CryoNet #32886 - #32888

CryoNet - Thu 30 Sep 2010

    #32886: "Survival" yet again [Ettinger]
    #32887: Re: Duplicates - who gets the bank account [John de Rivaz]
    #32888: Uploading [2Arcturus]

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Message #32886
From: [email protected]
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 05:36:22 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: "Survival" yet again

Brook Norton writes in part:
 
>We can "continue" (in large part, never 100% unchanged) but not  
"survive". And we can >"continue" as a corpse, as an upload, as a duplicate,  
whatever - all equal options as >continuers - but there are no survivors. And  so 
concern over which is the true way to >survive is misguided  concern.

Equal options? Surely not.
 
In my view, a survivor is a continuer. Continuers (in particular  your 
qualia) overlap each other in space and time, which allows partial  
identification of later and earlier versions, and we must settle for  that.  
 
The fact that duplicates or whatever would seem "as good as" to  outside 
observers is irrelevant.
 
Robert Ettinger
 



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Message #32887
From: "John de Rivaz" <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Duplicates - who gets the bank account
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 11:36:12 +0100

"Who gets the bank account" is an insoluble problem, just like trying to get an answer to "Do you enjoy beating your wife - yes or no" is an unanswerable question if the witness is compelled to tell the whole truth. All this really shows is that the logic behind the legal profession is incapable of solving some problems, as the divorce courts so ably demonstrate every day. In many ways, the divorce court has a very similar problem - they try to put the parties in the same position as if the marriage had not broken up -- clearly impossible. [The alternative of putting them in the same position as if it had not taken place is easy enough to work out, but for some reason best known to legislatures this is not used. A possible explanation that may occur to readers of this list is that it canno
 t yet include reversing the ageing that took place during the failed marriage, but as both people aged equally this may be a weak explanation.]

Another way of looking at problems is the religious way -- someone (preferably dead so they cannot be questioned) gets a revelation from God (whoever or whatever that is) and loads of followers down the ages who use this to try and lead exemplary lives. Sometimes people add to these revelations by having their own as well and linking them in - this works if they are believed, but many are not. I am not aware of religion providing a solution to the duplicates problem any better than the legal profession. Their answer to the divorce problem was to ban it, or at least make it very difficult. Probably this is how they would deal with the problem of duplicating people.

That leaves us with science - repeatable observations or experiments. But all we can do are "thought experiments". These are a bit more liberal than either law or religion, but they don't prove much. 

One way one might look at it is via the idea of feedback. If you tell someone how negative feedback improves the quality of the information coming out of an amplifier [send the signal through the amplifier and then subtract the difference between the input and the output divided by the gain, ie the error and feed that back to subtract from the input] that may well conclude that you are mad. It seems like going back through time to correct a mistake in life. Nevertheless it works if you get it right. If you conclude that people are ultimately information -- which is clearly what uploading and duplication does, then feedback considerations apply. The duplicates will conspire together against the duplicator to stop more being made. A time must come when the duplicator would be overwhelmed, le
 aving a finite number of duplicates. Come to think of it, I think this is the plot of a film or TV series, but can't recall the title.

-- 
Sincerely, John de Rivaz:  http://John.deRivaz.com for websites including
Cryonics Europe, Longevity Report, The Venturists, Porthtowan, Alec Harley
Reeves - inventor, Arthur Bowker - potter, de Rivaz genealogy,  Nomad .. and
more

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Message #32888
References: <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 15:18:41 -0700 (PDT)
From: 2Arcturus <[email protected]>
Subject: Uploading

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Well, by embodiment, I meant to include virtual bodies, which are bodies after 
all.
We seem well on our way to living in virtual reality - people work all day 
looking into one computer screen, then go home and spend all evening looking 
into another, television or computer, screen, for fun.
But for reasons that are too complicated to go in to here, I hope humanity 
always keeps one foot in the 'real world.' At a minimum, for virtual embodiment, 
that would mean the ability to sense and manipulate the external world.

Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2010 15:34:32 -0700
From: Edgar Swank - President <[email protected]>
Subject: Uploading

>>>Arcturus also wants to be reconstituted in a body of some kind and 
compares living inside a computer to locked-in syndrome. But living in a 
sufficiently rich virtual reality would not be like that at all. One 
could have any kind of virtual body one wanted, including any super 
powers one might imagine. I don't see any problem moving from the 
virtual reality to an advanced android or cyborg body. But I expect most 
people would choose the virtual reality, at least most of the time. 
Maybe there might be a requirement to spend some minimum time in the 
real world earning money to pay for upkeep on the computer hardware for 
the virtual reality. But one could still earn a living in the virtual 
reality, if it had a communication link to the outside, by doing various 
kinds of consulting, writing stories, etc.

-- 
Edgar W. Swank  <[email protected]>
President - American Cryonics Society
http://AmericanCryonics.org




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