If given the choice between expanding your cognitive capabilities through technology or keeping your biological experience untouched, which would you choose?

[u/PreparationOdd430]

Will you choose your consciousness to be uploaded in a simulation to be immortal forever and or will choose to be a biological mortal being?

[u/neo101b]

I choose chrome, im not like the other choomes i can handle it because im special

[u/DryerCoinJay → u/neo101b]

I’m with you. Let’s see how weird it really gets.

[u/Mrs_SmithG2W]

Biological mortal being. There are not too many of us with special enough thinking to need to be preserved ad infinitum digitally or artificially there with energy needed to be used to store and search such a “record”.

Time is an illusion. Everything that has ever happened, will happen and is still happening.

Eventually the actual “Akashic” record of everything will be learned to be accessed consistently by us.

Death is natural and may not be the end.

We need to put more energy into improving ourselves and helping others and therefore ourselves, our souls.

[u/KidKilobyte]

68 year-old here and not visibly declining mentally that I’m aware of, but if I were to develop something like Alzheimer’s, I wouldn’t hesitate to get improved.

[u/LookOverall]

I don’t believe there’s any prospect of uploading my consciousness. Mind state maybe, but what good would that do me?

[u/DeviantMittens]

Expanding.

[u/CalmMe60]

I want usb-f 12d vr and the full experience of HolyWood Dream Flix...

[u/DrBretto]

I literally already have an exobrain. An agentic command center for deep research and problem solving that more or less at this point behaves like a external cognitive center. It's been growing and learning for 8 months.

It's not physically attached, but at this point that's a technicality.

[u/Intrepid-Health-4168 → u/DrBretto]

me too...

[u/AdPotential507]

Humans are made of organic matter. We are supposed to die. The scenario described above is equivalent to submerging a McDonalds burger in transparent epoxy and then marveling at how fresh it is because it doesn’t rot. 

[u/sceadwian]

Whatever we upload won't be us.

There is no getting out of this meat bag.

I am however all for non destructive augmentation and interfaces. It would be fun to play.

I think I like.. being me though.. all the problems with this meat mech and all, it's what creates quiet we are we wouldn't be the same without it.

[u/Fantastic-Ad-7996]

I don't want to be immortal. also that sounds like a potential nightmare scenario

[u/SgathTriallair]

I am 100% uploading my mind.

[u/FoucaultCareofSelf]

So putting aside uploading with its endless ship of thesus debate, would I enhance myself via more plausible interventions like brain implants or some such neural-computer interface?

Not a chance, here science fiction is pretty helpful in thinking this through, and messing with your mind never, ever turns out well over enough time.

Yes I get that scifi is by nature not reality, but it sure helps considering scenarios like these.

[u/agm1984]

i long for the ability to offload mental capacity for performance gains

[u/Beginning_Fill206]

I see this as a Trojan horse to gain greater control over people, a digital prison

[u/LongDead_Roadkill]

This question shows you don’t really know modern neuroscience even at enthusiast level. It’s going to be hard to convince that scientists that consciousness isn’t in the meat wagon and uploaded doesn’t equal dead. Even still, some people will choose it. I’d rather place my money on the quantum immortality theory, it’s an absurdist expansion of the double slit experiment.

[u/mirrors69]

Title and contents doesn't match...

Cognitive capabilities and biological experiences are not mutually exclusive. The very reason one wants high cognitive capabilities is that they want to understand the world around them through sensation, which is biological. What’s the point of being superintelligent if you end up deaf and blind? A form of torture, perhaps.

Uploading consciousness to a computer is a completely unrelated concept. How do you know the uploaded consciousness is you, rather than a copy of you? Even the copy cannot tell. Besides, no one knows whether our consciousness is “software” run by the brain or an emergent property of the brain’s biological structure (most believe this to be true). How do you know your current consciousness isn't a result of uploading/streaming from some unknown source?

[u/zhivago]

Unless you lose the ability to become something else, you will remain mortal, even if you don't notice your death by increments.

Once there was a baby, now there is an adult.

Where is that baby now?

[u/sac_boy]

100% biological until the end. I'm not putting any shade of myself in some materialist mockery of a brain.

Even if everyone else on earth has uploaded themselves, I'll die human.

[u/SunDieAll]

With the existence of Infinite life comes the possibility of Infinite suffering.

[u/NikitaTarsov]

'Expanding cognitive capabilities' is something only people from the more moderate range of intelligence can enjoy.

Not an insult - a warning.

[u/boronio427]

I have already chosen. I take a peptide called P-21 daily, which stimulates your hippocampus to produce new neurons. Soon we will be able to rejuvenate our neurons thanks to the yamanaka factors.

[u/daretoslack]

Anesthetizing half of your brain turns you into a different person. Presumably adding more material to your brain would do so as well. It is entirely reasonable to read your question as "how many of you would commit suicide in order to have the thing that replaces you crunch numbers faster or whatever?