Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Same here.

I think <scraps> and I are making the same point: yes, the copy is in
every testable way a perfect copy of the original at the time the copy is
made, but -- like with digital files -- the original's existence does not
end just because a copy now exists. The original continues to experience
existence.  When that original has self-awareness, including an awareness
of its own continuing consciousness, the decision to end that existence
would not be made casually.

 When Cory says:

>>they'll "die" but in the eyes of their peers and by their own lights,
 they will have marvellously survived.<<

I'd agree with the "eyes of their peers" but disagree strongly with the "by
their own lights." In the eyes of their peers and in the eyes of the perfect
copy, but the original physical instantiation, the consciousness that was
copied, *would* be the one jumping into the shredder. 

The suicide aversion seems to be a pretty strong bit of biochemical 
hardwiring. It would take more than a culture shift to make willing, 
casual suicide a part of who we are.
  

    
3 slips
  

    
I think we're headed for yes-it-is/no-it-isn't territory, but: I don't doubt
that people who've never been resurrected will have lots of moral qualms and
fear about it. I also don't think it'll last. Sensawunda is the hardest to
sustain of all emotions. When you've been resurrected a bunch of times, as
has everyone you know, when the kids do it like you ride the bus, you'll
forget why you ever worried. Or you won't. And you'll die.
  

    

Cory, honestly, I think you are missing the point, and I don't know how to 
get it across.  It isn't a moral objection, or a spiritual one, it's a 
materialistic objection.

You say that those who don't go along will all die, and that's true, but 
what I can't get across to you is so will everybody else, from their own 
point of view.  The Cory-pattern will continue, and I'll be glad to have 
it around, or the Scraps-pattern will be glad to have it around; but you, 
Cory, the original Cory, when your body dies, so will you.  That's what 
you will experience.  And the rest of us will still have you around, and 
the new Cory will be Cory.
  

    

Maybe this will help: What happens if the backup is brought to life while 
the original still lives?  Are they sharing a single consciousness, or are 
they two separate, initially identical consciousnesses?
  

    
I *do* understand that, Scraps. I just don't agree.

I think that in a world where the procedure was normal, that you *won't* die
from your PoV. You'll lie down on a table and wake up again and never give
it a thought.
  

    
Slippage.

That's a good question. You are, of course, two separate consciousnesses and
it will be really confusing (and in an overpopulated world, very bad for the
old Whuffie). It's the kind of edge-case that would make for a great scandal
(especially if it were a charismatic cult-leader who made a thousand of
himself) and provoke a lot of hand-wringing, and certainly, for *those*
people, entering the backup/gas-chamber would be a giant crisis.
  

    

How, physically, can that tranference occur?  It looks mystical to me.

Everyone can accept it and be calm about it, and as you point out the 
process will =select= for people who feel that way -- but that doesn't 
mean they aren't dying!
  

    


Slip.  Okay.  Lemme think about this some more and come back.
  

    
depending on which backup the new Cory has restored, wouldn't he be 
somewhat different in our eyes from the lost experience?  He might have 
no memory at all of things we did together because they happened after 
the backup.  
  

    
Something that's a plot element in DaOitMK, btw.
  

    
there's a love interest who restores a backup and loses memory of the 
lover.

in fact, I think that's happened to me!
  

    
I was gonna say -- yeah. I know people who've had concussions and such and
lost days or months of their lives. They're both the same person and not.

People change all the time. Your best friend goes trekking in Nepal for a
year and comes back completely transformed, Same/not same, and we manage to
normalize it. We have the cognitive mechanism for normalizing it, and we'll
adapt that mechanism to other situations if need be.
  

    
One problem with the transfer-of-consciousness meme is the underlying 
assumption that the body is a vessel and consciousness is its content. IMO 
that's flawed thinking: consciousness is an aspect of the whole, you can't 
'remove it' and 'store it.' 
  

    
I wrote an editorial to that effect for the upcoming Singularity issue of
the Whole Earth Review, in fact.
  

    
Slippage... agreed, Cory. Continuity is partly a function of our 
reflection in our surroundings, I think. There's plenty of evidence that 
body and mind are discontinuous.
  

    
Another slip!
  

    
I've played massively multiplayer RPGs for long enough to recognize that
death and restoration is just part of the process. You die; you get
restored; you lose a bit of experience in the course of things. The first
time you die, it's more than a bit traumatic, but fairly quickly you adapt,
and are willing to take greater chances because you can deal with the risks.

But even while the games are often described as being "first person"
perspective, they're not. They present an externalized identity. It's
relatively straightforward to deal with death & restoration of an
externalized identity, as we can see the apparent continuation.

With current technology, an individual can experience myriad external
identities -- e.g., other people -- but only one internal identity.
Backing up and dumping one's mind-state into a force-cloned body pushes a
copy of one's internal identity into an external form. If I've died
between the point of backup and the point of restoration, then that's just
fine; there's no internal identity to care, and the new me won't have any
recollection of dying -- as Cory says, it will remember lying on a backup
table and waking up in the restoration tank.

But the existence or non-existence of an external copy of me does nothing to
my own internal sense of identity -- my consciousness. The second me may be
a copy of the backed up Jamais down to the molecule, but it remains
*external* from my (the ur-Jamais) point of view. That it could exist may be
reassuring from the keep-my-wife-from-mourning perspective, but it does
nothing to keep *me* (the internal base Jamais identity, the consciousness
pattern in *this* physical instantiation) around.

I have no problem with the idea of backing up in case of accident or
malice. I agree that those who find backing up and restoring after an
accidental or malicious death to be totally unacceptable will eventually
fade into the mists of the past. What I disagree with is the notion that
any significant number of people will be willing to choose to kill their
current selves in order to let a copy live on. It may look like me 
(external identity), but it's not me (internal identity).

It doesn't matter how perfect or sublime the copy is, the original is
still being asked to end its own unique (from its own perspective)  
internal existence. And, no matter how many times a body has died and been 
restored, the consciousness -- which is backed up *prior* to death -- will 
have to make that choice for the first time every time. It can't get used 
to the idea; it has never had to make that decision before. Someone else 
(who happened to be a perfect copy at the point of backup, but not after) 
had to.
  

    
6 slips, this time
  

    
>> People change all the time. Your best friend goes trekking in Nepal for a
 year and comes back completely transformed, Same/not same, and we manage to
 normalize it. We have the cognitive mechanism for normalizing it, and we'll
 adapt that mechanism to other situations if need be.
<<

I don't think anyone here is arguing that other people wouldn't get used to
backup/restore situations. Nobody is arguing that the new copy wouldn't
think of itself in every way as the continuation of the original. What
people are arguing with is the notion that the original would choose to die
in order to let a copy live on.
  

    

My take on this is that when you're uploaded, copied, whatever, you just
forked your future.  I have no problem thinking of myself as a person with
one past and multiple futures.  "Which one" I end up being is sort of a
meaningless question to me.  They'll both have continuity of consciousness
& memory from the copying point.  So to me, both of those instances are in
my future.  Therefore losing the meat copy before it has any chance to
continue processing wouldn't mean a loss of subjective continuity because
you could just run the backup-me.

On the other hand, leaving meat-me around to continue experiencing things
means that the backup copy no longer lies in meat-me's future, so I'd be a
little squeamish there.  But by the time you've accepted that a backup copy
of yourself is also you, you've probably also come to terms with the fact
that consciousness is just a function of a very clever biological
computer.  And therefore losing a day or or two of experiences, well, data
loss happens, you know?  I think that like Cory says, people will just get
over it.

Speaking for myself, I think I had a shift in my thinking a while back when
I really realized that I wasn't some magical unexplainable soul floating on
top of my brain; I *was* my brain.  There's no afterlife, there's no heaven
or hell, there's just functioning for a while and then not.  So I don't
fear *being dead*.  There's nothing there to be afraid *of*.  I fear not
experiencing things and not being around, and I fear the pain of dying, but
I can see that if I had a backup copy running, and a painless euthanasia
for this meat-me, I wouldn't regard it as suicide.
  

    
When all of us are copies, welcoming our copy friends from the backup tanks,
forever and ever, I can't help but feel that something authentic is gone.
  

    

I have kind of a reverse example that I find persuasive, actually.  Once
(and only once!) when I was a teenager I drank so much that I had a long
period (4 hours maybe) where I was conscious (talking to people, walking
around), but had no memory whatsoever of it later.  So to me, that period
is not part of my continuity of consciousness even though it was running on
the meat-me's brain, and even though at the time I'm sure I thought I was
still me.  Did the me that was running around drunk "die" when I passed
out?  I don't have any memory of what he did.  Am I mourning this dead guy
who was me?  Of course not!

Losing a few days processing on an instance seems kind of like that.  A
regrettable accident, but hardly the end of the world.
  

    

I've tried to think of sleep as a similar consciousness break -- I have 
dreams about that, in fact -- but it doesn't work for me.  I think I'd be 
one of the people of the future who doesn't give up any particular body 
(while making backups of course) until it's too much trouble and pain to 
deal with anymore.

There'd be communities of us.  Lots of people who are willing to admit the 
sense in making backups are still going to feel that way about each body 
they back up from, in my opinion.

Broadly, maybe our future will be divided into short-livers and 
long-livers, maybe doing not much more than sharing physical worlds, with 
only the occasional people who travel in both societies.
  

    
Cory:

Are you considering ever writing a nonfiction book?

Did you read Ellen Ullman's recent Harper's Magazine article, attacking 
the way AI enthusiasts use the notionof emergent behavior? I'd LOVE to see 
the two of you discuss (I don't know if it would be a debate) her article 
here. It doesn't look like the article is online. It was published a 
couple months ago.