Re: NEWS: neurochip; LIT: Egan and uploading

Anders Sandberg (asa@beattie.nada.kth.se)
28 Nov 1997 17:08:29 +0100


mark@unicorn.com writes:

> phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu wrote:
> >It's a neural network
> >implanted in the brain in childhood. It receives the same input you do,
> >and it's output is corrected by a "teacher" to conform to the output of
> >your brain.
>
> Yuck; I don't like that idea. I'm far more convinced of survival of
> identity by scanning arguments than I am by output arguments. If a
> computer is a duplicate of my brain and acts just like me I'm pretty
> much convinced that it is me in a real sense. But in this case I can
> see no good reason for believing that the internals of the network will
> bear any resemblance to mine, and hence it's unlikely to continue to
> act like me after it's disconnected.

In that case you really should read Egan's "Learning to be me". The
protagonist also struggles with this problem, with a rather surprising
and worrying conclusion.

-- 
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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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