| Occam's razor cuts both ways, and can lead to false conclusions when over-ambitiously applied (e.g. Why is grass green? "God made it that way" - instead of describing the nature of light, macrophysical objects, human sense perceptions and cognitive substrate). But yes, just try to explain what a non-material soul would be: no eyes, no feet (nor matter to resist against the surface of the floor or ground OR be bound to it by gravity), no clothing, no physical location, no temporally-bound existence (bound by changes in matter that constitute substrate). What is left, aside from memories of the person for a time, artifacts, and causual effects of the person in life (actions, exchanges) or the corpse after death (physical presence, rotting if not cremated, or cryogenically frozen* - in which case it might be revived)?
"mere replication of mental states does not transmit the original perspective of an intelligent living entity onto the new substrate" - me
But White Rice is correct in saying it would be like two people who acted and thought in *nearly* identical ways. Life extension as the effort to preserve a phenomenologically experiencing entity (a "perspective") is not *just* about preserving information. I would even go so far as to say preservation of substrate is *more* important. The only way substrate becomes unimportant is through an active process of enxtending connections onto another substrate (wirelessly), which could then be integrated with an inactive functional copy of connections remaining in the skull. The extended portion could then connect with and activate the copy, runing in near parallel with the bio brain. In the event that the bio brain was destroyed then, the continuous perspective could justifiably be said to have been preserved (i.e., the same person remains alive, despite damage to a redundant and expendable region of his or her or zer processing system, i.e. brain).
See my Meta Brain Growth Process tribe on Tribe.net for more details.
As for "weakness," our ancestors did not preserve the species by wrestling bears and lions with their bear hands, they used the muscles in their heads (in a sense, we are "muscleheads" as some of the components of our nervous [neuronal] tissues are akin to those in our voluntary muscles). We got where we are today by staying out of the trees on the savanna, cooking our food (which reduced tooth size by half), devising hunting techniques, improving shelters, developing agriculture, and refining our cultural and conceptual practices (religions, governments, philosophy and science*). In a sense, I believe we are "self-directed" (in the Dennett sense of evitablity and self-models) biologically-based robots. We won't loose an "essense" by extending our capacities through extensions of our nervous - and specifically neuronal system - into alternative substrates, as the facillatory substrates will become "us."
If a "non-biological robot arm" feeds you (digestion could be changed too), but that particular arm is intricately connected to your processing system (i.e. brain) via sensoral and motor fibors analogious to nerves, it could be said that you have become a cyborg, but I think it is a weak assertion to say that the arm is somehow "not you." With certain bionic replacements, humans could actually make themselves much stronger than any human or protohuman that has ever lived. They could eventually extend into non-humaniod bodies that are much more up to the task of heavy work (adaptive machinary) than the relatively soft, structurally weak bodies of humans (for example a much stronger "knee" for a robot extension would bend backward like a grasshopper). Much more interesting to me would be the enhanced processing abilities supported by new substrates, and how those advances would help enhace our conceptual capabilities.
Best,
Ben |