Addressing the immortality wing of the Transhumanist cult
Inside the cult of transhumanism lay the cult of machine-aided immortality. They think that they could somehow transfer their consciousness into a machine and live forever that way.
Just about all of their arguments in favor of such silliness involve some kind of smoke-and-mirrors trickery. Usually it involves throwing out a highly technical term like quantum entanglement and then hand wave their way around it.
Let's be charitable and for the sake of argument take their argument for granted, without an in-depth examination of the technicalities. You take some artificial copy of yourself, "entangle" the two, and voila! Your consciousness is now in the copy.
No.
You've made a "copy" (again, ignoring the full implications of that, again for the sake of argument) but when it comes time to switch off your own continuity, you still die. All you would be doing is making another mechanized continuity, of which you wouldn't be experiencing because one, you'd be dead on your side even if it's conscious on the other and two, there is no consciousness in the AI on the other end. The entanglement doesn't place your consciousness on both ends- It constructs what is a simulated consciousness on the other end i.e. an artificial system that shows all the signs of consciousness yet contains NONE.
The trickery doesn't stand. Immortality Transhumanists are seeking to make a dead world out of p-zombies.
Just about all of their arguments in favor of such silliness involve some kind of smoke-and-mirrors trickery. Usually it involves throwing out a highly technical term like quantum entanglement and then hand wave their way around it.
Let's be charitable and for the sake of argument take their argument for granted, without an in-depth examination of the technicalities. You take some artificial copy of yourself, "entangle" the two, and voila! Your consciousness is now in the copy.
No.
You've made a "copy" (again, ignoring the full implications of that, again for the sake of argument) but when it comes time to switch off your own continuity, you still die. All you would be doing is making another mechanized continuity, of which you wouldn't be experiencing because one, you'd be dead on your side even if it's conscious on the other and two, there is no consciousness in the AI on the other end. The entanglement doesn't place your consciousness on both ends- It constructs what is a simulated consciousness on the other end i.e. an artificial system that shows all the signs of consciousness yet contains NONE.
The trickery doesn't stand. Immortality Transhumanists are seeking to make a dead world out of p-zombies.