Cryonics and uploading as leaps of faith? (was Re: Uploaded Omniscience)

From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Thu Jun 26 2003 - 12:11:19 MDT

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    Brett raises one of our oldest and most fruitlessly debated topics:
    whether an upload or a cryonics revivee is "the same" person he was
    before.

    I believe the question is meaningless, based in part on questions like
    these:

    Are you "the same" person you were yesterday? How do you know? Isn't
    this ultimately just as much a "leap of faith" as believing that you
    are the same person after awakening from an upload or cryonic suspension?

    Or, suppose you are an upload. Let's leave aside for the moment the
    question of whether you are "the same" person as before, but consider
    your identity going forward. Suppose you learn that the computer that is
    running you uses a time-sharing architecture like most computers today.
    It occasionally stops your program for a short while, running other
    people's programs. It rapidly switches among everyone's program, giving
    the illusion that everyone is running at once. Does this make you doubt
    that you are not "the same" person from moment to moment?

    Suppose the computer were shut down for a longer time, and your program
    then allowed to run again. Do you have greater doubts that you are
    "the same" person?

    For me, the intuition that there is an objective fact about whether
    you are "the same" in one incarnation as another does not work well
    given these kinds of gray areas. If "sameness" is really well defined,
    either you should be "the same" or not "the same". It doesn't work well
    to say that there are gray areas. It seems to be a binary relation, if
    you hold to this philosophical perspective.

    Yet the examples above, which can be further subdivided and permuted
    ad infinitum, demonstrate many kinds of gray areas based on advanced
    technology that can manipulate the substrates that embody our brains.
    Ultimately it does not work (for me at least) to imagine that there
    is a fact of the matter about whether two incarnations of a mind are
    "the same".

    Hal

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