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Null hypothesis on human futures is pretty grim: Brain uploads seem metaphysically ill-posed/not-even-wrong FTL travel, force fields, antigravity, time travel are all most likely impossible. Cryofreezing, extreme longevity (>200y), artificial wombs seem extremely unlikely
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> Brain uploads seem metaphysically ill-posed/not-even-wrong You mean personal identity problem? It feels like almost everyone who hears about the idea just lazily dismisses it by applying their crude intuition from, uh, "real world".
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Seeing consciousness as a hard problem is magical thinking. Not to say it's a solved problem, but look into Graziano's attention schema theory. At the very least there are non-handwavy (as in you could code that shit if you wanted to) theories of the how and why of consciousness.
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You don't have to solve the hard problem in order to upload a mind. You can just figure out, reductively, how each neuron works and communicates with other neurons then scan a brain and create a representation of it in software. You don't need to know any emergent props of it
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The hard problem of consciousness doesn't give us a reason to strongly believe that our meaty brains have some special factor that silicon wouldn't have. It suggests that consciousness in general is mysterious, so our meaty brains being special is possible. I'd put it at < 20%.
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The hard problem of consciousness is transubstantiation for technical nerds. (I say this as a technical nerd myself) The whole discourse has a distinct flavor of metaphysical philosophy of the kind David Stove made fun of in What is Wrong with our Thoughts: Aristotle, Hegel &c.