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[That Wolf]

Why are many of you afraid of death?
Computer and robotic bodys decay and require maintanence, your data will more than likely become corrupt and you will get robot dementia.
You also lose much of the experiences and awareness of life by becoming a computer.
Its not much of a life, just accept your death.

Consciousness is not your mind or memorys, it is not your intellegence or feelings.
It is simply being aware. Like watching a video and just taking it in for what it is with no thoughts attached.
Its watching a cat but not wondering why its got claws, or why it likes milk.
Achiving this fleeting state (more like removing the objects in your way) is quite fufilling and enlightining for lack of a better word.
It in no way does it make you happy or pleased, it just is (for me at least).

LordBucket. Whats your answers if I ask you the questions you asked?

[LordBucket]

LordBucket. Whats your answers if I ask you the questions you asked?

To the Ship of Theseus question?

I think it depends on the nature of time, which unfortunately I have a very limited view of. I suspect that continuity of consciousness is an illusion resulting from memory, and that human perception of time is limited in such a way that we tend to have very incorrect ideas about our nature.

English grammar doesn't handle non-linear time very well, but to try to explain...that which we might call "you right now" and "you two seconds ago" are both discrete entities. The "experience" of "you two seconds ago" is/was being observed just as you right now are observing your experience right now. Just because the you of right now is unable to directly observe the experience of you of two seconds ago doesn't mean that the you of two seconds ago isn't/wasn't also being observed. Each of those yous exist. There is no was or will be to it. The consciousness of "you of two seconds ago" doesn't go away just because "you right now" is conscious any more than you right now would not exist just because there "will be" a you-two-seconds-from-now.

As such, every Planck-time-length instance of the ship throughout its existence is actually a different ship. Every Planck-time-length instance of you and I throughout our entire existences are also different people. We just don't perceive ourselves-now and ourselves-two-seconds-ago as different entities because each of these entities only perceives "right now" and the right now that each of these entities perceives includes awareness of "memory of having been" other entities. But each of those entities was only ever itself.

For example, consider a story book. The entire book exists. Every page is a different page. Every "instant" of what's going on in the story all exists and reading page two doesn't make page one vanish. But if you were a character in that story, you wouldn't perceive what you were doing on page one as being a separate and distinct entity from what you're doing on page two. You would perceive them as sequential events that happened to a singular you. You on page two would "remember" what happened on page one. But page two was never page one.

I think that might be what's going on.

I would like to think that "ascension" is possible whereby all the pages of your life come to be collectively aware. But if so, then it would probably not be any of the individual pages changing, and "come to be" is probably a bad way of describing it. Rather the "sum total of your entire life" is a singular, conscious entity. There is no was or "will be" to it. It simply is a collective entity. Nothing more needs to be said to describe it.

At what point do pages in a book become a book? They collectively already are a book. People looking to "ascend" in the sense of the the "you in the right now" going or being or doing something different...I think that's not how it is. The ascended you, exists. It is the collective of all the instances of you just like the book is all the pages. But even that isn't the whole picture because what each of those instances of you perceives as  "you" are also collective entities. The book is composed of lots of pages, but each page is composed of lots of words. "You right now" are actually a network of separate entities experiencing themselves as a collective whole. As mentioned previously, "you" are composed of thoughts, feelings, emotion, a physical body with chemicals, etc. You could cut your brain out and put it in another body and that would probably work fine. Your brain perceives itself as a single entity too, but it's also a collective entity composed of lots of cells, and we could probably remove some of those cells and put them somewhere else and they'd work just fine too.

The "collective you" composed of all the time-instants of your entire life viewed as a single timeless entity is very likely also part of a larger network. Possibly the collective of the entire human race, for example. And that collective is probably also a component to a larger collective. And each of these components at all the various levels are more or less interchangeable just like your brain cells. Nothing particularly stopping a hypothetical bit of mind/soul stuff from another planet incarnating into a human body on Earth, for example. And if it did, what would you call the result? Would it be human? If you put a few human brain cells into a mouse brain, does that make it no longer a mouse? Because we can do that. Do "you" cease to be you when you learn something new? Does the ship cease to be the ship when we replace its pieces?

Thinking of "identity" as an immutable thing is I think kind of misunderstanding what is. Identity is a flexible phenomenon. We can perceive this particular group of cells and thoughts and memories we're experiencing right now and perceive it as "I." The collective that is humanity can perceive itself as "I." We can perceive an ocean wave as a single thing, even though it doesn't make any difference which particular water molecules comprise it, and we might not all look at the same wave and agree exactly where it ends and begins. You and me and Hugo and everyone else in this thread are discrete entities, but collectively together we are having this conversation and this conversation is also discrete entity unto itself.

An ascended being might look at the separate entities "you" and "me" talking to each other and perceive both of us as a single thing just like you probably tend to think of your brain as a single thing even though it's composed of different cells talking to each other.

What is and isn't "the ship" depends on where you look.

[i2amroy]

Why are many of you afraid of death?
Computer and robotic bodys decay and require maintanence, your data will more than likely become corrupt and you will get robot dementia.
You also lose much of the experiences and awareness of life by becoming a computer.
Its not much of a life, just accept your death.

Personally I'm not "afraid" of death, it's just something that I would avoid at any cost if possible. In my opinion there is no afterlife, there is nothing after you are dead, no fancy heaven, no horrible hell, fiat, that's it. You don't even have any sense of awareness of the nothingness, because you as a person ceases to exist once your brain stops ticking irreversibly (though what we consider to be "irreversible" might change in the future). As such I would like to continue my existence here, if only because you can't exactly experience new things and have new thoughts to contribute to the world after you are dead. (As a matter of fact, because of that the belief of "continue your own existence at any cost" takes the top spot in my moral guidelines, hands down).

Also, yes, computer data does occasionally corrupt, but that's why we keep snazzy multiple copies running simultaneously in serious modern computers. As long as at least one of the copies maintains it's data of any given part, you can create new duplicates of any corrupted parts without any loss of data at all. You could easily wipe out something like 50%-80% of the data many servers store nowadays and they would be perfectly fine just running from their interior backups (not even looking at things like off-site weekly backups), which is certainly more than you can say for most other methods of data storage (including your current brain ). Why would you think that we would do anything less for something that was running a human mind? There's no realistic reason why someone would ever suffer from "robot dementia", and in fact a computerized brain would most likely be much better at repairing itself than a biological one due to a higher level of inbuilt redundancy allowing for repairs of slowly accumulated errors before they become a serious problem.

[Grek]

That Wolf:
People fear death because death is bad and scary. It is really that simple. This shouldn't be a weird position to take, but our culture has internalized a lot of mental gymnastics to justify why death is right and proper and therefore not something to worry about.

Dementia is neither unique to silicon minds, nor inevitable. Regular meat brains decay too, and both are something that should be prevented as soon and as well as it becomes feasible to do so.

There is no reason to suppose that life as a silicon-based lifeform is in any way less fulfilling than life as a carbon-based lifeform. Any detrimental side effects of the transfer are flaws to be corrected and obstacles to overcome, not universal cosmic limits indicating that we are wrong to seek to extend our lives.

No. I prefer living to not living. If death can be delayed, I would like for it to be delayed. If death can be prevented, I would like for it to be prevented. If death can be reversed, I would like it to be reversed. There is nothing wrong with this preference.

More generally, I fear that your internal narrative generator may be getting the best of you by retroactively making up reasons to justify your gut-level rejection of anti-deathism. If you have good reasons to believe that is is appropriate for a person to die, please, tell us about them. Regardless of if you do or don't, strive to embrace the disunity of your inner life and thus remain vigilant regarding the origins of your own thoughts, accurately identifying those which arise from careful reasoning in pursuit of honest truth and those which arise from post hoc justifications supplied by evolution to make snappy arguments for previously held positions.

[That Wolf]

Thanks LordBucket for the concise post.
I guess its a matter of perspective then 
So when you say the book metaphor.
If I am writing a book, I obviously have a plan to finish it and give it a cover saying 'insert book name here'
but its not really a book until its finished, of course page two wouldnt exisit without page one, so perhaps life isnt lived until it ends?

I wasnt aware (as far as I know) of my exsistence in the womb, so could we be unaware of previous consciousness?

I still think the computer body would seem like you but it wont be you,

i2amroy would you kill me if it would extend your life by decades?
Would you become a night creature?

And Grek you caught me mid post, I will attempt an answer.
I realise that much of my thoughts are ignorant in nature and I am always trying to change that.
However seeing as death is inevitable you might aswell die when your natural body gives in, instead of drinking the mercury or becoming a computerman.
Everything that lives dies, its a law of nature and life can be measured but consciousness cannot (as of yet) so unliving objects could be conscious and flora while living could not have consciousness. So if its true your consciousness could survive death, of course memorys and intellegence are part of the body so they die with it.
I hope this answers your questions.
Nag me if it doesnt

[SirQuiamus]

No. I prefer living to not living. If death can be delayed, I would like for it to be delayed. If death can be prevented, I would like for it to be prevented. If death can be reversed, I would like it to be reversed. There is nothing wrong with this preference.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with it, but it's your personal preference, not mine, for instance.

If you have good reasons to believe that is is appropriate for a person to die, please, tell us about them.

I think it's entirely appropriate for a person to wish for non-existence once they've had enough of life. I don't know about you, but I personally think that around eighty years is more than enough for anything one might want to experience or accomplish in life, and living past the current world record of longevity would be going grossly overtime. Although I'd be somewhat hesitant to drop dead right now, I cannot see the prospect of my non-being as something terrible to be fought off at all costs: I'm rather comforted by the idea that I don't have to endure everything for all eternity -- that there's always a "way out" into nothingness, which (in my opinion) is infinitely preferable to immortality. In the meantime, the fact that my days are numbered augments my existence with something that might be called a sense of purpose or determination -- trying to get things done before my time runs out. The existentialists argued that death is the sole reason why people bother doing anything in the first place, and I fully agree with them: Life without death is not life -- at least not human life.

[Angle]

ptw

[scrdest]

putting on a pair of sunglasses is a significant modification of your experience

Remove the word "significant" and I would agree with that statement.

your argument literally leads to conclusion that putting on a pair of sunglasses is killing your consciousness as it was every time you do it.

"Killing?" How is it "killing?" Do you cease to exist when you put on sunglasses? Your experience is altered, yes, but I don't think "killed" is a suitable way to describe that alteration. If you paint a car, replace the interior and change the engine, somebody might reasonably say that it's "a totally different car now." But is that the same as demolishing it?

If you take out the engine, interior, electronics and whatever else a car has under the exterior and replace them, it's no different than taking an Icke-style reptilian (if you excuse the silly metaphor) in a suit made of human skin and claiming it's a human, move along citizen, Thought Police will contact you soon.

If, as you assert, consciousness == personality

No, consciousness is awareness. Personality is merely one of the things a conscious entity may be aware of. Or possibly a result of certain systems interacting with each other, depending on how you look at it.

A tree is a single entity. So is a forest, even though it is composed of trees. If you cut down one tree, the forest is different, but is it a different forest? Or if we're to use the standard example, a ship is composed of many parts. A plank of wood is a single thing. A sail is a single thing. A deck made of planks is a single thing. A ship made of planks and decks and sails is a single thing. If you replace the sails on a ship, does that make it a different ship? If you replace the decks, is it a different ship? If over the years you replace piece by piece, plank by plank until the entire ship is composed of pieces that were not part of the original ship, is it a different ship?

If you say that it is a different ship, at what point of change did it become a different ship? If you scrape a knee, and the skin grows back, are you a different human being? If no, then why would putting on sunglasses make you a different human being?

If you say that it is still the same ship, then presumably none of the pieces of the ship "are" what makes the ship, the ship. Why think that your brain is all that makes you, you?

Ship's components are fungible. Trees in a forest as a whole are also fungible, and even then if you cut down enough of them it's no longer a forest. The system maintains its properties, and therefore its identity, if the properties are unchanged statistically.

That is an extremely human-centric, or perhaps perspective-centric distinction, because a new plank may become a weak point due to slightly variant properties, for example, but fundamentally every component of the universe is, from a frame of reference's point of view, perfectly replaceable by something without changing the behavior of the chosen frame.

In case of the forest, the frame of reference might be your given definition of a forest - a forest without a tree you cut down stops being a forest if you define it as 'an area where trees grow' and you cut down the very last tree growing there; or if it's 'area with a tree growth density of X/m2', once you cut down the tree that makes the density less than that. Or for 'whatever I call a forest' if you feel that without that One Damn Tree it's not much of a forest anymore.

[i2amroy]

If there was a third, possibly viable option to take? No. If I was on death's doorstep and couldn't see any other way to extend it? Yeah, no question (though I would take into the calculation any possible consequences of killing you, it's useless to kill you if then somebody immediately killed me for killing you). And if I had something that offered me eternal life in exchange for having to subsist on others (think vampire or something similar), and I had to make the decision right then I'd also take that decision without much of a problem.

Of course that's not saying I wouldn't expect you to fight for your own life if I then tried to eat you, because "protect your own existence at any cost" is one of those rules where the morals change slightly depending on who's side of the situation you are looking through.

@surquimus:
The way I see it is that if I manage to live long enough we'll eventually begin to develop ways to make my life more manageable through things like replacement prosthetics, anti-aging treatments, brain uploading, whatever. Sure, I might have to suffer through a living hell for a dozen centuries or whatever, but after that point my life will get better and then you've got the rest of eternity in a relatively nice state. However any "repair" treatments that come into existence are useless to you if you are already dead by that point.

As for things to do? To look at a single example there are currently over 7,000 different languages spoken in the world. If I wanted to learn at least the basics of them, and assuming I could do so in a month (which is a very optimistic estimate) that would be something like 583 years to learn them all. It's the work of 5 current lifetimes just to do something like that, and there are dozens of tasks like that that I'd love to accomplish. And if I last long enough that we can repair memory then I don't need to deal with the problem of forgetting any of those languages either (unless I chose to), since they would be stored in a space that never breaks down or forgets. And the universe is constantly creating new things to learn as culture adapts and changes, at a pace far faster than we could learn, so you're never in danger of running out of new things to look at and do (and even if we overcome that problem there's nothing saying you couldn't just go to "sleep" for a hundred years or so to give the universe a head start).

[Grek]

That Wolf:
Lives aren't like books. They don't have plots to them. A life keeps on going until it is ended, and unless you specifically prepare to die, you mostly just end up with a bunch of unfinished threads of narrative that won't get picked up in the sequel. Because there isn't a sequel. Because you're dead.

There are good epistemological reasons to think that humans naturally experience neither prior lives nor reincarnation. I am willing to explain these reasons in detail if anyone is interested, but if not, I won't - doing so would take a lot of writing. There are likewise good reasons to justify the basic assumption of anti-deathism: that death is not actually inevitable. I can also get into those if anyone likes.

surqimus:
I don't want to remain indefinitely conscious, be that the dictionary definition of 'conscious' or That Wolf's definition regarding passive observation and acceptance. They aren't enough for me. I want to remain alive. To walk and to talk and to see all there is to see and delight in the wonderful parts of the universe I have not yet seen, to watch the blossom of history as it unfolds, to see my grandchildren's grandchildren happy and healthy and able to do things I can't even imagine because it will be the future and everything will be strange and different and new again. Eighty years just isn't enough.

Now, I don't object to someone electing to die. A person shouldn't be held against their will, be it in a prison or more generally. If someone really, truly and honestly has had enough, they should have the right to cease. But, equally, if someone feels they need more time, it is wrong to forbid them from getting more life to live.

[SirQuiamus]

@Roy
He he... if technology becomes advanced enough to allow us to upload minds and store memories, it would also make the whole process of learning entirely obsolete. If anyone can instantly download 7000 languages into their brain, what's the point of spending 500 years to learn them! What could be more boring than a world where you can know everything without so much as googling it first! Luckily the brain-upload thing will probably take several millenia to accomplish (if it's actually feasible at all -- that's a topic in its own right), but in any case, I'm sure we're going to see printed organs and anti-aging pills within the next fifty years, leading to a dramatic increase in longevity during our lifetimes. Now, what will such a medically augmented future society look like? Initially only the richest can afford such bleeding-edge treatments, and people with lengthened lifespans will be at an advantage in what comes to making money and hoarding capital gains. Sadly, these people are probably not very open-minded to begin with, and what curiosity they may have had will eventually melt away in the course of the centuries. The result: A stagnant, stratified class society ruled by a hyper-rich, hyper-conservative aristocracy of hoary sibyls and struldbrugs. I wouldn't want to live there, so I'd better do myself in before someone slips me an immortality pill. 

@Grek
In my opinion, the only thing that can provide a meaningless sequence of events with a plot is... death.     

[Sergarr]

1) Millenia to accomplish? On something which is not literally impossible? I think you're overestimating

2) If immortality pills will be a thing, curiosity pills will be, too. Also all other kind of emotion pills, for that matter. Want to feel jealous? Have your jealousy pill! Bam.

3) The only thing that can provide a meaningless death with a plot is... life. Which is a sequence of events.

[SirQuiamus]

@Sergarr:
The problem is, how can we say that simulating a mind is "theoretically possible" if we don't even have the slightest inkling of how the mind works on the neuronal level? If you want to simulate a functional human brain, at what level of detail will the simulation become "realistic enough," so that you can safely say: "Oh, that's my brain inside the computer, sure enough."? At the moment, we simply have no idea whether mathematical modelling of neuronal activity will result in anything comparable to the original mind -- my guess is that it will require going all the way down to the molecular level, which would be completely beyond the pale of current and near-future technology. All I know is that the mind is an emergent epiphenomenon of a vast number of neurochemical phenomena, and the odds are that it isn't reducible to anything above the molecular scale of neurochemistry.       

[XXXXYYYY]

PTW

[i2amroy]

Actually we've already successfully modeled chunks of rat brains to the extent that they functioned identical to a real one as best as we can tell. The problem with modeling human brains at this point isn't so much a bit understanding of how they work on a base level, but is more a complexity problem of how the different parts interact and react to various stimuli.

As for learning things, yeah you could certainly download things like languages, but I guess really the key lies in things created by people. There are always going to be new books to read and movies to watch, and while there might be a limit to things like the number of languages, there is no limit to the number of stories and games to be told and played.