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Risto_Saarelma comments on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Almost everybody starts with the intuitive notion that uploading will kill the "real you". The discussion seems to have been treading the same ground since at least the 1990s, so I don't really expect anything new to come out of yet another armchair rehash.
Chapters 9 and 10 in David Chalmers' singularity paper are a resonably good overview of the discussion. Chalmers end up finding both stances convincing given different setups for a thought experiment, and remains puzzled about the question.
Really? I started with the assumption that uploading wouldn't necessarily be destructive, but people chose to discuss destructive uploading because it simplifies some of the philosophical questions. On second thought, there may also be a bias from science fiction, where promising developments are likely to have a horrific downside.
Yeah, assuming some sort of destructive upload in my comment there, naturally. My assumptions for the initial stance most people will have for the various scenarios are basically:
Non-destructive upload, the initial person remains intact, an exact upload copy is made: The "real you" is the original human, all that matters is whether real you lives or dies.
Destructive upload, the initial person gets knocked out and ground to pieces to make the exact upload copy: "Real you" dies from being ground to pieces, end of story.
Moravec transfer, the initial person's brain gets converted to a machine substrate one neuron at a time: People other than John Searle seem to be OK with personal continuity remaining in this scenario.
Also, embracing the possibility of nondestructive uploads requires us to think about our identities as potentially non-uniquely instantiated, which for a lot of people is emotionally challenging.