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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2879 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 2, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Nota bene: I am old. You will get different perspectives on this.

That is by far the biggest downside of a baseline human body, and why I don't want to be stuck in one even if I like mine.

It will, despite our best medicines, decay and fail you. Maybe our drugs and treatments will get better, and we can keep people healthy indefinitely. But even then, I want things that no human body constrained by biology will be able to provide.

I'm not physically decrepit. Well, not yet. When I say old I mean mainly my perspective is different from that of the generation that grew up online.

Edit: As for the remainder of your comment, I'm at a loss. The human condition is its frailty and finitude. The Gift of Men, as Tolkien wrote.

If someone is that greatly attached to their frailty and finitude, then who am I to object? I won't, as long as they don't get in the way of me escaping mine.

There are plenty of aspects of the "human condition" that were ubiquitous and seemingly unavoidable for all of human history till they were not. I don't think most people miss 50% infant mortality rates, or heart attacks being inevitable death. They're not going to miss old age either, and if they really want that experience for themselves, that's their prerogative.

For what it's worth, the human condition seems to be a consistent trend of overcoming how awful said condition could be at times.

Imagine that tomorrow we perfect mind-upload. Your entire brain, and with it your identity and memories get cloned into an AI. You get to meet the AI, it’s really you. But the physical you, the meat you, still exists. The AI is a clone. I presume there would be no need to kill yourself, but would you no really longer have fear of death in your physical body? I doubt it. The thing about us living forever is that even if it happens in your lifetime, it probably won’t be ‘you’ living forever.

False premise, this isn't perfect mind upload.

The state of the art in sci-fi, last time I checked, was that you stay conscious as they disconnect your brain cells one by one (or some small enough increment) and replace them with the artificial ones, slowly so that you can fill the gaps in your memories back in Ship of Theseus style and have no doubt you're staying yourself.

Imagine if it was perfect mind upload, and you find yourself back in your meat body after the mind upload is complete. You can kill yourself, but you have to do it yourself. Now answer the question.

You been playing soma recently?

SOMA is one of those Muggle Plots that immediately gets solved once you accept the pattern theory of identity.

Literally just put the original in dreamless sleep before making the copy (shouldn't be hard since the original is already an upload; just pause the hardware!), make the copy, and then destroy the original without waking it up.

Before the process, there was one of you in the old body. After the process, there is one of you in the new substrate, which is what we wanted. No one had to experience being left behind. No need for an existential crisis; it is now no different than the Star Trek transporter disassembling your atoms, beaming the information over, and re-assembling you out of new atoms at the target location.

EDIT: Original post defining the term.

This is raised in-game. That's why there's a suicide cult who kill themselves as soon as they're uploaded and why you have to choose if you're going to mercy-kill your unconscious original before you go down into the abyss. It's mostly played for tragedy because the original is a perfectly healthy human being who kills themselves or gets murdered, and is essentially thrown away like garbage. The existence of a happy, healthy copy doesn't magically turn scanning someone's brain into a transfer of consciousness rather than the creation of one life and destruction of another.

In terms of the game, you're stuck playing through the memories of abyss-Simon. You get to play through the experiences of car-crash Simon and woke-up-under-the-sea Simon because those got copied over and now form part of abyss-Simon's memories. The appearance of transferring between them is pure illusion - you possess their memories but you were never either of them. There's no process on earth that can transfer you into the mind of ark-Simon because there's no process that can transfer you into anyone's mind.

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