I'm just curious... would you do it? Would you sacrifice your body, your humanity, for the transforming the virtual into reality? It's something that I've been mulling over for a long time.

I think, in the end, I would do it. Well, I know I would. My thirst to see the future outweighs my attachment to emotions, mortality, the "horror/boredom" of virtual immortality (something I attribute to human emotion anyway), etc... I want to know what happens. I want to be there at the end. I want to see humanity reach its pinnacle. That's the point of evolution, after all, and I don't want to be some stepping stone on the journey. I want to see if we even survive the destruction of our current ecosystem (it seems like that's inevitable at the moment), and if we do, what happens next. Every trial and tribulation.

I want to be able to think in new ways. I want to be unhampered by my body, and its pitfalls. I want to think faster, I want to think clearer, and I want to think without distraction. I want to partition my mind, mimic the holy trinity. I want to be modular, ever expanding my capabilities. I want reality to bend to my will. Let's face it, there's only so much the mind can do with mortality, hormones, and toxins. Which raises another question, I guess.

When would you do it? The end of your natural life? The prime? Would you wait until you had died, and get someone to transfer your mind then (assume it possible to boot up the brain so to speak). Or would you do it ASAP?

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When they leave me, they're all smiles.
When they leave you, they're in tears.

Without emotion, without desire, you would remain silent and impassive for the rest of your existence. Your thirst for knowledge would vanish. You would never partition your mind. You would never expand your capabilities. You would do nothing, for you would lack all motivation. I see no upside.

There's absolutely no reason why self improvement cannot be a digital desire. We already have it in embedded systems, the desire to do things and improve upon them. If I decided upon my objective, to observe, then I would partake in it, whether I had the drive to or not. That aside, there's no reason why the drive should be lost.

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When they leave me, they're all smiles.
When they leave you, they're in tears.

Computers are not governed by natural selection; they will be able to improve themselves better than that, so they won't need it, and they'll be motivated to do a single thing: what we tell them to.

The concept of me, personally, being at the end just seems meaningless.  At best, computers will be able to keep me alive and make me happy roughly forever, if only because that's what they're told to do.

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http://www.golivewire.com/forums/peer-yatapys-support-a.html

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I would consider emotion to be part of the construct, not the essence. Emotions are hormones which are interpreted. It's the synapses themselves which I would consider the essence of the person. Perhaps I just meant the consciousness. Either way, poor lexical choices can be overlooked.

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There's absolutely no reason why self improvement cannot be a digital desire.

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We already have it in embedded systems, the desire to do things and improve upon them. If I decided upon my objective, to observe, then I would partake in it, whether I had the drive to or not. That aside, there's no reason why the drive should be lost.

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Emotions are hormones which are interpreted.

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I disagree with this.  I believe that emotions are something tied into the human essence, which manifest as hormone level in order to let the brain understand the workings of the mind.

As to the topic at hand, I'm not sure it would be possible to transfer the essence of a person into a computer.  Perhaps you could make a copy of their observable output, but there's something more than neurons firing, and I don't think it would reside anywhere other than its chosen body for a lifetime.  I most certainly wouldn't do it, though I'd be sort of intrigued to see what happened to someone who did.

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We aren't gonna die. We can't die. You know why?Because
we are so very pretty. We are just too pretty for God to let us die.