Isn't it really just perspective?

Take your example one step further. Your mind is uploaded for backup and for some reason, a new body is created and your mind uploaded while you are still alive. Now you are standing in front of yourself.

From your perspective, the other you is not you. From the other yous perspective you are not the other you. Confused yet?

The other thing is that from the moment the other you is created, s/he will begin to diverge. In a year or two the conditions and choices both of you make will result in unique individuals.

I think the problem is the expectation is that "being the same person" is a binary issue. It probably isn't, seeing as how most things aren't.* A copy could be 99.9% you AND be .1% not you.

The issue of divergence is important. If your backup only had 99% of you memories but missed the last 1% containing the accident that killed you, would you think the backup would be a valid continuation of your consciousness?  You could argue that it would be no different than blacking out and losing your short-term memory.

*Sometimes people point out how something in life is a binary thing by saying that to insist otherwise is like saying a woman could be a little bit pregnant, implying that pregnancy is a binary thing. But how else would you describe the point when a sperm cell has only *just* penetrated an egg cell? I would say at that point that the woman IS a little bit pregnant.  

People being people, you'll hear vigorous, speculative discussion of the last mile of any journey long before the first step has been planned and completed. It's no different in the community of folk supportive of healthy life extension. We're just about

Then again, what are YOU?  If we try to create a recipe for "you", we see that it is mostly references to global recipes for this hair color protein or that insulin receptor.  So physically, "you" are a collection of distributed phenomena.  Then when our recipe for you describes your memories, we find much the same - mostly references to external recipes for creating memories of the language you speak and think in, common concepts such as what an apple is like, etc.  These generic recipes will have small adjustments to accommodate your particular experiences with apples, but most of the information is common.  So physically and mentally, "you" are a more a collection of distributed phenomena, than an instance of uniqueness.  In this way people are a lot like libraries - each has a unique collection of books, but the books themselves are quite common.  So when a library burns down, what is lost?

What is lost is our heritage, though such is not of much value in our 'enlightened' digital age or materialism and mass self-consumption.  Perhaps people might better understand this in terms of intellectual property rights though such is not well defined either, at least not in any sense that benefits or offers protection for the individual against those powerful corrupting entities of greed, money and power that would seek to steal, manipulate, suppress, or redistribute such primal evolved individuality as just another product they can own.

I imagine in the near future (as if it weren't already well underway) these brain backups will be pirated and sold, and people will be able to purchase huge sections of other people's memories.  Real people will be butchered, ripped apart, and go extinct, and the maniacs of artificial art will run around living forever in their little mindless automated world where everyone who can afford it is all the same, running more or less the same collection of stolen memories and artificial soul, and everyone not entertaining them enough to make the insane amount of money necessary just to survive will be dead.

Isn't the original just a matter of copyright?

Will we have the responsibility to establish comprehensive laws granting copyright to one's own memories and genetic makeup prior to the advent of technology that enables it to be manipulated and stolen?  Apparently not, because that technology is here and while bills are currently before the house that would prevent corporations from delving into the genome and personal makeup of their employees to help decide whether they are too high-risk to be granted health care etc., the entire area is still pretty gray.

Given our rather pathetic track record I would wholly expect greed, vanity, and ignorance to pioneer this field before any organized altruistic consideration.  Just look how we deal with all our other problems; we ignore them and condemn the suffering to take blame for our negligence and gross irresponsibility.

Humans aren't ready for this, not because we aren't scientifically capable, but because collectively our motives and priorities are so corrupt, selfish, materialistic, and cold, with no value beyond base material equivalence assigned to an actual human experience, we cannot possibly sustain the invasion beyond a few dynastic families of the super-wealthy who will end up being the only ones capable of affording an adequate protection from our own innate stupidity.

I don't believe nor have I seen any indication that as a species we have the collective vision or integrity to do anything right.

Sgail, I was answering the original post that goes into extensive treatment of originality, and claiming that original has some exceptional, almost mystic, value.

I disagreed.

Legaly, I would not use copyright law to protect uploaded individuals or memories. Producing a new set of laws would be a better idea.

As to the original question, it has been effectively answered a number of times by a variety of authors. The short summary is that we as humans perceive an individual (even ourselves) as a continuum of observable moments and if that individual experiences a sudden, or slow but overwhelming, change in the dynamics of their behaviour (due to trauma, psychosis, etc.) we regard them as being "not themselves". We tolerate slow or minor changes to a person's behaviour as normal. A slow movement of an individual mind from one substrate to another is likely to be perceived as normal by the majority of the population, whereas rapid changes will likely produce shock and a perception of 'otherness'. It is interesting that similar perceptions are true for the speed of changes in cutural shifts as well.

There are problems with the current popular conception of 'mind-uploading' and I dislike that phrase because it is unlikely to ever be true that we can copy the dynamics of the mind without copying a great deal of the underlying structure of the brain. The key point being that your body greatly informs your mind's dynamics and that you need structures and inputs as complex as the ones human brains currently have in order to pull something like this off.

Sgaileach1 - your comments are somewhat off topic but they deserved a reply because they are confusing the nature of individual property rights and their current application. Intellectual property rights do not promote altruistic behaviour, they inhibit it. They are sometimes necessary to incentivize individuals to use their talents or assets to produce new and interesting things, but they should be used sparingly. Individuals who sit on their wealth or talent do nothing for society as a whole, and this behaviour essentially what intellectual property rights are protecting. I agree that we need some form of credit-assignation system for information producers so they can benefit from their work, but the period of control of that information has to be limited so that it can be placed in the commons and others can freely build upon it. I believe the same argument can be made for wealth (use it or lose it), sitting on it does nothing for you or society. The problems you are pointing out are due to a lack of corporate and government transparency and an overabundance or power concentration, not to a lack of intellectual property and privacy protections for individuals. It is information hiding and hoarding that produces the types of behaviours you are talking about, not vice-versa.

While I agree it is folly to hoard huge amounts of material wealth (money), primarily because our collective worship of the dollar and the scarcity of it in the hands of those who actively pursue positive change is primarily what holds us back as a civilization, I think there is a clear and necessary line between that obvious problem and a fundamental right to privacy of one’s own personal thoughts and ideas.  The notion that an individual be held technologically responsible to share their talent against their will and without reimbursement simply because you aren’t or feel that they should is seriously flawed, dangerous, and frankly quite disturbing.  Not that this is what you meant to say, just what your statements seemed to imply.

My ideas are not your currency simply because you’d like to get your hands on them, for whatever reason.  Even if someone honestly believed they might help better the world it doesn’t give them the right to manipulate technology that would dig into an individual’s mind and extract these “value bits” for their or anyone’s purposes.  Freedom of speech also implies freedom not to speak or share one’s personal ideas, a freedom that is equally essential and must continue to be protected from misguided science or duplicitous tricksters attempting to cheat their way into some advantage.

Besides, if society so lacks talent that they must steal it from individuals against their will, it is likely we are witnessing a lager problem here.  Perhaps it is not a lack of ideas but how society chooses to apply them that presents a serious problem and obstacle to progress, in which case all that will be accomplished in stealing them from individuals is heaping more fuel on a failing fire.

Have you ever considered the wisdom of timing, of knowing when to act and when not to?  Perhaps those with the talent you seek to squeeze for the good of society know something else you don’t which is HOW such information must be applied in order to succeed.  Perhaps it really is all in the presentation, and to flush out creativity unnaturally or steal it simply because we can and might be under the false impression it is somehow the right thing to do diminishes the value of that material to the point it no longer has any appreciable influence on the bettering of society, and all you have succeeded in accomplishing is the destruction of the individual by an excruciatingly painful process of Borgian assimilation.

But then perhaps that sort of totalitarian suppression and absolute invasive control is exactly what was intended all along, and all we have left of art as a society is the reproduction and redistribution of dead corporate ideas that it is our primary responsibility first and foremost to destroy in any living natural and honest form, in order to avoid that annoying little obstacle called human rights.

The only problem I've ever had with the concept is the name, "uploading." I prefer the older, more science-fictiony, yet more accurate, expression "brain taping."

Anyone vaguely familiar with computers knows that uploading is a term that sadly abused and misunderstood. Upload only means to send data to a network. Download means to receive data from a network.

Somewhere in the eighties some dubious futurist tangled these terms up  with the idea of taking snapshots of brain states at molecular resolution. Why I don't know.

Other than the silly name, I think the concept is scientifically valid and probably likely sometime in the future.

Squaileach1 - I think you are conflating personal privacy rights with commercial IP laws, which are very different things. I didn't say anything about sharing anything against their will. That said, a realization has to be come to that once information is released by an author into the wild there is only a limited amount of time before it becomes part of the information commons, and the onus is on the author to include protection for the information if they do not want others to be able to access it. I'm all for strong personal privacy rights, but in terms of commercial use of information we must continue to revaluate how long and in what situations a piece of art remains the authors property if they have released it via mass communication. The laws that for physical property can not be applied in an identical manner to informational property. The current structure of IP laws allows large corporations to hoard information via barriers to information flow and does not give individuals strong protection (because of the real costs of an individual having to defend their property rights in court). People should have an absolute right to personal information they have not distributed, but once they let it out of the bag in a big way it can only be 'owned' (in terms of real usage of that information) for a limited amount of time, although credit for its creation should be assigned to them.

Mr Farlops - 'brain taping' is an even less accurate descriptive phrase than uploading. At least uploading connotes that something more than a static picture is being transfered, although it still really doesn't capture the true difficulties in having to copy structural and dynamical information. Probably the most accurate descriptive term I have seen so far to describe the actual process that will be necessary is 'brain emulation'.

Ocsrazor,

Granted. I should have clarified that it's not just static snapshots it's a continous succession of molecular resolution frames from microsecond to microsecond.

Still, uploading, for people in the know, is a bad term for this. Uploading has nothing to do with what we are trying to achieve. Your expression, "brain emulation," is much better.

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