Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

marvinthedog t1_iysgdhu wrote

Reply to comment by Candid-Register-6718 in Don't think you will make it to Longevity Escape Velocity? No worries: meet Nectome, the company promising to preserve your brain and memories. by Redvolition

>By this logic nothing at all matters.
>
>I agree with your premise that we don’t really have any possibility to verify anything other than something conscious exists.
>
>But your conclusion that continuity doesn’t matter could be extended to anything.
>
>If we can’t verify continuity why even bother about this mind uploading stuff?
>
>Maybe you switched consciousness with a bird today and your memories are just implanted.

Even if we disregard most of my value reasoning we have been discussing I still don´t see how you would arrive at the conclusion that nothing would matter.

​

If other conscious moments exist (regardles of whos brain they belong to) isn´t it extremely reasonable to assume they hold value? After all, they are conscious. And if the decissions of a current conscious moment can influence other future conscious moments we can have an influence on value. Ergo things matter.

​

But then you mentioned that I am wrong about free will and determinism or something. And I don´t see what this has to do with anything. If anything that would equally affect both your and my world view the same because then nothing would actually matter in neither your or my world view, if I have understood you right.

1

Candid-Register-6718 t1_iysp9y2 wrote

No I’m saying we don’t know if it matters and if it matters we don’t know the context for what is good or bad.

Basically that humanity doesn’t know if there is objective morality.

It’s a philosophical question from the field of ethics / value theory.

I wasn’t introducing any world view of my own as much as I was just criticizing your theory about the importance of physical connectedness for one’s mind upload/copy.

We simply do not know the context so we can’t know if it is important to have continuity or if the mind upload would be the same thing. And if it’s not the same thing maybe it’s better to just die and have body decompose back into nature and become reborn in the cycle of life this way.

I’m not saying I know I’m just asking questions and criticizing answers 😅

2

marvinthedog t1_iysujiw wrote

Ah, I see.

>We simply do not know the context so we can’t know if it is important to have continuity or if the mind upload would be the same thing. And if it’s not the same thing maybe it’s better to just die and have body decompose back into nature and become reborn in the cycle of life this way.

For me, I can´t find any arguments to even assume that the upload, for all intents and purposes, wouldn´t be the same thing though. I would probably be to afraid to do it myself but only for the same reason people fear flying or taking the elevator, I would say.

​

What I have been reading about objective morality and value theory has really puzzled me lately though. I have for a long time thought it was a given that objective value/disvalue was directly proportional to how much pleasure/suffering consciousnesses experienced throughout all of time and space. But during the last couple of years I have come to realize that this doesn´t seem to be the general consensus. This is very puzzling to me :-P

1

Candid-Register-6718 t1_iyszdvs wrote

As I see it things don’t exist on an exact scale where you can clearly separate one from the other.

But rather a continuous spectrum of existence where everything is connected as one thing but still has different aspects/ properties to it that contain enough information for us to differentiate.

A bit like a color spectrum where the color blue is not exactly defined and might be more of a dark purple to one person but most would still agree it’s a completely different color from yellow for example.

All this to say that in my personal opinion the mind upload would definitely be something different but you could say the same every moment when your mind or the particles that make up your body make even the slightest change. (Like a minimal change in hue could be classified as a different color)

The question is how much different it would be? I think it would be quite a difference since so much of what makes us human is anchored in our biological anatomy. Our imperfections and desires, social, biological or sexual they are very much a product of our physical bodies.

Would we try to keep them somehow or would the mind upload be like a perfect mind free of impulses and vices?

I agree that ethics is a very puzzling field. I have my own theory that might be a bit to long to elaborate here. But I must say that over all the judicial system is doing a surprisingly good job in having a nuanced and differentiated view on ethics, at least in theory. How we differentiate murder from manslaughter for example is quite an advanced level of logic, that I sometimes miss in other branches of Society.

1