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Comment Re:Physchology (Score 1) 274

But an actual, honest-to-god Mars trip is different, and everybody will know it. Just outside the cramped wall is the darkest, blackest, most incomprehensibly complete void mankind can fathom. No air, no beer, no babes. Nothing. And not just some nothing, MILLIONS of miles of nothing. Months of travel at speeds inconceivable to airlines flight. Something go wrong? Everybody's dead!

Ok, ok, so just put them in a bathysphere, send it to the bottom of Challenger Deep, and pull up the tow line. Should take care of the stress issue...

Comment Re:Irresponsible headline, summary (Score 5, Informative) 911

It's like the pilot that landed his plane in the river after losing an engine to birds. I don't think a computer would have taken that option and not only would it have been likely that all the passengers would have been killed, but bystanders as the planes computer attempted to correct and eventually goes down in a populated street.

For the record, it was an Airbus A320 (a full FBW aircraft) that was flown into the Hudson.

Comment Re:Supplement, not replace (Score 1) 350

Today your web browser always hits the remote server first, even if you already have a cached copy of the content. It's checking to see if its cache is still valid. If the site is down, you see an error (read: your app won't run); if the site decided to delete or change the content, your browser obliges and caches the new version, whether you wanted the old version blown away or not.

New to the WWW? Homework for tonight: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt

Comment Re:I'm ready... (Score 1) 366

Well, no, the "digital representation" certainly wouldn't mind, but you would simply be dead. Would it really make you feel better to know that after you are dead there's a digital conscientiousness out there that's identical to yours?

If the digital consciousness is identical to me and still believes and feels like it's me (i.e. it), is there truly any difference?

When you go under for a heart replacement and wake back up, is it you? How much can be changed while you're unconscious before it's not you on the other side?

The hang up most people have with an unconscious destructive transfer is that both the organic source and resulting digital copy are aware of the process that supposedly took place. A Morevac transfer somehow lessens the impact by drawing out the "death" over a longer period of time such that the original and copy are not aware of or can point to a definitive time the transfer took place.

Assuming a digital copy is truly identical to the organic upload source (i.e. it is not immediately aware of any difference in experience or consciousness), consider this scenario: What if you signed up for a destructive transfer to happen while you were asleep or unconscious but you would not know the time of the transfer. It might happen the next night or sometime in the next six months. If the digital copy is identical and not aware of when it comes into existence (when it wakes up for the first time). Would you or it still care?

Moreover, how do you know this didn't already happen last night?

Comment Re:I'm ready... (Score 1) 366

Sure, but who's going to break the bad news to your "organic representation"?

Death is death even if there are 100 more copies of you.

-DF

Initially, I thought this same way and in a sense I still agree with you. I'm just not sure it matters to me anymore. Is the immediate unconscious disposal of my organic representation any different than a month long death by progressive neuron replacement?

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