Re: what it's like to be uploaded

From: QueeneMUSE@aol.com
Date: Mon Feb 21 2000 - 20:36:39 MST


In a message dated 2/21/2000 6:54:03 PM Pacific Standard Time,
d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au writes:

<< I suspect the (somewhat
 disciplined) imagination of sf writers might be as good a guide as anything
 an engineer or psychologist might come up with. >>

NO NO NO!!!!!
You've missed my point entirely. I have read any and everything I can on
jacking in, etc. Thanks for giving me a couple titles, but... Most of us have
read sci-fi. I want to know what THE LIST envisions their OWN personal
experience of uploading, not what sci-fi authors think. I believe it might be
valuable to do so *on list* since this is the pool of talent that is most
inherently prone towards researching and making such a thing possible --
exactly NOT as fiction, but as their own reality. I even know people who are
studying neuroscience to help it happen!!

Without a clear cut vision of one's own ideal of such a transformation, one
would be left at the mercy of other's ideas, wouldn't one? Would you like to
upload into what might be a virtual HELL for you, because that's the only
option available for immortality???
N

(PS: I find Neuromancer/Snow Crash scenario inviting, yet depressing. Fancy
being a burned out hacker, living in a storage unit and jacking into VR?
Anyhoo, it is not uploading. Uploading is preserving your entity as a
nonphysical AI being inside a computer)
Quite a different thing.)
(PSS Sci-fi quite frankly is not compelling to me, most of it, since the post
Armageddon "trashed planet" theme is so prevalent -- or exo-terran bleak off
world colonies run by robots scenarios. Acid rain and drug addicts.
Woo-hoo!!! Fun!

Not at all what I think of when i envision a dynamically - optimistic
"extropic future". I have search hi and lo for images of a positive future
both in fiction and in films, and all I ever get, is doom, black hole, post
apocolyptic crap. Even Syd Mead, my idol, tends that way when the film
industry calls, a la Blade Runner. Frankly, I see a much more Utopic view.)



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