One of the big benefits of uploading is safety through redundancy. If you only upgrade, you only ever have one brain and if that suffers even relatively minor physical damage you are dead or permanently changed. However, it does very likely require more advanced technology than just surrounding a poorly understood squishy meat brain with more and different stuff.
You can also have a much broader range of physical embodiments. Uploading doesn’t mean that you are “pure machine code”, since you don’t exist in that state. While you exist you’re always running on some sort of physical substrate, just one that isn’t limited to a particular bag of flesh. But if you like using a bag of flesh for the embodiment of your consciousness, you can probably download back into one.
I don’t think the concept of “free or open source software” applies to people. It’s a copyright concept, and copyright is almost certainly not going to be the operating legal principle. I don’t know what would be, but not that. At the very least I would expect legal restrictions on what you are allowed to do with someone else’s mind-state, including some issues around consent that we haven’t yet needed to seriously consider. For example, I would expect it there to be no legally valid consent to many types of modification to your own mind-state.
I think one doesn’t necessarily preclude the other, with upgrading at least. I’d be okay with upgrading that had moment-to-moment differential backups being sent off elsewhere which one could be restored from in the event of death. Admittedly, that discontinuity of consciousness may actually mean death for “original” version of the self, which sucks, but at least roughly the same entity would still be around.
I would want upgrades that minimize discontinuity of consciousness & experience but do allow for some way to fire off into “virtual space” and do stuff there with some portion of total self for some amount of time. And that’s true re: existing requires running on some sort of physical substrate, though I’m not sure why that obviates my concern re: issues with running on other people’s hardware / servers: how do the legal particularities of selfhood & existence get handled in such scenarios?
Why won’t copyright be the operating legal principle? What other principle governing determination of property & rules of ownership and interaction thereof would there be? My prior is that existing systems of law would be extended as much as possible to future scenarios, based on the assumption that that seems more “face validity” plausible than civilization experiencing a significant enough discontinuity to come up with an entirely new legal system to base things on. Legal technologies tend to be conserved and appended, rather than created anew.
Fair enough, it looks like the main disagreement there was just whether the word “upload” included backups.
Copyright won’t be the operating legal principle for all sorts of reasons. First is that copyright pertains only to “creative works” that were authored by a person. Uploaded people are very unlikely to be considered “creative works”. Modifications might be, but those seem more likely to be governed by patent-like laws if anything, as processes rather than end result.
Another is that copyright is fundamentally about ownership rights, and while it is possible that the future may be a dystopian hell in some ways, it won’t necessarily be one in which people are legally owned by others. If your prior is a conservative extension of current law, reinstating slavery does not seem to fit that. Even if it were, I doubt that copyright law specifically would be the means by which it is enacted.
Another is that copyright is primarily about publication, not use. I would expect there to be substantial legal restrictions surrounding how mind-states may be used along the same lines as existing laws about how people are permitted to interact with other people, though I suppose in some hell-world even that may be absent.
I do think there’s a key difference between a full upload that more or less maintains continuity of consciousness (e.g. you don’t experience anything beyond going to sleep and waking up in a different ??body??) and a backup that restores you to a point after a definite permanent break in said continuity, e.g. death or brain injury.
What is your epistemic confidence in “Copyright won’t be the operating legal principle for all sorts of reasons.”? I know we are both making assumptions here, how do we best test those assumptions and validate which world seems like the more possible world to exist in? Predicting the future is hard. I will make a Metaculus question on this matter. I tried just now but ran into “An unexpected error” and don’t have time to troubleshoot.
I had not thought about the distinction between patent & copyright law in this case, I’ll have to examine that further another day.
One of the big benefits of uploading is safety through redundancy. If you only upgrade, you only ever have one brain and if that suffers even relatively minor physical damage you are dead or permanently changed. However, it does very likely require more advanced technology than just surrounding a poorly understood squishy meat brain with more and different stuff.
You can also have a much broader range of physical embodiments. Uploading doesn’t mean that you are “pure machine code”, since you don’t exist in that state. While you exist you’re always running on some sort of physical substrate, just one that isn’t limited to a particular bag of flesh. But if you like using a bag of flesh for the embodiment of your consciousness, you can probably download back into one.
I don’t think the concept of “free or open source software” applies to people. It’s a copyright concept, and copyright is almost certainly not going to be the operating legal principle. I don’t know what would be, but not that. At the very least I would expect legal restrictions on what you are allowed to do with someone else’s mind-state, including some issues around consent that we haven’t yet needed to seriously consider. For example, I would expect it there to be no legally valid consent to many types of modification to your own mind-state.
I think one doesn’t necessarily preclude the other, with upgrading at least. I’d be okay with upgrading that had moment-to-moment differential backups being sent off elsewhere which one could be restored from in the event of death. Admittedly, that discontinuity of consciousness may actually mean death for “original” version of the self, which sucks, but at least roughly the same entity would still be around.
I would want upgrades that minimize discontinuity of consciousness & experience but do allow for some way to fire off into “virtual space” and do stuff there with some portion of total self for some amount of time. And that’s true re: existing requires running on some sort of physical substrate, though I’m not sure why that obviates my concern re: issues with running on other people’s hardware / servers: how do the legal particularities of selfhood & existence get handled in such scenarios?
Why won’t copyright be the operating legal principle? What other principle governing determination of property & rules of ownership and interaction thereof would there be? My prior is that existing systems of law would be extended as much as possible to future scenarios, based on the assumption that that seems more “face validity” plausible than civilization experiencing a significant enough discontinuity to come up with an entirely new legal system to base things on. Legal technologies tend to be conserved and appended, rather than created anew.
Fair enough, it looks like the main disagreement there was just whether the word “upload” included backups.
Copyright won’t be the operating legal principle for all sorts of reasons. First is that copyright pertains only to “creative works” that were authored by a person. Uploaded people are very unlikely to be considered “creative works”. Modifications might be, but those seem more likely to be governed by patent-like laws if anything, as processes rather than end result.
Another is that copyright is fundamentally about ownership rights, and while it is possible that the future may be a dystopian hell in some ways, it won’t necessarily be one in which people are legally owned by others. If your prior is a conservative extension of current law, reinstating slavery does not seem to fit that. Even if it were, I doubt that copyright law specifically would be the means by which it is enacted.
Another is that copyright is primarily about publication, not use. I would expect there to be substantial legal restrictions surrounding how mind-states may be used along the same lines as existing laws about how people are permitted to interact with other people, though I suppose in some hell-world even that may be absent.
I do think there’s a key difference between a full upload that more or less maintains continuity of consciousness (e.g. you don’t experience anything beyond going to sleep and waking up in a different ??body??) and a backup that restores you to a point after a definite permanent break in said continuity, e.g. death or brain injury.
What is your epistemic confidence in “Copyright won’t be the operating legal principle for all sorts of reasons.”? I know we are both making assumptions here, how do we best test those assumptions and validate which world seems like the more possible world to exist in? Predicting the future is hard. I will make a Metaculus question on this matter. I tried just now but ran into “An unexpected error” and don’t have time to troubleshoot.
I had not thought about the distinction between patent & copyright law in this case, I’ll have to examine that further another day.