Re: The way you present this, as well as the discussion in the comments, suggests you think “death” is a thing that can be avoided by living indefinitely [...]
Er… ;-) Many futurists seem to have it in for death. Bostrom, Kurzweil, Drexler, spring to mind. To me, the main problem seems to be uncopyable minds. If we could change our bodies like a suit of clothes, the associated problems would mostly go away. We will have copyable minds once they are digital.
“Death” as we know it is a concept that makes sense only because we have clearly-defined locuses of subjectivity.
If we imagine a world where
- you can share (or sell) your memories with other people, and borrow (or rent) their memories
- most of “your” memories are of things that happened to other people
- most of the time, when someone is remembering something from your past, it isn’t you
- you have sold some of the things that “you” experienced to other people, so that legally they are now THEIR experiences and you may be required to pay a fee to access them, or to erase them from your mind
- you make, destroy, augment, or trim copies of yourself on a daily basis; or loan out subcomponents of yourself to other people while borrowing some of their components, according to the problem at hand, possibly by some democratic (or economic) arbitration among “your” copies
- and you have sold shares in yourself to other processes, giving them the right to have a say in these arbitrations about what to do with yourself
- “you” subcontract some of your processes—say, your computation of emotional responses—out to a company in India that specializes in such things
- which is advantageous from a lag perspective, because most of the bandwidth-intensive computation for your consciousness usually ends up being distributed to a server farm in Singapore anyway
- and some of these processes that you contract out are actually more computationally intensive than the parts of “you” that you own/control (you’ve pooled your resources with many other people to jointly purchase a really good emotional response system)
- and large parts of “you” are being rented from someone else; and you have a “job” which means that your employer, for a time, owns your thoughts—not indirectly, like today, but is actually given write permission into your brain and control of execution flow while you’re on the clock
- but you don’t have just one employer; you rent out parts of you from second to second, as determined by your eBay agent
- and some parts of you consider themselves conscious, and are renting out THEIR parts, possibly without notifying you
- or perhaps some process higher than you in the hierarchy is also conscious, and you mainly work for it, so that it considers you just a part of itself, and can make alterations to your mind without your approval (it’s part of the standard employment agreement)
- and there are actually circular dependencies in the graph of who works for whom, so that you may be performing a computation that is, unknown to you, in the service of the company in India calculating your emotional responses
- and these circles are not simple circles; they branch and reconverge, so that the computation you are doing for the company in India will be used to help compute the emotions of trillions of “people” around the world
In such a world, how would anybody know if “you” had died?
“Death” as we know it is a concept that makes sense only because we have clearly-defined locuses of subjectivity.
If we imagine a world where
- you can share (or sell) your memories with other people, and borrow (or rent) their memories
- most of “your” memories are of things that happened to other people
- most of the time, when someone is remembering something from your past, it isn’t you
- you have sold some of the things that “you” experienced to other people, so that legally they are now THEIR experiences and you may be required to pay a fee to access them, or to erase them from your mind
- you make, destroy, augment, or trim copies of yourself on a daily basis; or loan out subcomponents of yourself to other people while borrowing some of their components, according to the problem at hand, possibly by some democratic (or economic) arbitration among “your” copies
- and you have sold shares in yourself to other processes, giving them the right to have a say in these arbitrations about what to do with yourself
- “you” subcontract some of your processes—say, your computation of emotional responses—out to a company in India that specializes in such things
- which is advantageous from a lag perspective, because most of the bandwidth-intensive computation for your consciousness usually ends up being distributed to a server farm in Singapore anyway
- and some of these processes that you contract out are actually more computationally intensive than the parts of “you” that you own/control (you’ve pooled your resources with many other people to jointly purchase a really good emotional response system)
- and large parts of “you” are being rented from someone else; and you have a “job” which means that your employer, for a time, owns your thoughts—not indirectly, like today, but is actually given write permission into your brain and control of execution flow while you’re on the clock
- but you don’t have just one employer; you rent out parts of you from second to second, as determined by your eBay agent
- and some parts of you consider themselves conscious, and are renting out THEIR parts, possibly without notifying you
- or perhaps some process higher than you in the hierarchy is also conscious, and you mainly work for it, so that it considers you just a part of itself, and can make alterations to your mind without your approval (it’s part of the standard employment agreement)
- and there are actually circular dependencies in the graph of who works for whom, so that you may be performing a computation that is, unknown to you, in the service of the company in India calculating your emotional responses
- and these circles are not simple circles; they branch and reconverge, so that the computation you are doing for the company in India will be used to help compute the emotions of trillions of “people” around the world
In such a world, how would anybody know if “you” had died?