But that's the part I never bought into about this part of the transhumanist genre. I get genetic engineering and cyber-implants, but uploading your actual "YOU" consciousness into a computer is never going to happen. All you'll get is an AI copy trapped in a meaningless existence, echoing fragments of a once living organism's mind. And all of those fragments can be stripped away through updates and editing.
Yeah, the whole "Back yourself up and live forever!" horseshit that transhumanists get into doesn't take in to account your gestalt. Look, if I make a backup of you, and you're both standing there, and I kill you, the you that's reading this right now? YOU are
dead. It's over. Now, if you're a spiritual person, and you believe you go to an afterlife, rock on. But YOU YOU is dead. Your experience of the now, reality, is switched off. It doesn't jump over into the other person. From my perspective, that other you, that backup, is for
my convenience. The only way around that is to transfer that gestalt from YOU to HIM. Not ctrl-c, ctrl-v, but ctrl-x, ctrl-v. And if the latter is done, and the copy you got ctrl-x/ctrl-v'ed into dies? You're still dead. Sure, if you face no hazards beyond aging, it is a way to live forever, but the minute someone kills whatever your consciousness - I mean YOUR consciousness, not a copy! - is in, then that's it. Game over.
Some people will bring up the whole "Aha, but when you go to
sleep you effectively aren't the same person...!" Yes, you are. The gestalt continues, albeit through the surreal mindscape of unconscious dream, but the thread is unbroken. It's not like when I go to sleep tonight, I die, and a new Bill Silvey awakens tomorrow and keeps on chugging. That's not how it works. And if it is, at what point does the copy kick in? The minute I drift off to sleep? During deep REM? shallow sleep prior to awakening? And if you interrupt any of that, am I now both me and this hypothetical copy? No: sleep is a continuation of gestalt, not a termination of it, and a new gestalt begins at awakening.
"Upload my consciousness" bitch
please. If putting yourself on a floppy disk or atari cartridge is just as valid a "you" as the you that is your gestalt, then typing out your life's history onto paper is a copy of your consciousness!
(And it ain't)