10/11&13/04


Would it be a good thing to be able to upload our brains to robots so we could live forever?


what's real?  what is the relationship between the physical world and what is in our heads?

real world exists, we know it through our senses (which are certainly not entirely reliable and could conceivably be entirely wrong) , but how we perceive it depends on our concepts

this room exists but each of us interprets it differently and stores that interpretation in our brain

default (average) philosophy:  physical world is real, our perception and experience and inner interpretation of it isn't fully real (and is also different for each person so we can't really know what someone else feels and experiences)

default=the way our minds naturally work
default=the current common assumption of our culture

this is depressing, it takes the meaning out of life.  We've based our lives too much on science (because it works) and lost our belief that life has meaning, people matter, what you think and do matters.

in our hearts we believe that feelings, relationship, meaning, all matter more than facts (are most real in a deeper sense)

the web is so appealing because it highlights relationships, narrative, our own interests, feelings--so it leads us towards a world where those things are more important and realer than empty facts

alternative view--the web makes reality even more elusive because so many people aren't "telling the truth"