marvinthedog t1_iysujiw wrote on December 3, 2022 at 10:07 PM

Reply to comment by Candid-Register-6718 in Don't think you will make it to Longevity Escape Velocity? No worries: meet Nectome, the company promising to preserve your brain and memories. by Redvolition

Ah, I see.

>We simply do not know the context so we can’t know if it is important to have continuity or if the mind upload would be the same thing. And if it’s not the same thing maybe it’s better to just die and have body decompose back into nature and become reborn in the cycle of life this way.

For me, I can´t find any arguments to even assume that the upload, for all intents and purposes, wouldn´t be the same thing though. I would probably be to afraid to do it myself but only for the same reason people fear flying or taking the elevator, I would say.

What I have been reading about objective morality and value theory has really puzzled me lately though. I have for a long time thought it was a given that objective value/disvalue was directly proportional to how much pleasure/suffering consciousnesses experienced throughout all of time and space. But during the last couple of years I have come to realize that this doesn´t seem to be the general consensus. This is very puzzling to me :-P

Candid-Register-6718 t1_iyszdvs wrote on December 3, 2022 at 10:43 PM

As I see it things don’t exist on an exact scale where you can clearly separate one from the other.

But rather a continuous spectrum of existence where everything is connected as one thing but still has different aspects/ properties to it that contain enough information for us to differentiate.

A bit like a color spectrum where the color blue is not exactly defined and might be more of a dark purple to one person but most would still agree it’s a completely different color from yellow for example.

All this to say that in my personal opinion the mind upload would definitely be something different but you could say the same every moment when your mind or the particles that make up your body make even the slightest change. (Like a minimal change in hue could be classified as a different color)

The question is how much different it would be? I think it would be quite a difference since so much of what makes us human is anchored in our biological anatomy. Our imperfections and desires, social, biological or sexual they are very much a product of our physical bodies.

Would we try to keep them somehow or would the mind upload be like a perfect mind free of impulses and vices?

I agree that ethics is a very puzzling field. I have my own theory that might be a bit to long to elaborate here. But I must say that over all the judicial system is doing a surprisingly good job in having a nuanced and differentiated view on ethics, at least in theory. How we differentiate murder from manslaughter for example is quite an advanced level of logic, that I sometimes miss in other branches of Society.