The Hayworth-Miller 2019 Debate About Brain Preservation
&gt; <i>A terminal patient choosing brain preservation with the hope of future revival via mind uploading is making the same type of rational judgement –faced with the alternative of oblivion I choose to undergo an uncertain surgical procedure that has some chance of restoring most of the unique memories that I consider to define ‘me’ as an individual. Hopefully this makes clear that I am rejecting a ‘magical’ view of the self. An individual’s mind is computational and, just like with a laptop, an imperfect backup copy is better than complete erasure.</i><p>Doesn&#x27;t this argue against the entire brain preservation enterprise? That is, without a &quot;magical&quot; view of selfhood, why attempt to preserve a partially faithful replica of one&#x27;s self instead of finding other ways to do the things that you&#x27;d want to do in the future once revived?<p>I don&#x27;t really back up my laptop in a conventional sense. I do git pushes of my git clones, I copy some files to rsync.net, I do a lot of work on cloud services like Google Docs and Trello, etc. A lot of what&#x27;s on my laptop is transient. This is nice, because I&#x27;m not backing up <i>a Mac</i>; if I decide to run Debian or switch to a Chromebook or whatever, I can still achieve my high-level goal of not losing work without the low-level implementation of restoring a Mac. And certainly I don&#x27;t back up servers at work in the conventional sense, either; most of those &quot;servers&quot; are now just Kubernetes pods anyway, represented declaratively, and that&#x27;s a lot better than a backup.<p>I think in the same sense, I do have a plan for immortality, and that plan is to change the world for the better while I am alive, now, as conventionally defined, in lasting ways. I don&#x27;t really know what I would do if I were resurrected many centuries in the future. (I would expect at least as much change in the world as between now and many centuries in the past, and I can&#x27;t really imagine even the greatest thinkers or doers or heroes of ages past productively helping the world today. Should Arthur return from Avalon to save Britain today, he&#x27;d have a lot of trouble recovering the throne in a largely pro-democratic society, and he&#x27;d have no idea what to make of &quot;Brexit.&quot;)<p>Meanwhile, there&#x27;s quite a bit I can do <i>today</i> to improve the world, to improve the lives of others, to try to improve by a fraction of a percent the chances of human society even existing a few centuries hence, etc. My self - my life and physical conscious existence - is just a tool for accomplishing whatever goals I have; it&#x27;s not the goal itself. My laptop is also a tool; if I can keep doing the work that was on my laptop, I don&#x27;t need a clone of the laptop itself.<p>It seems to me, then, that the only argument <i>for</i> brain preservation - for attempting to preserve one&#x27;s &quot;self&quot; into the future and for investing in the ability to make it happen - is seeing one&#x27;s self in this &quot;magical&quot; way, in believing that there&#x27;s <i>more</i> value in the very fact of one&#x27;s existence, and in fact even a partial and inaccurate continuation of that existence - than in what you do with that existence.<p>(And it does not save you from having to influence the world and engineer its future. At the least, as we can see, you have to spend a fair amount of your life today convincing society that it should develop in a way so that, in the future, they build the means to restore you.)