From: Chris Ledwith (chris.ledwith@gte.net)
Date: Tue May 29 2001 - 20:38:31 MDT
Hi,
I am new to this list but I've been aware of transhumanism for
nearly a year now, and have been slowly adding it to my worldview.
I've been thinking about the subject of uploading, and the
reluctance of many on this list to destroy themselves after the
superior copy is made. At first I had the same feelings. But after
giving it much thought, my question is, why? It seems to me that
this desire to preserve oneself is an unfortunate hang-up in our
programming (survival is so heavily integrated into our experience of
consciousness, perhaps because consciousness rose out of the
survival instinct and environmental pressures of pre-history). But
this hang-up ought to be capable of overcoming by people as
forward-thinking as many of you are. After all, some are proposing
the deletion of certain emotions or attitudes that they feel are
limitations they've acquired either genetically or environmentally, so
why is this any different? I mean, how could ingesting a suicide pill
and then taking a nap not be considered a valid option, since the
copy (which for all intents and purposes is you; or rather, you have
no more intrinsic value than your copy; calling the other a 'copy' is
purely incidental really) will carry on in your absence with all the
same characteristics, and achieve all the same things, or much
greater. In other words, SO WHAT if it's NOT you; it IS you -- this
is something our minds have trouble accepting since there's no
precedent for such thinking. Now, in my view, this is very different
from committing suicide in the present -- suicide, in the old sense
(pre-upload technology) is something I would never do, even though
I don't fear death. However, knowing that a being which is 'exactly
me' would carry on seems sufficient to me to end my own
existence. And why shouldn't it? I will feel no pain, no sense of
loss, if I am say, in the middle of a nap when the pill does its work.
Even if I'm wide awake as I die, the experience of death would only
last an instant and then that experience would be lost forever
anyhow.
-Chris L.
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