Upload yourself to a computer. You’ve got a copy on the computer, you’ve got a physical body. Kill the physical body a few milliseconds after upload.
Repeat, except now kill the physical body a few milliseconds before the upload.
Do you mean to define the former situation as involving a “Death” because a few milliseconds worth of computations were lost, but the latter situation as simple a transfer?
I don’t think the word “death” really applies anymore when we are talking at the level of physical systems, any more than “table” or “chair” would. Those constructs don’t cross over well into (real or imaginary) physics.
Since Eliezer is a temporal reductionist, I think he might not mean “temporally continuous”, but rather “logical/causal continuity” or something similar.
Discrete time travel would also violate temporal continuity, by the way.
Why?
Upload yourself to a computer. You’ve got a copy on the computer, you’ve got a physical body. Kill the physical body a few milliseconds after upload.
Repeat, except now kill the physical body a few milliseconds before the upload.
Do you mean to define the former situation as involving a “Death” because a few milliseconds worth of computations were lost, but the latter situation as simple a transfer?
I don’t think the word “death” really applies anymore when we are talking at the level of physical systems, any more than “table” or “chair” would. Those constructs don’t cross over well into (real or imaginary) physics.
Since Eliezer is a temporal reductionist, I think he might not mean “temporally continuous”, but rather “logical/causal continuity” or something similar.
Discrete time travel would also violate temporal continuity, by the way.