Living forever isn’t quite impossible. If we ever develop acausal computing, or a way to beat the first law of thermodynamics (AND the universe turns out to be spatially infinite), then it’s possible that a sufficiently powerful mind could construct a mathematical system containing representations of all our minds that it could formally prove would keep us existent and value-fulfilled forever, and then just… run it.
Not very likely, though. In the mean time, more life is definitely better than less.
Let me ask you this. Somebody makes a copy of your mind. They turn it on. Do you see what it sees? Someone touches the new instance of you. Do you feel it?
Depends on your definition of ‘you.’ Mine are pretty broad. The way I see it, my only causal link to myself of yesterday is that I remember being him. I can’t prove we’re made of the same matter. Under quantum mechanics, that isn’t even a coherent concept. So, if I believe that I didn’t die in the night, then I must accept that that’s a form of survival.
Uploaded copies of you are still ‘you’ in the sense that the you of tomorrow is you. I can talk about myself tomorrow, and believe that he’s me (and his existence guarantees my survival), even though if he were teleported back in time to now, we would not share a single thread of conscious experience. I can also consider different possibilities tomorrow. I could go to class, or I could go to the store. Both of those hypothetical people are still me, but they are not quite exactly each other.
So, to make a long story short, yes: if an adequately detailed model is made of my brain, then I consider that to be survival. I don’t want bad things to happen to future me’s.
Living forever isn’t quite impossible. If we ever develop acausal computing, or a way to beat the first law of thermodynamics (AND the universe turns out to be spatially infinite), then it’s possible that a sufficiently powerful mind could construct a mathematical system containing representations of all our minds that it could formally prove would keep us existent and value-fulfilled forever, and then just… run it.
Not very likely, though. In the mean time, more life is definitely better than less.
Let me ask you this. Somebody makes a copy of your mind. They turn it on. Do you see what it sees? Someone touches the new instance of you. Do you feel it?
When you die, do you inhabit it? Or are you dead?
Depends on your definition of ‘you.’ Mine are pretty broad. The way I see it, my only causal link to myself of yesterday is that I remember being him. I can’t prove we’re made of the same matter. Under quantum mechanics, that isn’t even a coherent concept. So, if I believe that I didn’t die in the night, then I must accept that that’s a form of survival.
Uploaded copies of you are still ‘you’ in the sense that the you of tomorrow is you. I can talk about myself tomorrow, and believe that he’s me (and his existence guarantees my survival), even though if he were teleported back in time to now, we would not share a single thread of conscious experience. I can also consider different possibilities tomorrow. I could go to class, or I could go to the store. Both of those hypothetical people are still me, but they are not quite exactly each other.
So, to make a long story short, yes: if an adequately detailed model is made of my brain, then I consider that to be survival. I don’t want bad things to happen to future me’s.