Re: Why Immortality might be a sham!

Frank Prengel (prengel@physik.tu-berlin.de)
Thu, 19 Feb 1998 14:20:49 +0100 (MET)


On Thu, 19 Feb 1998, chris belt wrote:

> If you upload your mind into a computer by means of copying brain
> waves,(I don't know how, it just seems like that work) or however else
> you would do it, you'd still have a hard copy of your mind inside your
> body. My point is, the mind in the computer would be a seperate entity
> that just thought like you do. It wouldn't be you inside the computer,
> just a copy. You'd wouldn't control the computer, the thing controlling

Ahh, the "copy paradox" again.
We seem to inevitably run into this when discussing uploading. IMHO, it
cannot be resolved with our present knowledge, since we seem to arrive at
different conclusions when deciding if the uploaded mind is "you" or
"someone else", depending on how (by which criteria) we distinguish "you"
from "anybody else". See the mailing list archive for threads on this
topic.

Bye,
F.P.

P.S.: Lem (who else could it be :-) has already discussed this in his
"Dialogs" as early as 1961. Can't remember, however, at what conclusions
he arrived, have to re-read it.

o Frank Prengel (prengel@physik.tu-berlin.de) o
o Institut fuer Theoretische Physik, TU Berlin o
o http://itp1.physik.TU-Berlin.DE:80/~prengel/ o