From: Robin Hanson (hanson@econ.berkeley.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 15 1998 - 12:10:15 MDT
I think the whole premise of most of these endless uploading discussions
is ill conceived. They focus on the scenario where you have been ripped
from your current world and thrust into a future uploading sales room,
where the slick-talking salesperson is pitching their upload copying
service, and all you have to go on is some abstract philosophical
analysis of dozens of strange transformation scenarios, where in each
case you need to answer "but is it me?" It's Socrates in the Twilight Zone.
Come the day when you actually have such a choice to make, I don't think
such philosophy will matter much. You'll be embedded in a whole social
world to help inform your decision. You'll be able to talk to uploads
and their copies, and read articles about their experiences. You might
well know friends and relatives who've tried it. You'll have consumer
reports type evaluations. You'll have reasonable expectations about how
much fun it is to be an upload, how much pain they suffer, the economic
rewards possible to uploads, and the social penalties they suffer. And
you'll have a reasonable idea of the rewards and penalties to you from
creating such a creature.
Given all this context, I think the self-centered question "is it me?"
will fade relative to the parent's question "will the creature I create
have a good life?" How will I feel about creating such a creature, trading
off parental positives I feel against the trouble of being such a "parent",
and the costs this new creature might impose on the other creatures I've
created? Will it get along with its siblings or fight with them?
Will it take resources away from them, or provide them with needed supports?
Do I have to devote decades of my time to effort to "raise" this new
creature, or is a few days work enough? How much do I like being around
such creatures? Do then enhance my social world, or make it more trouble?
Given the range of feelings out there about the value of creating new
creatures, when the joy of a life outweighs the sorrows, how much we like
being around people like ourselves, even about "is it me?", it seems obvious
to me that *some* people will choose to be uploads. And given that some do,
I think that, using our best understanding of people and social systems,
we can say a lot about all these factors that will influence the choice to
"parent" an upload copy.
This seems like the interesting question to me: assuming many people
choose to make uploads and upload copies, what will life be like for such
uploads, and for those that don't choose to make copies? The answer to
this question will be a much better basis for choosing to make a copy than
"is it me?"
(I made an initial stab at such analysis years ago with my article
http://hanson.berkeley.edu/uploads.html, but there's lots more to do.)
Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/
RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884
140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-2627
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