>From: "john grigg" <starman125@hotmail.com>
>Subject: maintaining total integrity of self with teleportation and
>uploading.....
>Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 14:31:42 PST
>
Matt mjg223@is7.nyu.edu wrote:
>There's a chain of individuals: each fooled into believing he's all the
>one's who've passed before him. This is what I mean when I say
>'consciousness' is instantaneous. You're a sequence of instances, still
>frames, with the happenstance of memory the only connection between them.
>This is why death doesn't matter - you've already died an infinite number
>of times. You're being uploaded a trillion times a second.
>(end)>
I do see how in a sense the person I was especially ten or fifteen years
ago is mostly dead. The natural processes of human development cause
"death and rebirth" even within the lifecycle.
>
>Still, the Star Trek transporter analogy, or the one regarding uploading,
>do unnerve me. I do not want a perfect copy of myself from a second ago.
>I want me! Some would philosophically argue that it does not matter but
>for ME it does. I would want some sort of interdimensional conduit that
>would whisk me to another location rather then a molecular reconstruction.
As for uploading, I do not want merely a perfect softclone copy of myself
being made. I want ME. I suppose some sort of process where the matter in
my brain is converted to a pure energy form where it can still function as
my consciousness with no loss of self-integrity.
>
I will be one of those people who will wait a long time to be
convinced that uploading does more then kill and then perfectly reconstruct
the individual.<end quote>
Consider now the process of action. Whatever action you chose to take, even
the act of choice, occurs over a span of time. Thus, the actual act either
has not happened or else has already happened. From the view that you only
exist in some infinitesimal "present," there is no reason to act or not act.
If you mean by consciousness, some kind of process involving a system of
actions, results, feedback and correction resulting in a correct modeling of
reality, then you cannot really claim that you are conscious, as you are not
aware of the next future instant, and will never really be conscious of
anything. Thus, this line of analysis leads to complete nihilism, the
denial of consciousness, knowledge, etc.
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