MichaelG comments on Which Parts Are "Me"? - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 October 2008 06:15PM

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Comment author: MichaelG 22 October 2008 10:06:49PM 0 points [-]

Moshe Gurvich, thanks for the encouragement. I can never decide if my problem is Depression as a disease, or just reaction to my particular life circumstances.

There are people who recommend purely cognitive approaches to depression, including a lot of self-monitoring. Finding a project that engages you, so that you don't dwell on your depression, is a different approach, although also purely cognitive.

My point on the original post though was that you might naively assume that people would be scared of self-modification. But then you see people using Prozac without a second thought. More commonly, alcohol and other mood-altering substances are used. So perhaps we aren't frightened of self-modification after all.

As Eliezer implies, that would make us even more unstable as an upload with direct self-modification abilities.