Uploading: what about the carbon-based version?

It definitely wouldn't be murder, so long as Eliezer agreed to the procedure. At worst it would be assisted-suicide. I would even go a step further and say that it seems plausible that killing the carbon version might be the only sensible long-term economic decision.

Imagine if there were a small number of Mt. Everest-sized humans who needed massive amounts of food to stay alive. They are sentient, but think far more slowly than regular humans. They subjectively experience only a couple days every sidereal year. Because they need so much food, and think so slowly, they can't do much productive work, and to survive they collectively need trillions of dollars of resources donated from the world's governments.

1. Would it be wrong to let the huge version die?
2. Wouldn't it be better to painlessly mercy-kill the huge version so it didn't have to starve to death?
3. If you could cheaply make a human-sized, human-speed copy, wouldn't that be kinder than simply killing the huge copy?
4. What if society had the resources to keep the huge people alive, but only with anti-natalist legislation that keeps the human-sized population smaller?

More generally, what would folks here consider to be good enough evidence that uploading was worth doing?

I think many would give different answers for a destructive versus non destructive upload. I'm more sentimental about my meat sack, and can't see snuffing it in one fell swoop. I'd rather go the Ship of Theseus route.

1. I assume that in the hypothesis in which Eliezer was speaking, the upload is then a safe procedure, not an experimental one. And anyway you can sedate the living body, do the upload, check that the upload went well, and then destroy the carbon body.

2. Whatever your optimal number of copies of Eliezer it (be it 1 because split-heads of personality creates too much problems, or 2^42 because you love Eliezer so much), if an upload is significantly better than a carbon version (which I assume too), then it would be better to get n upload versions and still get rid of the carbon one.

If carbon and upload versions have different pros and cons (like some senses not yet well implemented in the upload version), it could make sense to keep both. But in the long term, I'm pretty sure the upload version will be much better, and keeping a carbon version wouldn't make sense.

Changing the issue from murder to suicide might be interesting.

You're the leftover meatsack. You wake up after the upload, and see UploadedYou frolicking in a virtual world. What would you have to see to shoot yourself in the head?

I doubt that's going to seem like a good idea to this meatsack.

one is that two Eliezers would presumably be better than one, though I don't have a strong intuition about the optimum number of Eliezers.

Once you've uploaded I would expect it to be fairly trivial create as many Eliezers as one likes, all with the advantages of being uploaded. But it isn't implausible that there will be some unique advantage to being meat... it just depends on contingent features of the world in which this happens. Features that no one is going to be able to predict reliably.

I recall once having serious objections to the idea of duplicating but those have disappeared over time. I suspect my copies would empathize with each other and I don't think I would worry about 'becoming the unhappy twin'. Though that might change if owned significant property that one or the other copy wouldn't inherit. The flip side of that coin is that I think I would be alright 'killing myself' if I knew a copy of myself (which only differed in very recent memories) was still alive and kicking. Though the longer the divergence the less okay I would be with it. What I hope might one day be possible is integrating the memories of multiple copies so that I could merge and split repeatedly and not have to miss out on anything.

Given your clarification of the question... I think my minimum standard for treating X as a continuation of my personal identity (whether X is an upload, or my organic body after a stroke, or various other things that some people treat as such a continuation and other people don't) is that it experiences a significant fraction of the memories I experience, and that its other memories are consistent with those memories (that is, it's plausible that a single entity in fact had all of those remembered experiences).

That's not to say that the existence of X would satisfy me in a broader sense. Then again, my current existence isn't always satisfactory either, but I still believe it's my current existence.

one is that two Eliezers would presumably be better than one, though I don't have a strong intuition about the optimum number of Eliezers.

The cost of keeping a carbon-based Eliezer alive would mean that whoever pays the bill would have less money to run the uploaded Eliezer. So the uploaded Eliezer would live for fewer years. Since it would probably be cheaper to run uploaded Eliezer for a subjective year than to keep carbon Eliezer alive for a year, running only the uploaded Eliezer would mean more Eliezer years overall.

I have always wondered what it would be like to kill myself. Not that I am suicidal, just morbbidly curious.

I always thought those “I get uploaded, my body is killed before waking up, there was no murder” scenarios were closer to the trolley problem than an actual policy proposal. Sort of strengthening the opposing argument—“destructive uploading would be murder”—before countering it.

By “destructive uploading” I mean something like freezing, slicing and scanning a brain, which by default kills the source. Proposing a process that harmlessly uploads a living (but unconscious) person, and then kills it (before it regains consciousness) is a strengthening of the associated moral dilemma. My memory tells me I heard the weaker argument/question discussed a long time ago (7-10 years) but not recently; I don’t trust my memory much, though.

So I don’t think of it as “should the source die after upload”, but rather as “wouldn’t actually be murder if it did”, thus it is not (necessarily) murder to upload someone, even if destructively.

Taking the question at face value, I agree with the moral attitude—it’s not murder to kill the source after upload (barring obvious things like the operation being involuntary, which might need a more nuanced approach.)

It’s not quite my policy—I don’t see a general reason to get rid of the source. But if something like the particular individual no longer being interested in being incarnated, or resource limits favoring digital-only people, happens to be the case, that might be enough reason.

From a practical point of view, I think it’s more likely that at first, and probably for quite a while, we won’t have a choice, i.e. uploading will be destructive, and if and when we’ll be able to do a live upload (or at least one where the body wakes up after) we’ll have bigger moral problems to solve (of which this might be just a special case).

My ideal plan for uploading is as follows:

1. I go unconscious and my brain is scanned.
2. The upload wakes up.
3. Someone who knows me very well, and whom I trust, observes and interacts with the upload to make sure they're complete, sane, and sufficiently similar to meat-me that meat-me would agree, if asked, that they and the upload are the same person.
4. If those conditions are met, the trusted person euthanizes meat-me. If the transfer failed badly enough not to create a mind, the trusted person deletes the upload and wakes meat-me up.

What I settled on doing (after thinking about this for a while) is to just keep both bodies, and when meatbag-me gets envious about being "the one to die", I'd just reupload. :)

More generally, what would folks here consider to be good enough evidence that uploading was worth doing?

Good enough evidence that (properly done) uploading would be a good thing, as opposed to the status quo of tens of thousands of people dying every day, you mean?

[edit] If you want to compare working SENS to uploading, then I'd have to think a lot harder.

And to spell out the application to Unfriendly AI: You've got various people insisting that an arbitrary mind, including an expected paperclip maximizer, would do various nice things or obey various comforting conditions: "Keep humans around, because diversity is important to creativity, and the humans will provide a different point of view."

EY, "Contaminated by Optimism" 06 August 2008 12:26AM