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SubstantialFrivolity  I'm not even supposed to be here today  2yr ago (text post)   2573 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 14, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Personally, I wouldn't do it. Even assuming that you can replicate the phenomenon of consciousness in a non-biological substrate (something that could be the case but that's basically impossible to prove), there's the issue of continuity when you're uploading your brain. Sure, there's another version of myself now, but this is not me and I will not experience the change. I will live and die as meat-based life, and there will not be any "transfer" of consciousness. There will not be any change in my own state except now I possess the knowledge that there is an immortal version of me running around out there.

My typical rejoinder is basically, how do you know this isn't happening every time you go to sleep -- that "you" die and a new "you" comes into existence when your body and brain awake the next morning, a brand new consciousness tricked by your brain's memories into inferring false continuity of self? Or even that this isn't happening thirty times per second as part of your brain's natural operation?

My other rejoinder is, how about a Moravec Procedure, where you remain conscious and lucid the entire time during your gradual upload, in each moment satisfied (and confirming via repeated formal consent) that your consciousness has not changed?

The issue for me is that you don't actually get to colonise anywhere, nobody leaves, you just make another galaxy cluster full of humans. Maybe this is just an irreconcilable values difference, but I think this solution completely voids the point of the exercise. I don't intrinsically care about creating as many humans as possible and distributing them throughout the galaxy. I care infinitely more about where these humans come from.

Indeed, perhaps an irreconcilable values difference, but I think there's something ineffably beautiful about a quest to awaken the dead matter of the universe into sentience.

Fortunately, it's very cheap! The cost of sending von neumann probes beyond the radius of a given civilization sphere is likely to be low relative to the wealth of mass-energy contained within the sphere. That is true even when our sphere is just the earth, and becomes only more true as the sphere expands. Even if 99% of the sentiences or "mind-share" of the civilization agrees with you, the remaining 1% could probably fund the expedition as a hobby.

Let's assume we can go at, say, 50% light speed (149896.229 km/s). The expansion of the universe is 68 km/s/Mpc, and the value of Mpc that gives us a recession speed of 0.5c (the relevant formula here is 68 x Mpc = 149896.229) is 2204.36 megaparsecs, which translates to roughly 7 billion light years. Everything outside that distance is receding from us faster than that.

A 7 billion light year radius is pretty damn good, I'd say! We're well outside our local group and have begun eating superclusters like potato chips at that point!

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