You can push the logic even further : as even sustaining your body in a small tank becomes unsustainable, one might really go all virtual : get rid of your body, and upload your mind in a piece of silicon (or whatever replaced silicon). The silicon would be much less expensive to run than your meat brain.
Even if you don't believe your upload wouldn't truly be you, you might take the option, if the alternative is certain death by starvation. Better die and spawn a ghost, than die and leave nothing.
Now it's not all pretty: if you assume a capitalistic, competitive environment, one could set up "interesting" forms of exploitation. An upload could be saved, stopped, restarted, spied on, tortured… Robin Hanson produced quite interesting (though horrifying) speculation about how such a world might look like.
"Better die and spawn a ghost, than die and leave nothing." What's the point of a ghost? How does this make your situation "better"? Your point is based on the assumption that death is inherently "bad".
Darwinism suggests that if ghosts can continue to exist (and reproduce?) and affect the world to create more of themselves (e.g. tell people that it's not so bad), then they will be selected-for.
Ceasing to exist is, in a strict Darwinian sense, bad. Reproduction and, to an extent, continued existence are good.
Seconded. It should be noted that some people see making children as a form of immortality. My own mom thinks along the lines of "what's the point of living forever, you just have to make children".
I say the immortality of my genes pale in comparison to the immortality of my thought processes. Even if the copy isn't really "me", it will have the same influence I could have had if it was. I may have other goals besides not dying. My ghost would have at least a chance of carrying them out.
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You can push the logic even further : as even sustaining your body in a small tank becomes unsustainable, one might really go all virtual : get rid of your body, and upload your mind in a piece of silicon (or whatever replaced silicon). The silicon would be much less expensive to run than your meat brain.
Even if you don't believe your upload wouldn't truly be you, you might take the option, if the alternative is certain death by starvation. Better die and spawn a ghost, than die and leave nothing.
Now it's not all pretty: if you assume a capitalistic, competitive environment, one could set up "interesting" forms of exploitation. An upload could be saved, stopped, restarted, spied on, tortured… Robin Hanson produced quite interesting (though horrifying) speculation about how such a world might look like.
"Better die and spawn a ghost, than die and leave nothing." What's the point of a ghost? How does this make your situation "better"? Your point is based on the assumption that death is inherently "bad".
Darwinism suggests that if ghosts can continue to exist (and reproduce?) and affect the world to create more of themselves (e.g. tell people that it's not so bad), then they will be selected-for.
Ceasing to exist is, in a strict Darwinian sense, bad. Reproduction and, to an extent, continued existence are good.
Seconded. It should be noted that some people see making children as a form of immortality. My own mom thinks along the lines of "what's the point of living forever, you just have to make children".
I say the immortality of my genes pale in comparison to the immortality of my thought processes. Even if the copy isn't really "me", it will have the same influence I could have had if it was. I may have other goals besides not dying. My ghost would have at least a chance of carrying them out.
death is inherently "bad"
Hell, yes. And it is not an assumption, it is an observation.