From: Dickey, Michael F (michael_f_dickey@groton.pfizer.com)
Date: Tue Oct 29 2002 - 13:16:26 MST
-----Original Message-----
From: gts [mailto:gts@optexinc.com]
Eugen Leitl wrote:
> I am an upload, and maintain an incremental backup which is up to
> date within biological chronon (currently some 10 ms). I step up to
> a nuke in person, and detonate it. My hardware is destroyed within
> ms, and the remote backup is being instantly instantiated. What I see
> subjectively is that I'm teleported to a new location. No bifurcation
> had time to occur. I'm happy that I have kept a backup.
"Yes, I can agree. The key is that no bifurcation had time to occur, so
there is no disparity in self/identity/personality. For the moment I'll take
your word for it that a 10 ms biological chronon is a sufficiently short
time interval (in my own arguments along these lines I used Planck Time,
which as you know is of much shorter duration)."
As I have acknowledged as well, since time itself does not exist at any
increment shorter than the Planck Time, then the universe can be thought of
as being destroyed and re-created from every instant to the next. However,
the question remains important, is the entire universe is destroyed and
recreated simultaneously or is each part of it destroyed and recreated on
its own planck-time schedule. If the former were the case, I would not
object to a teleporter that scans, destroys, and copies me in the interval
the plank time, as this happens all the time anyway. If the latter was the
case, I would object, since at any given interval of time the vast majority
of the things that made up my pattern were present at the instant before.
If the scanner copier was not operating at planck time intervals, I would
object. In Eugen's case mentioned above, even at 10 ms the, the atoms that
make up your pattern were dissassembled and that pattern was imprinted to a
new group of atoms. This is still not a subjective continuation of you,
since if you were not destroyed, you and the copy would experience different
things, and this if a far greater time scale than the plank length.
> I am an upload, and maintain an incremental backup which is
> up to date within biological chronon. Somebody severes the link
> to the archive, tortures me for an hour, and then kills me. The remote
> backup is being instantiated as soon as the link is severed (or after
> an hour, or two megayears). While I'm screaming and bleeding virtual
> blood all the way to /dev/null the new instance of me perceives to be
> teleported after the link has been severed (whew! it heaves a virtual
> sigh).The new instance of me which has forked of (and thus is no longer
> me) has no idea what is happening to me. All it knows is that it got
> reactivated at some point when the link broke down. While I certainly
> wish I was in its place this doesn't currently help me with the current
> predilection.
"Excellent illustration."
Eugen and GTS, would you not prefer, given the conditions I have outlined,
to instead have your conscioussness distributed in realtime amongst multiple
entities? Just as I have outlined, if that vast majority of the things that
make up your pattern were part of the same group that made it up the instant
before, I believe it logical to consider it a continuation of you. Given
that, one may replace ones nuerons one at a time with silicon equivalents,
over a length of time being uploaded AND maintaining subjective continuity.
Once uploaded, one could start spreading his computational parts to other
groups of atoms, one small part at a time. If my consciousness were
distributed amongst, say, 1 million equally powerfull computers, at any
given time one of them only containing 1 millionth of my concioussness, then
the loss of 1 would not amount to the loss of anymore than 1 millionth of
myself.
Instead of making continuous backups of yourself, store your concioussness
amongst distributed systems, and then interact with the world as a physical
representation of yourself. That representation, which is controlled by you
and transits all sensory experience to you, would be the one tortured.
To clarify, nothing I have outlined is incompatable with the common
extropian themes of 'uploading' 'copying' and 'backups'. Except what I
outline ensures is that you are indeed present from one moment to the next,
instead of just a copy of you.
Michael
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