Q: What are necessary criteria for existence?

For instance,

  • If your brain was uploaded to a computer, would that count as continuing to exist?
  • Does progeny count as continuing existing?
  • What if you cryogenically froze your brain and then 100 years later some nanotech was able to repair your brain, recover the mental state of your brain. Would this count as existing?
  • What if there was a teleporting machine that cloned you and then destroyed the copy of you at the old location. Would you use this teleporter? And, would you still exist after using this teleporter?

todo

tldr:

  • I think there is some kind of range of existence.
    • Like, maybe if a clone of you is created when you go through the teleporter, then that’s like you are 99% continuing to exist
    • Robots healing your brain after you are frozen for 100 years is like 95% continuing to exist.
    • Progeny is maybe like 0.001% continuing to exist
  • 100% existence is a lot better than 99% existence, but we can run expected value computations on these numbers probably. So like, if I’m being chased by a cat and have a 50% chance of dying unless I use the teleporter then fine I’ll do it; but I wouldn’t be so happy about it.

consciousness