one killed and disassembled down to the atoms in the Star Trek teleporter thought experiment, also featured somewhat differently in The Prestige). Loads of people are afraid of death or think they're important/special enough that they deserve or are interesting enough to keep around forever.

I have a deep fear of death. I don't find it reassuring to think that there might be a copy of me running around. I'm not so vain to think that my consciousness is of value outside myself, I just know that it is of value to me because that's the only place I exist. It seems strictly an exercise in ego.

I don't think it's a universal thought by far but it's not uncommon, before the theoretical tech existed for uploads the niche for providing a balm to people's fear of death was monopolized by religion. Not everyone went to it for that but it is a common component of why people turn to religion.

Also to the upload they're not a copy they're in continuity with your experience just in a different place. To borrow a metaphor from The Prestige, they're the one that stepped out of the box, the one that goes on living and gets the reward of that and of continued qualia.

Finally if we start throwing around labels about uploads taken right at your last living thought and squirting that onto a cloud and call that separate we get into some sticky philosophical quagmires about brain damage, comas, the continuous replacement churn of all the cells in our body, etc that make defining You as you tricky.

I think this isn't as complicated as you're making it out to be. If I take a digital copy and then create it in the cloud, that's not me. We could create 3 digital copies all at once. Clearly, those aren't all me. I'm not a gestalt, those are three individual entities who are having different, even if similar, experiences.

Same with a clone of me. Not me. Similar, sure, but not me. How do I know that? Because the real me could stand beside it.

Me with brain damage? After some brain cell replacement? I'm changed as a person, sure, but there's a difference between change and duplicating. It's seem like you're saying that the answer to the Ship of Theseus is "yes" in every scenario, and I don't follow that.

And this is all immaterial - like I said, the me I really care about is going to one day be rotting in the ground, and that's the only real continuity of consciousnesses I care about. The digital copy may be thankful for being alive, and it may very well think of itself as me, it only makes sense being based upon the same experiences, but they aren't the same thing.

You must have already answered that question if you choose to scan your brain. Otherwise, you wouldn't get your brain scanned in the first place.

You aren't in a position to make that choice when it would need to be made!

You can make clear before you die — e.g. in your will — that you don’t want your brain scanned like this, and certainly don’t want to pay for it. So you take the choice out of their hands.

Why should we want to pay for our brains to be scanned like this?

> You aren't in a position to make that choice when it would need to be made!

As it stands now, you presumably need to make a choice to enable bringing your projected self back from the dead in the first place.

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