If you haven’t watched “the creator” yet, there’s a scene that depicts exactly that. Bringing a dead soldier’s “mind” back to life in another’s body so they could recount their last moments.
I think the first few preserved will be a novelty.
I have associates who are really into trans humanism and the services they’ve bought include the resurrection in the price. So the person interested in resurrecting is the same individual paying to preserve themself.
>why do archaeologists use CT scanners to painstakingly read fragile rolled-up scrolls from thousands of years ago?
I was under the impression that we haven't read a lot of old scrolls, tablets, etc. because it costs money and most of them are uninteresting. A lot of clay tablets just document financial transactions iirc.
I imagine the first human to be "revived" from a frozen brain would be quite a feat. 100000th? Not so much. Would the future archelogist still care about that?
I think I'd like to have my brain frozen -ideally after a long and fulfilling life- just for the heck of it but the chances of a future civilization with the means and the will to resusciate a large quantity of random damaged brains from the past is low.
I'm more concerned about TOO many people wanting to revive your preserved digitized brain.
Imagine the technology is so mature, anyone can take your "johndoe.brain" file and simulate it on their local hardware/machine. Worse, your digital brain is now in the public domain and free for anyone to download and use for any purpose.
If someone wants to read a fictional story that takes a deeper look at this scenario, "Lena" is an excellent read in the format of a Wikipedia article: https://qntm.org/lena
brilliant and sublimely haunting piece. I knew it would come up in this thread somewhere. I only wish it were slightly shorter and less involved in some of the weedier details, because it's current form is rather Limited in the audience that I can share it with, most people just don't have the time even if they do have the curiosity. would be an excellent way to introduce the bigger picture agency problems, of effectively handing out -intentionally or not - a perpetual "clone me" license to anyone who wishes to use your consciousness for any purpose up to and including unrestricted torture and sadism. "uploading your consciousness into a computer" gets generally positive interest from people ( like myself, before encountering some of this material) who haven't given much consideration to the consequences of subjecting ones individual human consciousness to open source licensing and 'market forces.'
Currently playing SOMA, where this is also an issue. People that got scanned commit suicide for "continuity" reasons, you repeatedly start up a specific mind to extract information out of it - and that version is a copy ... haven't finished it yet, but it's interesting so far.
Made me think of “A conversation with Einstein’s Brain” one of the chapters in Hofstader & Dennett’s “Mind’s I: Fantasies & Reflections on Self & Soul” (1985), that chapter takes the form of a Socratic dialogue between Achilles and The Tortoise. Like Hofstader’s earlier “Gödel, Escher, Bach”, it is one of the best books I’ve ever read.
The article says they preserved a pig brain. Can they preserve it.
It seems to assume that all the information that constitutes the brain function that defines some one can be physically preserved. What if some is in the form of signals that require the brain to function continually to be preserved?
> What if some is in the form of signals that require the brain to function continually to be preserved?
This. We don't know if a brain keeps all information necessary for a "reboot" or not. It may decay over time if whatever machinery necessary to first "start" consciousness is never used after birth.
I've used some psychedelics recreationally, and as far as I can tell, at least my consciousness is definitely affected on an ongoing basis by whatever signals happen to be in the brain. It's some sort of feedback loop and I'm not so sure how easy it would be to just start up again if it ever ended.
Simulators may have to just guess, and the simulated brains could end up with an altered consciousness compared to when they were alive.
> This. We don't know if a brain keeps all information necessary for a "reboot" or not. It may decay over time if whatever machinery necessary to first "start" consciousness is never used after birth.
We do not even know what consciousness is. I am not even sure there is an agreed upon definition that would fit the layman's understanding of what consciousness is.
The hypothesis that consciousness is a by-product of brain/nervous system/body activity is, in its current state, just this: an hypothesis. Not only that, but it is pretty much an hypothesis outside of the field of modern scientific models, which are based on a materialist methodology (assuming that everything has a material cause), such that we do not really have mature ways to study anything else. The materialist ontology ("there is nothing else than matter") only developed later in history, once the methodology was so established it became accepted as fact, rather than just as a (very successful) method of working.
It might be polemic, but there is also data from the study of NDEs and memories of past lives in infancy which, in my opinion and that of many others, should at least motivate us to stay open to the possibility that consciousness is something more than a by product of brain activity. Some propose that the nervous system could act as a form of "receptor", in the same way a radio receives a program. You cannot experience the radio program without the device, but it does not mean that the radio "creates" the program. Obviously those theories are no less wild guesses than the consciousness-as-byproduct ones, but they show that other models can have internal validity and cannot just be rejected because "obviously the cause must be in matter".
I could go on and on, but to people interested in going down this rabbit hole, I always recommend the report of the Galileo commission, and detailed call by academics to open the width of interpretations of consciousness that are considered acceptable enough to be studied: https://galileocommission.org/
All of this to say: we do not know anything about consciousness, so any such business is just preying on rich people afraid of loosing it all or unwilling to contemplate their life decisions, as one feels drawn to when the end feels close. It is sad and absurd.
(Before I get burned to the altar of scientific wisdom: I did not say that the theory of consciousness-as-a-byproduct is absurd or should not be studied. It is good to test it and try to make it work, and I have deep respect for the researchers in this field. I just argue that, in the current state of our science, there is no reason for it to be the only acceptable theory)
To me, consciousness is the collection of electrochemical signals traveling throughout the brain. I'm plural[0], so I also believe in brains that have more than one consciousness, as I've personally experienced a similar thing before. But really, I don't know which signals make up consciousness, or where they are. I don't know how metacognition forms, either. And I don't know a real, physical explanation of plurality. I know just enough to play with the concepts, and in my opinion, that's enough. You can still say things about consciousness without knowing all the details, because most people will be able to form some idea of what it means based on how you are using it. So I think saying we don't know how to start it is still reasonable, even if we don't know what it is we're even trying to start in the first place.
> To me, consciousness is the collection of electrochemical signals traveling throughout the brain
This is unfortunately not a definition of consciousness, rather an hypothesis about the cause or origin of it. Consciousness is an experience, as you mention in your next sentence:
> I also believe in brains that have more than one consciousness, as I've personally experienced a similar thing before
This is what makes it so tricky. My only definition of consciousness is pretty much "I know it when I see it", with the annoying caveat that I cannot see any other experience than my own...
I've always used the analogy when thinking about this, or at least when discussing it casually with others, that trying to comprehend the experience of consciousness from within it, is perhaps inaccessible due to some presently unnoticed principle of reflection of recursion in thought, analogous in a physical sense to trying to lift yourself up by your own shirt collar.
There is also an animated show called Pantheon that deals with “uploaded intelligence” and the process is likewise fatal. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It had two seasons and the story was completed.
I would never be on board with such a thing. Because even if I were to be backed up, I wouldn't get to experience the simulation. I would experience death, and then a backup would experience the simulation.
SOMA is a great game that touches on this topic, btw. It's like a movie, so watching a playthrough is almost as good as the game itself.
I'd love to wake back up in a non-human body, honestly.
That could, theoretically, be a way to appease those who suffer from species dysphoria. Not any time soon, though.
I'm not sure if there have been any studies on it yet - people are only just starting to recognize gender dysphoria as a legitimate condition. Species dysphoria probably sounds utterly insane.
I don't experience either gender or species dysphoria, but that seems like a way to "cure" species dysphoria, unlike gender dysphoria which is actually workable. I know a few therians and really feel for them, having such a condition and not being able to do much of anything doesn't sound like a fun existence.
I don't identify therian, but I am otherkin. You're right that this is incurable right now. There's no "species transition" like there is HRT or SRS. It's only coping mechanisms right now. Trying to find ways to be less disordered and all.
I've been trying to find my way since childhood, but it's taking a while. Hopefully I figure it out eventually. Having DID as well certainly doesn't help.
It's not a fun existence in and of itself, but I still have my fun every now and then.
Feel free to contact me directly if you'd like to talk more.
> I would experience death, and then a backup would experience the simulation.
But would it even know it's a backup? If it (or say, "he") has your memories, he will remember your first kiss as his first kiss, he'll look at your SO and feel the feelings you have looking at your SO, and think "Oh, let me greet them the way I usually do, 'What's up buttercup?'.". I think we're just the sum of our memories, and if the memories are identical, wouldn't it add up to the same person?
It's not that the backup will somehow not be identical to me. It's that I won't get to experience waking up as the backup. It'll be a different being, that just so happens to be a perfect clone.
It's basically like the teleporter that deconstructs you and then reconstructs you somewhere else. You get to experience waking into one end and then you die. Your life is over. The fact that something walks out the other end doesn't matter anymore. Even if to an outside observer it'll be indistinguishable from you simply having moved - the clone will even describe the experience of moving - you are now dead.
> It'll be a different being, that just so happens to be a perfect clone.
But will you even be aware of that?
> Even if to an outside observer it'll be indistinguishable from you
And how about the inside observer?
I used to think like you do. But now I think, Logan2 will have your memory, it should even think "well that's done, now where's my wife, she said she'll meet me and after this procedure we'll go get ice cream.". Or things like "Ah yeah I got to deal with my brother, he said something hurtful and we need to fix this conflict.". And your "soul" should not notice anything being different.
If the copies are identical, shouldn't they generate the same thoughts, be triggered by the same things, like the smell of the wife's perfume or be e.g. irrationally angry at someone revving their car, and are we aware enough to think "Hang on, something's different?".
To be technical about it, it's like having a virtual machine's state be copied onto a new host system, I think even the process called awareness or soul is a result of our software/hardware configuration, and nothing external, and the awareness would be an identical copy.
Thought experiment: what if you copied and restored the backup into two bodies, and both bodies were a state continuation of the original? Would the two existences be simultaneously the smae person? I think it would make more sense to say that at the moment of cloning the two bodies are separate consciousnesses with the same state.
In your analogy, if you copied the VM state onto two different host systems, I would think each host system would be a separate conscious experience. It's whatever being a host system is that generates consciousness, not the state itself.
I'm sure there's been movies about the scenario.. But yeah, it'd be weird to look at another person and he thinks he's me. It'd be hard to look from the outside at my copy and think "That's me, with all my knowledge and my thought processes", but.. it'd be the case.
Can people stop missing the point and asking if the clone will know that it's a clone or not? Because that doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter what the clone thinks - I still died.
I see you're in no mood to argue, but to me this death seems like the view of an external observer. As I say, I think my clone will happily live on thinking he's me, with all his (my) memories and his feelings and thoughts about the world, and about his own mind...
It's not that I'm not in the mood to argue, it's that the life and experiences of my clone won't matter to me. If I wanted to carry on a legacy or something that was larger than myself, then sure, I'd want that clone in the world even if I wouldn't get to see it myself. But in the sense of "I want to carry on living", I'd rather not die to get there, you know?
I've been trying to argue that my "self" will think I've continued on living, I'll have my old memories, the happy and painful ones; I'll have the stuff I have in my agenda for next week, I'll have my likes and dislikes, the only difference is that they're stored in a different physical place (brain or SSD?). In that sense, did I die? I'll feel as content as my old self about the things I feel content about, etc, etc...
I think the soul is just like an instance of a software running on hardware, and if the software and hardware are identical, why should the copy of an instance not think "I'm instance 'LoganDark'"?
Subjectively, true, your original died, but if there's an identical copy, won't this perspective of the subject just be transferred over to the copy, with all the identical historical past?
The thing is that you're absolutely right and I never meant to dispute what you're saying. However just like the teleporter that deconstructs you and reconstructs you somewhere else, even though the person that comes out is entirely identical to the person that went in and will also feel as such (i.e. nothing went wrong from their perspective), the person that went in experienced death, and will never actually get to be the person that came out.
Basically, you killed someone, then restored a snapshot of when they were still alive. The one you killed will never know of the snapshot or get to be that snapshot, while the snapshot will live on exactly as the original would have. I don't want to be that original who never gets to see the snapshot.
Yes, the snapshot will inherit everything that makes me "me", and yes the snapshot will get to live life normally. But I die.
True but SOMA itself contradicts your statement since there is a point where you continue playing as a "backup" and it even takes a moment for the character to realize what happened. The copy doesn't feel like he's a copy.
It does not. I do not care how the copy feels as I will still be dead. Even if the copy gets to live out life exactly how I would have, as if I really had just moved, I still died.
I left a comment elsewhere in the thread about the teleporter that deconstructs you and then reconstructs you somewhere else. That's what this would be like.
I like the theory that the CNS is part of the brain. So the spine, organs, connections between them... there are actual neurons in the stomach, for example.
Yes, but in quadriplegics that connection is severed, and while it results in a lot of unpleasant medical issues, spinal cord injury doesn't alter cognition (other than the depression from coping with a severe disability.)
Of course it doesn't affect consciousness to a significant degree, since metacognition largely (or entirely) happens within the actual brain. But you still receive signals from other places, and losing them detracts from the experience of actually having a body, imho. I'm sure quadriplegics can attest to feeling like they've lost parts of their body, since they sort of have.
I wouldn't have my brain frozen unless we have a better understanding of the fundamental stuff that makes up consciousness. The mind is more than the neurons and synapses. Yes it's a necessary condition to have a brain but consider the following anecdotes:
1. Under anesthesia, the neurons within the brain are fully connected and have access to blood and other resources of the body, yet it is not functioning at all. No pain, respiratory drive, no memory
2. Patients with large parts of their brains removed, or large parts of their brains injured by stroke, can recover fully to a point that is functionally indistinguishable from their previous intact state.
1. The neurons are simply not firing /exchanging neurotransmitters.
2. That’s not true. They might look they have recovered but passing a standard cognitive test and the artifice will go away. The brain is notoriously bad at healing itself because mammals and especially humans don’t produce new neurons after teenage apart from very restricted areas (SVZ, stratium, which are still controversial btw).
This is silly, at least to a neuroscientist. Yes, let’s assume that the physicalist or naturalist interpretation of our sense of self and its content are entirely held within our cranium. And furthermore assume that a reboot is possible—as from deep sleep or anesthesia. This leave the open question if what resolution is required to take a snapshot of the embeddings? I don’t think mist neuroscientists would be satisfied with just a perfect synaptic-level connectome. One would almost certainly need to know the the deeper state of each presynaptic and postsynaptic junction. The postsynaptic molecular complex is an assembly of over 500 protein species embedded in and below the plasma membrane. And many of these molecules are labeled by their phosphorylation states in functionally very important ways.
The resolution required to obtain a functional read-out is almost certainly at the atomic level. We are beginning to get close to this level with cryo-electron tomography, but it will take an atomic resolution version of magnetic resonance imaging to achieve the throughput one would need. The dataset would probably be measured in exabytes.
In comparison, a superAGI might be able to run a damn fine simulation of you or me if given 25 years of sensory input and all behavioral output. But to what purpose other than some ill-defined vanity.
Try a mouse or rat first before soliciting VC funds. Has the Human Brain Initiative even managed to nail one 500 mg mouse brain? Not even close!
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 70.0 ms ] threadI can think of a few incentives for them to do so and it doesn’t seem appealing to me from that point of view alone.
I have associates who are really into trans humanism and the services they’ve bought include the resurrection in the price. So the person interested in resurrecting is the same individual paying to preserve themself.
I was under the impression that we haven't read a lot of old scrolls, tablets, etc. because it costs money and most of them are uninteresting. A lot of clay tablets just document financial transactions iirc.
I imagine the first human to be "revived" from a frozen brain would be quite a feat. 100000th? Not so much. Would the future archelogist still care about that?
I think I'd like to have my brain frozen -ideally after a long and fulfilling life- just for the heck of it but the chances of a future civilization with the means and the will to resusciate a large quantity of random damaged brains from the past is low.
Imagine the technology is so mature, anyone can take your "johndoe.brain" file and simulate it on their local hardware/machine. Worse, your digital brain is now in the public domain and free for anyone to download and use for any purpose.
http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-26-conversation...
It seems to assume that all the information that constitutes the brain function that defines some one can be physically preserved. What if some is in the form of signals that require the brain to function continually to be preserved?
This. We don't know if a brain keeps all information necessary for a "reboot" or not. It may decay over time if whatever machinery necessary to first "start" consciousness is never used after birth.
I've used some psychedelics recreationally, and as far as I can tell, at least my consciousness is definitely affected on an ongoing basis by whatever signals happen to be in the brain. It's some sort of feedback loop and I'm not so sure how easy it would be to just start up again if it ever ended.
Simulators may have to just guess, and the simulated brains could end up with an altered consciousness compared to when they were alive.
We do not even know what consciousness is. I am not even sure there is an agreed upon definition that would fit the layman's understanding of what consciousness is.
The hypothesis that consciousness is a by-product of brain/nervous system/body activity is, in its current state, just this: an hypothesis. Not only that, but it is pretty much an hypothesis outside of the field of modern scientific models, which are based on a materialist methodology (assuming that everything has a material cause), such that we do not really have mature ways to study anything else. The materialist ontology ("there is nothing else than matter") only developed later in history, once the methodology was so established it became accepted as fact, rather than just as a (very successful) method of working.
It might be polemic, but there is also data from the study of NDEs and memories of past lives in infancy which, in my opinion and that of many others, should at least motivate us to stay open to the possibility that consciousness is something more than a by product of brain activity. Some propose that the nervous system could act as a form of "receptor", in the same way a radio receives a program. You cannot experience the radio program without the device, but it does not mean that the radio "creates" the program. Obviously those theories are no less wild guesses than the consciousness-as-byproduct ones, but they show that other models can have internal validity and cannot just be rejected because "obviously the cause must be in matter".
I could go on and on, but to people interested in going down this rabbit hole, I always recommend the report of the Galileo commission, and detailed call by academics to open the width of interpretations of consciousness that are considered acceptable enough to be studied: https://galileocommission.org/
All of this to say: we do not know anything about consciousness, so any such business is just preying on rich people afraid of loosing it all or unwilling to contemplate their life decisions, as one feels drawn to when the end feels close. It is sad and absurd.
(Before I get burned to the altar of scientific wisdom: I did not say that the theory of consciousness-as-a-byproduct is absurd or should not be studied. It is good to test it and try to make it work, and I have deep respect for the researchers in this field. I just argue that, in the current state of our science, there is no reason for it to be the only acceptable theory)
[0]: https://morethanone.info
This is unfortunately not a definition of consciousness, rather an hypothesis about the cause or origin of it. Consciousness is an experience, as you mention in your next sentence:
> I also believe in brains that have more than one consciousness, as I've personally experienced a similar thing before
This is what makes it so tricky. My only definition of consciousness is pretty much "I know it when I see it", with the annoying caveat that I cannot see any other experience than my own...
SOMA is a great game that touches on this topic, btw. It's like a movie, so watching a playthrough is almost as good as the game itself.
That could, theoretically, be a way to appease those who suffer from species dysphoria. Not any time soon, though.
I'm not sure if there have been any studies on it yet - people are only just starting to recognize gender dysphoria as a legitimate condition. Species dysphoria probably sounds utterly insane.
I don't experience either gender or species dysphoria, but that seems like a way to "cure" species dysphoria, unlike gender dysphoria which is actually workable. I know a few therians and really feel for them, having such a condition and not being able to do much of anything doesn't sound like a fun existence.
I've been trying to find my way since childhood, but it's taking a while. Hopefully I figure it out eventually. Having DID as well certainly doesn't help.
It's not a fun existence in and of itself, but I still have my fun every now and then.
Feel free to contact me directly if you'd like to talk more.
But would it even know it's a backup? If it (or say, "he") has your memories, he will remember your first kiss as his first kiss, he'll look at your SO and feel the feelings you have looking at your SO, and think "Oh, let me greet them the way I usually do, 'What's up buttercup?'.". I think we're just the sum of our memories, and if the memories are identical, wouldn't it add up to the same person?
It's basically like the teleporter that deconstructs you and then reconstructs you somewhere else. You get to experience waking into one end and then you die. Your life is over. The fact that something walks out the other end doesn't matter anymore. Even if to an outside observer it'll be indistinguishable from you simply having moved - the clone will even describe the experience of moving - you are now dead.
But will you even be aware of that?
> Even if to an outside observer it'll be indistinguishable from you
And how about the inside observer?
I used to think like you do. But now I think, Logan2 will have your memory, it should even think "well that's done, now where's my wife, she said she'll meet me and after this procedure we'll go get ice cream.". Or things like "Ah yeah I got to deal with my brother, he said something hurtful and we need to fix this conflict.". And your "soul" should not notice anything being different.
If the copies are identical, shouldn't they generate the same thoughts, be triggered by the same things, like the smell of the wife's perfume or be e.g. irrationally angry at someone revving their car, and are we aware enough to think "Hang on, something's different?".
To be technical about it, it's like having a virtual machine's state be copied onto a new host system, I think even the process called awareness or soul is a result of our software/hardware configuration, and nothing external, and the awareness would be an identical copy.
In your analogy, if you copied the VM state onto two different host systems, I would think each host system would be a separate conscious experience. It's whatever being a host system is that generates consciousness, not the state itself.
Can people stop missing the point and asking if the clone will know that it's a clone or not? Because that doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter what the clone thinks - I still died.
I see you're in no mood to argue, but to me this death seems like the view of an external observer. As I say, I think my clone will happily live on thinking he's me, with all his (my) memories and his feelings and thoughts about the world, and about his own mind...
I think the soul is just like an instance of a software running on hardware, and if the software and hardware are identical, why should the copy of an instance not think "I'm instance 'LoganDark'"?
Subjectively, true, your original died, but if there's an identical copy, won't this perspective of the subject just be transferred over to the copy, with all the identical historical past?
Basically, you killed someone, then restored a snapshot of when they were still alive. The one you killed will never know of the snapshot or get to be that snapshot, while the snapshot will live on exactly as the original would have. I don't want to be that original who never gets to see the snapshot.
Yes, the snapshot will inherit everything that makes me "me", and yes the snapshot will get to live life normally. But I die.
I left a comment elsewhere in the thread about the teleporter that deconstructs you and then reconstructs you somewhere else. That's what this would be like.
1. Under anesthesia, the neurons within the brain are fully connected and have access to blood and other resources of the body, yet it is not functioning at all. No pain, respiratory drive, no memory
2. Patients with large parts of their brains removed, or large parts of their brains injured by stroke, can recover fully to a point that is functionally indistinguishable from their previous intact state.
2. That’s not true. They might look they have recovered but passing a standard cognitive test and the artifice will go away. The brain is notoriously bad at healing itself because mammals and especially humans don’t produce new neurons after teenage apart from very restricted areas (SVZ, stratium, which are still controversial btw).
Absolutely nothing guarantees you the "backup" can be used for anything in the future.
The resolution required to obtain a functional read-out is almost certainly at the atomic level. We are beginning to get close to this level with cryo-electron tomography, but it will take an atomic resolution version of magnetic resonance imaging to achieve the throughput one would need. The dataset would probably be measured in exabytes.
In comparison, a superAGI might be able to run a damn fine simulation of you or me if given 25 years of sensory input and all behavioral output. But to what purpose other than some ill-defined vanity.
Try a mouse or rat first before soliciting VC funds. Has the Human Brain Initiative even managed to nail one 500 mg mouse brain? Not even close!