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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

They still die. "Uploading" is a copy operation, but the flesh and blood human and their flesh and blood brain still dies. Whether the copy counts as equivalent to the original is a philosophical matter. But as far as biology isn't concerned, you haven't eliminated death, you've just moved the goalposts on life.

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It doesn't have to be.

Neurons are created and die all the time. Replacing them one at a time, with their virtual equivalent, would not be entirely different to what is already happening.

Not really, neurons are one of the few types of cells that don't undergo a cycle of death/creation of new cells. The neurons you had when you were born are the same you have now. They probably encode a lot of information that would be lost if they died and were replaced by fresh cells.

there is some neurogenesis, and the assumption is the new cells integrate with existing circuits over time.

However , in the scenario that single neurons are replaced with artificial copies with exact same synaptic weights, then yes they are functionally equivalent. It's already happening, with deep brain implants etc.

This is a myth. Neurogenesis changes with age and is mostly prevalent only in specific brain areas, but is a well investigated phenomenon.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3106107/ https://www.nature.com/articles/nm1198_1313 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4812798/

My point was - what will these growing numbers of living things do to a non-increasing volume of 4/3 pi r^3?

if the living things are electric they can be shot to interstellar space and beyond. even on earth, they'd be zero emissions

In the end, the geometry does imply that for a given reproduction rate, you eventually reach a crunch where there's not enough surface area of new space to expand to for your colonists, who are proportional to your volume. Being uploads speeds up your rate of expansion, because you could send out seedships much nearer to c and then beam over the digital colonists to be picked up by the infrastructure built at the new system- but digitised people could also reproduce much, much faster than biologicals.

The videogame SOMA is a pretty good exploration of this take :)

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