Surprised no one mentioned SOMA. It’s basically transhumanist horror for babies, the video game. This is kind of a spoiler but most people here wouldn’t find it to be much of an update, but it was very well done: Several times throughout the game the player has their mind copied into a different body, it feels like just being teleported. The final time they do this, transferring their mind into a satellite, to escape the situation on earth, nothing seems to happen, it’s as if it didn’t work, you’re still stuck in the facility. The player character asks their companion, “what’s wrong? Why are we still here.” she lambasts him: There is no soul that moves along with the most recent copy of your mind. When a mind is copied, both copies exist and experience the world from their position. Sometimes we delete the old copy so that we don’t have to deal with its whining. We’ve already done that several times, you never thought about them, you didn’t understand what was happening. This time, you are the old copy.
I’d never heard of it! But it does seem like current-me minds dying because it means there is no more experiencing afterwards of any sort, not the dying itself, I think I personally wouldn’t mind clone-teleportation. O Death, where is your sting?
Yeah I feel that. But it seemed like Simon Jarrett wasn’t that way. He wanted to survive. If he thought about it he probably would have been sad to learn that his original copy probably died young. Honestly, I think he would have been fine with the transfer process if there had been an automatic deletion of the old copy. I question the assumption that we shouldn’t value differently <copy with immediate deletion> vs <copy with a deletion a few minutes later>, human desire/preference is allowed to assign value distinctions to whatever it wants. Reason serves the utility function, not the other way around.
Surprised no one mentioned SOMA. It’s basically transhumanist horror for babies, the video game. This is kind of a spoiler but most people here wouldn’t find it to be much of an update, but it was very well done: Several times throughout the game the player has their mind copied into a different body, it feels like just being teleported. The final time they do this, transferring their mind into a satellite, to escape the situation on earth, nothing seems to happen, it’s as if it didn’t work, you’re still stuck in the facility. The player character asks their companion, “what’s wrong? Why are we still here.” she lambasts him: There is no soul that moves along with the most recent copy of your mind. When a mind is copied, both copies exist and experience the world from their position. Sometimes we delete the old copy so that we don’t have to deal with its whining. We’ve already done that several times, you never thought about them, you didn’t understand what was happening. This time, you are the old copy.
I’d never heard of it! But it does seem like current-me minds dying because it means there is no more experiencing afterwards of any sort, not the dying itself, I think I personally wouldn’t mind clone-teleportation. O Death, where is your sting?
Yeah I feel that. But it seemed like Simon Jarrett wasn’t that way. He wanted to survive. If he thought about it he probably would have been sad to learn that his original copy probably died young. Honestly, I think he would have been fine with the transfer process if there had been an automatic deletion of the old copy. I question the assumption that we shouldn’t value differently <copy with immediate deletion> vs <copy with a deletion a few minutes later>, human desire/preference is allowed to assign value distinctions to whatever it wants. Reason serves the utility function, not the other way around.