From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Tue Apr 30 2002 - 14:14:25 MDT
Dossy wrote:
> How will you know that you've actually awoken from cryo-sleep?
>
> In other words, when you're finally resuscitated, will it matter to
> you if you woke up in your original body? What if you wake up in
> a different body? How will you know you really "woke up" at all
> and really weren't just uploaded into some kind of reality
> simulator and that you'll never have a physical body ever again?
>
> Does this matter? Should it matter?
>
> "What if you were a brain in a vat ..."
This almost exactly duplicates Descartes' infamous musing. If you were
uploaded into a VR that *perfectly* replicated your current reality, in
a way that you did not remember the upload, then no, it would not
matter: by definition, there would be no difference to you. The nagging
suspicion that it might matter comes from the insistence on perfection
here: we intuitively know that, no matter what we may rationalize,
replications (at least from non-digital states like "reality as we now
know it") are actually rarely perfect, even if done by very clever
people assisted by the best of modern technology (and thus, one suspects
despite all rationalization, replications made by even very advanced SIs
would suffer from the same limitation in practice), that one state can
often be told from another...and in that difference, is what matters.
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