Why do you have your position on destructive uploads
Mostly by comparison to non-destructive uploads. Copy my mind to a machine non-destructively, and I still identify with meat-me. You could let machine-me run for a day, and only then kill off meat-me. I don’t like that option and would be confused by someone who did. Destructive uploads feel like the limit of that case where the time interval approaches zero. As with the case outlined in the post, I don’t see a crossed line where it stops being death and starts being transition.
Now that I’ve written that, I wish I’d thought of it before you asked; the two are really mirror images. Approach destructive uploads from the copy-then-kill side, and it feels like death. Approach them from the expand-then-contract side, and it feels like continuous identity. Yet at the midpoint between them they turn into the same operation.
Mostly by comparison to non-destructive uploads. Copy my mind to a machine non-destructively, and I still identify with meat-me. You could let machine-me run for a day, and only then kill off meat-me. I don’t like that option and would be confused by someone who did. Destructive uploads feel like the limit of that case where the time interval approaches zero. As with the case outlined in the post, I don’t see a crossed line where it stops being death and starts being transition.
Now that I’ve written that, I wish I’d thought of it before you asked; the two are really mirror images. Approach destructive uploads from the copy-then-kill side, and it feels like death. Approach them from the expand-then-contract side, and it feels like continuous identity. Yet at the midpoint between them they turn into the same operation.