Would a slow cell by cell, or thought by thought / byte by byte, transfer of my mind to another medium: one at a time every new neural action potential is received by a parallel processing medium which takes over? I want to say the resulting transfer would be the same consciousness as is typing this but then what if the same slow process were done to make a copy and not a transfer? Once a consciousness is virtual, is every transfer from one medium or location to another not essentially a copy and therefore representing a death of the originating version?
I would follow this line of questioning. For example, say someone does an incremental copy process to you, but the consciousness generated does not know whether or not the original biological consciousness has been destroyed, and has to choose which one to keep. If it chooses the biological one and the biology has been destroyed, bad luck you are definitely gone. What does your consciousness, running either just on the silicon, or identically on the silicon and in the biology, choose ?
Let’s say you are informed that there is 1% chance that the biological version has been destroyed. Well, you’re almost certainly fine then, you keep the biological version, the silicon version is destroyed, and you live happily ever after until you become senile and die.
On the other hand, say you are informed that the biological version has definitely been destroyed. On your current theory, this means that that the consciousness realises that it has been mistaken about its identity, and is actually only a few minutes old. It’s sad that the progenitor person is gone, but it is not suicidal, so it chooses the silicon version.
At what point on the 1% to 100% slider would your consciousness choose the silicon version ?
(Hearing the though-experiment of incremental transfer (or alternatively duplication) was one of the things that changed my mind to pattern-identity from some sort of continuity-identity theory. I remember hearing an interview with Marvin Minsky where he described an incremental transfer on a radio program).
I definitely agree that incremental change (which gets stickier with incremental non-destructive duplication) is a sticky point. What I find the most problematic to my my thesis is a process where every new datum is saved on a new medium, rather than the traditionally-cited cell-by-cell scenario. It’s problematic but nothing in it convinces me to step up to Mr Bowie-Tesla’s machine under any circumstances. Would you? How about if instead of a drowning pool there was a team of South America’s most skilled private and public sector torture experts, who could keep the meat that falls through alive and attentive for decades? Whatever the other implications, the very eyes seeing these words would be the ones pierced by needles. I don’t care if the copy gets techno-heaven/ infinite utility.
Your thought experiment doesn’t really hit the point at issue for me. My answer is always “I want to stay where I am”. For silicon to choose meat is for the silicon to cease to exist, for meat to choose silicon is for meat to cease to exist. I only value the meat right now because that is where I am right now. My only concern is for ME, that is the one you are talking to, to continue existing. Talk to a being that was copied from me a split second ago and that guy will throw me under the bus just as quickly (allowing for some altruistic puzzles where I do allow that I might care slightly more about him than a stranger, but mostly because I know the guy and he’s alright and I can truly empathize with what he must be going through (ie if I’m dying tomorrow anyway and he gets a long happy life, but I may do the same for a stranger). The scenario is simply russian roulette if you won’t accept my “I want to stay put” answer.
Shit, if I came to realize that I was a freshly-minted silicon copy living in a non-maleficent digital playground I would be eternally grateful to Omega, my new God whether It likes it or not, and that meat shmuck who chose to drown his monkey ass just before he realized he’d taken the Devil’s Bargain.
Not that “meat” has any meaning other than “separate entity” here. If I am sim-meat I want to stay this piece of sim meat.
I would follow this line of questioning. For example, say someone does an incremental copy process to you, but the consciousness generated does not know whether or not the original biological consciousness has been destroyed, and has to choose which one to keep. If it chooses the biological one and the biology has been destroyed, bad luck you are definitely gone. What does your consciousness, running either just on the silicon, or identically on the silicon and in the biology, choose ?
Let’s say you are informed that there is 1% chance that the biological version has been destroyed. Well, you’re almost certainly fine then, you keep the biological version, the silicon version is destroyed, and you live happily ever after until you become senile and die.
On the other hand, say you are informed that the biological version has definitely been destroyed. On your current theory, this means that that the consciousness realises that it has been mistaken about its identity, and is actually only a few minutes old. It’s sad that the progenitor person is gone, but it is not suicidal, so it chooses the silicon version.
At what point on the 1% to 100% slider would your consciousness choose the silicon version ?
(Hearing the though-experiment of incremental transfer (or alternatively duplication) was one of the things that changed my mind to pattern-identity from some sort of continuity-identity theory. I remember hearing an interview with Marvin Minsky where he described an incremental transfer on a radio program).
I definitely agree that incremental change (which gets stickier with incremental non-destructive duplication) is a sticky point. What I find the most problematic to my my thesis is a process where every new datum is saved on a new medium, rather than the traditionally-cited cell-by-cell scenario. It’s problematic but nothing in it convinces me to step up to Mr Bowie-Tesla’s machine under any circumstances. Would you? How about if instead of a drowning pool there was a team of South America’s most skilled private and public sector torture experts, who could keep the meat that falls through alive and attentive for decades? Whatever the other implications, the very eyes seeing these words would be the ones pierced by needles. I don’t care if the copy gets techno-heaven/ infinite utility.
Your thought experiment doesn’t really hit the point at issue for me. My answer is always “I want to stay where I am”. For silicon to choose meat is for the silicon to cease to exist, for meat to choose silicon is for meat to cease to exist. I only value the meat right now because that is where I am right now. My only concern is for ME, that is the one you are talking to, to continue existing. Talk to a being that was copied from me a split second ago and that guy will throw me under the bus just as quickly (allowing for some altruistic puzzles where I do allow that I might care slightly more about him than a stranger, but mostly because I know the guy and he’s alright and I can truly empathize with what he must be going through (ie if I’m dying tomorrow anyway and he gets a long happy life, but I may do the same for a stranger). The scenario is simply russian roulette if you won’t accept my “I want to stay put” answer.
Shit, if I came to realize that I was a freshly-minted silicon copy living in a non-maleficent digital playground I would be eternally grateful to Omega, my new God whether It likes it or not, and that meat shmuck who chose to drown his monkey ass just before he realized he’d taken the Devil’s Bargain.
Not that “meat” has any meaning other than “separate entity” here. If I am sim-meat I want to stay this piece of sim meat.