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Comment by wging | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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