Re: Lilliputian Posthumians

Robin Hanson (hanson@econ.berkeley.edu)
Thu, 22 Oct 1998 09:38:20 -0700

Joe Jenkins writes:
>> and that people will be
>> uncomfortable with the very fact that it isn't real.
>
>I can't prove were not already uploaded, so why should I care if we
>upload within the upload if nothing more than for the sake of
>efficiency.

I claim that you are now pretty convinced that you are not an upload, and that if we were to convince you that you are, you would be very disturbed and disoriented.

For one thing, living in a physical world, you have a rich intuition to draw on to think about security. If you can defend a volume of space against intruders, you are largely secure. If you live in a virtual reality all that gets thrown out, and you have to use very different and alien approaches to evaluate and preserve your security. That by itself is enough to make someone uncomfortable with such a life.

Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/ RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884 140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-8614