= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
A4FB53AC comments on Resurrection through simulation: questions of feasibility, desirability and some implications - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
Comments (57)
From the point of view of those who'll actually create the minds, it's not a choice between somebody who exists already and a new mind. It's the choice between two kinds of new minds, one modeled after a mind that has existed once, and one modeled after a better design.
One might also invoke Big Universe considerations to say that even the "new" kind of a mind has already existed in some corner of the universe (maybe as a Boltzmann brain), so they'll be regardless choosing between two kinds of minds that have existed once. Which just goes to show that the whole "this mind has existed once, so it should be given priority over a one that hasn't" argument doesn't make a lot of sense.
Yes. See also David Pearce's notion of beings who've replaced pain and pleasure with gradients of pleasure - instead of having suffering as a feedback mechanism, their feedback mechanism is a lack of pleasure.
Still I wonder then, what could I do, to enhance my probability of being resurrected if worse comes to worse and I can't manage to stay alive to protect and ensure the posterity of my own current self if I am not one of those better minds (according to which values though?)
I realize that this probably won't be very useful advice for you, but I'd recommend working on letting go of the sense of having a lasting self in the first place. Not that I'd fully alieve in that yet either, but the closer that I've gotten to always alieving it, the less I've felt like I have reason to worry about (not) living forever. Me possibly dying in fourty years is no big deal if I don't even think I'm the same person tomorrow, or five minutes from now.
You're confusing two meaning of the word "the same." When we refer to a person as "the same" that doesn't mean they haven't changed, it means that they've changed in some ways, but not in others.
If you define "same" as "totally unchanging" then I don't want to be the same person five minutes from now. Being frozen in time forever so I'd never change would be tantamount to death. There are some ways I want to change, like acquiring new skills and memories.
But there are other ways I don't want to change. I want my values to stay the same, and I want to remember my life. If I change in that way this is bad. It doesn't matter if this is done in an abrupt way, like dying, or a slow way, like an FAI gradually turning me into a different person.
If people change in undesirable ways, then it is a good thing to restore them through resurrection. I want to be resurrected if I need to be. And I want you to be resurrected to. Because the parts of you that shouldn't change are valuable, even if you've convinced yourself they're not.
Sure, I'm aware of that. But the bit that you quoted didn't make claims about what "the same" means in any objective sense - it only said that if you choose your definition of "the same" appropriately, then you can stop worrying about your long-term survival and thus feel better. (At least that's how it worked for me: I used to worry about my long-term survival a lot more when I still found personal identity to be a meaningful concept.)
I've pondered this some, and it seems that the best strategy in distant historical eras was just to be famous, and more specifically to write an autobiography. Having successful ancestors also seems to grow in importance as we get into the modern era. For us today we have cryonics of course, and being succesful/famous/wealthy is obviously viable, but blogging is probably to be recommended as well.