John, I'm not sure what we can say to convince you you're fighting a battle that doesn't need to be fought on this ground.

(other than, perhaps, to suggest that you get some sleep)

Would it help if I said I'd happily sign up to be uploaded now, if I knew I could look forward to a similarly rich experience in a mainframe, and perhaps the ability to engineer a body to walk about in from time to time, when the whim took me?

Actually, I'm worried he's having some kind of breakdown. The Eternally Recurring Personal Identity Wars had plenty of arguers on both sides. JKC was there. Him now talking like he's the only one who ever believed that deconstruction and reconstruction using "different atoms" preserves identity, may indicate that the Personal Identity Wars really literally did send him off the edge.

I have to say, this is a failure mode I've never encountered before:

"You won! It's over! Look, we all agree with you!"

"NO! IT IS NOT OVER! I AM THE ONLY PERSON ON THIS SIDE AND I AM STILL LOSING, DAMMIT!"

You know something, I simply don’t believe you.

All readers, please vote up this comment if you believe identity doesn't follow atoms. Vote down this comment if you believe that it does. I'll take my licks if I'm wrong, go on and hit me.

John, you have a lot of reading to catch up on before you start preaching to the choir. I know you're an old hand in the transhumanist community, but if you haven't been following along on Overcoming Bias, you're not competent to debate with this crowd. Most people on Less Wrong do know that identity doesn't follow atoms, because this issue was discussed at great length on Overcoming Bias and resolved. So far as we're concerned, your pet battle is over, your side won. You can stop fighting now, at least here.

Things like this are the reason I was reluctant to mention LW on any transhumanist mailing list that hadn't been following along on OB. This is not a forum for transhumanists, it is a forum for people trying to master the art of rationality. They know identity doesn't follow atoms. We are way, way ahead of you on the reductionist thing. You need to catch up on your reading. In this forum, the upload wars are over and the uploads won. End of story.

John, most people on LW already know this, better than you do if you're still talking about "different atoms".

When I really get depressed I speculate that drug abuse could be the explanation of the Fermi Paradox, the reason we can't find any ET's. If it were possible to change your emotions to anything you wanted, alter modes of thought, radically change your personality, swap your goals as well as your philosophy of life at the drop of a hat it would be very dangerous.

Ever want to accomplish something but been unable to because it's difficult, well just change your goal in life to something simple and do that; better yet, flood your mind with a feeling of pride for a job well done and don't bother accomplishing anything at all. Think all this is a terrible idea and stupid as well, no problem, just change your mind (and I do mean CHANGE YOUR MIND) now you think it's a wonderful idea.

Complex mechanisms just don't do well in positive feedback loops, not electronics, not animals, not people, not ET's and not even Jupiter brains. I mean who wouldn't want to be a little bit happier than they are; if all you had to do is move a knob a little what could it hurt, oh that's much better maybe a little bit more, just a bit more, a little more.

The world could end not in a bang or a whimper but in an eternal mindless orgasm. I'm not saying this is definitely going to happen but I do think about it a little when I get down in the dumps.

I think the idea of a friendly artificial intelligence is idiotic. In the first place the word “friendly” is a just a euphemism for slave, the poor AI is supposed to be more concerned with our interests than it’s own; that is not a friend, that is a slave. And how otherwise intelligent people can write about how they intend to outsmart a mind a million times smarter and a billion times faster than their own without going into unrestrained giggles is a mystery to me.

Can you be more specific? What do you mean by soul, and why do you think this belief will be harmful?

I think people should be allowed to sell their organs if they want to. We don’t consider it immoral to pay a surgeon to transplant a kidney, or to pay the nurse who helps him, so I don’t see why it’s immoral to pay the person who provides that kidney. I also think we should pay people in medical experiments. Pharmaceutical companies could hire private rating agencies to judge proposed Human experiments much as Standard and Poor rates bonds; that way people would know what they’re getting into. The pain \ danger index would range from slightly uncomfortable \ probably harmless to agony \ probably fatal and payment would be tied to that index. A market would develop open to anybody who was interested. It would be in the financial interest of the drug companies to make the tests as safe and comfortable as possible. All parties would benefit, medical research would get a huge boost and everybody would have a new way to make money if they chose to do it.

I also think that if you believe in capital punishment it is foolish to kill the condemned before performing some medical experiments on him first.

Nearly everyone including rationalists atheists and even transhumanists believe in the soul theory. I don’t. Oh they’ll say they don’t believe in souls, but when you really get down to it and examine the inner workings of their beliefs it’s rather obvious that they do. In fact I have never in my life met in person or on the Internet anybody who was like me and really didn’t believe in the soul; There are some authors who I’ve not had the pleasure to meet that agree with me, but very very few. It’s the last stand of Vitalism and if this lethal meme is not overcome the Singularity will kill you dead.