From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Jun 26 2003 - 08:51:03 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
> The psychological problem that most people have
> against uploading, of course, is that of "being
> inside a computer", or of knowing that one is really
> just on a silicon chip.
>
> A theme that probably should (and so probably has)
> been stressed by SF writers, and any of those of us
> who engage in discussions with the unconverted, is
> the attendant near-omniscience it would provide.
But this isn't a logical reply to the question. Or did I misunderstand it?
Human beings are temporal dynamics of Shannon information in physical
states. Uploading makes absolutely no difference if the new substrate has
equivalent dynamics and the uploading process preserves all functionally
relevant information (in the Shannon sense) of the original to within
thermal noise limits with no functionally relevant global bias. Uploading
makes no disruption in the way that humans are woven into physics; it is
as philosophically trivial as a sneeze. You go through a larger
discontinuity when you fall asleep at night and wake up the next morning.
Seriously.
As for near-omniscience, you can't do that without philosophically
nontrivial revision of sensory modalities.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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