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Eternal Life...

Taffer said:
If the copy is identical to you in every meaningful way, what objective criteria are you employing to distinguish between you and it?
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Continuity might be a good start. I'm not the same person I was 25 years ago, but second-to-second there are minimal changes.

Still, I'm not sure how anyone else could distinguish between me and my duplicate, if it were done accurately enough. So objective criteria probably doesn't exist.

In fact, if Many-Worlds is true, then I already have countless clones of myself in different universes. There are probably some universes where I live a very long time--maybe forever. That's not much comfort to the brain in this universe, though.

- Dr. Trintignant
 
Also:

As long as I was unconscious during the scanning, and my body was destroyed before the 'copy' was turned on, I would be comfortable that it would be 'me'.

That would be the only way to be sure that the information my brain contained and the information the copy contained were the same during the transfer.
 
Dr. Trintignant said:
Continuity might be a good start. I'm not the same person I was 25 years ago, but second-to-second there are minimal changes.

Still, I'm not sure how anyone else could distinguish between me and my duplicate, if it were done accurately enough. So objective criteria probably doesn't exist.

In fact, if Many-Worlds is true, then I already have countless clones of myself in different universes. There are probably some universes where I live a very long time--maybe forever. That's not much comfort to the brain in this universe, though.

- Dr. Trintignant
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I am under the impression, that continuity in my own consciousness is a complex illusion which arises from the present state of information processing in my brain accessing/using stored memories.
 
Gate2501 said:
I am under the impression, that continuity in my own consciousness is a complex illusion which arises from the present state of information processing in my brain accessing/using stored memories.
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Ok, but that doesn't mean that continuity is totally irrelevant, either. "Locality" (the feeling that I am somehow inside my body) is also seemingly an illusion, as the feeling can be removed with drugs, and yet it remains true that everything about me is localized within my body--mostly my brain. So the feeling may be an illusion, but that doesn't change the physical reality.

- Dr. Trintignant
 
Fred Pohl's "Heechee" novels also go into this notion in some depth. The Omni article I mentioned addressed the problem of simply making a copy of yourself; they speculated that at some stage you would transfer "your" POV back and forth between your biological body and the computer, till you couldn't differentiate which was which....

We can always invoke Arthur Clarke's dictum that if human beings can think of something, they will likely try to do it.
 
Bob Blaylock said:
But then again, perhaps you don't really have anything to say that is worth reading, so instead of posting it in a readable way, you post it in a pale lavender type that is difficult to read, and which hurts one's eyes who foolishly makes any serious attempt to read it.
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Remove thy beam of color from your signature font before you criticize the motish font of another.
 
Setting aside the philosophy discussion about whether or not a scanned you is "you"...(In other words, assume the copy is as much "You" as you are. Given time if you both were ummm... operating... you would diverge into more and more separate people...)

The results would probably be devastating.
We are wired, our entire evolution as beings is based on mortality.
The first hundred years or so may rock, but after that, the sheer weight if time would most likely begin to press very heavily upon you.
Given enough time, the burdens of the things you have witnessed would become like living a death sentence.
As we live our mortal lives, we tend to shut away the negatives we experience. As people become older, they generally develop more cynicism and bitterness. But we can handle that because our time is limited. We know that it's limited.
Imagine if you knew that it wasn't. Imagine after a thousand years of witnessing not just the joys in life, but the terrors, the pains, the wars- whatever- KNOWING that you were going to keep witnessing it... Forever.

Kinda stuff that will mess up your head...


The only practical way that I can imagine for a person to be immortal- would be to take away his humanity.
 
Let me also add:


This is now my fifteenth post so I should be able to post links. From here on out- I can immortalize myself not by living forever, but by swinging my mighty pen...er... keyboard...

Ok I only swing my keyboard when I'm really mad.

Hang on... I messed up...

Right.. The best way for a human to become immortal is to be remembered. To be alive at the time makes you fleeting rather than immortal, because the history books don't record the fact that you were a jerk.
 
gdnp said:
Ignoring the fact that we do not have the technology to scan the brain to record even the most rudimentary thoughts, my brain, scanned into a computer hard drive, might seem like "me" to other people, but it would not be me to me. It would be a separate entity.
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And it would immediately not be you. A chip would have no way of gaining the new information that you would be gaining. The scan is over and you look at the chip and say "wow." Right there, an experience the chip doesn't have. You conclude the chip doesn't have that experience. There's another experience the chip doesn't have. It goes on and on. Not to mention the fact that the chip cannot actually do anything by itself. Frankly, I cannot believe I'm typing this. The whole concept is absurd.
 
jmcvann said:
And it would immediately not be you. A chip would have no way of gaining the new information that you would be gaining. The scan is over and you look at the chip and say "wow." Right there, an experience the chip doesn't have. You conclude the chip doesn't have that experience. There's another experience the chip doesn't have. It goes on and on. Not to mention the fact that the chip cannot actually do anything by itself. Frankly, I cannot believe I'm typing this. The whole concept is absurd.
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No more absurd than having twins.
The almost meta-physical philosophy of it IS pointless, however.

Granting the hypothetical technology to do it... The scanned person and the copied person would both be the same exact person immediately. After that, they would become less and less like eachother, but they would also remain remarkably similar in basic traits for a very, very long time. Even with different experiences and such, the copy and the scanned would remain essentially the same person for quite a while, Reacting to things in the same way, making similar decisions, having the basic same temperment and so on.

To put it more simply: My grandmother barely changed at ALL in 40 years, in spite of 40 years of experience.

If I was scanned and a copy made, it would not bother me In the LEAST to know that he was a duplicate- that he was basically the same person as me. I might try to give him advise about his behavior, knowing all the while that he/I won't listen...
He might marry some woman whom I would wonder why he picked, nevermind the fact that I might have picked her too if the circumstances were right.. Moving along to bear their little duplicate robot children whom I would not love as I do my own, even though they have the "same" father...

I really think, from what I have read in this thread, that the OP wanted to stay the heck AWAY from the Meta-physical philosophy.

The thread struck me as a "Benefits or liabilities of Immortality" discussion rather than a "Is a copy of me still me" discussion.

Changing the premise-

Imagine that you found the Fountain of Youth- Would it be cool to live forever? A strain on your psyche? Incredibly boring?
 
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Actually, on the scan / copy model, a recent movie used this to good effect- "the Prestige"- a stage magician used a scan & copy teleporter to beam one copy of himself to the back of the theatre and the "spare" copy was plunged into a tank of water and drowned. Of course there were two "hims" after each show- one alive, one drowning. Nasty.
 
Neverfly said:
Setting aside the philosophy discussion about whether or not a scanned you is "you"...(In other words, assume the copy is as much "You" as you are. Given time if you both were ummm... operating... you would diverge into more and more separate people...)

The results would probably be devastating.
We are wired, our entire evolution as beings is based on mortality.
The first hundred years or so may rock, but after that, the sheer weight if time would most likely begin to press very heavily upon you.
Given enough time, the burdens of the things you have witnessed would become like living a death sentence.
As we live our mortal lives, we tend to shut away the negatives we experience. As people become older, they generally develop more cynicism and bitterness. But we can handle that because our time is limited. We know that it's limited.
Imagine if you knew that it wasn't. Imagine after a thousand years of witnessing not just the joys in life, but the terrors, the pains, the wars- whatever- KNOWING that you were going to keep witnessing it... Forever.

Kinda stuff that will mess up your head...


The only practical way that I can imagine for a person to be immortal- would be to take away his humanity.
Click to expand...

No one is talking about anything magical here, there is no way anyone could stop you from taking your own life if you were tired of living.

All we are talking about is taking away the frailty of the human body and making death less common as an accident.
 
Third Eye Open said:
No one is talking about anything magical here, there is no way anyone could stop you from taking your own life if you were tired of living.

All we are talking about is taking away the frailty of the human body and making death less common as an accident.
Click to expand...
I wonder how long our immortalized cyborgs would last before they cracked up and committed hari kari then?
 
Third Eye Open said:
No one is talking about anything magical here, there is no way anyone could stop you from taking your own life if you were tired of living.

All we are talking about is taking away the frailty of the human body and making death less common as an accident.
Click to expand...

Why would there be less frailty? Aren't we talking about a synthetic human that would be walking around doing things? It's brain is only as good as the one scanned and would be just as likely to walk into traffic as any human.
 
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