Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Yes, but it's not so discrete a difference. We change every second of our lives physically and mentally. We have ever increasing complexity of drug, surgical, and bionic therapies.


Running a simulation of a person would probably enable different kinds of change to be made, and some of those may be qualitatively very different from anything that has happened before. One also has to think about running multiple instances of a person, running a person in a non-real-time simulated environment, taking a checkpoint, restoring from back-up, and so on. At what point do you start to treat two instances of the same person as different people? If you stop running any instances of a person, have no particular plan to run one in the future, but you think you still have a snapshot in an archive somewhere, is that person still "living"?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: