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Manfred comments on [Link] Death, long lives, uploading - a conworlding perspective - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Vulture 27 January 2014 04:04PM

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Comment author: Manfred 27 January 2014 09:03:38PM 12 points [-]

get yourself uploaded to a computer, so you can stay alive indefinitely. I think it’d be horrible to give up food, sex, exercise, and the rest of our bodily experience, even if we posit that you can still somehow retain your visual qualia.

I will be nice rather than mean, and explain why this is wrong.

We already have artificial deices that help the blind see. We can take the signals from an amputee's brain and use them to move an artificial limb. We understand how the ear works - there are different nerves for different frequencies. Artificial taste would be pretty trivial, but isn't as good without artificial smell, which seems the hardest of all the senses. To assume that a brain simulated on a computer in 100 years won't be able to hear, touch, taste, or smell is incredibly naive about the workings of the human body and the progress that's being made right now.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 29 January 2014 08:20:24AM 0 points [-]

Not to mention that all of your parts that can be cut off without making you stop being you, like eyes or limbs, might already best be viewed as squishy prosthetics instead of fundamental parts of your true being. Ari Heljakka has written about this stuff, unfortunately in Finnish. I wonder if his Model Zero book has something about it.