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Dying is concerning. Like other panicked easy marks, I'm signed up for cryonics. Although I think it's very unlikely to work - call it a 1% chance - it still beats the baseline.
I engage in moderately risky activities and if my death occurs in the next 5-ish years it will almost certainly be due to an accident. Most scenarios kill or incapacitate me from meaningful decision making outright. Some don't, however, and it's possible that I could be mortally injured while retaining my basic decision making abilities.
Assuming that I find myself in one of these's rare scenarios, let's say I'm offered a choice. Without emergency treatment I will die. This treatment has an around 20% chance of causing significant additional damage to my brain. Damage that could not be undone even under best sci-fi medical advancements should the cryonics process work. Even with the treatment I have suffered irrevocable damage and it's unknown if it may be progressive.
My instinct is to request that doctors treat me as if I had died in the accident and begin the cryonics process in as controlled and ideal fashion as possible. I know that in practice that's a request that's unlikely to be granted, I'm just not sure if it would be the right choice.
Would you make the same decision? Should anyone be allowed to make that kind of trade-off with the assistance of medical staff?
For me, cryonics is yet another attempt to fill the God-shaped hole in society. You need to learn to accept your mortality; even if cryonics worked freezing yourself wouldn't save you from a bullet or a skydiving accident or anything else.
That said, I'd put your chances at far, far less than 1%. Most cryogenic places have trouble simply avoiding going bankrupt, and even those that stay afloat seem wildly mismanaged and/or incompetent. Best case your head will be frozen to a bunch of tuna cans like Ted Williams.
Well, yeah. For me at least it's explicitly about filling the God-shaped hole in reality. If I thought religion could credibly - even at very low probability, like cryonics - offer a path to immortality, I'd take it. I very much want what religion is selling, there's just nothing it has in stock that can fulfill my order.
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Cryonics supporters aren't "not" accepting their mortality. They still understand it perfectly well. If a human being lives for 10,000 years, that is not technically immortality. Our current understanding of the laws of thermodynamics says that isn't possible. Maybe that'll change one day but it's highly unlikely because all the laws of thermodynamics are inevitable. There's only a certain amount of negentropy left available in the universe to perform physical computations with. But if today you will want to live one more day it's not far-fetched to think tomorrow you will also want to live one more day. That's proof by induction on the positive integers. I remember the article Chris Hallquist put out that caused people to raise some interesting objections to it, namely difficulties with the preservation of the of the brain after vitrification takes place. I don't know if that's been overcome or changed in recent years but I found it somewhat persuasive.
I don't know anything at all about the financial stability of these institutions, but yeah there's that as well.
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It's funny how you say "God-shaped hole", whereas it's clear you mean "immortality-shaped hole", for which God is the go-to plug. But it's much sillier than cryonics.
This is a very strange objection too. OK? How about not getting shot? Nothing is ever guaranteed but one can take reasonable precautions.
Even if you’re immortal, some people might still feel the presence of a God-shaped hole if they feel that their lives lack meaning.
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Why can't one have a zenned out acceptance of their own mortality while still choosing cryonics? Not being able to prevent all causes of death isn't an argument to not try to prevent some causes.
And what would you say about the God-shaped hole if the success rate was credibly discovered to be closer to 50%?
Because that's a lot of money to spend for a long shot at avoiding something you've supposedly accepted.
It wouldn't change my feelings on the matter at all if we found a 100% surefire way to achieve biological immortality tomorrow. Humans aren't meant to live forever in this fallen world, and those trying to circumvent death are trying to play God.
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I will "accept" my inevitable mortality at Heat Death, assuming we can't find a solution for that minor problem.
I genuinely cannot understand the drive to "accept" what might well be the worst possible thing to happen to you, personally, or the people you love. Death sucks, we should be doing everything possible to avoid it. If it's "inevitable", we should first begin by trying even harder to actually check if that's actually the case.
Is cryonics the optimal arrangement? Probably not. But we're not spending the majority of global GDP on curing aging, which is what a sensible civilization would be doing.
You can do quite a bit to reduce your risk of being shot or dying in a physical misadventure.
But the correct solution, in my humble opinion, is to push back even harder against death. We need to figure out a way to scan and upload human brains, alongside means of running our minds in-silico. Once that's an option, we can trivially ensure that nothing short of vacuum decay or the end of the universe poses a meaningful risk. That might not be the platonic ideal of immortality, but I'll take living so long that I need scientific notation as a decent consolation prize.
Sure, once you can reliably work miracles, then that's trivial.
Making a few hundred, thousand, billion or quadrillion copies and sending them to various parts of interstellar space on Von Neumann replicators isn't a "miracle" miracle. If you have the photos on your phone being synced to the cloud or saved in an offline backup, you're half-way there.
They really won't be able to kill all of us.
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Why is dying the worst thing to happen to you? Old people dying is what allows society to rejuvenate and science to progress. I can see why one person would want to live on, but I find it very hard to understand why you think we 'should be doing everything possible' to avoid something that is so good for our species.
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Only if you assume a priori that there is no afterlife, or even if there isn't, you assume that there are actual ways to significantly extend life or outright prevent death.
That's not cheating death, that's making a shitty copy of yourself but it isn't even you. How does that avoid death whatsoever?
Again, this is all madness caused by people who have rejected God and are trying to replace Him with themselves (or technology, or any number of substitutions). It is the destiny of all men to die, kings and vagabonds alike, and you cannot and will not escape it. Run from it, cry about it, rage against the dying of the light, squander your children's inheritance trying to defeat it, but you will always fail. And even worse, you'll make the life you do get to live worse by worrying needlessly about what you cannot change.
In your post a few weeks ago you talked about how you oneshotted yourself with an AI image of what your children could have looked like. Even from a purely secular point of view, children are the preferred method of achieving immortality for most of history. If you want immortality, have a big family. That option is closed off to me due to infertility, but I've made peace with that. But instead of chasing useless pipedreams of immortality, do something that will leave your indelible mark on the future of the world.
These are pretty reasonable assumptions to make. Besides, as a doctor, my job usually involves extending life or preventing death. We could do better at it, but that's an engineering challenge, not a logical impossibility.
It's not that I "assume" such things, but rather that no life after death is the null hypothesis, and religious thinking to the contrary is hardly convincing. We might all reincarnate as Boltzmann Brains after eons, but I still prefer concrete, present-day solutions.
And why exactly would it have to be a "shitty" copy? The human body, including the human brain, runs on the laws of physics. The laws of physics can be simulated on a computer to arbitrary accuracy. A game of chess is still a game of chess, all relevant parameters are conserved whether using wood, plastic or bits. No reason we can't say the same for human brains.
My conception of personal identity is pretty flexible, but it is in no way stretched beyond breaking point by the notion that a digital copy of me is - for my purposes - interchangeable with me. In many aspects, it's nothing but a straight upgrade. If I want to be stronger, faster, more durable, more intelligent, it helps to be an entity in-silico rather than a meat computer.
I mean, all well and good, but your attempt to convince me that I'm making unreasonable assumptions is rather undercut by the fact that you're making far bigger ones. God is a really poor candidate for ontological simplicity, and even worse as health insurance.
Like, the reasons to believe in your God are not very convincing, and even I concede that we might be unavoidably hard-capped by ever diminishing supply of negentropy in the universe. If he's real, and also timeless, I'm sure he won't mind if he was to wait a few quadrillion years for my immortal soul as opposed to this century. Since Christians believe in medical care and extending healthy lifespan, there are no downsides I can see.
Having children is better than nothing, when it comes to leaving your mark on the world. But it is still a pale imitation of actually staying alive and healthy to tell people about it. I do intend to have kids, and I'm sorry to hear about your fertility issues. But doesn't change the fact that my kids would also like to have me around too. When I talk about life extension, it's not just me being selfish, but thinking about my parents, and my grandfather, and all the other humans alive who would like to keep on being with their loved ones.
I am rather familiar with the technical challenges of human life extension. When I claim that it is possible, I can only hope it is a semi-informed claim. This is not at odds with it being incredibly difficult, which it is. Difficult isn't insurmountable, we went to the moon and will be back. That was as much of a "pipe dream" for almost as much of recorded human history.
It was the destiny of all men to experience half of their children dying before adulthood. You couldn't save them, whether you were a king or a pauper. And yet, look at us today. Soon, any death might well be the same kind of tragedy that is the passing of a child. We can all live for so much.
Okay, thought experiment time. Let's say some friendly aliens drop by and they can do this. They produce a digital copy that is 100% identical to your brain state at the time they created it. Total fidelity. "Look!" they say, "this is you! Now step into the disintegration chamber, we'll just dispose of this meat body and leave digital you the only existing entity".
Would you do it? Would you really think "well sure, fine, me in this body being killed isn't any big deal, digital copy me is just as good" or would you go "hang on, that's going to kill me! That copy exists alongside me but isn't me!"
Third option:
Object, on the grounds that I see no good reason for the biological me to be killed right away.
Both the copy of myself and the original are just as valid. Killing even one of them for no good reason is murder, and I would be just as pissed about it if my perfect clone was going in the bin, and since he's also a perfect clone of me, he would object vociferously to my death.
I can only presume that super advanced aliens are a stand-in for something like destructive mind uploading, where the brain is... destroyed in the process of mind uploading. Like digitizing a shitty paperback without caring too hard about keeping the spine of the original intact. At that point, the "murder" is no longer murder, because there was simply no choice - bio-SMH (unless biologically immortal) will die without undergoing the procedure, and likely soon, which is why he'd sign up for that process. That would be a sad fact about engineering limitations, rather than sadistic aliens trying to make a point about personal identity.
As a matter of fact, I might even prefer that my perfect digital clone be the one saved in my place. He can copy himself on a hard-drive a few times to make up for the loss. Bio me just isn't that lucky or as durable, and is already limited by the tyranny of biology.
The point about the perfect copy and you both existing, before you are at the point of death, is that the perfect copy is a copy and not you. It is not the continuation of personality and experience of the biological you, as there is continuity between the sleeping you of last night and the waking you of today and the you of tomorrow. So if it is murder to kill you once the copy is made, then even if the copy is made when you are on the point of biological death and can no longer continue to be kept alive because you are too sick, injured, or aged to remain alive, then that copy is not continuation of you, the dying person. It's still a copy. Real you dies when your body and brain (and mind) dies, even if the copy thinks "okay, this is Me".
But I think there's little agreement between those who think a perfect copy is the same as them, and those who think the biological entity is them and a copy is only a copy.
This is begging the question. I mean, I'll grant that once the copy is made, the digital version and the biological version are not the same person, but that doesn't mean they can't have been the same person. From the perspective of the a-week-before-the-procedure SMH, he anticipates waking up to both sets of experiences.
Counter-thought-experiment: the aliens need to actually open up the skull, remove the brain, and do some very detailed but non-destructive inspections to make aforesaid digital copy, but they don't quite have enough mastery of human biological processes to put it back in. Instead they keep the brain in a life-support tank, feeding it exactly the sense data the digital copy would have received and treating the output the same way the digital copy's output would be. They also put the digital copy in a small computer that they put in the vacant brainspace, hook up to the body's nervous system, and seal the skull back up before waking the person. They don't tell people that they do this because they expect humans to act weird about it and don't think the distinction is relevant.
Which is the real person, the brain-in-a-jar that thinks it's a digital copy, or the computer-piloting-a-meat-body that thinks it's been scanned but otherwise unaffected?
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There’s people on the frontiers of whole brain emulation (WBE’s) already, but even they don’t seem to think a copy of you is a continuation of the present day you in the same sense that today is a continuation of the you of yesterday.
Your ontology of identity may be flexible, but that’s exactly what most people don’t want. They want a continuation of themselves for tomorrow that feels pretty much like today, only either extended perhaps in another added faculty of perception, or as a backstop or guarantee of their ordinary present day consciousness in case something (like death) happens to them.
This is why Buddhist and Hindu philosophy has never drawn or inspired any real attraction or attention from me, though I’ve read their religious texts. If I was someone in a past life, and even if the wheel of karma went on in both directions forever and there was something in me that never died, why would I care, if there’s no concrete mental and physical continuity between that life and my present life today? The two are causally disconnected. If it was me, it’s not me in any sense I regard as interesting or that I should care about. It’s about as meaningful as saying the person standing across from me is also me. I can’t see out of his eyes as well as my own. I can’t feel what he feels and I can’t think what he thinks.
I think John Polkinghorne was the only theologian I’ve ever read that made a case similar to this. Even as a Catholic myself, most of the arguments I’ve seen Christian philosophers make against transhumanism are incredibly weak.
Most people don’t consciously decide to have children because they want to extend their biological footprint into the future, although we know evolution programmed that drive into us for that specified purpose. But it’s incidental to our conscious processing. I want to have children because family is what I find meaningful and fulfilling. Hedonism is empty and a dead end and even if transhumanism could extend my life a million years into the future, lack of a family would still ultimately leave me feeling unsatisfied. Even in my life right now, I would never be in a relationship with someone who wouldn’t consider or has already decided against having a family of their own. That’s a completely worthless relationship as far as I’m concerned.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/reincarnation
This comic is perfect. I have as little truck with Buddhist/Hindu notions of reincarnation as I do for the Abrahamic belief in eternal life or the dead rising again. There is no real reason to believe in a soul, at least in a soul that does anything useful like carry across memories or personality, and even that would be insufficient.
This is the exact reason why a mind upload is the antithesis of reincarnation, and why I find the former so compelling and the latter so meaningless.
Most people really haven't thought very hard about the ontology of identity. Which is fine, it doesn't come up a lot in practical contexts between birth till someone issues a death certificate on your behalf.
I think this relies on a folk intuition about personal identity that, while comforting, doesn't stand up to scrutiny. What does "continuation" truly mean? You go to sleep every night, and for several hours, your continuous stream of consciousness ceases to exist. The "you" that wakes up is a reconstruction, a new instance of a pattern that has access to the memories stored in your brain from the previous day. We accept this without a second thought because the process is familiar and the fidelity is extremely high. The physical substrate is contiguous, but the conscious experience is not.
I will try and explain my personal understanding as best as I can:
This is the absolute core of it. Personal identity isn't a binary state of "me" vs "not me." It's a spectrum of informational fidelity. There is a threshold of similarity below which I no longer consider the entity to be a functional continuation of myself. A zygote has my DNA, but none of my memories or personality; it's a potential precursor, not me. A dementia-addled version is a degraded, corrupted file; the core data has been lost.
This is precisely where mind uploading comes in. The "continuation of themselves for tomorrow that feels pretty much like today" that you describe is simply what happens when the information loss between two points in time is negligible. You wake up, your brain's memory access is intact, the pattern is conserved, and so you "feel" like the same person.
A high-fidelity mind upload is designed to be the ultimate act of this conservation. It’s not a "copy" in the sense of a blurry photocopy but a photo taken with tomographic electron microscopy and {more speculation}. The goal is to capture the pattern with such precision that the informational difference between pre-scan bio-SMH and post-instantiation digital-SMH is far, far smaller than the difference between me today and me a year from now. And even if it wasn't that perfect, well, my essence is robust to minor perturbation. It's the major ones that kill the "me".
(In the limit:)
The digital version would wake up with a perfect, uninterrupted stream of my memories, feeling exactly as continuous as I do waking from a nap. It would remember typing this very comment. From its perspective, the transition would be seamless. To object to this on the grounds that the substrate changed from carbon to silicon is pure sentimentality - a preference for the original, increasingly faulty hardware over a superior, backed-up system running the exact same software.
The choice isn't between "the real you" and "a fake copy." The choice is between:
Given those options, the preference seems self-evident to me. It's the most robust way to guarantee a "continuation of yourself for tomorrow that feels pretty much like today," indefinitely.
We can grade proposed procedures by fidelity of memory, stability of values, and preservation of personal style. I have laid out elsewhere the sort of blinded behavioral and circuit-level tests I would want. If a method passes those with no more variance than I display across years, it counts. If it fails, it does not.
Caring is allowed to be indexical. I care about versions of me in proportion to their connectedness to this one. That is a sane policy even if you are conservative about what “counts.” It also recommends cooperation between forks, which solves the alleged problem where copies become rivals. They are far more natural allies than almost any other agent in the universe.
On the theology line: I appreciate Polkinghorne’s attempt to reconcile persistence with physicalism (I must admit I've only skimmed it), but I do not need it to ground my choices. From a secular starting point the null hypothesis is no afterlife, and the world hands us ordinary cases that already break naive essence talk. Neurons turnover. Sleep erases consciousness for hours. Anesthesia erases it for longer. Memory is reconstructive and highly lossy. Yet prudential concern flows across these gaps because causal structure and stored information persist. Uploads aim to preserve that structure more faithfully than biology eventually will.
We do not really disagree. Family is one of the big sources of value. The move I am making is not “replace family with silicon.” It is “keep the goods you care about for longer and more reliably.” My parents would like me around. I would like them around. My future kids would like both of those. Dying, in contrast, represents permanent separation. It is the end of both me and most of my dreams, and the connection I have with those I love.
This isn't selfish either. My grandfather is dying. He had a good life, it's hard to imagine better. He spent almost all of the last of his days surrounded by his kids and grandkids, loved and cherished even when there's so little of him left. I know that he will die without regrets, content in the knowledge that being a good person and doing all the right things paid off right until his body and mind decayed on him. He has long stated that he's old, and so very tired, and that death would be a relief.
No. I do not accept this wish, precisely because I love him. I do not love him selfishly, I would not hook him up to life support indefinitely while his organs, the brain being the most important, decay into ruin. I want him to be healthy, and happy, the kind man I once knew should stay. I can't save him, despite being a doctor. He couldn't save himself, despite being an even better one.
What I can only look forward to is the distinct possibility that this never happens to me, and that my kids and grandkids will have me around as long as they care to have me. Then I can tell them, with my recollection intact, just how much one old man really meant to me.
Longevity multiplies time available for the very commitments you name. Choosing survival is not hedonism. I want kids for a multitude of different reasons, and I very much intend to have them. I can fuck around with women without the intention of having kids, but every day, my desire to put a ring on someone and then have kids with them only grows stronger. It's probably better than even odds that I'll be married in a year or two.
I might as well tag @Rosencrantz2 and @HereAndGone, since this lengthy reply probably captures the answers to many of their questions.
Eh, I've always found SMBC to be a little too self-satisfied. As for memories, how much do you remember from when you were one year old? Or from when you were twelve? Every single day, not just a few highlights? And yet there is continuity of personality here. The idea of reincarnation is that the atman, the eternal part, the 'soul', has all the memories of past lives, it is the incarnation at this particular time does not remember (those past lives are like the early years of childhood).
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That comic is wonderful, :D. Thank you for sharing.
As a Catholic I take the soul as an article of faith. It hasn't been adduced or supported by any scientific evidence. It'll probably indefinitely stay contained within the realm of philosophy and theology at best. The trend of the evidence has been in one direction. I'm not sure uploading human consciousness is something to get anymore excited about than reincarnation though. With WBE's for instance, you could in theory simulate a brain up to behavioral isomorphism of all it's inputs and outputs. Provided it be fully scaled up in complexity with the brain it's emulating, it indeed would be every bit as real and just as complex as the brain. Neuron by neuron, atom for atom. But that's in the same sense I could say I have two water bottles sitting in the refrigerator. They are identical as far as their material constituents go even though the tetrahedral geometry of the arrangement of water molecules will differ. But in neither are they the same in the sense that taking a drink out of one of them will cause water in the other bottle to disappear. Which is the kind of thing people are asking for.
People can't think clearly about the ontology of identity a lot of the time because it isn't always clear how one should think of it. People's folk notions of it are incorrect as you said, but even we've been discussing it at the level of a folk notion that only approximates reality because it's easier for us to understand each other this way. When you dispel the idea of personal identity as one of human being's being made up of these persistent billiard balls bumping around but get used to thinking of it in terms of the ontology reality itself seems to use, the correct frame of mind is to think of identity the way it's described by Special Relativity, which is to say points in space-time that are related to each other causally. I'd push back on the idea that when we wake up, we can be thought of as waking up as a reconstruction of sorts. There's a physical continuity between the me right now and the me of one second ago. The me of one second ago isn't dead per se, but it no longer exists either. But my thinking on this issue I'll readily concede isn't completely clear to me. Science can definitively rule out a notion of personal identity that depends on your being composed of the 'same' atoms because modern physics has taken the concept of "same atom" and thrown it out the window. Subatomic particles themselves do not possess a sense of personal identity. It's completely, experimentally ruled out, which makes it difficult for anyone to speculate about where personal identity is located.
The brain doesn't exactly repeat itself. The state of your brain one second from now is not the state of your brain one second ago. The neural connections don't all change every second, but there are enough changes every second that the brain's state isn't cyclic, not over the course of a human lifetime. With every little fragment of memory new you lay down and every thought that pops in and out of short-term memory and everything that changes the visual field of your visual cortex, you ensure that you never repeat yourself exactly as before.
Over the course of a single second (not seven years, which people mistakenly think all the atoms in the body are replaced), the joint position of all the atoms in your brain will change far enough away from what it was before such that there's no overlap with the previous joint amplitude distribution. The brain doesn't repeat itself. In just a single second, you will end up being comprised of a completely different, non-overlapping volume of configuration space. And the quantum configuration space is the most fundamentally known reality, at least according to what our best physical theory says. Even if quantum mechanics turns out not to be truly fundamental and there's something deeper, it has already finished superseding the notion of individual particles.
And actually, the time for 'you' to be comprised of a completely different volume of configuration space is much less than a second. That time is the product of all the individual changes in your brain put together. It'll be less than a millisecond (even less than a femtosecond). And then there's the point to consider that the physically real amplitude distribution is over a configuration space of all the particles in the universe. 'You' are just a factored subspace of that distribution. This means that the idea that you can equate your personal continuity with the identity of any physically real constituent of your existence is false and any attempts to rehabilitate that folk conception of personal identity is a dead end. You are not the same 'you' because you are made of the same atoms. You have no overlap with the physical constituents of yourself from even one nanosecond ago. There is continuity of information, but not equality of parts. This is where I think personal identity will ultimately be located. The new factor over the subspace looks a lot like the old you and that isn't by coincidence because the flow of time is lawful.
Whatever makes you feel that your present is 'connected' to your past it has nothing to do with an identity of physically fundamental constituents over time (hence why I think the Eastern metaphysics of reincarnation is bullshit).
He's not the only one to do this. Peter van Inwagen attempted to do something similar at one point. I remember reading his books but I can't fully recall the details. The subset of Christian materialists is something that's caused me to raise an eyebrow and I've always found it interesting. You're correct that you don't need to buy Polkinghorne's thesis to explain personal identity. In fact I don't buy it at all. But if you're a non-denominational Christian or something of his particular stripe, you need what he's selling or something close to it to preserve personal identity in the classical sense, given what science says about it currently.
We very much do agree on what's important about family. The rest of your overall comment leaves me with some interesting things to consider and think about. I wouldn't want to respond prematurely on it.
Thank you, and I appreciate you taking the time to have this discussion.
I'm not as demanding as these people, but if they want a version of "continuity" that strict, they're likely out of luck. In a very important sense, I consider it a good thing that changes made to one copy of me won't necessarily affect the other. The whole point of making backups of me, or of one's wedding photos, is that damage or destruction to one won't delete the other.
You can, of course, achieve such ends far easier on a digital substrate. Google Photos does version control, it is also possible to provide exactly the same input to two digital copies of me. Assuming the hardware and software has error-correction, we should get indistinguishable outcomes. I just don't see this as all that important, my copies are not beholden to grow and develop in the exact same manner as the "original".
"Reconstruction" is a fuzzy word, so if it helps things, I would say it's analogous to putting a computer to sleep and rebooting it. Windows might update, the time on the clock might change, but for all practical purposes it is the same PC, even if it differs slightly when you zoom in very hard.
I can reasonably expect my pc to not change overnight. But in a year? Two years? Five? It might have had some/all it's components overhauled or replaced. At that point, the question of whether or not it's the "same" pc becomes arbitrary (or more arbitrary than it already was!), or at least context dependent. As long as it still has a valid Windows license, my files are still there etc, I'll call it my PC.
So it goes for the most personal of all computing platforms: myself.
Other than that, I agree with your claims regarding the physics of things.
As always, a pleasure, and if you want to continue our discussion when you have thought my claims over, I'll be around. While we'll likely never get on the same page about beliefs in a "soul", it's been enjoyable nonetheless.
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It could be that when physically embodied you dies, that releases the soul. Whatever digital copy has been made is only a recording, the same as a video (now) is a recording of image and voice but not the person. Or the AI emulations of people, I don't think it could be argued this is the real person still existing.
So the soul goes to the particular judgement, the silicon copy is just a dead thing - not alive, not ensouled, not a continuation of consciousness. I mean, we're getting into "is the soul the brain? is the soul the same thing as the mind? is the mind the brain?" questions here, and even if copies of the brain state can be made, is that the same thing as downloading the mind? And if we can download or transfer the mind, is that the same thing as the soul?
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Are you giving up on the possibility of actually experiencing this new entity yourself or do you think your consciousness can be transferred somehow?
If the former I see the value in building a really cool mech with your name on it but it seems tangential to the problem of personal death, if the latter I am interested in hearing why as it is hard to conceive of how that would work.
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From the perspective of dodging death, any copy is shitty, because it's a copy. None of the things that make death scary are alleviated by having one, and you never addeess the difference between prolonging your life and copying, or make an argument for why they should be treated interchangeably.
How would you feel if we could achieve a 1 to 1 The Prestige style copy where the copy believes they're the real one? I know hand waving getting there has real 'draw the rest of the owl' energy but I'm interested in your answer anyway.
Sounds horrifying? He'd love my wife as much as I do, be as attached to my entire life as much as I am, and think I'm the fake?
How doesn't this end with one of us dead, or feeling cucked for the rest his life?
I don't know if it's a mark of emotional health or the opposite, but I would love to have another me around the place. Like anyone, I spend lots of time in my own company anyway, I would expect me to understand me better and cooperate with me better than anyone.
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