From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Tue May 29 2001 - 23:34:19 MDT
In a message dated 5/30/2001 12:18:55 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
emlyn@one.net.au writes:
<< Hi Chris
I'm one of the uploading-squeamish types, who believes that a straight copy
will not be me in a critical sense. >>
That copy would be you, if the original was effectively dead (rotting corpses
don't count) and if the exact thoughts, prior to your demise, your sense of
self were contiguous to that copy, fright up until your consciousness was
lost and your memories obliterated. The contiguousness would be linear to
your personal, perception of conscious and being
Importantly, your copy could not in anyway be directly involved in your
demise, or participation, thereof. Your copy couldn't kill you, at the behest
of Dr. Evil, otherwise said copy is merely an excellent clone. So that sense
of personality and memory that we mammalian nervous systems produce, would
again, be the person that you were, immediately prior to your conking out-or
what's a Los Vegas for?
<<A lot of people come up with this idea, that drive to self preservation is a
relic of our evolutionary history. I'm sure it is, indeed... how could an
organism come through the natural selection process without it?>>
I suspect it is now in human evolutionary history, more then a mere relic of
adaptation. I believe that "life after death" whether a technological
process, or a religious fantasization, ends in likely, the same goal or hope.
That Goal is the elimination for the primary cause of grief, death. An
accident or physically, disabling disease are close, runners up, perhaps
exceeding death-loss-grief as a psycho-social effect. But the 800 kilo
Gorilla, in the human experience is death, and the reaction to it.
Give me but a place to upload, and I shall upload the Cosmos!
-Mitch
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