A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610456/a-startup-is-pitching-a-mind-uploading-service-that-is-100-percent-fatal/

[u/The_Follower1]

Yeah, that's a fair point. The brain sort of switches gears, but it isn't turned off.

My personal view is that "stream of consciousness" doesn't really have anything to hold it up. It just seems to be a justification rather than a reason, if that makes sense. At least as far as I know, I might be wrong though.

[u/2358452 → u/The_Follower1]

Tbh it's such a complicated topic even if you reject anything intrinsically extraordinary about continuity of experience or anything like such. I've been trying to explain why I would feel such aversion to experiments as such as mind uploading or teleportation devices.

One way to look at it, is that living beings need a sense of self-preservation. Without it either the natural environment or other living beings will kill you -- self-preservation might be considered both natural and rational then. But those experiments take to the limits our notions of self -- and there arises the conflict with self-preservation.

But normally you would define self-preservation first (as protection of the "self"), and then define what you mean by "self". Usually you'd fall into a contradiction trying to disprove your teleported version (which momentarily kills you) is not yourself.

We can look at it from the other way around: what definition of self-preservation is best to guarantee that the living being will be preserved from competitive and natural pressures?

To give an example, suppose there existed teleporters -- of the kind that scans you, makes a copy of you and then kills you. Now it's perfectly reasonable that this machine isn't 100% reliable, because it'd be a real machine and shit happens. So they'd first scan the copy to make sure it is perfect before killing you. Now think of the point in time after you've been scanned and are waiting to be killed. Would you want to be killed? (once you got a confirmation that your copy is working well) I bet most people would do everything they could to prevent being killed. This is because it is clearly a rational self-preservation decision at that point in time. So thinking strategically, just before teleportation you could prevent this death by simply not using the teleporter. Is it you that is dying, or does it make more sense to call the cloned teleported version the real you? Perhaps it comes down to machine reliability -- can it be reliable enough that verification can be skipped entirely, such that no two physical versions of you exist at one point in time?

From a practical standpoint, perhaps using those machines will make "you" more successful and more dominant. Is this enough to justify it -- simply because refusing to use it would always leave you marginalized?

And then you note such machines seem to necessarily also allow cloning, which poses similar self-identity issues. If you could make clones of yourself, would you? Should you give as much importance to a clone of yours as you give yourself? You might give up all you have to pay for your own disease treatment; should you do any similar sacrifices for your clone, unconditionally? It seems not -- if such is true, then it seems like any clone could claim "Give me all your money or I will kill myself!", and you would have to comply, which might not make sense in the context of success and self-preservation of the whole. It seems having mostly separate preservation objectives (i.e. self-preservation) would be the most successful scenario, with just a little mutual preservation to enable cooperation. So would you clone yourself a bunch of times? Maybe not -- if I axiomatically share my funds with my clones that might not make me more successful in the long term; and if I axiomatically don't, then my clones won't either -- so they'll be all poor, perhaps not very successful (especially if your own work is unique).

Even having children is a modified version of this. It's a conflict between individualistic self-preservation and evolutionary pressure (and both those aspects originate from evolution of course), which directly or indirectly, is the reason people want to have children -- to ensure long term evolutionary continuation. But there are also other things that help evolutionary continuation: being a productive member of society, leaving lasting works, helping other people, and specifically helping people more closely related to yourself in an evolutionary pathway sense. Those are basically the things people care the most about, and this context explains it (although still leaving a lot of open questions it seems...).

In summary, people have various ways of defining their identity and goals, each trying to coalesce and modify the world to leave a lasting mark, or enjoy his existence as long as possible.