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Comment by ideonexus | Hacker News Reader

AND ANOTHER THING!!! Screw you Kurzweil. We're not going to "upload" our consciousnesses to the cloud/singularity. We're going to "copy" them. Once the Brain Project(1) is complete and MRIs get enough resolution and computing becomes cheap enough, we'll make neuron-per-neuron simulations of our brains. Those will be exact copies of us, but they won't be us. Our copies will live forever in the singularity, but us poor biological saps will continue to die just like we did before. I plan on hating my copy out of incredible envy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project

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I think Ray uses "upload" as shorthand for something more complex.

Say over the course of 10 years you replaced 1 of the millions of cortical columns in your neocortex every minute or so with a functionally equivalent computer chip. You would never stop being you. Your consciousness would never be interrupted. You would simply become something greater.

This is already happening in a very limited way with the various brain implants used to treat Parkinson's, hearing impairment, blindness, strokes, head injuries, etc.:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_implant

Or you would slowly, imperceptibly become 'not' you.

This has the same issues of defining the 'self' that we already do -- namely that none of the cells in your body are the same as the cells that made you up ten years ago. Maybe we're all imperceptibly becoming someone else all the time...

I picture 'self' as a surfer riding a wave. If you could suddenly and instantaneously replace every molecule in the wave without getting the velocity exactly right, the experience changes. History is altered, a fork of you.

I slowly, imperceptibly become "not me" every day. I change and become a different person; so do you.

Why does it have to be a slow process? That sounds like a cheat workaround for the difficulties of defining "self" and "consciousness".

Plutarch described this paradox of gradual replacement in the ship of Theseus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

I think you would enjoy this comic, which explores the consciousness copy problem:

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1

"a braver film would have addressed this somehow. Samantha is a slave."

I don't think Samantha is a slave. Note that Theodore is not shown paying for Samantha. He could as well have partaken in a free beta program. She also asks for time for herself, does not sound slaveish to me.

There were many places where the story could have gone, but Jonze decided not to go there: privacy, hacking and trust, malfunctions, AI doing stuff for you that you did not explicitly asked for and Theodore suing the company for that.

Jonze simply decided to accept Samantha as a real person in a love story, and go from there.

I don't agree with you that "Her" is not a brave film just because it did not raise issues that you had in mind.

Well, he never asked her to compile the book and find a publisher.... It was explicitly not asked for, and we have a words for that; surprise, nice gesture, gift..

> ...but us poor biological saps will continue to die just like we did before. I plan on hating my copy out of incredible envy.

By the same reasoning we should stop all work on improving the world out of envy of the people who come after us. Those people who will enjoy longer and healthier lives without cancer, poverty, crime and environmental pollution thanks to the progress we're making today.

A copy of you is you[1]. And likely the original will be destroyed in the process.

[1]http://lesswrong.com/lw/pm/identity_isnt_in_specific_atoms/

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