Re: Immortality is but a small fee away!
Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 4:52 pm
A worthy enough arguement, but let me provide a brief, Kreshh-marketing, retort:Central Facehuggeria wrote:Let's say you make a copy of your mind but don't destroy the original. There are now two seperate individuals who count themselves as 'you' running around. You say they count as two individuals, yes?The Mindset wrote: What's the big deal with continuity? You are your mind. You are nothing else. Make a perfect copy of it, and that perfect copy is you, because you are your mind. Nothing else.
Now let's say we destroy the 'you' from which the copy was made. There is still an entity called The Mindset running around, but it is not the original Mindset. It's a copy with all the same memories and mental patterns, but it's still seperate from the original Mindset.
Let's say you were were the original which we just tossed into the disintigration booth. We've just destroyed 'you,' but there's still a copy of you running around, so it's all good, right?
The only exception to this line of reasoning that I can see is if you're a hivemind with your copy, but we aren't talking about that.
Basically, here's a scenario:
You're sitting at your computer. An omnipotent space gerbil appears and makes a perfect copy of you. He then waves his whiskers and consigns the you sitting at the computer to oblivion. There is still someone with your memories and thoughts running around, but the you who was sitting at the computer is gone forever.
You humans are social creatures, yes? You do not live purely for yourselves in any case. Now while it may make little difference to you that there is a perfect copy of yourself running around, continueing your life where you left it, consider your loved ones...
How unhappy would your death make them? Do they need you? Depend on you physically, finantially, or emotionally? What would become of them if you were to disapear?
Or perhaps you are an important someone, influential perhaps... do you have a cause? What would become of your goals and asperations were you to fall?
We can insure against all of this. And while you may not be around to enjoy it, you may rest soundly in whatever afterlife calls you, knowing that all is in good order.
Further - to thwart some, entirely baseless, claims that we are creating multiple duplicates, returning one, and then performing untold malicious acts upon those remaining - we are publically anouncing the institution of additional safeguards to insure that only one copy may be produced.
