WYR: Be banished to a personal purgatory of your own design for 20 years, or exist exclusively on the internet for 20 years?
The purgatory is a perfectly self-contained 10-acre plot of land that you create limited mostly by your imagination, but you're cut off from the world and other people.
The internet connection is stable, but you lack a physical body and cannot upgrade the machine hosting you - your hardware will become out of date fairly quickly.
I'll take the purgatory, no question. Since I design it's contents myself, I could make a nice little cottage with a farm for food, some animals to keep me company, a workshop to build stuff, books, and a PC with a big steam library and loads of other media.
Since its purgatory, the nice little cottage will have terrible weather. The animals will make it impossible to sleep. All books will be written by Dan Brown.
...your purgatory sounds like a dream sabbatical to me: 100% down for option A, finally an opportunity to do what i want with my life rather than renting it out to FIRE lords for bare survival...
Like what do I even do in purgatory. Can I have the internet there? If so I'd take that. Since having some form of human contact is vital, even if its this way.
Ofc there's the possibility for all physical pleasures with purgatory. Food and drink, music, wanking etc.
Well, my wife would miss me in either case, and I wouldn't really be there for my stepson's young adulthood, in either case. Even if I did the online thing, it would be similar to moving away from my family as far as they're concerned, and that would be pretty hard for them.
After the 20 years, if I pick the online option, do I get back my current body, or is it aged by 20 years?
You say the hardware will be outdated fairly quickly and I'm not sure what you mean by that. If it's strong enough to completely simulate a human consciousness then it's probably better than anything we'll build in the next 20 years. Or is there like a magic usb stick connected to it that allows me to interface with the computer? Well, either way I choose the computer. I can just rent a server if I want to do more computationally intensive stuff.
or exist exclusively on the internet for 20 years?
Do I get credit for time served?
More seriously, "purgatory" sounds awesome on the face of it. I assume I can create human-like entities to interact with? Failing that, could I have a dog, horses, maybe even a pet sandworm?