[Dont Mention the War]

The conversation in the Chequers lobby (I’d like to say “our” conversation, but most of the time I have no idea what Doctorow and Stross are talking about)

That's okay, neither do they. Especially Doctorow.

Who gives a &%^#$% if you can upload a copy of your brain onto some device? That's not you that's going to live forever, it's just a machine with your thought patterns on it. You're going to end up just as dead as you ever were.

[Physicist]

That's not you that's going to live forever, it's just a machine with your thought patterns on it.

As long as it really believes itself to be me, and does a sufficiently good job of using those thought patterns, I don't see the difference. Ultimately, any distinction will be the machine's to draw.

[Moonman62]

Who gives a &%^#$% if you can upload a copy of your brain onto some device? That's not you that's going to live forever, it's just a machine with your thought patterns on it. You're going to end up just as dead as you ever were.

That depends on the nature of consciousness and whether it can be transferred to a machine.

[Paladin2b]

The conversation in the Chequers lobby (I’d like to say “our” conversation, but most of the time I have no idea what Doctorow and Stross are talking about)

That's okay, neither do they. Especially Doctorow.

And Stross has got some cognative dissonance issues as well. He posts a lot in some USENET forums I like, and I got news for you: he's a flaming leftist and anti-American to boot. Every once in awhile he comes up with some freakish idea too stupid for words, like the time he thought US hostility to Libya was based on US government hatred that Gaddafi has actually come up with a viable "Third Way", a non-capitalist, non-socialist, Muslim economic theory that the rest of the world will queue up to adopt. He thinks that the Arab-Israeli conflict is really over water rights. He's bonkers.