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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1722 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 2, 2025

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I hate VR, but I used to, maybe 15 years ago, play WoW, and I enjoyed running and flying and interacting in that world--sometimes I'd think "If this were the real world, there is no way in hell I'd still be running right now" after crossing the entirety of Eversong Woods. I spent hours playing, then one day my wife took a photo of me in my headphones staring seriously at the screen and I had a moment. I quit not long after.

But to answer your question "do I enjoy being embodied and doing stuff with my physical body" the answer is what I suspect it would be for most: Sometimes. Most of the time probably. Even after having my ass kicked and thrown all over the floor in Aikido, when I come home and shower and then get into the furo I feel sore as hell--but I feel alive. I was having this conversation with my oldest son recently: I feel most alive when I am walking in the freezing cold at 4:30 am going to the train station. If it's pissing down rain or snowing, all the more.

I am not a masochist. But you don't get to my age without having experienced a lot of physical discomfort (and I am relatively whole and healthy with all my limbs, unlike many.) You learn to enjoy the relaxing moments in the warm bed, or in the pool, or on the couch, or having a glass of wine at the kitchen table with your wife where the room is heated, while at the same time holding in the back of your head that this is only a brief respite from the freezing cold or burning heat, from hunger and fear and extreme exhaustion and a walking journey with a big pack where the end will not be for hours and hours and you have to make sure of not only your own safety but that of others, and you're scared shitless but that's your lot. That's an earthquake away. Or fill in your disaster. To say nothing of the eventual hospital or hospice bed where you may someday be in constant freakish pain without IV analgesics.

Yes I enjoy being embodied. Or more to the point, until your post, I've never questioned that "being embodied" is anything but reality, or that anything that is not that is unreality, or a Baudrillard hyperreality. Maybe when I was a kid and I watched that Star Trek OS episode Spock's Brain where his mind is literally disembodied (Brain and brain! What is brain?)

I'm intrigued at your feelings of what you're calling "severe distaste," particularly in that you say you've felt them since childhood. It makes me wonder if gaming has knocked loose something in the human brain that shouldn't be knocked loose.

Nota bene: I am old. You will get different perspectives on this.

Nota bene: I am old. You will get different perspectives on this.

That is by far the biggest downside of a baseline human body, and why I don't want to be stuck in one even if I like mine.

It will, despite our best medicines, decay and fail you. Maybe our drugs and treatments will get better, and we can keep people healthy indefinitely. But even then, I want things that no human body constrained by biology will be able to provide.

I'm not physically decrepit. Well, not yet. When I say old I mean mainly my perspective is different from that of the generation that grew up online.

Edit: As for the remainder of your comment, I'm at a loss. The human condition is its frailty and finitude. The Gift of Men, as Tolkien wrote.

The human condition is its frailty and finitude. The Gift of Men, as Tolkien wrote.

"Aging and death are good, actually" is the biggest fucking cope I have seen in my life.

I'm not as much of a transhumanist as some of the other rationalists, but I really don't think wanting to live until the heat death of the universe in an 18-year-old body is too much to ask.

I can't tell if you're calling George's words or Tolkien's "cope", but if it's the latter then I think you're mistaken. Tolkien was Catholic, and his setting reflected his beliefs. Death is absolutely a good thing in that framework, because you get to be with God, and that is such a profound joy that all else pales in comparison (even being in an 18-year-old body until the heat death of the universe).

Also, I think you're underrating how weary the world can become after even just our short stay here. Some of those problems would be obsolete in your hypothetical scenario, but not all. At some point, when you've seen a pointless genocide for the hundred thousandth time, is the fact that your body works great really that much of a solace? One thing I've noticed in spending time with old people (proper old, not @George_E_Hale lol) is that they are often quite ready to lay down their cares and rest. And the young never quite understand it because they just haven't been through enough of life to get to the point where death seems like a welcome end to things (with some exceptions, like very depressed people). But it's a very real thing, and to be honest I can understand it a lot more now at (almost) 40 than I could at 25.

I would think somewhere around 22 is more advantageous for a man.

Well I'm happy to have contributed to the biggest something in your life. I really dislike the neologism "cope" used in this way--rationalization/delusion is what you mean?

Whether aging and death are good or not is beside the point, or beside my own point. They've always been part of the human condition. Knowing your time is limited--and it will always be limited, regardless of how much progress longevity science makes--is a large contributor to what gives that time meaning.

If someone is that greatly attached to their frailty and finitude, then who am I to object? I won't, as long as they don't get in the way of me escaping mine.

There are plenty of aspects of the "human condition" that were ubiquitous and seemingly unavoidable for all of human history till they were not. I don't think most people miss 50% infant mortality rates, or heart attacks being inevitable death. They're not going to miss old age either, and if they really want that experience for themselves, that's their prerogative.

For what it's worth, the human condition seems to be a consistent trend of overcoming how awful said condition could be at times.

Imagine that tomorrow we perfect mind-upload. Your entire brain, and with it your identity and memories get cloned into an AI. You get to meet the AI, it’s really you. But the physical you, the meat you, still exists. The AI is a clone. I presume there would be no need to kill yourself, but would you no really longer have fear of death in your physical body? I doubt it. The thing about us living forever is that even if it happens in your lifetime, it probably won’t be ‘you’ living forever.

That is a strict improvement over the status-quo.

I'm not a biological chauvinist, and I think that the upload has equal claim to my name and assets. I also expect that unless things go really awry, the human version would probably end up acquiring biological immortality eventually. Destructive scans seem much easier than ones that preserve the original, but the latter isn't a bad thing as far as I'm concerned. It always leaves the option of another upload, one when the original is closer to death.

Even if that wasn't the case, I'd rest easier. Growing old and dying of old age sucks, but it is a great comfort to have seen your grandkids be born, follow in your footsteps and flourish. You can die with fewer regrets. In the same manner, if I had a backup, even one that would outlive me, I'd wish it well, and know that it would share most of my goals and desires, and would mourn my passing.

would mourn my passing.

Or feel relief about not having some progenitor who's seen as more-real-than-you hanging aroung anymore.

I suspect there will be all kinds of dysfunctions with the uploads themselves and revolving around them. The psychologists of the future will have their quackery cut out for them.

The best person to speculate about a copy of myself would be me. And I don't think that would happen.

The copying process may not be perfect. There could be bit flips. And that's assuming that your pattern will actually think like you go; that the difference in hardware will not matter and that the uploading process actually captures everything that makes you tick.

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False premise, this isn't perfect mind upload.

The state of the art in sci-fi, last time I checked, was that you stay conscious as they disconnect your brain cells one by one (or some small enough increment) and replace them with the artificial ones, slowly so that you can fill the gaps in your memories back in Ship of Theseus style and have no doubt you're staying yourself.

Imagine if it was perfect mind upload, and you find yourself back in your meat body after the mind upload is complete. You can kill yourself, but you have to do it yourself. Now answer the question.

Refer to the edit. In the process I described, the meat body is wiped by the process, if it failed the only way I could end up is "dead".

If it was the mind upload you described, I would not undergo it as it's pointless. Or rather, I would see it as some self-fetishistic form of procreation and would do it only as soon as I wanted to bear a digital child who was a copy of me. Naturally, I wouldn't like to share my bank account with them.

You been playing soma recently?

SOMA is one of those Muggle Plots that immediately gets solved once you accept the pattern theory of identity.

Literally just put the original in dreamless sleep before making the copy (shouldn't be hard since the original is already an upload; just pause the hardware!), make the copy, and then destroy the original without waking it up.

Before the process, there was one of you in the old body. After the process, there is one of you in the new substrate, which is what we wanted. No one had to experience being left behind. No need for an existential crisis; it is now no different than the Star Trek transporter disassembling your atoms, beaming the information over, and re-assembling you out of new atoms at the target location.

EDIT: Original post defining the term.

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I am certainly not suggesting that medical science and longevity are net negatives. Looked at from your materialist perspective, again, your viewpoint makes perfect sense.

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