Matt mjg223@is7.nyu.edu wrote:
There's a chain of individuals: each fooled into believing he's all the
one's who've passed before him. This is what I mean when I say
'consciousness' is instantaneous. You're a sequence of instances, still
frames, with the happenstance of memory the only connection between them.
This is why death doesn't matter - you've already died an infinite number of
times. You're being uploaded a trillion times a second.
(end)
I do see how in a sense the person I was especially ten or fifteen years ago
is mostly dead. The natural processes of human development cause "death and
rebirth" even within the lifecycle.
Still, the Star Trek transporter analogy, or the one regarding uploading, do
unnerve me. I do not want a perfect copy of myself from a second ago. I
want me! Some would philosophically argue that it does not matter but for
ME it does. I would want some sort of interdimensional conduit that would
whisk me to another location rather then a molecular pattern reconstruction.
As for uploading, I do not want merely a perfect softclone copy of myself
being made. I want ME. I suppose some sort of process where the matter in
my brain is converted to a pure energy form where it can still function as
my consciousness with no loss of self-integrity.
I will be one of those people who will wait a long time to be convinced that
uploading does more then kill and then perfectly reconstruct the individual.
sincerely,
John Grigg
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