incidentally empowering numerous mistaken notions about the future interplay of mind and technology.
Is that a prediction then? That your family and friends could somehow recognize the difference between you and a simulated copy of you? That the simulated copy of you would somehow not perceive itself as you? That the process just can't work and can't create anything recognizably conscious, intelligent, or human? (and does that mean strong AI needs to run on something other than a computer?) Or are you thinking it will be a philosophical zombie, and everyone will be fooled into thinking its you?
What do you think will actually happen, if/when we try to simulate stuff? Let's just say that we can do it roughly down to the molecular level.
states have a microphysically exact definition
What precludes us from simulating something down to the sufficiently, micro physically exact level? (I understand that you've got a physical theory of consciousness, but i'm trying to figure out how this micro-physical stuff plays into it)
What do you think will actually happen, if/when we try to simulate stuff?
I'll tell you what I think won't happen: real feelings, real thoughts, real experiences.
A computational theory of consciousness implies that all conscious experiences are essentially computations, and that the same experience will therefore occur inside anything that performs the same computation, even if the "computer" is a network of toppling dominoes, random pedestrians making marks on walls according to small rulebooks, or any other bizarre thing that implements a st...
In June 2012, Robin Hanson wrote a post promoting plastination as a superior to cryopreservation as an approach to preserving people for later uploading. His post included a paragraph which said:
This left me with the impression that the chances of the average cryopreserved person today of being later revived aren't great, even when you conditionalize on no existential catastrophe. More recently, I did a systematic read-through of the sequences for the first time (about a month 1/2 ago), and Eliezer's post You Only Live Twice convinced me to finally sign up for cryonics for three reasons:
I don't find that terribly encouraging. So now I'm back to being pessimistic about current cryopreservation techniques (though I'm still signing up for cryonics because the cost is low enough even given my current estimate of my chances). But I'd very much be curious to know if anyone knows what, say, Nick Bostrom or Anders Sandberg think about the issue. Anyone?
Edit: I'm aware of estimates given by LessWrong folks in the census of the chances of revival, but I don't know how much of that is people taking things like existential risk into account. There are lots of different ways you could arrive at a ~10% chance of revival overall:
is one way. But:
is a very similar conclusion from very different premises. Gwern has more on this sort of reasoning in Plastination versus cryonics, but I don't know who most of the people he links to are so I'm not sure whether to trust them. He does link to a breakdown of probabilities by Robin, but I don't fully understand the way Robin is breaking the issue down.