Precisely my point - if you MOVE - as by teleportation, you still occupy only one locus in space/time, and therefore you are still you. Your location in space/time and its continuity back through time (along with all the contents of that location including your brain) ARE your identity.
If you are COPIED, the copy is NOT YOU.
And we don't know that the "mind" is an "information construct" - both terms are meaningless in the scientific sense in any event - except in the sense that the same information the brain represents can probably be copied into another brain. The point of my argument is that the copied brain is not the original brain and therefore the original brain is not personally immortal, merely persistent.
I'm beginning to think there is something hardwired in the human brain which makes it impossible for humans to reason about this topic. It's obviously viewed as a psychological threat in some way.
And if the guy is right and governments ARE only interested in power?
How do you propose to show them the "other side" of the argument?
You complain that his statement is a "generalization". This implies that YOUR statement is a "generalization" of the opposite opinion, i.e., that there ARE some governments who are not so interested.
Prove it or fuck right the hell off.
How's that for a "bold polarizing statement"?
Here's another: For humans, change doesn't happen by "creeps and subterfuge" - it happens either via new technology or someone gets a foot up their ass.
Fortunately, we Transhumans are preparing a new foot for your ass based on technology.
Other lists? This would be the same lists that various people's names - who are not terrorists - have shown up on which resulted in their being detained, searched, interrogated - only to discover that said person was a ten-year-old boy who happened to have the same name as a "terrorist"?
I reiterate what I've said elsewhere. No terrorist worthy of the name is going to have a problem producing perfectly adequate ID which will sail through any check you care to devise (with the possible exception of biometrics, which is not feasible until you have everyone on the planet in your DNA database - and as I recall, in the movie "Gattaca" they beat that one, too.)
As for "slip ups", make the paperwork more voluminous and the morons in our government departments will "slip up" - with the result that innocent people will be detained, and terrorists will slip through the cracks - as always.
For proof of that, read the statements pertaining to the effectiveness of the FBI translation department as outlined by Sibel Edmonds, the FBI whistleblower.
And even if you succeed in making the terrorists' jobs "harder", that will not stop them either. They will simply find another way to accomplish their goals.
The only way to eliminate terrorists is to eliminate the social, religious, economic and political causes of terrorism and then kill the ones still living. No live ones, no replacements. Nothing else is going to be effective. Nothing.
You check luggage because you're actually looking for a bomb. And if your tech is right, you don't have to open it to check it.
How does X-raying luggage violate your privacy - unless your wife (or you) has a collection of steel dildoes in there? X-raying and magnetic and chemical detectors just show the shape and composition of things and only things that look like weapons or explosives will be of significance. Nobody's going to record anything else they see in there and connect it to your name - unless they HAVE your name.
Your identity is irrelevant unless you HAVE such things in your possession. Then somebody might want to know who you REALLY are - and looking at your papers isn't likely to tell them that.
You do know that cops take fingerprints, right? They don't rely on identity papers to establish who a criminal suspect is?
There's a reason for that which our morons in Washington seem to forget - or don't care to remember.
Is that why they outed the Pakistani double-agent who was the US's best chance in years to penetrate Al Qaeda?
And why should we care if *some* people in the government want to do something stupid and ineffective to try to catch terrorists?
We should care about them doing something which is effective and not stupid - assuming any of those morons actually come up with something like that.
In other words, maybe there are some morons in the government who think these measures are of some actual value. Fine - fire them. They're morons.
Now, for the rest of the ASSHOLES in the government who are just doing this crap to extend the authority of the state and boost their own pathetic careers and psychopathic fucking personalities - shoot their fucking asses.
Yes, you are - you just don't know it yet, because the law hasn't been passed.
More likely, you probably are already doing something illegal - you just haven't had a cop inform you of the particular one of the millions of statutes in this country that you regularly violate without being aware of it. DO something he doesn't approve of (whether it is illegal or not) and you will then be informed of *some* law you are violating. React to the obvious injustice and you'll do time for "resisting arrest" and "interfering with an officer."
Your number 2 point is brain-dead. Nothing related to "paper checking" is going to stop any professional terrorist for an instant. Granted, most of these clowns aren't terribly professional, but anybody in the business will have any number of sources of perfectly adequate ID and cover stories. A good terrorist will waltz right through a check that would hang you up merely for technicalities (your papers aren't *quite* in order because your local state moron screwed them up - the terrorist's forger won't screw his up.)
Your third point is completely oblivious. You choose to focus on one issue - airplane privacy - and ignore the overall effects of repeated invasions of civil liberties on all levels. Meanwhile, you focus on issues involving sucking at the tit of government (education, health care) or which are never ever going to be changed (campaign finances) as long as politicians can draw breath.
In other words, you're just another American sucker.
You probably think we invaded Iraq to bring democracy to the Iraqis and safeguard America from those evil Iraqi terrorists, too, right?
Neither the soap box, ballot box, jury box or ammo box is of any value at this time and will only become less so in the future.
The soap box is buried in the "Society of the Spectacle", the ballot box is rigged by the two-party system, the jury box is rigged by definition - it IS the fucking state, for Christ's sake - and the ammo box is only useful if you can get enough people to take it up - which you can't because the soap box is buried, etc.
Wait for nanotech and do the job right.
My prediction: Gilmore is going to LOSE - big time.
You can say anything because most people are morons who either won't hear what you said or won't believe you because it interferes with their cognitive dissonance.
Moore has undoubtedly had some effect on the voting public who had doubts about Bush anyway. He has probably not swung the election in any direction it wasn't already going.
And all Bush has to do to swing it back is come up with an "October Surprise" - say, another "terrorist incident" conveniently planned and agent-provocateured into "Al Qaeda" by some associates of Ariel Sharon.
was likely shot down by a Stinger missile, which the Clinton White House admitted may have been part of three of them which came across the Canadian border into the New York area - although some theorists still insist it might have been a bomb. Most witnesses reported one or two points of light moving up to the aircraft before the explosion.
The perps were likely Iranians and their motivation was revenge for the Vincennes shootdown of an Iranian airliner, which in itself was probably deliberate provocation of the Iranians.
Which is why Flight 800 was covered up, as it might have led to a re-opening of the Vincennes case.
Irrelevant to the main issue, of course, which is the stupid and malicious reduction in civil liberties which will have absolutely no effect on reducing the conduct of terrorism in this country.
I'll go further than that. The government of this country WANTS more terrorism so they can further reduce civil liberties.
How else to explain the outing of the Pakistani double-agent who was the US's best chance to penetrate Al Qaeda? Somebody in the Bush administration is a TRAITOR who views Bush's poll ratings as more important than national security. Karl Rove, perhaps? Possibly the same asshole who outed Valerie Plame and compromised an entire CIA network devoted to tracking down WMDs?
You are entirely incorrect in just about every particular.
First of all, there is Transhuman technology and there is Transhuman philosophy and there is Transhuman attitude. Don't equate the three.
Secondly, you say the technology is "no where near" - without stating how many years you consider "near" to be. I claim thirty to fifty years (entirely dependent on the progress of nanotech and its effects on the relevant sciences).) To me, that is "near".
If you claim it is scores or hundreds of years off, you are delusional.
Secondly, your terms "antisocial" and "sociopathic" are themselves human pejorative terms with no meaning outside of human prejudices and human social mores, most of which are irrational in the extreme.
Third, as I said, it could well be irrelevant whether someone doesn't want someone else to take advantage of Transhumanizing technology.
Fourth, your statement that Transhumans wouldn't want me is brain-dead. You have no clue how Tranhumans think, quite obviously, either the current philosophical ones, or any that might arise technologically.
Fifth, it may well be irrelevant what the condition of a human is who is transmogrified by Transhumanizing technology. What is relevant is the outcome of the transmogrification. You presume that becoming Transhuman (whatever definition that may entail) will result in no mental changes at all. This is probably nonsense.
You really don't have a clue what you're talking about, you're literally just babbling nonsense to convince yourself that there's nothing to the concept of Transhumanism.
The outcomes are not indistinguishable if somebody remembers that object A in scenario 2 previously existed.
And in terms of space/time events, that is exactly the case - the outcomes are totally distinguishable because the object A in location Y in scenario 2 is not the same object as object A in the previous location.
This has nothing to do with any notion of "soul" - it has to do with the simple fact that you destroyed object A. The object in location Y in in the first scenario IS object A. The object in location Y in the second scenario is a copy of object A - it is NOT object A. It might be identical to object A, but being "identical" is not "identity" - any toothpick might be the same as any other toothpick but they are not all one toothpick. Identity includes space/time location, and object A in scenario 2 does not have the same space/time location as the object at location Y - because you destroyed it, it is now scattered energy or whatever.
Mind you, the copy of object A might have perfectly good usability and it may be perfectly rational to produce it, but it doesn't solve the original object A's problem of continuity.
If you tell him the human died, and he says "I'm the human!" - then he's simply wrong, too.
Show him the body, explain the circumstances of his creation, and then see what he says - if he's rational.
Your statement that the human "didn't truly die" is merely semantic nonsense or mysticism. He did in fact die.
Try it this way. Your identity is your continuity, that seems true. BUT your continuity includes and indeed depends on your space/time localization. "You" exist at a specific point in space/time and have a continuity extending backwards in space/time. A copy simply isn't you, because the only continuity it contains is your memories of your past. Second by second, after copying, that continuity diverges from the original - whether the original is dead or not. Because the copy is no longer part of the space/time continuity of the original. It has its own space/time continuity now. Thus continuity is broken by copying.
It can only NOT be broken by UPGRADING the original "in place". No copy, no break in continuity - even if you replace every brain and body cell of the original in the upgrade process.
It would be seem to be a simple concept, but most people just don't seem able to get it, and indeed it can be hard to express it in precise terms.
Maybe not the first one, but okay, how about when they're available at K-Mart for $299?
Your basic problem is the notion that a Transhuman could even be sociopathic (assuming proper design of the brain augmentation - I suppose one could deliberately design a sociopathic superior brain - but it might be hard to guarantee its function - just like it is now.)
In other words, your concerns are irrelevant in either case. True Transhumans aren't going to be concerned about human concerns - and true Transhumans aren't going to be subject to human foibles that may raise such concerns.
Which still doesn't change the basic problem - that humans are subject to those foibles and they are going to be a problem (albeit very temporarily) for Transhumans.
In San Francisco, you can now use food stamps to eat at certain fast food restaurants and they even wanted to start a program where you could order out and have hot food delivered.
Why? Electronic food stamp cards have replaced the actual stamps.
So now everyone wants to suck the money off the card accounts because it has become simple with no paper to have to redeem.
There's no way someone with food stamps can possibly make it through the month with these sorts of programs being pushed at them.
And this sort of thing was predicted by those who were opposed to going to the electronic card program.
They prevented food stamp owners from redeeming the stamps for useful goods such as toilet paper, then they put them in prison for selling them for cash, then they converted them to electronic cards so they can steal the money back by offering superfluous options.
at City College who is also a tech support person for a computer consulting company related an experience he had last spring.
One of their clients had refused to update his annual subscription to antivirus definitions for his email server. So of course he was "owned" almost immediately.
The tech spent three days trying to clean the machine. There were gigabytes of spam messages, and a ton of viruses, trojans and spyware on the server. The reason it took three days instead of just rebuilding the server was the tech was trying to get rid of just ONE virus that just couldn't be killed no matter what AV software he used.
Eventually they decided to just rebuild the server. Once that was done and the server brought up, it was instantly hit by thousands of spam messages - the guy's IP address has been seized on by hundreds of spammers worldwide as a "spam server" and the IP address was now totally useless. Another IP address had to be assigned to the server.
So the owner of the server spent who knows how much money per hour for tech support over thirty hours or more because he wouldn't spend $300 or whatever for an annual AV subscription.
I had a client a few weeks ago who allowed the daughter of the secretary to come in and play with the secretary's machine which was on DSL. Next thing they knew, their mouse would freeze, their PC clock was losing time, etc. I came in, ran Ad-Aware - yup, spyware. Not too much - lots of tracking cookies, but only a couple executables. It doesn't take much for this crap to ruin your system.
Who says Transhumans will have a problem with that in the first place?
Who says Transhumans will care what happens to humans once they reach Transhuman capability?
Who says there's such a thing as Transhuman "ethics" or "morality" or "empathy" or "compassion" (other than the Extropians, who are a naive bunch at best?)
Are you aware that some religious theorists believe that angels have no concept of mercy in the narrow human sense? Ever see the movie "Prophecy" where the angel Gabriel talks about destroying all the first-born children of Egypt? Christians don't seem to have a problem with that (since of course they weren't affected and it's their dogma.)
Similarly, the Singularity Institute wants to create a "friendly" or "ethical" AI. LOL, guys.
There was a Star Trek novel where Kirk and Spock were EXACTLY duplicated by the villain which explored this very issue big time. The resolution of course was that one of the Spocks was actually a copy of the villain (and his existence was a big problem for the villain since he wanted to be the ONLY copy of the villain), so he got killed - and the copy of Kirk got sent to another dimension so he wouldn't be a problem for the real Kirk - or the Star Trek storyline.
I think there was another such story done in the Next Generation novels involving a duplicate Riker who ends up being dumped from Star Fleet and joining some Romulans against Star Fleet (I forget the details.)
A copy of you is NOT you and you no longer have any control over what he does. This may or may not have consequences to one's liking.
I DO view the "move" operation as murder IF it is destructive of the original brain - because then it is NOT TRULY A MOVE. To be a true "move", it has to not leave anything behind OR destroy anything.
If the original brain can still function after the process, it still has a mind in it. If you destroy it AFTER the operation, it's murder. If you destroy it DURING the operation, BUT the destruction is because of the inadequate technical ability of the process to preserve the brain, then it's still murder. If the destruction is necessary to be able to MOVE the brain function at all (which I find hard to accept, except possibly in the elsewhere-referenced and irrelevant quantum level effect), then it might be acceptable.
I'm basing this on Hans Moravec's original description of the process where he indicated sections of the brain are removed, analyzed, simulated, and the resultant simulation uploaded to a computer. This is obviously destructive of the original brain and he doesn't even bother to acknowledge the fact that the simulation is just that. The simulation has no direct continuity with the original brain and the original brain is destroyed. I can't see how this is immortality for that brain except, as I say, in the sense of a PERSISTENT COPY. And that's not immortality to me.
On the other hand, if it is a "copy", you have two minds, not one. And that is nothing to the immortality purpose either.
The ONLY acceptable way to achieve immortality is the TRANSFORMATION of the existing entity into a more robust form directly.
You say that as far as you're concerned, no death has occurred. This is not correct. You have in fact died, and your copy is unaware of it (until he wakes up - and what might be the psychological effect on that copy of realizing that his original self has in fact died.)
The bottom line is that if your brain is destroyed, you are dead, regardless of whether a copy exists or not. Anything else is merely a "scientific" form of mysticism (absent any evidence of non-locality of "mind").
Now, if someone can establish that the "identity" of an entity is non-local to the brain (an energy pattern or something) and that it can be removed from the brain (rendering that brain useless) and then placed in another (manufactured) brain which only then becomes functional, then my objections would be irrelevant. I don't see that happening but it's not impossible.
Yes, as I mention elsewhere, there are valid reasons for doing it (as well as valid risks).
I'm just saying it doesn't solve the specific problem of PERSONAL immortality for a given entity. It's not likely to be done for that reason once the problems I outline are recognized.
Slashdot Mirror
It's people with empty skulls like yours who need the tinfoil hats to keep the rain out.
The noise of the rain on the tin also insures you'll never hear anything rational which might penetrate your delusions that all is well in the world.
Precisely my point - if you MOVE - as by teleportation, you still occupy only one locus in space/time, and therefore you are still you. Your location in space/time and its continuity back through time (along with all the contents of that location including your brain) ARE your identity.
If you are COPIED, the copy is NOT YOU.
And we don't know that the "mind" is an "information construct" - both terms are meaningless in the scientific sense in any event - except in the sense that the same information the brain represents can probably be copied into another brain. The point of my argument is that the copied brain is not the original brain and therefore the original brain is not personally immortal, merely persistent.
I'm beginning to think there is something hardwired in the human brain which makes it impossible for humans to reason about this topic.
It's obviously viewed as a psychological threat in some way.
And if the guy is right and governments ARE only interested in power?
How do you propose to show them the "other side" of the argument?
You complain that his statement is a "generalization". This implies that YOUR statement is a "generalization" of the opposite opinion, i.e., that there ARE some governments who are not so interested.
Prove it or fuck right the hell off.
How's that for a "bold polarizing statement"?
Here's another: For humans, change doesn't happen by "creeps and subterfuge" - it happens either via new technology or someone gets a foot up their ass.
Fortunately, we Transhumans are preparing a new foot for your ass based on technology.
Other lists? This would be the same lists that various people's names - who are not terrorists - have shown up on which resulted in their being detained, searched, interrogated - only to discover that said person was a ten-year-old boy who happened to have the same name as a "terrorist"?
I reiterate what I've said elsewhere. No terrorist worthy of the name is going to have a problem producing perfectly adequate ID which will sail through any check you care to devise (with the possible exception of biometrics, which is not feasible until you have everyone on the planet in your DNA database - and as I recall, in the movie "Gattaca" they beat that one, too.)
As for "slip ups", make the paperwork more voluminous and the morons in our government departments will "slip up" - with the result that innocent people will be detained, and terrorists will slip through the cracks - as always.
For proof of that, read the statements pertaining to the effectiveness of the FBI translation department as outlined by Sibel Edmonds, the FBI whistleblower.
And even if you succeed in making the terrorists' jobs "harder", that will not stop them either. They will simply find another way to accomplish their goals.
The only way to eliminate terrorists is to eliminate the social, religious, economic and political causes of terrorism and then kill the ones still living. No live ones, no replacements. Nothing else is going to be effective. Nothing.
You check luggage because you're actually looking for a bomb. And if your tech is right, you don't have to open it to check it.
How does X-raying luggage violate your privacy - unless your wife (or you) has a collection of steel dildoes in there? X-raying and magnetic and chemical detectors just show the shape and composition of things and only things that look like weapons or explosives will be of significance. Nobody's going to record anything else they see in there and connect it to your name - unless they HAVE your name.
Your identity is irrelevant unless you HAVE such things in your possession. Then somebody might want to know who you REALLY are - and looking at your papers isn't likely to tell them that.
You do know that cops take fingerprints, right? They don't rely on identity papers to establish who a criminal suspect is?
There's a reason for that which our morons in Washington seem to forget - or don't care to remember.
Really?
Is that why they outed the Pakistani double-agent who was the US's best chance in years to penetrate Al Qaeda?
And why should we care if *some* people in the government want to do something stupid and ineffective to try to catch terrorists?
We should care about them doing something which is effective and not stupid - assuming any of those morons actually come up with something like that.
In other words, maybe there are some morons in the government who think these measures are of some actual value. Fine - fire them. They're morons.
Now, for the rest of the ASSHOLES in the government who are just doing this crap to extend the authority of the state and boost their own pathetic careers and psychopathic fucking personalities - shoot their fucking asses.
Why do we need to look away?
You already have your head buried so deep in the sand (or up your ass) you shouldn't notice anything we do anyway.
"1. I'm not going to do anything illegal."
Yes, you are - you just don't know it yet, because the law hasn't been passed.
More likely, you probably are already doing something illegal - you just haven't had a cop inform you of the particular one of the millions of statutes in this country that you regularly violate without being aware of it. DO something he doesn't approve of (whether it is illegal or not) and you will then be informed of *some* law you are violating. React to the obvious injustice and you'll do time for "resisting arrest" and "interfering with an officer."
Your number 2 point is brain-dead. Nothing related to "paper checking" is going to stop any professional terrorist for an instant. Granted, most of these clowns aren't terribly professional, but anybody in the business will have any number of sources of perfectly adequate ID and cover stories. A good terrorist will waltz right through a check that would hang you up merely for technicalities (your papers aren't *quite* in order because your local state moron screwed them up - the terrorist's forger won't screw his up.)
Your third point is completely oblivious. You choose to focus on one issue - airplane privacy - and ignore the overall effects of repeated invasions of civil liberties on all levels. Meanwhile, you focus on issues involving sucking at the tit of government (education, health care) or which are never ever going to be changed (campaign finances) as long as politicians can draw breath.
In other words, you're just another American sucker.
You probably think we invaded Iraq to bring democracy to the Iraqis and safeguard America from those evil Iraqi terrorists, too, right?
A product of the American educational system.
No clue.
Neither the soap box, ballot box, jury box or ammo box is of any value at this time and will only become less so in the future.
The soap box is buried in the "Society of the Spectacle", the ballot box is rigged by the two-party system, the jury box is rigged by definition - it IS the fucking state, for Christ's sake - and the ammo box is only useful if you can get enough people to take it up - which you can't because the soap box is buried, etc.
Wait for nanotech and do the job right.
My prediction: Gilmore is going to LOSE - big time.
You can say anything because most people are morons who either won't hear what you said or won't believe you because it interferes with their cognitive dissonance.
Moore has undoubtedly had some effect on the voting public who had doubts about Bush anyway. He has probably not swung the election in any direction it wasn't already going.
And all Bush has to do to swing it back is come up with an "October Surprise" - say, another "terrorist incident" conveniently planned and agent-provocateured into "Al Qaeda" by some associates of Ariel Sharon.
was likely shot down by a Stinger missile, which the Clinton White House admitted may have been part of three of them which came across the Canadian border into the New York area - although some theorists still insist it might have been a bomb. Most witnesses reported one or two points of light moving up to the aircraft before the explosion.
The perps were likely Iranians and their motivation was revenge for the Vincennes shootdown of an Iranian airliner, which in itself was probably deliberate provocation of the Iranians.
Which is why Flight 800 was covered up, as it might have led to a re-opening of the Vincennes case.
Irrelevant to the main issue, of course, which is the stupid and malicious reduction in civil liberties which will have absolutely no effect on reducing the conduct of terrorism in this country.
I'll go further than that. The government of this country WANTS more terrorism so they can further reduce civil liberties.
How else to explain the outing of the Pakistani double-agent who was the US's best chance to penetrate Al Qaeda? Somebody in the Bush administration is a TRAITOR who views Bush's poll ratings as more important than national security.
Karl Rove, perhaps? Possibly the same asshole who outed Valerie Plame and compromised an entire CIA network devoted to tracking down WMDs?
You are entirely incorrect in just about every particular.
First of all, there is Transhuman technology and there is Transhuman philosophy and there is Transhuman attitude. Don't equate the three.
Secondly, you say the technology is "no where near" - without stating how many years you consider "near" to be. I claim thirty to fifty years (entirely dependent on the progress of nanotech and its effects on the relevant sciences).) To me, that is "near".
If you claim it is scores or hundreds of years off, you are delusional.
Secondly, your terms "antisocial" and "sociopathic" are themselves human pejorative terms with no meaning outside of human prejudices and human social mores, most of which are irrational in the extreme.
Third, as I said, it could well be irrelevant whether someone doesn't want someone else to take advantage of Transhumanizing technology.
Fourth, your statement that Transhumans wouldn't want me is brain-dead. You have no clue how Tranhumans think, quite obviously, either the current philosophical ones, or any that might arise technologically.
Fifth, it may well be irrelevant what the condition of a human is who is transmogrified by Transhumanizing technology. What is relevant is the outcome of the transmogrification. You presume that becoming Transhuman (whatever definition that may entail) will result in no mental changes at all. This is probably nonsense.
You really don't have a clue what you're talking about, you're literally just babbling nonsense to convince yourself that there's nothing to the concept of Transhumanism.
"I can vouch for having been burned after an upgrade changes the behavior of a routine that worked happily for years."
So if they change TCL like they're planning to change Perl 6 someday, and your code breaks, where are you then?
I'll tell you. You hand-coded stuff that was already in another database, and now your hand-coded stuff has to be re-hand-coded.
And that is not "easier" than using a better tool to begin with.
I'm continually amazed at how many people seem to delight in using crippled tools and who can then rationalize it for all sorts of reasons.
"We move through time and space yet maintain our identity."
You OCCUPY a specific place in space/time. You do not occupy anyplace else.
Is that not obvious to you?
Do you think that if you copy a piece of paper on a Xerox that both pieces of paper are the SAME PAPER?
Wake up.
Your brain is in ONE PLACE. If you COPY that brain, there is one brain in one place and another brain in another place. They are NOT the SAME brain.
Jesus Baron Von Christ! What does it take to explain simple existence to a human?
"It's called object oriented programming."
Er, in other words, you programmed these capabilities instead of using the capabilities programmed into the database by other programmers.
Right?
So you're using MySQL because it's "easier"?
What's wrong with this picture?
The outcomes are not indistinguishable if somebody remembers that object A in scenario 2 previously existed.
And in terms of space/time events, that is exactly the case - the outcomes are totally distinguishable because the object A in location Y in scenario 2 is not the same object as object A in the previous location.
This has nothing to do with any notion of "soul" - it has to do with the simple fact that you destroyed object A. The object in location Y in in the first scenario IS object A. The object in location Y in the second scenario is a copy of object A - it is NOT object A. It might be identical to object A, but being "identical" is not "identity" - any toothpick might be the same as any other toothpick but they are not all one toothpick. Identity includes space/time location, and object A in scenario 2 does not have the same space/time location as the object at location Y - because you destroyed it, it is now scattered energy or whatever.
Mind you, the copy of object A might have perfectly good usability and it may be perfectly rational to produce it, but it doesn't solve the original object A's problem of continuity.
Sorry, doesn't work, try again.
If you tell him the human died, and he says "I'm the human!" - then he's simply wrong, too.
Show him the body, explain the circumstances of his creation, and then see what he says - if he's rational.
Your statement that the human "didn't truly die" is merely semantic nonsense or mysticism. He did in fact die.
Try it this way. Your identity is your continuity, that seems true. BUT your continuity includes and indeed depends on your space/time localization. "You" exist at a specific point in space/time and have a continuity extending backwards in space/time. A copy simply isn't you, because the only continuity it contains is your memories of your past. Second by second, after copying, that continuity diverges from the original - whether the original is dead or not. Because the copy is no longer part of the space/time continuity of the original. It has its own space/time continuity now. Thus continuity is broken by copying.
It can only NOT be broken by UPGRADING the original "in place". No copy, no break in continuity - even if you replace every brain and body cell of the original in the upgrade process.
It would be seem to be a simple concept, but most people just don't seem able to get it, and indeed it can be hard to express it in precise terms.
Who says he didn't make the equipment himself?
Maybe not the first one, but okay, how about when they're available at K-Mart for $299?
Your basic problem is the notion that a Transhuman could even be sociopathic (assuming proper design of the brain augmentation - I suppose one could deliberately design a sociopathic superior brain - but it might be hard to guarantee its function - just like it is now.)
In other words, your concerns are irrelevant in either case. True Transhumans aren't going to be concerned about human concerns - and true Transhumans aren't going to be subject to human foibles that may raise such concerns.
Which still doesn't change the basic problem - that humans are subject to those foibles and they are going to be a problem (albeit very temporarily) for Transhumans.
Like I said, LOL, primates.
In San Francisco, you can now use food stamps to eat at certain fast food restaurants and they even wanted to start a program where you could order out and have hot food delivered.
Why? Electronic food stamp cards have replaced the actual stamps.
So now everyone wants to suck the money off the card accounts because it has become simple with no paper to have to redeem.
There's no way someone with food stamps can possibly make it through the month with these sorts of programs being pushed at them.
And this sort of thing was predicted by those who were opposed to going to the electronic card program.
They prevented food stamp owners from redeeming the stamps for useful goods such as toilet paper, then they put them in prison for selling them for cash, then they converted them to electronic cards so they can steal the money back by offering superfluous options.
at City College who is also a tech support person for a computer consulting company related an experience he had last spring.
One of their clients had refused to update his annual subscription to antivirus definitions for his email server. So of course he was "owned" almost immediately.
The tech spent three days trying to clean the machine. There were gigabytes of spam messages, and a ton of viruses, trojans and spyware on the server. The reason it took three days instead of just rebuilding the server was the tech was trying to get rid of just ONE virus that just couldn't be killed no matter what AV software he used.
Eventually they decided to just rebuild the server. Once that was done and the server brought up, it was instantly hit by thousands of spam messages - the guy's IP address has been seized on by hundreds of spammers worldwide as a "spam server" and the IP address was now totally useless. Another IP address had to be assigned to the server.
So the owner of the server spent who knows how much money per hour for tech support over thirty hours or more because he wouldn't spend $300 or whatever for an annual AV subscription.
I had a client a few weeks ago who allowed the daughter of the secretary to come in and play with the secretary's machine which was on DSL. Next thing they knew, their mouse would freeze, their PC clock was losing time, etc. I came in, ran Ad-Aware - yup, spyware. Not too much - lots of tracking cookies, but only a couple executables. It doesn't take much for this crap to ruin your system.
Bob Black's "Why Work?" as well as several other texts along those lines.
Of course, we can always use another.
If they CAN weed him out.
Who says he'll let them?
Especially if he's already Transhuman.
Who says Transhumans will have a problem with that in the first place?
Who says Transhumans will care what happens to humans once they reach Transhuman capability?
Who says there's such a thing as Transhuman "ethics" or "morality" or "empathy" or "compassion" (other than the Extropians, who are a naive bunch at best?)
Are you aware that some religious theorists believe that angels have no concept of mercy in the narrow human sense? Ever see the movie "Prophecy" where the angel Gabriel talks about destroying all the first-born children of Egypt?
Christians don't seem to have a problem with that (since of course they weren't affected and it's their dogma.)
Similarly, the Singularity Institute wants to create a "friendly" or "ethical" AI. LOL, guys.
Exactly.
There was a Star Trek novel where Kirk and Spock were EXACTLY duplicated by the villain which explored this very issue big time. The resolution of course was that one of the Spocks was actually a copy of the villain (and his existence was a big problem for the villain since he wanted to be the ONLY copy of the villain), so he got killed - and the copy of Kirk got sent to another dimension so he wouldn't be a problem for the real Kirk - or the Star Trek storyline.
I think there was another such story done in the Next Generation novels involving a duplicate Riker who ends up being dumped from Star Fleet and joining some Romulans against Star Fleet (I forget the details.)
A copy of you is NOT you and you no longer have any control over what he does. This may or may not have consequences to one's liking.
Slight correction.
I DO view the "move" operation as murder IF it is destructive of the original brain - because then it is NOT TRULY A MOVE. To be a true "move", it has to not leave anything behind OR destroy anything.
If the original brain can still function after the process, it still has a mind in it. If you destroy it AFTER the operation, it's murder. If you destroy it DURING the operation, BUT the destruction is because of the inadequate technical ability of the process to preserve the brain, then it's still murder. If the destruction is necessary to be able to MOVE the brain function at all (which I find hard to accept, except possibly in the elsewhere-referenced and irrelevant quantum level effect), then it might be acceptable.
I'm basing this on Hans Moravec's original description of the process where he indicated sections of the brain are removed, analyzed, simulated, and the resultant simulation uploaded to a computer. This is obviously destructive of the original brain and he doesn't even bother to acknowledge the fact that the simulation is just that. The simulation has no direct continuity with the original brain and the original brain is destroyed. I can't see how this is immortality for that brain except, as I say, in the sense of a PERSISTENT COPY. And that's not immortality to me.
On the other hand, if it is a "copy", you have two minds, not one. And that is nothing to the immortality purpose either.
The ONLY acceptable way to achieve immortality is the TRANSFORMATION of the existing entity into a more robust form directly.
You say that as far as you're concerned, no death has occurred. This is not correct. You have in fact died, and your copy is unaware of it (until he wakes up - and what might be the psychological effect on that copy of realizing that his original self has in fact died.)
The bottom line is that if your brain is destroyed, you are dead, regardless of whether a copy exists or not. Anything else is merely a "scientific" form of mysticism (absent any evidence of non-locality of "mind").
Now, if someone can establish that the "identity" of an entity is non-local to the brain (an energy pattern or something) and that it can be removed from the brain (rendering that brain useless) and then placed in another (manufactured) brain which only then becomes functional, then my objections would be irrelevant. I don't see that happening but it's not impossible.
Yes, as I mention elsewhere, there are valid reasons for doing it (as well as valid risks).
I'm just saying it doesn't solve the specific problem of PERSONAL immortality for a given entity. It's not likely to be done for that reason once the problems I outline are recognized.