In a message dated 7/22/2001 12:31:02 PM Eastern Daylight Time, jr@shasta.com
writes:
<< Excellent point, thanks for mentioning it. Would "living cohorts" include
human-competitive AI, which would probably have co-evolved by the time
personality uploading becomes possible? How do we satisfy the H-CAI that
uploading humans is worth the trouble? >>
Its certainly worth the trouble if the uploaded personality, was able, as his
human pre-cursor, in having likes and dislikes, based on experience and now,
experiencing. Are you sure you want to ditch qualia forever? Banana icream
may taste like shit to you, but shit would likely not taste up banana
icecream's poor standards even. Experience matters, and the previous being
did not like banan icecream.
<<I'd definitely go along with the assertion that this would confirm
insufficient technology. Furthermore, I've doubts about a society sufficiently
advanced as to be capable of uploading human personalities missing the
immature nature of such a project. This technology would have far more
powerful uses than making a mommy proggie.>>
Kurzweil had a techno girlfriend as protagonist in Spiritual Machines-so
Mommy is not far off, as a decent re-created person
<<Of course Kurzweil, being a millionaire (billionaire?) would like to
preserve
his identity. This has to do with taking it with one, after bio-death.
Uploading personality may be necessary to establish identity for legal and
financial reasons, in case heirs want to claim that the uploaded entity is (or
is not) still deserving of control of family assets. Less financially endowed
experimenters may want to be more creative and inventive in uploading their
personalities. Here the whole project may take on the air of a video game.>>
Money is, I suspect NOT a top-level insentive for Kurzweil, but merely an
essentail means. Kurzweil is pretty altruistic, however lowly, that may rate
on the Aynn Rand scale.
<<Being autonomous and independent thinkers, the highly advanced A.I.s may
discover that they agree with me... that personalities are not worth
uploading, because they are, after all, trivial illusions manufactured for the
sake of possessiveness, and that they are counterproductive to more highly
evolved human ideals.>>
Minds are as physical a phenomena as ketchup, or a galaxy swirling, or
farting, or comming up with new cosmological theories, or fucking. Do I need
to tell you of all people, that mind is the squirting of neurochemicals and
the hopping of electrons? Mind is the fountainhead { (:OÞ) } of existence and
makes experiences worthwhile, other wise your value and the value of a pebble
at the bottom of the Marrianas Trench are the same. In other words Value
Death (maybe thats plonkable?).
<<Consider that dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in which people die
prompts the invention of uploading, yet this ironically and paradoxically
requires altering the upload such that it renders a satisfied customer, who
may, by virtue of such satisfying alerations, no longer resemble the original
(who lived with dissatisfaction).>>
The satisfied customer, who, without volition of their own, and tastes of
their own, equals an atomaton, and never a very good one. There is a qhole
slwq of customers of this one uploaded person to be
satisfied-personal-business-political-etc. Some are proggies-some are meaty
foggies such as I.
_mitch
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