In a message dated 7/21/2001 8:32:46 PM Eastern Daylight Time, jr@shasta.com
writes:
<< Congratulations, you've categorically identified the essential question
dodged
by proponents of "uploading." Why replicate brains so estranged from reality
they believe themselves somehow unique.
Stay hungry,
--J. R. >>
Its not if they believe themselves unique so much as to whether the situation
is satisfying to the uploaded "personality" and "its" living cohorts. If
there is a live body still walking around, attending to business, fretting
about its "uploaded" clone; then by my way of thinking, this is wholly,
unsatisfactory. If, on the other hand, there is a human corpse at the end of
the procedure, and an uploaded, personality, of what was that human being,
then it could be satisfactory, indeed. It then comes down to what the new set
of programs that comprise the newly, loaded, personality, feel, and think,
about their experiences.
A Turing test, in this situation would not suffice, if the physical children
of the deceased, parent, who was uploaded, came to state, "Hey, after a month
of speaking to Her (uploaded person) We, her children, know this isn't really
our Mom-she must've died during the upload operation." If the "Mom" proggie
doesn't seem to react and interact properly, this will confirm that the
upload technology is insufficient.
Kurzweil, in Spiritual Machines, seems unshakably confident that this
technology will be achieved, during the 21st century, which would be
wonderful if such a successful technology did occur that soon. I, take a much
more gradualist, approach, and suspect that many centuries will pass before
things get to the point where Kurzweil desires. E. Yudkowsky, holds that, if
I read his essays correctly, highly advanced A.I. will develop the science
for this, whether the world desires it or not, during the next 99 years-the
computers will be inventing the best theories, processes, and how to apply
them.
So it comes down to a satisfaction level. Is the customer satisfied? Is there
a living person left behind after uploading (answer no!), do the relatives
recognize the "person" in the net, and does that set of programs that
comprise that "person" recognize itself, through many different computer
generated environments???
Mitch
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:39:54 MDT