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[Cthulhu]

You guys are all aware that this would kill you, right?  Your "consciousness" is an emergent property of the physical and chemical organization of your neurons, it's probably possible to replicate this organization digitally but there's no reason to think that doing so would transfer whatever you think "you" are over.

So a bit like reincarnation then

Well no.  Having your body eaten by a pregnant lady is about as close to reincarnation as this is.  The thing you call you is inherent to your brain, destroying it is killing you, period.  A copy of yourself on a computer is not "you" in the sense that the person sitting on this forum would have some kind of unbroken chain of consciousness.  The copy would remember and it'd probably feel to him like he jumped from brain to brain, but he's still a copy and the human mind talking right now is still dead and gone forever.

And I didn't interpret it as implying your consciousness is preserved, I hear "uploading your consciousness" bandied around all the time.

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In either case, true consciousness transferral that preserves whatever made-up thing we think we are, or a digital duplicate that thinks that made-up thing was preserved, I wouldn't do it now but when I'm old and tired I'd do it.  And if I died too suddenly for transfer, well I guess I don't care about it much when I'm dead.

[Graknorke]

Unbroken chain of consciousness is a dumb idea. For real. There is no reason to think that matters.
It's all in the memories m8.

the human mind talking right now is still dead and gone forever

That's just the way time works. Things don't exist past the time when they exist. And when that thing only exists as an arrangement in a constantly-changing medium, stopping existing is a thing that's going to happen.

[Sirus]

Really? I would want to get uploaded as early as possible, preferably before something nasty like Alzheimer's could begin to wreck my mind.

[Loud Whispers]

You guys are all aware that this would kill you, right?  Your "consciousness" is an emergent property of the physical and chemical organization of your neurons, it's probably possible to replicate this organization digitally but there's no reason to think that doing so would transfer whatever you think "you" are over.

So a bit like reincarnation then

Well no.  Having your body eaten by a pregnant lady is about as close to reincarnation as this is.  The thing you call you is inherent to your brain, destroying it is killing you, period.  A copy of yourself on a computer is not "you" in the sense that the person sitting on this forum would have some kind of unbroken chain of consciousness.  The copy would remember and it'd probably feel to him like he jumped from brain to brain, but he's still a copy and the human mind talking right now is still dead and gone forever.

That's reincarnation m8
You die and a new you is made

[Teneb]

You guys are all aware that this would kill you, right?  Your "consciousness" is an emergent property of the physical and chemical organization of your neurons, it's probably possible to replicate this organization digitally but there's no reason to think that doing so would transfer whatever you think "you" are over.

So a bit like reincarnation then

Well no.  Having your body eaten by a pregnant lady is about as close to reincarnation as this is.  The thing you call you is inherent to your brain, destroying it is killing you, period.  A copy of yourself on a computer is not "you" in the sense that the person sitting on this forum would have some kind of unbroken chain of consciousness.  The copy would remember and it'd probably feel to him like he jumped from brain to brain, but he's still a copy and the human mind talking right now is still dead and gone forever.

That's reincarnation m8
You die and a new you is made

I live, I die, I live again?

I imagine a brain upload that did not involve the original being destroyed would be like some depictions of cloning, in that there is a new "you". Digital you probably wouldn't consider themselves to be a whole new person though.

[Cthulhu]

Which is why I'd do it when I'm old.  For me me, whatever me me is, it's death.  I still have shit to do.  When I'm ready to die, it's really a might as well preserve my brain kind of thing.

Well no, unless we're talking about two different kinds of reincarnation.  Reincarnation entails that there's some kind of intangible essence that is "you" and is preserved even after you die.  I don't believe that.  I believe that you're a meat computer and "consciousness" is an evolved adaptation to correlate the contents of your meat computer.  There is no soul or anything like that.  There's nothing to reincarnate, and if that's what you think reincarnation is then I think you might already be dead as far as your concept of it goes, since every cell in your body has been replaced several times since you were born.

[Levi]

You guys are all aware that this would kill you, right?  Your "consciousness" is an emergent property of the physical and chemical organization of your neurons, it's probably possible to replicate this organization digitally but there's no reason to think that doing so would transfer whatever you think "you" are over.

Who cares.  As long as something functionally equivalent to me is out doing shit I don't care.

Flesh is too fragile to leave that kind of shit to chance.

[NullForceOmega]

I'd do whatever this technology is, though I'd prefer it to be nanomachines replacing the cells in my brain one at a time with mechanical equivalents, to ensure that the process is indistinguishable from the simple cellular replacement that goes on all the time. Could even do that with the rest of the body.

This idea is tolerable, to an extent, but I'd rather actually have the nano-neural loom in addition to my own biological brain.

[Loud Whispers]

Well no, unless we're talking about two different kinds of reincarnation.  Reincarnation entails that there's some kind of intangible essence that is "you" and is preserved even after you die.  I don't believe that.  I believe that you're a meat computer and "consciousness" is an evolved adaptation to correlate the contents of your meat computer.  There is no soul or anything like that.  There's nothing to reincarnate, and if that's what you think reincarnation is then I think you might already be dead as far as your concept of it goes, since every cell in your body has been replaced several times since you were born.

Dead many times, still living - no one would argue they are the same person they were 10 years ago

[RedKing]

A copy of yourself on a computer is not "you" in the sense that the person sitting on this forum would have some kind of unbroken chain of consciousness.  The copy would remember and it'd probably feel to him like he jumped from brain to brain, but he's still a copy and the human mind talking right now is still dead and gone forever.

You realize that there's a school of thought that says this happens every single time you go to sleep, right? We don't have an unbroken chain of consciousness NOW.


My question is, how good is the sensory interface? Do I still get to eat, get to drink a good beer, get to snuggle under warm blankets? Do I get to fuck?
Lacking all those sensory inputs is a good recipe for depression.

[BFEL]

Do I get to be a Starship in the intergalactic wars?

[itisnotlogical]

Human beings are awful. Why would you want one that lasts forever?

But no, I have trouble moving on from friends I had four years ago. An infinite lifetime of watching the people I love grow old and die would not sit well with me. I believe (assuming I don't die right this second) that there will be a time, somewhere in the future, when I am satisfied with my life and would not have a problem with it ending.

[Cthulhu]

@Redking, yes, I know.  This reply is a pseudo-edit but I'll put it on top since it's a good segue into what I originally meant to say.

In response to slow nanite replacement and a theseus ship sort of thing, sure, that'd work, but I don't believe that the thing we're presuming to preserve here actually exists.  I guess the best way to explain what I'm trying to say is that I don't think Theseus's ship is preserved if you replace its boards one by one.  I don't think the question matters.  I think it's just a certain arrangement of boards and that the designator "ship" has no immanent value, so asking if the "ship" is preserved isn't really asking anything.

If that makes sense.  I'm bad at analogies.

[Graknorke]

Do I get to be a Starship in the intergalactic wars?

Why would you want a human-grown intelligence piloting when you could design one from the ground up to do the same? Sounds like a recipe for inefficiency.

That sounds like the opposite of what you were saying before. I am kind of confused as to what you're trying to get at.

Wouldn't the straightfoward solution to the issue of continuous consciousness be to run your mind simultaneously on your brain and the new hardware, phasing out your presence in your meat-brain once you've settled in?

Unfortunately, human mk 0.1.5 does not support multithreading. Also it's a non-problem so who cares?

[Flying Dice]

Wouldn't the straightfoward solution to the issue of continuous consciousness be to run your mind simultaneously on your brain and the new hardware, phasing out your presence in your meat-brain once you've settled in?