My intuition that uploading is not a form of immortality for me (i am in a body) was and is very strong. To me it is clear that “me,” in this body, dies, and whether or not a copy of me is created somewhere else, which would then have its own life it would want to conserve, was irrelevant to me, in this body. That is just because the new being would think it had been me is no reason for the current me, who knows he is going to die in the process of being uploaded, should be fooled.
But discussions in comments about the discontinuity even of my life in my own body leave me open to wonder. Instead of thinking myself a person who doesn’t want to die, I think of myself in each instant as a machine which, if asked if it wants to die accesses memories as part of its mechanisms to conclude that it doesn’t want to die.
This change came about through comment discussions.
My intuition that uploading is not a form of immortality for me (i am in a body) was and is very strong. To me it is clear that “me,” in this body, dies, and whether or not a copy of me is created somewhere else, which would then have its own life it would want to conserve, was irrelevant to me, in this body. That is just because the new being would think it had been me is no reason for the current me, who knows he is going to die in the process of being uploaded, should be fooled.
But discussions in comments about the discontinuity even of my life in my own body leave me open to wonder. Instead of thinking myself a person who doesn’t want to die, I think of myself in each instant as a machine which, if asked if it wants to die accesses memories as part of its mechanisms to conclude that it doesn’t want to die.
This change came about through comment discussions.