"Immortal But Damned to Hell on Earth"

Indeed, Surface Detail was an excellent book, one of the best Culture novels, imo.

Yes, technology which made immortality possible could also making torturing/punishing people forever possible, but this does not mean that death is good, rather it means that its important for people to have empathy, and that we need to evolve away from retributive justice.

I usually find articles like this from the deathists annoying, and this wasn't an exception.

Pascal's mugging. You are doing a similar thing to yourself: focusing on one possible scary outcome to the neglect of other, equally probable ones. E.g. eternal bliss, creating multiple clones of yourself, all enjoying eternal happy life beyond your wildest dreams. The odds are tiny and unknown, but both risks and rewards are potentially huge. You have no frame of reference, no intuition and no brain capacity to make a rational choice in this case. So don't bother.

Perhaps it was discussed in more depth before I join LW but I think far, far more cautiousness should be exercised at considering an upload could ever be you.

If you can reduce personhood to information representable in bits, it also means each and any part of it is changeable and replacable, thus there is no lasting essence of individualhood. (My former Buddhist training is really kicking in here, although it is possible I am looking it up in a cache.) Thus there are infinite amount of potential lumps of information, each of which are "more you" and "less you" depending on the difference. Basically from the second you thought a new thought or seen something new, you are not the same you anymore.

Fortunately, our lack of infinite brain plasticity protects us now from every experience radically rewiring what we are, we have an illusion of unchanging selfhood more or less due to this lack of plasticity.

Uploads are infinitely plastic. Probably nobody will care about keeping you intact just for the sentimental and nostalgic value of being attached to your former, meat-based, unplastic self. You will be changed so radically that it will not be you in any meaningful sense. Also there is no promise they will bother about uploading many meat minds. They may as well figure uploading one Really Nice Person and making a hundred billion copies delivers more utility.

And quite frankly if we give up all our last shreds of illusionary attachment to having souls, I am not sure we will care about utility anyway. I think I find it hard to care about whether a mere algorithm feels joy or suffering. After all a mere algorithm can put the label "joy" or "suffering" on anything. For an algorithm, what is even the difference between "real" suffering and simply putting the word, the label, the referent "suffering" on certain things? I need the illusion of some scrap of a not-literally-supernatural-but-it-feels-so type of soul to know the difference between suffering and "suffering". A software function that basically goes print("OUCH! Augh! Nooo!...") does not actually suffer, and I think the "actualness" is where the supernaturalistic illusion is necessary.

Otherwise, we would just engineer out the ability to suffer from the upload, and/or find the function that takes experiences as an input, judges them, and emits joy as an output, and change it so that it always emits joy. We would from that point on not care about the world.

Oh, true for the "uploaded prisoner" scenario, I was just thinking of someone who'd deliberately uploaded themselves and wasn't restricted - clearly suicide would be possible for them.

But even for the "uploaded prisoner", given sufficient time it would be possible - there's no absolute impermeability to information anywhere, is there? And where there's information flow, control is surely ultimately possible? (The image that just popped into my head was something like, training mice via. flashing lights to gnaw the wires :) )

But that reminds me of the problem of trying to isolate an AI once built.