From: Michael (mike.michaeljc@gmail.com)
Date: Fri Jan 27 2006 - 15:19:26 MST
Another variety of thread veiw.
Is that the thread of consciousness, continues through all future entities
that you have power over.
This is basicall;, you are (or you should have moral obligation to) all
the future entitys that you have power over.
So when copy of you is uploaded since you determined how it would be you,
had power over it. An it is you.
This also means you having control over yourself is desirable is better
(we don't have complete control over our minds now).
In the patternist veiw , could additive change be different than revisive
change, if you became a god by merely adding to your existing self - then
would it be you?
And russel would you veiw a static utopia, where you loop continuously
desirable?
What for becoming a god ,but preserving an imperitive too... recreate and
simulate all it's ancestor selves? Hence survival, and more.
Michael Clark
On Fri, 27 Jan 2006 06:04:20 +1300, Russell Wallace
<russell.wallace@gmail.com> wrote:
> The thread view (identity is a verb, a continuing thread of
> consciousness)
> and the pattern view (identity is an adjective; as John Clark put it, "I
> am
> the way matter behaves when it is organized in a Johnclarkian way") give
> the
> same results most of the time; the one scenario that always gets
> adherents
> of the two arguing with each other is destructive scan uploading (fine by
> the pattern view, semelparous suicide by the identity view). (Happily,
> gradual uploading is a potential way around this problem for the thread
> view.)
>
> Another scenario in which the two views might give different results is
> the
> wish expressed by some transhumanists that can be summarized as "when I
> grow
> up I want to be a Great Old One"; that is, over the next while - say, a
> million subjective years - they want to continually modify and augment
> themselves such that the result will be, as they see it, as far beyond
> the
> original as the original was beyond an amoeba. (I don't personally accept
> the analogy even given the premises, but it gets the point across nicely
> enough that I did happily make use of it for science fiction purposes.)
>
> To me, as a subscriber to the pattern view, this doesn't make sense
> because
> said entity wouldn't be me anymore, so it would be a form of suicide; one
> could still regard the future existence of such an entity as a cool
> thing,
> but why would one have a desire to use oneself in particular as a
> seed/raw
> material?
>
> But it occurs to me that it makes perfect sense from the thread
> viewpoint;
> with appropriate care (don't discard so much that the result, while
> incredibly intelligent, no longer has any feeling or awareness so that it
> isn't anyone, etc) a huge change could be done as a series of incremental
> steps, each small enough that the thread of consciousness was unbroken;
> so a
> subscriber to this view could reasonably believe a Great Old One _would_
> be
> them, if it came into existence by the right path.
>
> One should then desire to follow this path if and only if one believes
> gradual uploading is better than destructive scan uploading. I'm curious
> as
> to how many positive and negative examples of this theory there are?
>
> (Meta: This is an SL3-4 topic, which people on the SL4 list have been
> unhappy about the shortage of lately; it's also I believe on-topic for
> extropy-chat, and is something of a followup to a previous (lower SL)
> message I posted there, so it seems appropriate for both lists; if the
> moderators of one or both lists disagree, or if crossposting like this
> isn't
> the right way to go about it, please let me know.)
>
> - Russell
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