Stolen from another poster on here, but: Pretty telling that it's the techbros convinced we're on the precipice of achieving immortality, and not the biologists.
Someone once explained to me that, from their experience working in finance, the obscenely wealthy are as close to gods as likely exist, and as such their lives are the closest thing to heaven human beings will ever know, so being afraid of death in that case kinda makes sense.
It's a great pity that there's absolutely no literature of any sort in the entire span of human history addressing the topic of pursuing immortality because one fears death.
(taps earpiece) I'm getting an update...
There was some futurist that was talking about how he was paid to consult for a bunch of these billionaire tech bros about what to do to prepare for a society collapse event. He told them to build communities that trust you with people that aren't there just for payment.
And IIRC the billionaires floated solutions for maintaining loyalty of their staff postapocalypse by either explosive collars or having the combination for the food reserves. Eventually they thought robots.
This is like checking the box for every cliched dystopian villain
And the best part? The tantalizingly dramatically ironic part? You don’t even have to be an asshole from the outset to fall prey to this dynamic, either! You’re probably gonna convince yourself you’re A Real Nice Guy the whole time as you STOMP across the heads of everyone who ever helped you!
I remember listening to an interview with this guy. He's actually really modest. He knows he can only do this because he's wealthy. And that the experiment is n=1. He just thinks it's his best way to live long and I'm pretty sure he makes all his data public. (again n=1)
.. we have a much higher chance of digitizing consciousness in the next few decades than we do cheating death organically. But we're not ready for that talk yet.
Question: isn't the problem with digitizing consciousness the fact that you aren't "transferring" it from a physical body to a digital one, you're actually just making a copy of yourself? You're still going to be alive in your meat suit, you'll just have a digital echo around AFTER your death?
Whether that's a problem depends on some philosophical questions on the nature of identity and continuity. Proponents would argue that a digital version of my consciousness with the memories of being me and a sense of identity as me has the same relation to me as I do with my own past self.
The counterpoint is that, if I drive a car into the embankment and it gets crushed into a cube and I get a new care of the same make model and color, there is a sense that I have "the same car" but another more accurate sense that it's a different car, especially from the perspective of the cube.
and then there's problems like "but for real can you run consciousness on a computer," "is consciousness something that you can meaningfully isolate distinct from the whole," "is this whole thing an attempt to sneak Cartesian dualism into a materialist worldview on the sly"
This feels like the bodily equivalent of an architect building the most over the top nonsense whilst an engineer cries at the sheer stupidity and lack of logic.
It's funny seeing "atheists" and "scientists" who don't understand that science is not this magic wand smart people wave to make miracles. They still believe it works the same way it does in cartoons.
It drives me nuts how many self-styled "smart" people seem to take it for granted that science is some sort of limitless generative process that will inevitably make their favorite science fiction tropes happen.
Reminds me of the people who cryogenically froze themselves in hopes to wake up in a future where their diseases get cured, only for the mechanical failure of the freezers to fail and they just turned into chunky soup.
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(taps earpiece) I'm getting an update...
I'm convinced Elon Musk thinks he can pull off the Mars Colony because he won't summon demons like the UAC did...
They built bunkers anyway.
This is like checking the box for every cliched dystopian villain
Verrrryy interesting, that instinct.
Does he have another, younger son lined up?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VGajDTNKFU