On Sunday, August 16, 2020, at 1 p.m. U.S. Pacific Time, the U.S. Transhumanist Party invites Thomas James O'Carroll to discuss his work with Transhumanist UK and insights on the use of art in promoting transhumanist ideas to the public. Visit the website of Transhumanist UK: https://www.transhumanistparty.org.uk/ The meeting includes a public chat and portions where inquiries from members and the general public are addressed. Part of the Virtual Enlightenment Salon is devoted to answering questions from the public. Visit the U.S. Transhumanist Party website at http://transhumanist-party.org/. Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside: https://transhumanist-party.org/membership Become a Foreign Ambassador for the U.S. Transhumanist Party: https://goo.gl/forms/430kp31F0D6VmXFc2 ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfYjwYSRZh8

This is an excerpt from a piano improvisation by Dr. Ben Goertzel at RAADfest 2019 in Las Vegas. It caught my ear slightly after midnight when I was exploring the ornate penthouse after speaking to numerous transhumanists and life-extensionists whenever I could find a relatively quiet spot. Most of the attendees had dispersed by that time, so the entire penthouse became fairly well-suited for conversation, although you will still hear plenty of voices in the background. I was impressed by Ben Goertzel’s playing and struck up a conversation about musical composition with him afterward. It turned out that he had composed many works of electronic music in prior decades, but these all were destroyed in a hard wipe of one of his computer drives. This was most regrettable, as I was quite interested in listening to more of his music! I inquired whether it might be possible to recover the files through any technique that he knew of. He replied that the information had been thoroughly destroyed, but perhaps some quantum archeology of millennia hence might be able to restore it. I remarked (of course I would) that this is another reason to live indefinitely, so that one would be able to survive to hear the musical compositions of Ben Goertzel once more. If I recall correctly, the bridge of the conversation to the subject of continuity of consciousness and identity occurred when Ben Goertzel remarked that by such a time, the same approaches would be able to recover once-deceased individuals as well, and it became clear that the prospect of a “temporary” cessation of life alarmed him to a much lesser extent than it did me. It was at that time that the discussion became a bit of an informal debate between the pattern view of identity (his position) and the process view of identity (my position). For those who are not familiar with my position on the requirement of physical process continuity within the body for retaining one’s “I-ness” – the difference in our stances can be summed up via the following example: Ben Goertzel would be fully comfortable with stepping into a Star Trek-style transporter (which would disassemble the body atom by atom and reassemble it on the other end), whereas I would consider that to be the death of the “I” who steps in. Also, Ben Goertzel’s pattern view of identity essentially means that a copy of the individual with the same memories and mental faculties would be the same as (or a version of) the original individual, whereas I would hold them to be entirely different persons with a lot of physical structural similarity (or pattern similarity, in the case of “uploaded” entities). This debate between the pattern and process views of identity is crucial to develop, in my view, as it addresses what is the “I” that one is seeking to preserve through various proposed approaches for life extension. Of course, my advocacy of the process view seeks me to heavily favor life extension through biological age reversal, with perhaps some mechanical augmentations that could, in the future, be seamlessly integrated into existing bodily processes without disrupting the continuity of such processes. Those who advocate the pattern view are much more comfortable with mind uploading (for some, even the destructive kind), chemical brain preservation, as well as the vitrification techniques used in cryonics; for me, the answer to preserving the self seems to require never dying at all, but there may be some edge cases with cryonics that leave the conclusion open under my framework. So now you know what I do at parties after midnight: I discourse on philosophical questions about identity and its preservation – although I am also happy to do the same in broad daylight. I also engaged in an in-depth conversation on this subject with two other advocates of the pattern view – Robert McIntyre and Kenneth Hayworth – at the U.S. Transhumanist Party Virtual Enlightenment Salon of September 27, 2020 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHcSJa1wLYc – but it would be most interesting someday to discuss this subject in a more in-depth and structured manner with Ben Goertzel as well. Hopefully this can happen before the era in which future technology can restore his lost music! (And now I have transcribed this memory of mine so that it does not get lost either!) ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wqwc66-aiTI