From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Tue Nov 02 1999 - 18:30:20 MST
On Tue, 2 Nov 1999 hal@finney.org wrote:
> Billy Brown writes:
>
> > If primitive sentient life has value then allowing primitives to die
> > while they struggle towards understanding is immoral.
>
> The next step in this slippery slope is to say that the aliens are here,
> silently monitoring us, but as each person dies they take a snapshot of
> his brain state and take him off to live a new life elsewhere, one free
> of trouble and pain, until they can be rejoined with their loved ones.
>
Hal, what a great idea!! So the SIs can run the experiment untroubled
by the moral implications that allowing information to decay into
dust violates the commonly accepted standards of "Mind Ethics".
All they require is sufficient storage for the offline copies.
That of course raises an interesting question -- with a saved
mind copy, you may be obligated to "preserve" it, but are you
obligated to "run" it?
Robert
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