Tuesday, March 27, 2018

duplicitous singularity

re-reading the Altered Carbon trilogy, I'm struck by a fundamental philosophical with re-sleeving (upload)  - while the book runs with the paradigm of digital recording of the essence of consciousness and skates over thin ice about embodied intelligence (the meat is just a machine the s/w of a human being runs on), there's a separate idea of continuity; as with perfect forward and backwards secrecy, how is the new running copy anything to do with previous copies, and how do previous copies anticipate the new copy? they don't  - they are copies. so philosophically, they aren't the same person, they are separate instances. but worse, if there's any notion of "eventual consistency" in how anticipation (and memory) overlap and interleave, then this just doesn't work at all. not one bit.

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