Re: death

From: Hal Finney <hal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 06:52:03 -0700 (PDT)

Stathis Papaioannou writes:
> Yes; hence, everyone is immortal. But leaving that much-debated issue aside
> for now, I'm not sure that I understand what, if anything, you would accept
> as a method of surviving the death of your physical body. Would you consider
> that scanning your brain at the moment of death and uploading your mind to a
> computer constitutes survival? What about the Star Trek teleporter: is that
> a method of transportation or of execution? If you can accept the
> possibility that you can survive the death of your physical body at all,
> then I think you have to accept that the people in my thought experiment are
> *not* killed, despite the death of their physical bodies, just as in the
> case of mind uploading or teleportation.

I guess I would say, I would survive death via anything that does not
reduce my measure. If I am stopped here, I should be started over there,
or back then, or when such-and-such happens. If my measure is conserved
then I can be happy. If it can be increased, I will be that much happier.

Both uploading and transporting conserve measure, so they are not death.
Being killed and having only one in 10^100 of me continue does reduce
my measure, so that is death, death on a scale that has never been seen
before in the universe. (Compensated by birth on a scale that has never
been seen before... So morally maybe it's not that bad. Still it's
jerking people around to an amazing degree.)

Hal Finney
Received on Sun Jun 19 2005 - 10:44:00 PDT