One possibility is having Horcruxes (well. backup copies of your brain stored somewhere). Which would effectively end death by most causes less dramatic than supernova. Another is eventually making people (who wish to be) substantially more durable. But aging might be a more tractable problem than either of those, so it’s possible we’ll have a length of time during which you can’t die of old age but you can still be killed. That’d be scary, i agree, but the worst outcome is ‘you die’, which is the outcome anyway if we don’t cure aging, so it’s still worth going for.
Identity gets weird once backups are possible. These questions get a lot more complicated than they sound right now.
It does, but I’m guessing most people would take the identity issues over risking inarguable death.
(Also I approve of there being copies of me even if I knew for sure that all of them are definitely not me. That part probably doesn’t apply to everyone else.)
Yeah, I don’t quite get why when mind-uploading comes up, the question people always ask is “would an AI version of yourself really be you?”. I mean, that’d be nice to know, but it seems to me that the much more important question is “is dying and being survived by an AI version of yourself better than dying and not being survived by an AI version of yourself?”.
I’m inclined towards “AI!me is not me, but she’s better than nothing”, but it’s one of my more open-to-persuasion stances.
(I’m not entirely sure why I find the idea of an AI version of me (who is not me) living on after my death to be comforting, but not the idea of a genetic descendant living on, since at first glance those would seem to have similar reasoning behind them. It’s probably to do with whether your descendant inherits your memories.)
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Brinens and Things 