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

From: Jef Allbright (jef@jefallbright.net)
Date: Thu Jun 26 2003 - 20:53:57 MDT

  • Next message: Damien Broderick: "Re: [FYI]: WER Singularity Issue"

    Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:

    > If you are the same person you were 10^43 Planck increments ago, even
    > though all of the matter waves in your body have shifted places, why
    > would you not be the same person after a slightly different
    > interaction within the same huge wavefunction?
    >
    > There is no "stuff". Stuff is an illusion generated by a brain
    > adapted to deal with complex regularities of the macroscopic world as
    > if they were substances. You are dynamics of information in a
    > probability distribution, dynamics distributed over an unimaginable
    > number of changes and interactions, stretched over an incredibly long
    > time period. Uploading is a change scarcely more drastic, and no more
    > high-level, than the changes your brain is undergoing right now. It
    > is only the appearance of substance, the illusion of stuff, that
    > leads you to think there is any difference between just standing
    > there having a temporally evolving brain and being uploaded. Each is
    > a physical evolution that preserves complex correlations in the
    > wavefunction, and this is all that matters.

    Thanks Eliezer, for the most striking example I've seen so far of Buddhist
    wisdom wrapped in scientific terms.

    - Jef

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jun 26 2003 - 21:05:37 MDT