Summary

In the last few months I've been suffering from bouts of abject terror related to the thought of experiencing reality as a thinking being only - one with no senses of any kind, as well as no agency - presumably as a result of unintended consequences from asking to have my mind uploaded and emulated in a computer. I don't have anybody to talk to about this, who can recommend practical mitigation, and hope to request help from the LessWrong community for recommended reading.

Lead-Up / Premise

This is related and relevant, I promise: in theory I love the idea of dirigibles and airships. I hate that we spend so much energy (literally) and focus on fixed wing aircraft and drones, when we could just be drifting along gracefully through the air. Airship Ventures' "Eureka" airship (while it was flying) was one of my favorite things about Silicon Valley.

My wife knew this, and for my 30th birthday, arranged for us to go on a surprise hot air balloon tour of Napa Valley. I was so excited getting into the basket, I was grinning ear to ear! But the moment the basket lifted off the ground - and somehow it was only then that it hit me - I remembered I had a pretty serious fear of heights, and ended up collapsed on the floor of the basket, shaking pretty much throughout the whole flight.

Jumping topic but not point, I have been extremely keen, for decades, under a mechanistic "I am my brain" assumption, to destructively scan my brain and upload my mind into a computer, where it would not be subject to biological death, and could be backed up and made quite durable. This desire was a very natural evolution of my experience with NES and SNES video game emulation in the 1990s, and the idea is well treated by both pop sci-fi as well as more academic treatments on sites such as this one. We don't have the ability to do something like this yet, and I grow concerned as I approach 40 years old, that we may not have it solved in my lifetime. But I think I'm "reasonably hopeful" that between progress at the Allen Institute, with brain scanning; and the work by Robert McIntyre at Nectome and the Brain Preservation Foundation more generally; that if I live a typical lifespan (with about 35 years of life left), I will have the option to undergo physician-assisted suicide with something like Robert's aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation ...

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