Home | Join! | Help | Browse | Forums | NuWorld | NWF | PoPo   


~ Ping      Ping ~
Proud Heathen
The Out Campaign: Scarlet Letter of Atheism
Subscribe
Subscribe to this to blog if you would like to be emailed whenever it is updated.

Your email

Continuity of Consciousness
Sunday. 5.5.13 11:31 pm
For no apparent reason, I've been pondering immortality. There's a company that claims it's making robots that will one day be able to house a human so they can live forever. Besides the obvious hurdle of designing a computer powerful enough to contain the human mind, the designers will have to overcome the problem of Continuity of Consciousness.


It's all well and good to be able to transfer your memories into a robot and have it "wake up" with all your knowledge, but would that really be you? Imagine two tv sets. You watch half of a movie on one tv, pause, then go to the second tv and press play. The second tv picks the movie up exactly where it left off, but it's not the first tv. The first tv is still paused.


It's not enough to just transfer memory. If, from the perspective of the human, their life just ends the moment they flip the switch, what's the point of making yourself immortal? The whole idea is to continue your stream of consciousness into the next stage.


It makes it even more difficult that scientists don't really even know what consciousness is.


Kind of makes the prospect of transporters on star trek a dubious notion. According to the lore of the show, transporters disassemble you, and reassemble you on the other side. So what if that process isn't perfect? What if... David 1 is on the planet, ready to be beamed up. As soon as they flip the switch, everything goes black. Lights go out. Nothing. End of stream. Then, on the ship, what is essentially a clone wakes up with all of david 1's memories. Isn't that a terrifying idea? It's basically a machine that murders you and replaces you with a clone of yourself. And they'd never know. All those originals were silently killed the moment the transporter turned on.

Comment! (5) | Recommend!

I'm boring
Friday. 4.26.13 4:49 pm
So, if anyone is wondering why I don't update that often, the answer is quite simple. I'm boring. Nothing particularly interesting happens in my life on a day to day basis. I go to work, I come home, I play video games, I sleep. Sometimes Jenn and I go to a movie or play minecraft together. Most of the time I don't do enough in any given month to fill two paragraphs.


It makes it really hard to talk to my dad or other relatives. Every time they call the conversation quickly ends in dead air because they say "how are things going?" and I reply with "same ol same ol". And then dead air.


I should also mention that I'm terrible at making conversation. Besides not having anything to say, I'm particularly unskilled at faking that I have an interest in what the other person is saying. Jenn is about the only person I ever talk to that I'm genuinely interested in what she's saying (mainly cause I love her and whatnot). I think that's why I have so few friends. It takes a lot of mental energy and willpower to maintain a friendship, and to be quite honest, I'm usually tapped out just maintaining my relationship.


I guess that makes me antisocial. Doesn't really bother me. Thankfully Jenn and I share that personality quirk.


It's funny. We were talking about a wedding the other day. We've decided to get married at the courthouse. Initially, our reasoning was the expense of a wedding, and wanting to save the money for having a kid soon. But after talking, we both realized the core of our desire not to have a real wedding is entirely an antisocial one. We just genuinely do not want to deal with that many people. We don't want to be the center of attention, we don't want to have to entertain all our friends and relatives, we don't want to navigate what will be a conversational minefield with that many people. No no no.


It was an interesting revelation that shed new light on our collective personality. It's a good thing, really. We realized that the other half of our relationship is really all the human contact we want/need in any given day. Neither of us have that many close friends, and it's likely because we both feel fulfilled in our relationship. We're not just boyfriend and girlfriend, we're best friends, so we don't really feel the need to look for friendship outside of the relationship.


Anyway, it'd be way too hard to find anyone as cynical and judgmental as we are. Most other people just end up annoying us in one way or another.

Comment! (2) | Recommend!

Praetorian's Weblog Site • NuTang.com

NuTang is the first web site to implement PPGY Technology. This page was generated in 0.005seconds.

  Send to a friend on AIM | Set as Homepage | Bookmark Home | NuTang Collage | Terms of Service & Privacy Policy | Link to Us | Monthly Top 10s
All content � Copyright 2003-2047 NuTang.com and respective members. Contact us at NuTang[AT]gmail.com.