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Say an LLM trainer (hypothetical future robot-AI-thing) followed you around for 10 years, recording everything you did and said, and then recreated your personality, worldview and identity perfectly, such that you could present it with any problem or situation and it would react the way 'you' would.
Would you kill yourself, safe in the knowledge that you had achieved immortality? There's a viscerally unsatisfying nature to 'uploading' that can't be ignored.
There's a nice short story by Greg Egan that explores this, "Learning to Be Me". I won't spoil it, even though it's older than Russian Federation.
Sounds great, I’ll try to track it down.
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I'm with the spiritualists on this one. It is making a copy and then destroying the original. Our original bodies contain an essence and a continuity of existence that is then broken. You can't Ship of Theseus your way out of this by copying neuron by neuron. The copy is not 'you'. 'You' would die in the process, or would coexist with the copy, showing clearly that you are different entities.
I'd be open to regenerative techniques such as gene therapy or even nanites to repair organic tissue indefinitely, but I wouldn't go for a cybernetic version of immortality.
To be honest I'd probably even avoid Star Trek style transporters.
Your continuity of existence is broken every night. Thousands of nerve cells die and you also lose consciousness for hours.
Unless you're a a dualists positing 'souls' that are crucial and somehow distinct from the unique pattern of information in every person's brains, you aren't making much sense.
I won't make an argument to 'souls', but I will place my stake on continuity of existence. There is some loss and gain of brain and other cells and loss of consciousness, but this is not a break in continuity of existence.
I understand this is not something I can logically convince others of. They will have to make their own decisions on what 'they' are and how 'they' can gain immortality.
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The brain doesn't stop working entirely at night. I have reason to believe I wake up the same process as I was, which is completely lacking in the case of murder-teleporter, not to mention the LLM scenario.
People who blithely accept non-continuous cloning as acceptable substitute for themselves ought to experience talking to their own clone before being told that they'll be killed right now and it will live on. I think this will disabuse many of any further impulse to claim that's the same thing as going to sleep.
We have zero reason to believe anything beyond the very specific arrangements of matter determines everything about an individual, therefore a perfect copy with sufficient fidelity would be that person.
Why do you think instincts have much to say about thought experiments or sufficiently advanced technology ? They don't. Instincts can't even cope with something as mundane as radiation, or orders of magnitude. We don't have instinctual facility with numbers, there's some evidence that people whose language lack the concept cannot even learn to count.
Meanwhile the survival instinct is ancient and really not that smart.
Nothing about the very specific arrangement of matter explains why there has to be an awareness behind the matter and the electrical processes of the brain. However, as long as it exists, it would be trivial to see if the perfect copy with sufficient fidelity shares that awareness with me. If it doesn't do so while I live, I'm not about to count on it doing so after I die, simple.
(You don't have to bother asking me how I know whether or not the awareness exists. It's self-evident to me and I'm not a solipsist so I don't believe yours isn't self-evident to you, either. I consider the denial of self that's common in rationalist circles to be stubborn attempts to does-not-compute reality into the bounds of their theories. Call dualists incoherent all you want, as long as you have the guts to admit you don't have the answers either.)
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That's the point of this caveat. IMO it's still a huge gamble, but as @self_made_human discussed above, if there's even a chance it works it seems like a good gamble to make. I'm conflicted about the spiritual repercussions though.
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