Why we should send uploaded astronauts on interstellar missions. There are ways to test these assumptions of yours in much less dramatic way. John, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I will call it a duck. Similarly, if a person remembers my memories, thinks like me, feels like me, and thinks/feels that he is me, I will accept him as a valid continuation of me. But we have been here before. Discussions about uploading have been "plagued by metaphysical discussions about the continuity of personal identity ("is only a copy")" for decades. I think all these identity issues and “problems” disappear like snow in the sun when looked at from the right perspective, and I guess nobody will see any problem once uploading is commonplace.
But I also think this discussion will continue for decades, because different position come from different deep assumptions about reality and aesthetic preferences, and it is not easy to persuade others. A copy of a thing is not a thing. My mother passed away some years ago, and I miss her. Should we send a robotic boat to explore Titan's methane lakes? And now, a video of 2,299 exoplanets orbiting a single star. What's New. What secrets lie within the Caves of Mars? NASA finds hidden ocean on Saturn's moon Titan. With all these exoplanets, where the hell is the alien life? A Game-Changer in the Search for Alien Life: "All stars have planets"
Want to find alien life? Search for Dyson spheres. "I think most sci-fi fans would understand "uploading" as the process of basically creating a copy of one's mind in the form of a computer program, rather than some mystical process wherein your soul possesses a computer. " What's the difference? It still relies on the mystical belief that the soul/mind/consciousness is separable from the brain. There's no evidence this is possible. NONE. "logically speaking, there's no obvious reason why it shouldn't be possible someday" No- logically, since a mind has never left a brain and gone somewhere else, and since a damaged brain clearly leads to a loss of self, there's PRESENTLY no logical reason to believe it's possible.
In science, language counts. "one can imagine a human brain being gradually integrated with machine components, without there being a single moment of "upload" It doesn't matter if it's gradual or instantaneous. Unless we can actually transfer our consciousness. "with no speculation at all, this site wouldn't exist. " Absolutely. The Great Filter. Sept. 15, 1998 by Robin Hanson Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life.
But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we? Combining standard stories of biologists, astronomers, physicists, and social scientists would lead us to expect a much smaller filter than we observe. Thus one of these stories must be wrong. Introduction Fermi, Dyson, Hart, Tipler, and others [Finney & Jones, Dyson 66, Hart 75, Tipler 80] have highlighted the relevance to SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) of the "The Great Silence" [Brin 83] (also known as the Fermi paradox), the fact that extraterrestrials haven't substantially colonized Earth yet.
Life Will Colonize. Www.brin-l.com/downloads/silence.pdf. Does a galaxy filled with habitable planets mean humanity is doomed?