Quote:
Originally Posted by JCurwen3
Uploading an existing consciousness might pose problems, but to my mind only due to the psychological hang ups involved in the possibly meaningless question "but will it still be me?". Get over that, and you're gold.
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Well, there are actually two different questions here. There's the question of identity—is it the same person or a copy? But there's also the question of what you personally will experience.
1. I use nondestructive nanoscanning to describe your brain down to the molecular level, and program a very powerful computer to simulate it and provide inputs via simulated senses, while you watch. You can talk with the computer and everything. Do you think that you will suddenly start experiencing the spectacle of your organic body through the lenses of the cybershell in place of the spectacle of the cybershell through your eyes? Or both simultaneously? Or the two in alternation?
2. If you think you'll still be seeing the cybershell, while the simulated you sees your organic body, then if I cut your throat, do you think you will experience a final cessation of consciousness, not followed by regaining consciousness in a cybershell?
3. If you think the cessation of consciousness for your organic brain will be terminal, does it make a difference if I cut your throat before I activate the cybershell, or even before I program it?
4. If not, does it make a difference if the destruction of your organic brain is extrinsic to the copying process, or a necessary part of it?
(Note that Ray Kurzweil has described a process of uploading that doesn't raise those issues, in which one set of neurons is destructively scanned and replaced with a simulation that is interfaced with your remaining brain, and then another, and then another, with information processing being shared between brain and simulation at every step but the first and the last, and with only tiny sets of neurons being lost at each step. See
The Singularity Is Near.)
Bill Stoddard