From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu May 31 2001 - 22:01:44 MDT
At 08:22 PM 5/31/01 -0700, Hal wrote:
>So if you did ever find yourself an upload, would you have the same
>reluctance to have your program copied to a different computer? Would you
>worry that shutting down your program *here* and resuming it over *there*
>was actually a matter of killing the original?
Guess that's an empirical question nobody's in a position to answer yet.
It'd depend on the phenomenology of the situation, *from the inside*.
Perhaps an uploaded consciousness, to the extent he/she/se isn't an exactly
faithful emulation of an embodied human brain, will grow into a sort of
extended enotype, again *from the inside*.
Because of a developmental defect arising from a childhood ambylopia
repaired too late, I don't have depth visual perception. So I'm told the
world is flat to me (except for the evaluated cues of parallax,
differential and changing apparent sizes of invariants, etc.), but how
would I know? What would it be like for me if the relevant neural
structures were repaired and I were trained to see binocularly? Well, this
actually happened to David Chalmers, and it was interesting to read his
account of how the world became richer and thicker. Life for a disseminated
upload might be like that, and one couldn't bear the idea of going back to
the dreary restrictions of Cyclopean human consciousness...
Damien Broderick
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