Maybe the future will reverse the light cone and revisit everyone and everything that has ever lived. Maybe we're in their simulation.
If I'm going to identify with some future entity that's very different from me it might as well be something newly arisen, not something having a copy of some of my memories somewhere.
I guess those archived memories are the ultimate time capsule.
Death is a feature not a bug.
Oh they'll still need them, but only to stomp on their human faces.
You have fun with that.
> dictators that live forever
The world is more free than it has ever been, and it's getting better.
Preserved maybe, but never viewed by anyone. They might as well be gone.
Life, and consciousness, is absurd enough (yet certainly real) that I'm fully open to the possibility of further absurdities happening once we die, but I think it's an absolute certainty that we're all going to die. And accepting this is quite important because it rather dramatically influences one's life philosophy.
A digital copy of a mind is no less alive than your children. They are, after all, nothing more than lossy copies of yourself.
I find I'm actually happier accepting a little nihilism in my life, knowing that at some point, I will die, and within a couple generations of my death, I will be completely forgotten.
This isn't depressing, it's freeing. It means there are no long term expectations of me, so I should I just spend as much time as I can doing the things I enjoy.
One fudamentally cannot know the mind of another. Your opinion is based on incomplete observation and assumptions. Your insistence that a digital copy isn't me holds as much weight as the assertion that you aren't real because you exist only as text on my screen.
That's the part I directly dispute.
I don't dispute that a computer could become conscious, but I'm not convinced you could transfer your consciousness to a machine. If a brain scan copied your brain, that would not be the same consciousness that you have now. It would be like having a twin, and twins don't share a consciousness.
For a technical issue I'd also add that this entire thing becoming increasingly absurd given advances in understanding of human biology. Discoveries like the gut-brain axis emphasize that the concept of brains in a shell is mostly naive. Your body and your brain are completely interdependent to create 'you'.
But again I think the objections around consciousness or possibility are completely inconsequential (if not also strong arguments in their own right). Even if we accept every single point and desired outcome, you still die.
Machine-you would no doubt be thrilled. How does bio-you cope with not being made immortal? If your answer is "It doesn't matter, throw the original in the trash" is that murder or suicide?
Of course, nothing is immortal. All matter in the universe will eventually be subsumed into supermassive black holes, then spend the next thousands of quadrillions of years slowly evaporating into nothingness via Hawking radiation. I would very much like for my life to be longer than it is, to possibly witness the entire arc of all human civilization, but I sure as shit don't want to experience eternity as undifferentiated non-baryonic matter causally disconnected from all other matter. Death may come very far into the future for certain types of life that don't yet exist, or certain types of information sinks that can act but would not have been considered "life" by existing biological definitions, but it will still come, and if you live enough, it will be welcome.
Personally, I take a lot of comfort in this. Not a single one of us, not Charlemagne, not Khan, not Elon Musk, matter any more than an amoeba in the truly grand scheme of the cosmos. Even a hypothetical type III civilization is just as much dust as the Mayans in the long run. Conversely, within our own little sphere of influence, we all matter as much as a god.
I get why life has this ambition. I feel it, too. It's the reason we exist in the first place. But we're able to recognize it for what it is, the illusion of an imperative handed down by semi-random behaviors selected for no better reason than they made it more likely for their associated genes to proliferate. There is no actual imperative. That frees you to live within the confines of a tractable life of tractable ambitions. Be the absolute best person you can be to a small group of sentient creatures you happened to exist alongside for somewhere between a few decades to a century. Don't set the planet on fire and neglect your own family in an attempt to become a comic book hero.
Give me 500 years of life with good health and I will be more than satisfied.
Summum bonum, for those who want more.
And the Trojan Epic Cycle contained eight epic poems. We just only have two of them.
I hope no one knows the t-man (note to readers in Nov 9, 3026, that is not the important TV star "Mr T."). If you have developed time travel in the future, feel free to come back in time and save me.
This is not a rhetorical question. Maybe some of your offspring has higher chances of survival if you’re remembered?
Best you can do when we're all destined to become stardust.
The immortality of gods it's not so much they didn't die, but that we still remember and tell stories about them.
If you're here to leave a little mark on the universe while at it, the bigger the mark reverberations, the "better" you did with the hand you were dealt off
"I think men will remember us even hereafter."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:The_Poems_of_Sappho_(192...
"Real futurism means staring directly into your own grave and accepting the slow but thorough obliteration of everyone and everything you know and love."
The sufficiently distant future is a place where you (and they) won't be. Time capsules can be seen as a cry into this abyss.