I see your point, but I guess my problem is that I don't see why constructing these tradeoffs is productive in the first place. It just seems like a party game where people ask what you'd do for a million dollars.
Like, in the situation here, with uploading, why does immortality even need to be part of equation? All he's really saying is "intuitively, it doesn't seem like an upload would 'really' be me". What happens to the upload, and what happens to the original, is just a carnival of distractions anyway. We can easily swap them around and see that they have no bearing on the issue.
Yeah, as I said earlier, if you can't think of a better way to have the conversations but don't think those conversations are worth having at all, I have nothing to say to that.
Like any conversation, they're interesting to the people they interest, and not to the people they don't... I don't really understand why people talk so much about football, for example.
I have been trying to absorb the Lesswrong near-consensus on cryonics/quantum mechanics/uploading, and I confess to being unpersuaded by it. I'm not hostile to cryonics; just indifferent, and having a bit of trouble articulating why the insights on identity that I have been picking up from the quantum mechanics sequence aren't compelling to me. I offer the following thought experiment in hopes that others may be able to present the argument more effectively if they understand the objection here.
Suppose that Omega appears before you and says, “All life on Earth is going to be destroyed tomorrow by [insert cataclysmic event of your choice here]. I offer you the chance to push this button, which will upload your consciousness to a safe place out of reach of the cataclysmic event, preserving all of your memories, etc. up to the moment you pushed the button and optimizing you such that you will be effectively immortal. However, the uploading process is painful, and because it interferes with your normal perception of time, your original mind/body will subjectively experience the time after you pushed the button but before the process is complete as a thousand years of the most intense agony. Additionally, I can tell you that a sufficient number of other people will choose to push the button that your uploaded existence will not be lonely.”
Do you push the button?
My understanding of the Lesswrong consensus on this issue is that my uploaded consciousness is me, not just a copy of me. I'm hoping the above hypothetical illustrates why I'm having trouble accepting that.