I resist the idea that consciousness can be preserved like this, but moreover in any way. I think the litmus test for understanding consciousness is making something that is consciousness. I don't think anyone has done this.
> Alas, this scenario can’t work if your brain is burned or eaten by worms soon. But the info that specifies you is now only a tiny fraction of all the info in your brain and is redundantly encoded. So if we freeze all the chemical processes in your brain, either via plastination or liquid nitrogen, quite likely enough info can be found there to make a brain emulation of you. So “all” that stands between you and this future immortality is freezing your brain and then storing it until future tech improves.
This feels wrong to me.
No, not on an ethical level or anything like that, but rather the fact that it wouldn't be you that continues living, but rather a copy of you, much like cloning an HDD and putting the new one in the computer, while the old one probably gets tossed away (though some forms of getting to this emulation with brains might also be destructive during the process).
Your present consciousness is not just the pattern itself, but rather the pattern within a specific brain - yours. If you are currently reading this and are experiencing this (not just remembering this as a memory that you had a thousand years ago), then it's a given that you're on the losing side of this equation, unless we develop viable cryopreservation or something to reverse aging.
Otherwise, there's probably nothing but a final cessation of consciousness for you in store, at some point in time. One moment you'll be thinking and experiencing the world around you, the next you'll stop and will never have a thought or an experience again, at least with our present understanding of the universe (Boltzmann brains and Quantum immortality both seem unlikely).
Sure, you can argue semantics and the Ship of Theseus, but i don't care much about preserving an instance of my brain/memories that's not me, much like how i find the claims that a person can "live on" in others' memories to be nonsensical.
this is a pervasive issue with LessWrong-oriented life extension ideas. They seem to take the position that a simulation of you, IS you, and that your attitude towards it should be the same as your attitude towards your experienced self. This makes no sense to me whatsoever - a simulation of me would not, in fact, be me, because I would not experience its perspective.
I've never gotten around to reading about why they take this position - presumably there's a lengthy sequence or post about it.
You've hit upon an ongoing debate about continuity of consciousness. The best answer I've heard is to replace your brain with artificial neurons one at a time in order to create a gradual transfer but even that seems unsatisfying.
Why does it seem unsatisfying? Hanson makes the point that what makes us today, our X billion cells, all are not a part of us 20 years later. We are constantly replacing our individual components and yet still have the same stream of conscious. I suspect that over the next few decades, our understanding of biology and neuroscience will get much much better in explaining this phenomena and giving us the proper single-consciousness way of replacing our individual components likewise.
We actually have no way to know that our stream of consciousness is continuous, because all we have of the past is memory, and memory is not consciousness. There's quite a few unnerving ideas in this space, like that we can't really know whether we wake up the same "us" after we sleep. The only thing we really experience is the present moment.
True - I suspect that if you were to gradually replace human neurons with artificial ones that you could potentially achieve continuity of experience, but it would be impossible to prove one way or the other so doing it on somebody who wasn't dying might be unethical.
Don't think of it as a copy but a continuation of you. And why do you think I can't continue to live in a new body, brain included, cloned from my proprietary genome, with a digitally transmitted cache of my proprietary self which is electromechanically diagrammed from how my self has extended into my personal body over time?
And by the way, your judgment of permanent death is ignorant of the ancient Hellenic state of mind which actually germinated the European Scientific Revolution which your scientific thoughts are predicated upon. They didn't believe in death; indeed the Christian religious concept of the resurrection is paragonal to enlightenment scientific pursuits; in that the titans of Europe believed Heaven is justified. The "random-walk" experience of human cellular life which you are inferring is actually a century's old aberration in this great ascension of man towards everlasting life.
there's a very easy thought experiment to make against a copy of you implying experiential continuity, in the sense of experiencing qualia: make two copies. Do you experience two perspectives simultaneously? This defies both reality and intuition, because you could separate the copies by a light year and experiencing the two perspectives simultaneously would violate physics.
> You are mostly the mind (software) that runs on the brain (hardware) in your head; your brain and body are tools supporting your mind. If our civilization doesn’t collapse but instead advances, we will eventually be able to move your mind into artificial hardware, making a “brain emulation”. With an artificial brain and body, you could live an immortal life, a life as vivid and meaningful as your life today, where you never need feel pain, disease, grime, and your body always looks and feels young and beautiful.
Let's start by assuming science-fiction is true...
To be fair, assuming that science-fiction is true is the cornerstone of that entire genre.
Lets start by assuming time-travel exists, but it only goes back to the point where you turned on the machine. Or lets assume hyperdrives were invented and we're entering a period of space exploration (Star Trek), etc. etc.
It turns out to be pretty fun.
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So lets say it were possible that "saving your brain to software" was possible. How would it work?
We know that worms and jellyfish have memories but no brains for example. Their simple nervous systems store memories in the nerves themselves. Surely, our nerves in our muscles and fingertips are storing some of our memories: the "software" we download out of our bodies would probably have to include that!
(A common joke is that my fingers know my passwords but my brain does not. Maybe its true: muscle memory is a real thing after all).
Ultimately, it is clear that to "transfer our memories", we need to rebuild a nervous system, and maybe a good chunk of our bodies (if memories are truly stored in the nerves in our muscles, then to perform an adequate transfer, we need to recreate those nerves with the same "settings" as our hypothetically downloaded software)
Its fun to think about, because we don't actually have to solve the problem. Its just fantasy. We can think and discuss the problem as much or as little as we'd like, without in fact doing any hard work.
I have to ask: but why? The author correctly concludes that the human mind is software, but then their survival instinct gets the better of them and they don't carry this thought to its logical conclusion. And that is: death is a feature, not a bug.
The planet-wide human computer happens to run its computation by transferring some state from the current generation of humans to the next via a mixture of lip flapping, squiggles on paper, and backlit screens panels. In doing so it performs pruning of the state: every detail is not transferred.
In essence, a person pushing for immortality is a single selfish genome with a singular purpose: replicate to the detriment of maximizing the global utility of the system. The system by design will try its best to thwart this effort.
It’s an understatement to say this has yet to be established. The human body is very much hardware and includes our incredible cognitive system that we haven’t and may never be able to simulate accurately. Everything from quantum interactions of particles composing neurons to physically interacting with the world etc may prove irreducibly complex to intelligence so as to make simulation essentially just cloning. The “mind as software” meme really needs to have better evidence for its arrogant presentation.
> The “mind as software” meme really needs to have better evidence
It never will because it is fundamentally a bad metaphor in reverse. The proper metaphor doesn't apply in reverse to mind and brain. Mind is not an algorithm or a series of instructions that gets executed on brain, the notion is absurd.
Mind is also not something else, it is not some thing, as it has no substance, has no weight, color, smell, etc. Though we are certain the brain is the seat of the mind, you can slice up brain as many ways as possible and never find the mind. Near as experts can figure, mind is a phenomenon of personal experience that arises from healthy brain.
Conversely, Strong AI, a living but artificial mind in a digital machine, is unattainable and will remain the domain of science fiction, though it is easy enough to have a convincing enough AI fool us into believing an AI has personal experience, it is simply physically and logically impossible, at least until two things occur: 1) we actually fully understand mind (unlikely to occur) and 2) we attain the ability to create neurons at the scale of what makes neurons (may be impossible). But if it ever occurs, what a horrendous and cruel thing to create. Imagine being consciousness under those conditions.
But what about Plato's cave? You say that a mind arises from a healthy brain, but let's say we put a perfectly healthy brain into an environment where it cannot experience the same kind of stimuli that the brains riding in our bodies do. Would it still be healthy? Could we relate to this intelligence, and would we consider it to have a mind?
I'm no expert, but I wonder just how much of the distinction is entirely artificial and the only fundamental difference between our intelligence and what we call AI is the set of input data, and the rest of the difference can be attributed to scale. After all, scale has an effect on cell-based wetware too. Does a cat have a mind? Could one pass for a human?
This is a bad faith interpretation of what the parent said. They did not suggest gassing anyone or executing old people. There is a world of difference between that and saying that immortality is a selfish goal.
I don’t believe it is bad faith interpretation. I used a rhetorical technique where you ask a question which shows where a line of reasoning ends up.
The poster said we shouldn’t seek immortality as it goes against evolution. By the exact same logic we shouldn’t lift a finger to medically help people beyond child rearing age. It’s the same argument. And if we really believe that evolutionary incentives define morality, than we might as well cull that population to eliminate dead weight.
Sounds horrific? That’s because our sense of right and wrong has very little to do with what benefits evolution. And as a consequence, evolution has little if anything to contribute to this discussion of whether we should research immortality or not.
> The poster said we shouldn’t seek immortality as it goes against evolution. By the exact same logic we shouldn’t lift a finger to medically help people beyond child rearing age. It’s the same argument.
No it isn't, and if it seems that way then you're oversimplifying. For one, someone living forever is a far bigger insult to "evolution" than someone living 20 years past "child rearing age." You only get to "gas the elderly" by being over-literal and over-strict. Living a little longer doesn't disrupt the system, but living indefinitely longer does.
> “Insult to evolution” is not a viable moral argument.
So? The point was your reductio ad absurdum fails. You said "exact same logic" gets you both places, when it doesn't actually, especially once you start adding in real-world complexities.
I think our sense of right and wrong actually has a lot to do with evolution. Indeed, it's one of the things that drives our evolution as a species.
Self-preservation is very important, and anything that puts it in question tends to elicit a very negative visceral reaction. However, I do think you mischaracterized what I said. Not putting one's survival first and foremost is not always horrific in the grand scheme of things. We tend to call people who sacrifice their life to save others heroes. In the end, continued survival of the group outweighs the survival of an individual in human societies.
So far we have a working method for maintaining and evolving culture by way of knowledge transfer as well as replacement of the bodies that run this "software". And yes, it is absolutely "co-designed": our neural patterns shape the way we think as much as the collective knowledge does. With immortality the author is proposing to do away with a significant driver of cognitive evolution, and it's unclear to me what the benefit of this is, other than pandering to a selfish desire of self-preservation.
I also agree that if immortality was a thing humanity would still continue to evolve. It would just be a very different path, and it's not clear that it would be better.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 69.9 ms ] threadThis feels wrong to me.
No, not on an ethical level or anything like that, but rather the fact that it wouldn't be you that continues living, but rather a copy of you, much like cloning an HDD and putting the new one in the computer, while the old one probably gets tossed away (though some forms of getting to this emulation with brains might also be destructive during the process).
Your present consciousness is not just the pattern itself, but rather the pattern within a specific brain - yours. If you are currently reading this and are experiencing this (not just remembering this as a memory that you had a thousand years ago), then it's a given that you're on the losing side of this equation, unless we develop viable cryopreservation or something to reverse aging.
Otherwise, there's probably nothing but a final cessation of consciousness for you in store, at some point in time. One moment you'll be thinking and experiencing the world around you, the next you'll stop and will never have a thought or an experience again, at least with our present understanding of the universe (Boltzmann brains and Quantum immortality both seem unlikely).
Sure, you can argue semantics and the Ship of Theseus, but i don't care much about preserving an instance of my brain/memories that's not me, much like how i find the claims that a person can "live on" in others' memories to be nonsensical.
I've never gotten around to reading about why they take this position - presumably there's a lengthy sequence or post about it.
And by the way, your judgment of permanent death is ignorant of the ancient Hellenic state of mind which actually germinated the European Scientific Revolution which your scientific thoughts are predicated upon. They didn't believe in death; indeed the Christian religious concept of the resurrection is paragonal to enlightenment scientific pursuits; in that the titans of Europe believed Heaven is justified. The "random-walk" experience of human cellular life which you are inferring is actually a century's old aberration in this great ascension of man towards everlasting life.
Let's start by assuming science-fiction is true...
Lets start by assuming time-travel exists, but it only goes back to the point where you turned on the machine. Or lets assume hyperdrives were invented and we're entering a period of space exploration (Star Trek), etc. etc.
It turns out to be pretty fun.
-----------
So lets say it were possible that "saving your brain to software" was possible. How would it work?
We know that worms and jellyfish have memories but no brains for example. Their simple nervous systems store memories in the nerves themselves. Surely, our nerves in our muscles and fingertips are storing some of our memories: the "software" we download out of our bodies would probably have to include that!
(A common joke is that my fingers know my passwords but my brain does not. Maybe its true: muscle memory is a real thing after all).
Ultimately, it is clear that to "transfer our memories", we need to rebuild a nervous system, and maybe a good chunk of our bodies (if memories are truly stored in the nerves in our muscles, then to perform an adequate transfer, we need to recreate those nerves with the same "settings" as our hypothetically downloaded software)
Its fun to think about, because we don't actually have to solve the problem. Its just fantasy. We can think and discuss the problem as much or as little as we'd like, without in fact doing any hard work.
IE: The fun part.
The planet-wide human computer happens to run its computation by transferring some state from the current generation of humans to the next via a mixture of lip flapping, squiggles on paper, and backlit screens panels. In doing so it performs pruning of the state: every detail is not transferred.
In essence, a person pushing for immortality is a single selfish genome with a singular purpose: replicate to the detriment of maximizing the global utility of the system. The system by design will try its best to thwart this effort.
It’s an understatement to say this has yet to be established. The human body is very much hardware and includes our incredible cognitive system that we haven’t and may never be able to simulate accurately. Everything from quantum interactions of particles composing neurons to physically interacting with the world etc may prove irreducibly complex to intelligence so as to make simulation essentially just cloning. The “mind as software” meme really needs to have better evidence for its arrogant presentation.
It never will because it is fundamentally a bad metaphor in reverse. The proper metaphor doesn't apply in reverse to mind and brain. Mind is not an algorithm or a series of instructions that gets executed on brain, the notion is absurd.
Mind is also not something else, it is not some thing, as it has no substance, has no weight, color, smell, etc. Though we are certain the brain is the seat of the mind, you can slice up brain as many ways as possible and never find the mind. Near as experts can figure, mind is a phenomenon of personal experience that arises from healthy brain.
Conversely, Strong AI, a living but artificial mind in a digital machine, is unattainable and will remain the domain of science fiction, though it is easy enough to have a convincing enough AI fool us into believing an AI has personal experience, it is simply physically and logically impossible, at least until two things occur: 1) we actually fully understand mind (unlikely to occur) and 2) we attain the ability to create neurons at the scale of what makes neurons (may be impossible). But if it ever occurs, what a horrendous and cruel thing to create. Imagine being consciousness under those conditions.
I'm no expert, but I wonder just how much of the distinction is entirely artificial and the only fundamental difference between our intelligence and what we call AI is the set of input data, and the rest of the difference can be attributed to scale. After all, scale has an effect on cell-based wetware too. Does a cat have a mind? Could one pass for a human?
The poster said we shouldn’t seek immortality as it goes against evolution. By the exact same logic we shouldn’t lift a finger to medically help people beyond child rearing age. It’s the same argument. And if we really believe that evolutionary incentives define morality, than we might as well cull that population to eliminate dead weight.
Sounds horrific? That’s because our sense of right and wrong has very little to do with what benefits evolution. And as a consequence, evolution has little if anything to contribute to this discussion of whether we should research immortality or not.
No it isn't, and if it seems that way then you're oversimplifying. For one, someone living forever is a far bigger insult to "evolution" than someone living 20 years past "child rearing age." You only get to "gas the elderly" by being over-literal and over-strict. Living a little longer doesn't disrupt the system, but living indefinitely longer does.
So? The point was your reductio ad absurdum fails. You said "exact same logic" gets you both places, when it doesn't actually, especially once you start adding in real-world complexities.
Self-preservation is very important, and anything that puts it in question tends to elicit a very negative visceral reaction. However, I do think you mischaracterized what I said. Not putting one's survival first and foremost is not always horrific in the grand scheme of things. We tend to call people who sacrifice their life to save others heroes. In the end, continued survival of the group outweighs the survival of an individual in human societies.
So far we have a working method for maintaining and evolving culture by way of knowledge transfer as well as replacement of the bodies that run this "software". And yes, it is absolutely "co-designed": our neural patterns shape the way we think as much as the collective knowledge does. With immortality the author is proposing to do away with a significant driver of cognitive evolution, and it's unclear to me what the benefit of this is, other than pandering to a selfish desire of self-preservation.
I also agree that if immortality was a thing humanity would still continue to evolve. It would just be a very different path, and it's not clear that it would be better.