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people. If the computer fools a human judge into thinking that
it’s a person, then to all intents and purposes, it’s a person.
So how do you know if the backed-up you that you’ve restored
into a new body — or a jar with a speaker attached to it — is really
you? Well, you can ask it some questions, and if it answers the
same way that you do, you’re talking to a faithful copy of your-
self.
Sounds good. But the me who sent his first story into
Asimov’s
seventeen years ago couldn’t answer the question, “Write a story
for
Asimov’s”
the same way the me of today could. Does that mean
I’m not me anymore?
Kurzweil has the answer.
“If you follow that logic, then if you were to take me ten years
ago, I could not pass for myself in a Ray Kurzweil Turing Test.
But once the requisite uploading technology becomes available a
few decades hence, you
could
make a perfect-enough copy of me,
and it
would
pass the Ray Kurzweil Turing Test. The copy doesn’t
have to match the quantum state of my every neuron, either: if
you meet me the next day, I’d pass the Ray Kurzweil Turing Test.
Nevertheless, none of the quantum states in my brain would be
the same. There are quite a few changes that each of us undergo
from day to day, we don’t examine the assumption that we are the
same person closely.
“We gradually change our pattern of atoms and neurons but
we very rapidly change the particles the pattern is made up of.
We used to think that in the brain — the physical part of us most
closely associated with our identity — cells change very slowly,
but it turns out that the components of the neurons, the tubules,
and so forth, turn over in only
days.
I’m a completely different set
of particles from what I was a week ago.
“Consciousness is a difficult subject, and I’m always surprised
by how many people talk about consciousness routinely as if it
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