From: L' Ermit (lhermit@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Jan 29 2002 - 18:30:37 MST
[Joe Dees] Of course, as soon as the self is uploaded and thus effectively
cloned, the identities of the two selves will begin to diverge, as their
experiences will from that point differ.
[Hermit] Indubitably.
[Hermit] Interesting to speculate on the "arrow of time" for the "artificial
self" as it would be possible to delete it (would that be murder), reload it
(a genuine "rebirth"), modify it (instant "reprogramming"), place it in
stasis (a "time-freeze") or clone it - and possibly develop ways of
recombining cloned experience.
[Hermit] For a lot of the above, I suspect that we will have to develop new
vocabularies.
[Hermit] My answer to the first question is yes. That an intelligent
self-aware being is valuable, no matter what its neurons are made of. But it
will change the way we perceive death, as knowing that you can create as
many copies of yourself as you please, with whatever capabilities appear
important and that this effectively provides you with immortality will
change the value of life. So I might choose to send a clone of myself on a
tour of somewhere/thing where there was no way for the clone to return from
the trip, but where I could "update myself" to share the experience right up
to the moments just before the clone terminated. And if the experience
generated a psychosis, this could be cured by reverting to a back-up.
[Hermit] Interesting (and valuable) speculation in the light of the fact
that this is likely to be possible within our lifetimes. Of course, it will
be easier for our spirothetic* children to engage in these levels of self
transformation.
Regards
Hermit
*spirothetic: A new word proposal by Hermit, describing a synthesized
self-aware being (spiro-, from Latin, the breath of life, -thetic, from
synthetic, created rather than naturally occurring.)
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