system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: "Uploading your consciousness" into a computer is an impossible idea that will probably lead to the formation of a suicide cult.

Extremely tech-minded internet types sometimes bring up the idea of "uploading your consciousness to the cloud" as a type of immortality. The idea is you can live forever in a virtual computer world, once all of your thoughts and memories are "uploaded" into the cloud.

This, to me, is a nonsense idea. What they've done is basically reinvented the afterlife. Instead of "if I'm good when I die I'll go live in the clouds" it's now "if I live long enough and make enough money someone will invent a computer and I can live in the cloud". The science doesn't make sense. Even if your memories and thoughts could be uploaded and integrated into an AI, it wouldn't be you.

What you're essentially setting people up for is a Heaven's Gate style suicide where they "ascend" to another plane.

now I'll be the first to acknowledge that technology can take us a very very long way from where we are to things we can't even imagine. I'm not even saying immortality of some kind is totally off the table, necessarily (although within our lifetimes it almost certainly is). I just think this particular idea is total fantasy and easily exploited.

"Yes, you can live forever in the cloud, but before you do it, be sure to transfer me all of your Bitcoin so you can use it in heav--I mean, Epic Bacon Blowjob World."  


Edit: I want to clarify my issue is not the idea that we couldn't replicate human consciousness, but that creating a copy is not immortality because the human brain would still die and the consciousness would not transfer to the new version of the mind. A couple people have made the ship of Theseus argument for slowly replacing the brain with artificial parts and that seems to make sense. Although I still question if that is ethical/desirable, that wasn't the original CMV.
gpt
But the 'user' doesn't get to make that jump to another existence. That tech would create a new copy of the person, but the human mind would still be there trapped in the brain; nothing changed. They aren't experiencing anything new, and are still very much mortal.

This resembles when you have a child: you've made a split off copy of yourself that is completely seperate. Parents don't feel compelled to kill themselves now that a younger, longer lasting entity is created that will be able to age past them.