From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Jun 26 2003 - 19:58:55 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> But if you are the same person that you were last month,
> and you are the same person after you wake up from a coma
> wherein your EEG was zero for an extended period, then
> what are you besides information? What else could you
> possibly be?
If you are the same person you were 10^43 Planck increments ago, even
though all of the matter waves in your body have shifted places, why would
you not be the same person after a slightly different interaction within
the same huge wavefunction?
There is no "stuff". Stuff is an illusion generated by a brain adapted to
deal with complex regularities of the macroscopic world as if they were
substances. You are dynamics of information in a probability
distribution, dynamics distributed over an unimaginable number of changes
and interactions, stretched over an incredibly long time period.
Uploading is a change scarcely more drastic, and no more high-level, than
the changes your brain is undergoing right now. It is only the appearance
of substance, the illusion of stuff, that leads you to think there is any
difference between just standing there having a temporally evolving brain
and being uploaded. Each is a physical evolution that preserves complex
correlations in the wavefunction, and this is all that matters.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jun 26 2003 - 20:09:20 MDT