X-Message-Number: 7904
From: 
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 1997 17:00:51 -0500 (EST)
Subject: oysters & violins

A few more partial comments on uploading and the information paradigm, partly
for the benefit of recent readers:

1. Joe Strout defines "uploading" as "the copying or transfer of a person
from the natural biological substrate into a manufactured, artificial
substrate." One problem with this is that it assumes, or strongly suggests,
that such a thing is possible, thereby obscuring the questions. Another
problem is that it suggests the equivalence of "copy" and"transfer," again in
effect bypassing questions. (One might also quibble and say "uploading" is
only appropriate if the recipient substrate IS in some sense larger than, or
superior to, the original, which Joe says he does not assume. We distinguish
"uploading" from "downloading." Maybe Joe should say "offloading.")

2. Olaf Henny asks about the importance of preserving more than the brain, in
order to preserve one's hormones etc. The common-sense answer appears to be,
first, that a castrated man (e.g.) has nevertheless survived, as has a woman
after hysterectomy; and second, that glands etc. should be relatively VERY
easy to replace or regenerate.

3. While I have the greatest respect for Mike Perry's perceptiveness, and
have not had the opportunity to read his full discussion in his work in
progress, still it seems to me his ideas (and those of others) about
"instantiations" of a person are very shaky.

Mike says at one point that "I would identify 'you' with all 'instantiations'
[copies] of you..." and that "you" are distributed over all your
instantiations. 

This hides the problems of thought experiments. They can be useful or
suggestive, but are highly unreliable and rarely definitive. Often the
thought experimenter just asks himself, "What is my reaction to this?" He
rarely applies adequate tests to determine if his reaction or intuition is
CORRECT, based on rigorous logic proceeding from firm facts, physical and
biological. The real question is not, "Would this [kind of "survival"]
satisfy me?" but "SHOULD this satisfy me?"  That "should" requires a very
long, difficult discussion which has NEVER been adequately presented, and
hardly presented at all.

At another point Mike says that two instantiations become different persons
when their experiences begin to diverge, one person becoming two. This seems
to imply that an "instantiation" must be EXACTLY like you, which in turn
seems to imply that your successors (yourself at even slightly later times)
are different persons. From there one might be led again to the
"quantitative" survival viewpoint, which has its own recalcitrant problems.

I have sometimes been accused of relentless optimism. Here's a nasty scenario
for you, a variation of one I have suggested in the past, which explains why
we have had no higher-tech e.t. visitors:

All advanced technological peoples inevitably reach a stage, slightly in
advance of ours today, when they PROVE to themselves that survival is an
illusion, that "you" survive in any reasonable sense for only (say) a few
seconds, and that it makes no sense to worry about the effect of your actions
on your more distant successors. Thus you become a very nearly pure fatalist
and hedonist, since nothing is important except the most immediate
gratification. Ergo, every civilization collapses before reaching the
galactic travel stage.

This is more or less a variation of one of Heinlein's scenarios in "By His
Bootstraps," 
where the protagonist briefly encounters superhuman creatures via a
time-travel machine and his mind nearly crumbles: "It had not been fear of
physical menace that had shaken his reason, nor the appearance of the
creature--he could recall nothing of how it looked. It had been a feeling of
sadness infintiely compounded...a sense of tragedy, of grief insupportable
and inescapable, of infinite weariness. He had been flicked with emotions
many times too strong for his spiritual fiber and which he was no more fitted
to experience than an oyster is to play the violin."

O.K., back to relentless optimism. Depair, or even pessimism, is absurdly
premature. Freeze your assets, and one day you may play the violin--and a
jolly tune at that.

Robert Ettinger 

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