do people who believe in a post-human eternal life uploaded to the computer to transcend the physical realm know that computers are also made of physical materials and also they completely immediately die if you spill a latte on them
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Also it'll be so much easier to create a cloud personality that's indistinguishable from you and then just discard your meat puppet. So that's what will be done first
People also underestimate how much their personality is defined by the body they're in, how they experience life through it, how damaging it would be to their sense of self if they were suddenly in another body, or no body.
Think about the shift in your personality just because you're really hungry
This is a theme in Black Mirror and as someone who believe/ hope in natural reincarnation, it terrifies me to no end. Made me anxious enough to block the series.
the primary idea behind trasncending the body is that you can implement backups and redundancies that don't irreversibly self destruct when they're without constant oxygen supply for 3 minutes
even if your "body" gets latte'd, you assume to have several backups of whatever matters to you as "you"
See also: All the cryonics companies that were technically and/or financially incapable of the very straightforward task of keeping dead bodies frozen.
What I really like is the fact that, with advanced enough hardware, each compute cycle could feel like seconds, minutes even. Seconds become days. Minutes, years. After one day they've "existed" for centuries and been driven mad by isolation. Some immortality...
I always thought about it the other way around, that the hardware will likely be slower than a real time brain. You can talk to grandpa, but it takes him months to answer.
That's the version made by and for cryptobros. Buggy, bloated, unoptimized and rushed out the door for a fast buck. e.g. all their attempts at making a crypto game
Realizing the fact of materials age and wear off, break down when used (just usually more slowly than flesh) is why I stopped believing in thinking that androids will be immortal. They won't. They will be long lived.
*laughs in GLaDOS between Portal and Portal 2*
Also, if you manage to fix the computer, while it is rebooting, those "post-human uploaded" would relive their previous digital death during that moment. Over and over. Until being booted again and requesting to die forever to never relive death again.
I am so much gentler to my computer than I am to my own body and yet I have still had so many laptops die on me over the course of my lifetime while my crappy body, powered by coffee and burritos and nowhere near enough sleep, is still chugging along
but you easily restored all the data on them from backups, right? The vision isn't about silicon vs flesh (except when it's a kink thing) but about having a mind which isn't reliant on any particular body.
Not that i expect this to come to pass any time soon.
Not really. In the short term, yes. 3 decades later, it's hit or miss, a century later? Almost certainly not.
These people are proposing actions that risk the collapse of human civilization. What do they think will happen when no power or labor exists for maintaining server farms?
to be completely fair to the sci-fi authors who first conceived of that idea, computers were built a lot more durable back then. what's funny is that the people who've picked it up since are the same responsible for making them less so.
I recently tried to get a bunch of thirty- and forty-year-old computers to start and it did not go well. If we’re going back to older computers we’re talking about a lot of maintenance and part replacing to keep things going.
I was thinking of things like old N64s and Commodores still working today, but you're probably right. still, your typical modern device is likely to stop working or become nigh unusable in a decade or so even *with* regular maintenance, so...
Computers were a bit more durable, but also they simply weren't old enough for the common problems we see today on that old hardware, like rotting rubber and failing ball bearings and crumbling glue.
there are a select few computers that do and they're made of like 40 relays in total and control elevators and train tracks. much analogous to how the longest lived living things on earth are trees, fungi, and protozoae. simple is reliable!
Not to mention how the materials required for computers are rare and hard to obtain and much less recyclable compared to... food and water, which are part of a natural cycle that constantly renews itself because of the differences in how it functions.
The one last human put in charge of maintaining the servers where they store humanity's collective consciousness has the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever.
If they are lucky enough, they get to live five years longer, at which point the support for their OS ends and the hardware is too old for the new one.
I read an interview where Musk admitted to this reality and said that digital intelligence would be backbenched by biological intelligence and, yeah, that sounds like the ass-backwards solution of the guy who thinks you can save Earth by terraforming another planet.
It's striking that the richest man on earth is still so miserable he fantasizes about being a computer ghost rather than enjoying the actual life he has.
I feel like guy who achieves the technical singularity but looses out because his body knocks over a latte on his computers hard drive is the set up for a half decent Twilight Zone ep.
Maybe the essence of human existence is much more abstract. We could all be zillion digit prime numbers and our bodies, bio computers, being just one expression of it.
the idea is to build a neverending sequence of ever-improving bodies as humanity ascends beyond the limitations of flesh and time. sure it's a lot of work but the alternative is death, so
yes, your dumb chatbot based on all the bullshit you ever said is exactly the same as modeling your biology. uh huh. no really, you’re a very smart boy.
yes, that chatbot of you is immortality and you won’t feel alone and afraid when you die
Your consciousness, your experience of existing, would not upload to a computer. The best you could do is generate a copy that appears to be used to an outside of server. But when your biological form dies your experience of existing dies. The electronic version is a copy that thinks it’s you.
I know you read a cool post or something a few years ago but every person who read that cool post and uses it here is definitely missing the point of “less risk good”
Risk of discontinuing consciousness. There's no evidence that it happens when we sleep, but let's say 50% chance. There's no good reason to build a machine that makes it 100%
There's no evidence for either in either case. We have literally nothing that evidences continuity of conscious existence.
This is Pascal Wager bullshit. If you're too worried; don't do it then, but don't act like it's somehow the rationally correct position when it's based on raw presumption.
Similarly, all the crypto doofuses talking about the blockchain surviving an apocalypse-level event. I dunno man if that's your concern I'd stick to worrying about food and water
Look, its very simple. You build a big computer, and you place it on the event horizon of a black hole, so the time dilation effect stretches out the moment in time you're uploaded to infinity. Then you don't gotta worry about lattes or the heat death of the universe any more.
I don't want to hear about digital life or AI rights for the simple reason that we can wipe out a continent's electrical grid with a well timed solar flair.
They believe in a literal duality of self where they can simultaneously have a fully decentralized, communal existence with the web as afterlife, but also a digital castle with anime waifu
they've never had to worry about this stuff. they're used to "the cloud", aka other people's computers. it obscures all the labour going into those five nines of uptime or whatever
A hypothetical system for containing human consciousness, like a matroishka brain, would need to make today's server farms look primitive even to exist, so who can say. Even then, there are theoretical limits on how long a system could endure.
They took the singularity nonsense literally and believe that a future computer will be so smart it is able to make itself smarter, and that will mean it can self-repair and self-extend itself indefinitely. Where will it get the *metal* to build more of itself? It will find a way by being smart (??)
Basically the VC set has these completely bizarre, incorrect ideas about "intelligence" (what it is, where it comes from, what it can do) and this allows them to believe a wide variety of impossible things
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Think about the shift in your personality just because you're really hungry
even if your "body" gets latte'd, you assume to have several backups of whatever matters to you as "you"
this is why it'd be such a bad idea, even if it were possible
it's the most fragile form of storing any sort of information possible
Like if you can quickly automate creating another body for your cyberbrain or be uploaded into multiple at the same time why worry?
What gets me is that people are ok with being "copied" instead of transfered 😬 teleporter vibes
Realizing the fact of materials age and wear off, break down when used (just usually more slowly than flesh) is why I stopped believing in thinking that androids will be immortal. They won't. They will be long lived.
Also, if you manage to fix the computer, while it is rebooting, those "post-human uploaded" would relive their previous digital death during that moment. Over and over. Until being booted again and requesting to die forever to never relive death again.
Not that i expect this to come to pass any time soon.
These people are proposing actions that risk the collapse of human civilization. What do they think will happen when no power or labor exists for maintaining server farms?
https://bsky.app/profile/catblanketflower.yuwakisa.com/post/3lntqxdt7622l
^^^ highly recommend actually
*chatgpt instance generated from my emails and then they make me drink the MAID cocktail
In completely unrelated news, every day is free latte day at ForeverLife Inc. Lids will be available at some point.
GPTgreen is people.
yes, your dumb chatbot based on all the bullshit you ever said is exactly the same as modeling your biology. uh huh. no really, you’re a very smart boy.
yes, that chatbot of you is immortality and you won’t feel alone and afraid when you die
This is Pascal Wager bullshit. If you're too worried; don't do it then, but don't act like it's somehow the rationally correct position when it's based on raw presumption.
won't