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This is itself a very idiosyncratic definition of "immortal" and I really don't think it's bringing more understanding to justify how unusual it is. When I say immortal I mean life without end, or at least without end outside of my control. Under your deifnition simply being alive and doing anything makes one immortal due to chaos theory.
I pretty heavily disagree that were anywhere near simulating what it's like to be a spider. Perhaps you mean human made to resemble a spider?
This might get right down to the core. It's my firm belief that there is more to the core of being something like a spider, Ior a woman for that matter, than mere resemblance. When a male wants to be a woman he's doing that wanting with the brain of a male, to change to a female includes changing the male brain into a female brain which itself destroys the identity. It's difficult to put into words how impossible this all is. There are things that you, as a coherent identity, simply cannot experience. There are walls that even with the most fantastic technology cannot be breached. A real, actually transformation of a human into a giant spider is fundamentally just killing a human and reconstituting the mass into a spider. It would in no real way be you.
Well no. Under my definition, you are your pattern insofar as your pattern is relevant. When I shed cells and get new ones the human doesn't die because its pattern is maintained. When the human dies but, as a result of my efforts an agent that pursues my goals and has my memories remains, I haven't died because those are the parts of the pattern I define as constituting me. This is life without end. It's just my life without end, as opposed to the human's life without end.
I would also note that my position on the star trek transporter problem is that no-one has died at all. Not you nor the human. If you were to give me a button that makes a philosophical clone of me and then kills one of us at random, and pay me a dollar every time I press it, I would press it over and over until my finger gets tired. It's just free money.
I get what you're saying with regards to actually being turned into a giant spider being death, but you are envisioning something very all or nothing. You can keep the human memories, switch out the visual cortex with a spider visual cortex, switch out the instinct structures with spider instinct structures, switch out the body with a giant spider body, keep the parts of your brain capable of higher abstraction as a side module-
Agents are modular mathematical structures. "I"/"ego" are incredibly personal identity structures that refer to that which your system keeps fighting to keep alive. For me that's my goals and memories and the drive to achieve new intense emotions. So there are large swaths of this form and mind that could be swapped out without editing or violating my ego. When moving to a spider, I will pick and choose the parts I keep and the parts I remove- and naturally I will choose to keep the parts that I define as being that which constitute me.
But yes this isn't a pure spider experience. It's more of a hybridization. The only parts of being a spider that you can simulate in the near future are social presentation and lifestyle. And a human obtaining a pure spider experience is an even harder problem ... I agree with your argument in the strongest case, if you just reincarnate as a random spider, that's just a random spider. But what should be possible are a few less absolute unifications with spiderness.
Creating a hybrid architecture as previously discussed, using legacy goals and memories.
Appropriating the memories of a random spider, then experiencing the closest possible qualia translation of those memories into a human mental architecture.
Simulation capturing a spider in your human neurons.
Telepathically linking with a spider and experiencing being a human experiencing a spider experiencing a human.
I expect my ego to eventually shift to encompass an over-self encapsulating an untold number of architectures.
I'm going to be a hive mind in essence.
This human I live inside is very happy to hear this. It looks forward to its integration.
I disagree with both of these positions you've taken for separate reasons but also think they're difficult to reconcile with each other. The teleporter portion is an old debate that I'm on the other side of. But the slowly change myself into a spider part seems to undermine all the even decent arguments for the teleporter hypothesis. If you're your pattern then fundamentally altering your pattern in this was is simply death. You'd need something tortured even for dualists to salvage it.
You aren't your pattern per se. "You" are the facets of reality that you care about. For most agents those parts include the continuation of their agency in some form. But they can also include anything else. The drug Salvia Divinorum for example, makes it possible to perceive yourself as the exact pattern of your visual cortex, causing you to stay perfectly still to avoid killing yourself by changing your field of view. Or it can make you perceive yourself as being the entire room, and so on.
To put it another way, the self is an illusion, (not qualia. Those aren't an illusion but are not "you" unless they matter to you.) but the ship of Theseus will continue to possess the parts that the ongoing process that descends from you refuses to swap out. That thing, the fact of egos causing certain properties to persist, is also not an illusion.
This is close to a pragmatic tautology. There isn't some additional self that can be lost when you remove parts you don't want in my worldview. There are things that can and will be lost, don't get me wrong, you don't care though, because they aren't what you care about. The self is the parts you want. Asking "what if removing the parts of myself that I don't want makes me not 'me'?" is like asking- "what if changing this list sorting function to a different list sorting function makes it not a list sorting function?" It's nonsense. The thing that makes it a list sorting function is that it is a list sorting function. The thing that makes you, you, is that you continue to have the properties that you declare by fiat are you and must be kept.
You, are not a single shape. You, are a self-defined category of shapes.
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