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[Catmeat]

m not trolling.
Heres my issue. You Borgs will be everywhere and so will your disgusting tech.
If we were given lands to stay mortal and able to die without fear of replication enslavement many of us will be content.
However you wont leave us alone.
You will want total control.
You will take our jobs, you will be a 'higher' caste and due to lack of biology you may even destroy the enviroment further.
I fear you. I fear the strength, the intelligence.
Life continues after death, why potentially extend the agonising wait?
Fear is never a good answer, there has to be a way where you can accept your death.

I will discontinue this. But do try remember that we are here.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Heres my issue. You Borgs will be everywhere and so will your disgusting tech.
If we were given lands to stay mortal and able to die without fear of replication enslavement many of us will be content.
However you wont leave us alone.
You will want total control.
You will take our jobs, you will be a 'higher' caste and due to lack of biology you may even destroy the enviroment further.
I fear you. I fear the strength, the intelligence.

I know, it's awesome right!

We have the best transcendence technology. Just the best. We're making deals. We're modifying your children. It's gonna be great.

[Rose]

Immortality must not come before we have infinite resources.

[Solifuge]

Heres my issue.

This reminds me a bit of some Stephen Hawking thing or other... I think it was this lecture. Run it through retro text-to-speech for the full effect. :Y

There is no time, to wait for Darwinian evolution, to make us more intelligent, and better natured. But we are now entering a new phase, of what might be called, self designed evolution, in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA. There is a project now on, to map the entire sequence of human DNA. It will cost a few billion dollars, but that is chicken feed, for a project of this importance. Once we have read the book of life, we will start writing in corrections. At first, these changes will be confined to the repair of genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy. These are controlled by single genes, and so are fairly easy to identify, and correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them, and work out the relations between them. Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression.

Laws will be passed, against genetic engineering with humans. But some people won't be able to resist the temptation, to improve human characteristics, such as size of memory, resistance to disease, and length of life. Once such super humans appear, there are going to be major political problems, with the unimproved humans, who won't be able to compete. Presumably, they will die out, or become unimportant. Instead, there will be a race of self-designing beings, who are improving themselves at an ever-increasing rate.

TL;DR - His argument was that, once self-designing is possible, people who choose not to tweak themselves will become "unimportant", which is Hawking-speak for "Vanilla Humans will keep on existing with the problems and joys they have now, while Self-Designing Humans will be so much improved that they'll be doing all the cool stuff of consequence."

I think it's important to respect the people who don't feel comfortable tweaking their own bods to get rid of some of the bad parts of our evolutionary nature. It's a totally valid life choice. In a world where fetal genes can be tweaked, it gets a little more tricky; say there were two parents of a developing fetus, who had a genetic disease that would make their life miserable, but was completely treatable with gene editing; if they choose not to treat their child, do we just respect the choice they've made no matter the suffering it brings to their unborn kid, or do we require things like that to be treated? In ways, it's like the Anti-Vaccine thing, right?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'm not saying we should kidnap all the world's children and have them raised in giant complexes controlled by AGI with no outside human contact in order to permanently snap the bonds of emotional irrationality and cultural bias, but I'm not saying we shouldn't either.

[hops]

I mean, I'm not saying that technology is always good, but there's no point in opposing advancement. You can kill an idea but sooner or later it will come up again. Take solar energy. It was invented for ages but was toppled by other forms of energy, but now it's resurfacing again. You can plunge humanity into a Second Dark Ages and turn everyone Amish, but sooner or later people will want science and technology again. Only an individual can choose to forgo the comforts of technology, not society.

And people shouldn't get special treatment just because they don't want to catch up. They have to prove that they can do as well as others without tools.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Once we can tweak our own genes or grow new brain-holders (bodies ), I'll be so glad. I'll finally carry out an EXPERIMENT, an ACTUAL EXPERIMENT, on my gender. No more speculation! Experimental data, observations, now!

This is doubly relevant to our discussion, because immortality-stuff and !!science!!.

m not trolling.
Heres my issue. You Borgs will be everywhere and so will your disgusting tech.
If we were given lands to stay mortal and able to die without fear of replication enslavement many of us will be content.
However you wont leave us alone.
You will want total control.
You will take our jobs, you will be a 'higher' caste and due to lack of biology you may even destroy the enviroment further.
I fear you. I fear the strength, the intelligence.
Life continues after death, why potentially extend the agonising wait?
Fear is never a good answer, there has to be a way where you can accept your death.

I will discontinue this. But do try remember that we are here.

Another hole in that goddamn boat analogy that I wish would stop being used in this line of discussion more and more: in the case of the boat, there's simply the argument of structure, where being "the same" hinges on a definition. Consciousness is a process acting within a medium; it does not hinge on the brain itself being the same.

Yes!

Same goes with the "unbroken chain of consciousness" argument, as well as the common refutation. Your brain does not stop when you sleep. Consciousness breaks, but there's still activity in the brain. At no point is your brain 100% "off". Hell, it's our definition of death, at least in the medical field.

Yes, but to the observer...

Suppose that I have an AI. It runs. I turn the computer off and back on. It runs.

Second scenario: I have an AI. It runs. I turn the computer off and move the data to another computer. I turn the new computer on. It runs.

To the individual, there is no way of distinguishing (directly) between sleep-breaks and death-breaks in your consciousness. Waking up after a new body is grown and your information put into its brain would... feel pretty much like waking up every morning, I guess.

[Starver]

grow new brain-holders (bodies )

Rest of the sentence aside (because it seems a common pattern with even basic Transhumanism, e.g. 2312, KSR), the big step is between 'brain-holder' and 'mind-holder'.

[forsaken1111]

Immortality must not come before we have infinite resources.

We have more resources than we could ever use in a reasonable amount of time right here in our solar system. We're just too busy fighting each other to go get them.

[hops]

So, should I actually make Futurepol?

[Bumber]

At what point does our consciousness cease to be? If it is a specific, finite point, then that is the "root of consciousness" of a person, which requires that such a thing even exist. Assuming it doesn't, then there can be no point where the person ceases to be in such a process. So such a process wouldn't erase the person, or replace them with a copy, or whatever.

Decision-point fallacy. "If there's no finite point at which a rich man can be said to have become poor, then he cannot become poor."

[forsaken1111]

The real problem is that the terms have no definition. What is rich? What is poor?

What is me? At what point between the spectrum me and you do I become you, if some effect were slowly transforming me into you?

It's almost meaningless, because we don't even know exactly what we are. Almost certainly we are simply an emergent property of the brain processing information, but since we cannot define 'me-ness' we cannot say at what point the 'me-ness' stops. I'm not even convinced that the distinction is meaningful. What, really, is the difference between a biological computer and an electronic one if they give the same response to stimuli? If you receive the same output to all input, they are functionally identical so the only argument over the difference would be a spiritual one, which is an argument nobody can win because there is no proof such a thing even exists.

It is my opinion that the thing which makes you 'you' is the unique interactions only you are capable of. Only you will react a certain way to a certain thing. A computer simulating your brain perfectly would react the same way to the same thing, and thus is also 'you'. A simulation running independent of your brain will eventually diverge from 'you' and become a different 'you' if it receives different stimulus and input, just the way two identical twins diverge if raised in different settings.

[Max™]

You are a transient feature whereupon the worldlines of a large number of particles formed a long interwoven structure capable of observing itself, but unable to directly view more than a single slice of that structure at once.

You are not the you that was there a second ago, that you is still over there towards the big bang.

These structures often interact with other such structures, spawning new ones at times, dismantling and incorporating others into their extended structure.

Early forms of these structures were able to extend a similar structure into regions of time further away from the bright point than their own earliest edge.

Structures which can do this pop up here and there, but ones which are able to extend more offshots towards the dark empty at the far end of time are able to at least briefly divert some of the general reduction of order as you look from bright point to the dark empty, leading to sections of spacetime with massively interwoven and linked arrays of structures.

A few of those structures were able to spread further due to a basic ability to consider individual slices of their own structure.

A much smaller portion were able to consider their own ability to consider sections of their spatiotemporal extent.

For some reason they like to assign a sense of importance to the particular slice they are studying, though they do this with all slices they view, so it is only the change in the structure which allowed it to pass some of that sense of import downstream to other slices.



[You]
"Wow, I am here now."

[You][You]
"WWooww, II aamm hheerree nnooww."

[You][You][You]
"WWWooowww, III aaammm hhheeerrrree nnnooowww."

[forsaken1111]

What's really amusing is that some of those transient structures have anxiety over the strands of protein filament on their heads and hope other structures will find the arrangement of said strands pleasing.

[TempAcc]

Its not my fault your protein filaments are butt ugly.