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billswift comments on "Ray Kurzweil and Uploading: Just Say No!", Nick Agar - Less Wrong
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Comments (79)
Of course there is such a risk. We can't even do formal mathematics without significant and ineradicable risk in the final proof; what on earth makes you think any anti-zombie or anti-Riply proof is going to do any better? And in formal math, you don't usually have tons of experts disagreeing with the proof and final conclusion either. If you think uploading is so certain the risk it is fundamentally incorrect is zero or epsilon, you have drunk the koolaid.
Indeed, the line in the quote:
Could apply equally well to crossing a street. There is very, very little we can do without some "ineliminable risk" being attached to it.
We have to balance the risks and expected benefits for our actions; which requires knowledge not philosophical "might-be"s.
Yes, I agree, as do the quotes and Agar even: because this is not Pascal's wager where the infinites render the probabilities irrelevant, we ultimately need to fill in specific probabilities before we can decide that destructive uploading is a bad idea, and this is where Agar goes terribly wrong - he presents poor arguments that the probabilities will be low enough to make it an obviously bad idea. But I don't think this point is relevant to this conversation thread.
It occurred to me when I was reading the original post, but I was inspired to post it here mostly as a me-too to your line:
That is, reinforcing that everything has some "ineradicable risk".