Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!bcm!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: franz@cs.washington.edu (Franz G. Amador) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Is uploading suicide? Message-ID: Date: 9 Jan 91 21:06:39 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 93 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu It seems to me that the concept of uploading has a fundamental and unavoidable flaw. Namely, there is no way to tell if an uploading has been successful. By "successful" I mean that one's consciousness has been copied into the computer, not merely one's behavior patterns. Suppose, for example, that you are the last remaining un-uploaded person on Earth. All your friends have made the transfer, and their bodies have been done away with. "It's great," they say, "come join us! You can think ever so much faster, and you can live in an infinite and wonderous variety of synthetic worlds." You like the idea of this new sort of existence, but how do you know that your friends still really exist? There's no way for you to tell if what seems to be their voices coming from the depths of the system represent real, thinking beings with that vital spark of consciousness, or are simply perfect computer simulations that act exactly right, but are just mechanical marionettes. Are your friends in the computer, waiting for you, or did they die with their bodies? From the outside, you cannot tell the difference. Now suppose that one of them says, "Okay, I'll prove to you that I'm real," and uses the handy-dandy nanotech assembler system attached to the computer to generate a new body with the proper brain state to correspond to his current mental state in the computer. Newly corporeal, he walks over and shakes your hand and says, "See? No problem. I'm currently made of just the same stuff as you, and I am definitely conscious and remember perfectly my life in the computer. It was great, and I'm looking forward to going back. We're just starting a great simulated multi-dimensional party, and everybody's hoping I'll bring you along." Unfortunately, even if he's telling the truth, it doesn't solve your problem. A perfect simulation would, of course, create the proper memories, and once made physical again, even your friend cannot know whether he was really conscious within the machine or not. Whether these points bother the reader depends, I suppose, upon whether he or she believes that a "perfect" simulation will necessarily create consciousness. I do not see why it should, but the answer is immaterial to my argument. If you decide to risk your consciousness by uploading, it will be an act of faith without a guarantee, because there is no empirical means of determining if any prior uploading has been successful. Even if you decide to return to material reality after a fixed time limit, and your uploaded self doesn't change its mind, you still won't be able to know if you were conscious while in the computer. So if you really can't tell the difference while made of flesh and blood (not meat - meat is dead muscle tissue), and you can return to physical form whenever you or your simulation wants to, what difference does it make whether you are really conscious while uploaded? It is the difference between life and death. If your consciousness is not there while uploaded, then so long as you stay in the computer, you are dead. If existence in there really is preferable to that in the material world, then your simulated self might choose never to return, and by uploading you are committing suicide. Franz Amador franz@cs.washington.edu {rutgers,cornell,ucsd,ubc-cs,tektronix}!uw-beaver!june!franz [I am sure that this argument is a foretaste of the sort of reaction that some people are going to have to a number of the fundamentally new and different things in the world that nanotechnology is going to make possible. It's incumbent on us, here and now, before that happens, to get a good handle on the these arguments while this is still speculation, and all sides can be thoroughly explored without arousing counterproductive passions. The basis of this argument (and plenty of other ones we've seen here) is a strict dichotomy between life and death. In the natural world this makes lots of sense, because the two states are quite distinct. However, even current medical technology blurs the distinction, and in the future there will be a complete continuum. Mr. Amador's rhetorical device is to continue to identify the term "life" with its current strict meaning and call everything else "death", no matter how lifelike it may seem. Now one assumes that he believes there is some undefined essence associated with a direct biological implementation of a person's thought pattern, and he is making the distinction on that basis. However, even if that were true, it is argumentative rather than enlightening to associate the term "dead" with states other than the one it currently denotes. In particular, the disturbing connotations of the word are associated with the powerlessness, uselessness, and total loss and irretrievability which death currently entails. None of these is true of uploading, and only some of them are true of other possible states (such as being copied into the archives). Thus, rather than using an existing value-laden word such as "dead" it will be much more useful to use (currently) value-free words such as "uploaded", "simulated", "archived", "inactivated", and the like, and allow connotations to be attached to them as the states they describe become better understood. --JoSH]