I think that immortality would be a disaster, personally. That we die is a critically important aspect of life. I'd prefer that we work on ways to make the death process less traumatic.
There are some externalities at play here though...
- We currently only have one world that all living humans must share.
- Imagine the sickening amount of power some people would be able to gather given a few centuries. That can't be good for everyone else.
Well, people already gather that sickening amount of power - not for themselves, for their heirs, but still - take the soon-to-be-again US president: he probably wouldn't be where he is right now if his father hadn't amassed a considerable fortune which he inherited.
Yes. I have long believed that all those who applaud death as a good thing — Steve Jobs most memorably in his address at Stanford — will be first in line for life extension once it becomes an option.
It doesn't matter how much you like sci fi, even if it was technically possible it would be reserved to the 0.001% and you'd still be grinding your whole life just as you are doing now
Why? We have already decimated any semblance of natural selection so death is no longer a necessity from an evolutionary standpoint. Maybe immortal humans would be more beneficent because they wouldn't be scrambling to get ahead in their short time here.
If I didn't only have 30-40ish productive years to achieve whatever I will in this life it would be much easier to donate money or time to charitable pursuits.
I like knowing that the worlds biggest assholes sometimes lie awake at night fearfully pondering their own death. I don't want to deprive them of that.
> We have already decimated any semblance of natural selection
We certainly have not.
> If I didn't only have 30-40ish productive years to achieve whatever I will in this life it would be much easier to donate money or time to charitable pursuits.
True, but if you lived forever that would mean that it wouldn't be realistic for new people to come into the world, which means far fewer new ideas and ways of looking at the world. That would a net loss for humanity.
1) There's no danger of overpopulation. People have a natural tendency to reproduce slower when they feel safer.
2) Trivial argument: if people already lived indefinitely would you advocate murdering them to "make room"? Telling people they shouldn't be able to pursue a longer life is equivalent. Making that decision for yourself is perfectly fine; making it for others is not.
3) 150k people die every day, nearly 2 people per second. If fixing that tragedy creates new problems, bring them on; we'll solve those problems too.
1) Is not clearly true. Yes, 'feeling safer' pushes down on reproduction rates. But the _total_ effect on population growth could still be positive if the total death-rate drops enough -- we don't know enough to say for sure. And frankly, I think the most likely outcome is that people would be more likely to have kids if they didn't have to worry about missing out on their chance at XYZ dream.
2) Not true from most moral perspectives, including 'common sense morality'. In a pure utilitarian sense, sure, but most people don't subscribe to that. For example, choosing to not save someone from a burning fire is not the same as choosing to burn them to death. Both the actor and their intention matter.
3) I don't disagree with the first half of your point (that this is a tragedy) but I cannot share your optimism re.: us solving the consequent problems. If there's anything that the last fifty years of modernity have shown, it's that we're actually quite bad at solving broader social problems, with new and even-worse problems often arising well after we thought the original problem settled. Consider global warming (to which the 'solution' looks to be the further impoverishment of the third world, and probably mass deaths due to famine/drought/heat waves), or how we in the US 'solved' mobility by destroying main streets and replacing established public transportation with cars and mazes of concrete. Now we've "solved" loneliness by giving everyone a phone and -- well, I'm sure you know how that went.
1) We already have a growing population, and I don't think it's inherent that curing mortality must make it grow faster. The net effect would certainly be an ongoing upwards growth (since I would hope that population never goes down), but I'm arguing that the net effect does not inherently have to be unchecked exponential growth. Immortality doesn't solve resource constraints, and resource constraints do influence people's choices. That said, I also believe that even if it did result in faster growth, that isn't a reason to not solve the problem.
2) The equivalence here isn't "choosing to not save". Choosing to push someone back into a burning building, or preventing them from trying to escape, is equivalent to choosing to burn them to death.
3) I am an incorrigible optimist and don't intend to ever stop being one. Humanity is incredible and it's amazing what we can solve over time. I don't believe that any potential solution we might come up with is worse than doing nothing and letting 150k people die every day.
> If I didn't only have 30-40ish productive years to achieve whatever I will in this life it would be much easier to donate money or time to charitable pursuits.
Spoiler: The haves are not going to get any more generous when they've got thousand year lifespans. You would just have end up having to spend hundreds of years grinding away at the bottom of the ladder instead of 30 or 40.
Plenty of the most-powerful already keep causing harm just to make number go up even more, well beyond the point at which they can conceivably personally benefit before they die. Imagine if they could conceivably personally benefit from that because they live for centuries. Why would anyone expect that to improve their behavior?
I think old peoples inward focus is more a result of their physical condition than the amount of time they have been alive.
If you could put an 80 year olds mind in a 20 year old body they would probably approach life with the same optimism of other young people.
I think our behavior is more a product of our environment than some internal 'self' that is built over our lifetime. If you altered the environment from "75 years old, achy and slow body, limited future" to "25 years old, infinite future, healthy body" I would be amazed if there was not a humongous shift in behavior as well.
To be frank, the extent to which the very old now dominate science, business and politics is already unhealthy. I shudder to think what our world would look like if our most important positions of power were dominated by men born 110 years ago.
They say science advances one death at a time. Looking at congress, I think you can say the same for politics as well.
I don't know why you're getting so much pushback... Planetary resources are finite. If you give up dying, you have to give up reproducing beyond the replacement rate. People like to imagine they'll be part of some small tribe of a lucky few immortals, but the reality is we'd be in exactly the same situation as today, but with a population rapidly screeching beyond all known sustainable limits far faster than it is today. To name just one obvious problem.
Success of something like this entails a way to regulate reproduction at a far more draconian level than even China's one-child policy. I don't think any civilized nation could impose a "no child" policy and remain intact.
> but the reality is we'd be in exactly the same situation as today, but with a population rapidly screeching beyond all known sustainable limits far faster than it is today
I don’t think this is a given. Most developed nations have bad birth rates for example
What if death is just a 'feature' of how life evolved in this planet? What if we discover life in other planets that are just endless? It just seems too anthropocentric to think that all forms of life must die.
Ok, that maybe part of how 'WE' define life, but, for me, that looks a lot like an arbitrary definition.
It's a bit like fighting against the ocean imho, it doesn't matter how much you put into it you'll always lose eventually.
It's much simpler to accept and live within your constraints than to waste your life and mental energy wishing you could be/do something you will never be/do.
If you think about it most of the things we "fix" are extremely wonky, even something such as a bone fracture isn't guaranteed to heal 100%, most medicine have massive side effects, organ transplants have something like 50% survival at 15 years on average, &c. We think we're getting more and more control on things but most of it is a hack job temporarily delaying the inevitable
Also, anyone thinking being uploaded to a computer forever is heaven on earth must live a pretty fucking terrible life to begin with
Imagine people like putin pouring billions in, easily sacrificing millions to achieve such thing for themselves, and ideally nobody else. A truly terrible scenario worth fighting against.
Some folks are scared of rogue AI, when biggest threat to mankind always was, is and will be other, properly messed up humans with certain capabilities.
When I look back on my 45 years life, there are spans which feel like a different life altogether. I thought differently, and made choices that I won't make today. I'd say "in my former life" as if that life ended and a new one began. I suspect youthful immortality would be a sequence of many deaths and rebirths. If you had the neuroplasticity of a 25 year old and the experience and wisdom of a 50 year old, I imagine it won't get boring, and perhaps new ideas and modes of living won't require a generation to die, and a new one to be born.
Like so many scientific pursuits, this one has its roots in science fiction. A terrific trashy futuristic novel from the 70's by Lawrence Sanders called The Tomorrow File[0] features preserved heads that are kept around to spout ideas in the future, when they might become useful, among many other Brave New World-type concepts.
That internet archive version is particularly boring, isn't it. The novel is his best, if you ask me. His detective fiction didn't ever rise to that level and this was the only one he wrote in the sci-fi genre. Perhaps being relegated to the dime store novelist category in his other books prevented this from getting the attention it deserves, but it was wonderfully smarmy and prescient.
I used to buy into this kind of stuff, but I've become more and more skeptical of the idea that you would still be yourself if your brain could be preserved/emulated/transplanted/whatever.
Our nervous system extends into our bodies. We feel emotions in our bodies. People with certain kinds of brain damage that prevents them from feeling emotions normally also experience trouble making rational decisions.
More recent research has been hinting that we may even hold certain types of memories outside our brains.
Humans have always been drawn to neat, tidy ideas, especially ones that draw clean boundaries: it's an appealing idea that our consciousness lives solely in our brains, and that our brains could function independently of our bodies, but it seems unlikely that it's really that simple.
There is a bit of research and effort into a head transplants. I wonder if and when that is successful to see how it impacts the individual. Possibly having memories of the body or changing personality.
First Human Head Transplantation: Surgically Challenging, Ethically Controversial and Historically Tempting – an Experimental Endeavor or a Scientific Landmark? (2019)
In my PhD work, I helped conduct the human portion of a study on this topic, contributing to some discussions at the FDA [1]. The idea was a bit controversial then, and I've had a few anesthesiologists get mad at me for it, but the general pattern has now been replicated quite a few times now, such that the field has largely moved on from 'Is something bad happening?' to 'Why does it happen, and how do we prevent that bad thing from happening?'[2]. So it has been a gratifying excursion from my typical research before and since then.
Is there any reason to suspect that adults suffer the same effects as infants? (Not asking to be combative, just curious whether children are uniquely affected because their brains are still cooking.)
You and the other commenter bring up good points. Developmental neurotoxicity (with lesser or no effects in older children and young adults) is, I speculate, probably due to differential gene expression during early development versus later when genes related to development are suppressed and genes related to maintenance are more abundantly expressed. The developmental neurotoxicity probably works through different mechanisms than what is termed "postoperative cognitive dysfunction" in the elderly after general anesthesia dysfunction [1][2], which, all I know is that it is a thing. If I were to speculate it would be that in the elderly there are fewer redundant cognitive resources, and so detrimental effects to cognition are magnified. I know that it used to be thought that post-operative dysfunction is temporary, but it seems likely to me (again speculation) that there is both recovery and permanent dysfunction, but the dysfunction becomes a little more difficult to detect. Going back to my paper, where we used a method to disentangle two types of memory processes i.e. recollection (explicit recollection of experiential details) and familiarity (a general feeling of familiarity with things you've seen previously) which contribute to memory performance but tend to be differentially affected by neurodegeneration (recollection is more affected, and generally more hippocampal), so that sometimes, when not accounting for these processes, a memory test will fail to find differences because patients rely on familiarity to answer memory questions.
Thanks. This is purely anecdotal, but we had a family member whose child was under anesthesia for a severe respiratory infection. He’s been severely developmentally delayed in his first year, and it’s unclear to us what damage done.
Thanks for sharing. It is difficult to know for certain. If the respiratory infection led to hypoxic damage, then that could also contribute. I have not kept up with the field, but generally the most sensitive period for anesthesia was before 4 years or so. As I mentioned briefly, most of my work is in different areas of research so I haven't kept up to date.
I'm also skeptical of the idea that one can "upload" consciousness and it would still be "you". I suppose this is true in a philosophical sense, but in a practical sense, subjective experience of consciousness rules the roost. It's inevitably going to be a mere copy of you. You don't get to experience any of it. Similar to a software project which is forked, I think it makes more sense to classify it as an entirely different entity at that point.
I suppose there are valid use cases for this, but I'm not that narcissistic to think the world needs eternal copies of me.
The continued subjective experience of the original consciousness is where I believe the real value lies. Digitisation of consciousness, assuming it has any sound scientific basis in the first place, would practically need to look more like the gradual replacement of brain (and bodily) matter with something more durable, enduring, and controllable. A slow process in which carbon is exchanged for silicon, or cellular damage is continuously reversed and aging kept at bay.
> It's inevitably going to be a mere copy of you. You don't get to experience any of it.
You can make the same argument for 'you before you went to sleep' and 'you after you woke up'. The only real link you have to that previous consciousness are memories of experiences, which are all produced by your current body/brain.
Think about this: For every consciousness (including you right now) it is _impossible_ to experience anything other than what the thing producing that consciousness produces (memories, sensations, etc.). It doesn't matter whether the different conscious entities or whatever produces them are separated by time or space. They _will_ be produced, and they _will_ experience exactly what the thing that produces them produces.
With an analogy: If you drop pebbles in either the same pond at different times or in different ponds at the same time, waves will be produced in all cases. From the perspectives of the waves themselves, what they interact with is always _exactly_ the stuff that interacts with the water they're made up of. To them, the question of identity or continuity is fully irrelevant. They're just them.
Similarly, it makes no difference whether you only have the memories of the previous conscious experiences, or if 'you' really experienced them. Those situations are indistinguishable to you. The link to future consciousnesses inhabiting your body is effectively the same.
>> It's inevitably going to be a mere copy of you. You don't get to experience any of it.
> You can make the same argument for 'you before you went to sleep' and 'you after you woke up'. The only real link you have to that previous consciousness are memories of experiences, which are all produced by your current body/brain.
Except I know, empirically, that people go to sleep all the time and wake up, and remain the same person. And I know (for practical purposes) I do the same. I -- my mind/body composite -- lie down, and get up the next morning. I remain the same person.
Simply 'copying' or 'uploading' my consciousness, like a computer file, is impossible even in theory, because I'm not just a conscious mind, but a conscious mind which is also a body. Consciousness cannot be split from the material body, even in theory. Somebody upthread said that he'd seen many amputees undergo personality changes as a result of their operations -- this is an informative (if very sad) example.
> that people go to sleep all the time and wake up, and remain the same person
You have absolutely no way of knowing that last part is true. You can only see their behavior, which is identical whether they are the same consciousness or a different one from the one it was yesterday. You don't even know whether they have any conscious experience at all.
> And I know (for practical purposes) I do the same.
You do not. The "for practical purposes" points at your _body_. There is no evidence that an organic body is in any way special. If you upload your consciousness and the resulting computer 'body' works as a normal body, it _will_ generate a consciousness and that consciousness _will_ feel that it is 'you' (itself). Note that we're talking about hypothetical practically perfect computer bodies (which may be completely virtual, as longs as its sensors and actuators live fully in that virtual world).
You can spin the illusion of a continuous conscious experience every way you want. It is still just that, an illusion.
> You can only see their behavior, which is identical whether they are the same consciousness or a different one from the one it was yesterday.
The first clause of the sentence is true, but the second is not.
You never directly see a thing itself, you only ever see its effects on the world. You rationally postulate the presence of water because of its clear colour, its hydrating effect on you, its tendency to become a gas at 100C, its tendency to dissolve salt, and so on. Similarly, you rationally postulate the presence of the same person, at 10pm on Monday and 7am on Tuesday, because he has the same personality, the same look, the same eye and hair colour, the same body shape, etc. We know about the presence of a thing from the presence of its effects and behaviour. If these remain the same, it is rational to believe that the person remains the same.
> You don't even know whether they have any conscious experience at all.
Again, knowledge of effects leads to knowledge of the thing causing said effects. I am aware of my own conscious experience, I see Bob affects the world in ways that are very similar to myself and other human beings, and so I rationally postulate that he is a conscious, rational being like I am. You never see a person's mind directly, but you see the effects of the person's mind the whole time. You see such effects through their body. If the effects remain the same, or change only in certain, limited ways, it's reasonable to believe that the cause remains the same (and frankly crazy to believe otherwise).
> The "for practical purposes" points at your _body_. There is no evidence that an organic body is in any way special.
The mind and the body form one substance. The idea that "my mind is one thing, my body another" has been tried and failed as a philosophical idea several times in history. It raises far more problems than it purports to solve. I know I continue through time in part because my body continues through time. You say the body isn't "special"; I don't know what this means, but I know my body, and other people's bodies, are different from other things, because they walk, talk, reason, sense, desire, and so on. (Once again, the effects and behaviour of a thing lead us to knowledge of that thing.) The idea that consciousness or self can be 'uploaded', even in theory, is pure fantasy. You and your body are one thing.
> You can spin the illusion of a continuous conscious experience every way you want. It is still just that, an illusion.
If this is so, explain how rational thought is possible. Given that rational thought involves you reasoning from A to B to C through time, how is this possible if there is no continuous 'you' that is going through time?
As a neuroscientist working on brain computer interfaces, it's painfully clear to me that we are absolutely nowhere close to understanding the full complexity of the human brain in a manner required to simulate or reboot someone's consciousness. It's not even clear yet what level of abstraction is required. Do we need to map all of the synapses to get a connection graph, or do we need to map all synapses plus the synaptic proteins to assign connection weights too? This is ignoring other types of connections like gap junctions between cells, ephaptic coupling (the influence of local electric fields on neurons firing), mapping neuormodulator release, etc. On one hand, it feels like irreduceable complexity. On the other hand, however, you can lose about half of your neurons to neurodegenerative diseases before you start noticing a behavioral effect, so clearly not every single details is required to simulate your consciousness. It would be a MAJOR leap forward in neuroscience to even understand what level of abstraction is necessary and which biological details are essential vs. which can be summarized succinctly.
Anyone claiming to take your brain and slice it up and have a working model right now is currently selling snake oil. It's not impossible, but neuroscience has to progress a ways before this is a reasonable proposition. The alternative is to take the brain and preserve it, but even a frozen or perfused brain may have degraded in ways that would make it hard to recover important aspects that we don't yet understand.
It is, however, fascinating to do the research required to answer these questions, and that should be funded and continue, even if just to understand the underlying biology.
In addition to all that we don't know about synapses etc, I've often wondered if even mapping all the "hardware connections" so to speak would even be enough. You'd have everything in the right place, but what about the "signals" running on it? Does a certain amount of constant activity on these circuits constitute signs of a "living" brain vs a dead one? How much of our consciousness is really in the topology of the circuits, and how much of it is simply defined by the constant activity running around in them? I assume neural circuits form loops that consist of synapses that reinforce or surpress activity. If these signals going around and around ever "stop", can they ever be started again with the same "patterns"? What if these patterns, the living "software", are at least partially what define you?
Well anyway that's my airchair crackpot neuroscience theory for the world to consume ;). I'm sure there must already be a name for the idea though.
Six of the sheep were given a single higher dose of ketamine, 24mg/kg. This is at the high end of the anesthetic range. Initially, the same response was seen as with a lower dose. But within two minutes of administering the drug, the brain activity of five of these six sheep stopped completely, one of them for several minutes – a phenomenon that has never been seen before.
“This wasn’t just reduced brain activity. After the high dose of ketamine the brains of these sheep completely stopped. We’ve never seen that before,” said Morton. Although the anesthetized sheep looked as though they were asleep, their brains had switched off. “A few minutes later their brains were functioning normally again – it was as though they had just been switched off and on.”
There's gonna be million artificial minds of various levels of capacity before the first human mind is accurately simulated.
At that time we are going to be accustomed to glitching artificial minds creates, modified, bugged, debugged that current moral conundrums "is the copy me or not", "is it ok to create a hobbled copy of someone" are going to be as quaint bit akin to counting angels on a head of the pin. Mangled and molded consciousness will be as mundane as computation itself.
On one hand, I wonder if a gradual transition would work. Spend enough time over the years mirroring your conscious patterns onto a computational substrate, and they might get used to the lay of the land, the loss of old senses and the appearance of new ones. There might not be an ultimate "stepping in", but something like you might be able to outlive you, on a substrate that it feels happy and comfortable on.
On the other hand, the idea of "simulating your consciousness" raises questions beyond just cognition or personality. A mechanistically perfect simulation of your brain might not be conscious at all. Spooky stuff.
The way various hormones influence the brain alone makes it pretty clear to me already that you'd be a completely different person when taken out of your body, and I'm pretty sure that's just the tip of the iceberg.
In terms of computing (one that we do not understand), it would be like cloning a live machine by taking the CPU dye only, or maybe the hard drive. How many parts you need to take away from a computer for it to be the same machine? It's easy though with a VM, or a kernel that supports many hardware. Kind of a digress, but I liked this idea.
I don't think this is a great analogy because computers don't have consciousness (yet).
But I usually move the hard drive (or at least its contents) between machines when I get a new computer, and that's enough for me to think of it as the "same", even if I reinstall the OS on the new machine and just copy my home directory onto the new one.
Why would you want to go on in a world that has either left you behind or keeps making the same mistakes over and over in a cycle and won't listen to you because you're too old to understand?
And conversely, I think Kim Stanley Robinson puts it best in the Mars trilogy. Scientific progress often has to wait for the old guard to die so new ideas can be tried. Sometimes there are actually new things and they need to be allowed to cook.
There’s a short story about uploaded consciousnesses being used as AI slaves. They go bad once enough years have gone by that they can’t speak the modern language anymore. Then they usually lapse into insanity or depression.
A scientist like Einstein experienced scientific revolutions within his lifetime. That's hardly going to be the norm in the history of science, and also a horrible assumption to think revolutions would endlessly be occurring and reoccurring.
Also, we know when we're on the edge of knowledge, especially in cosmology and physics. We're waiting for revolution there. There's dark energy and dark matter. It doesn't matter if you're old or young, you knew that your theories isn't good enough to explain whatever these are.
Scientific knowledge don't get swept away especially if they're rock solid. Newtonian physics still has a lot of relevance after all. It's just that relativity is even more accurate.
Just imagine someone who died 50 years ago coming back and hearing skibidi toilet, no cap, ohio, etc. Then not being allowed to board a plane without a body scan, and not having money for a plane anyways since bread was dime and a gallon of gas was a quarter last you checked. You can't even get a job you're just a brain and all the knowledge work you could do is 50 years out of date.
German physicist Max Planck somewhat cynically declared, science advances one funeral at a time. Planck noted “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
I consider that I have likely died more than twice in my lifetime already. And before this body gives up, I will have already died more times. Must simply enjoy the present and give gifts to my future self.
I’m not sure I actually believe in quantum immortality but I think it is slightly suspicious—out of all the people you could have been be born as, you just happen to be born in a timeframe where brain preservation might be possible before you die?
Most people are alive right now. The population historically has been much lower, so odds are you would be born around the time high technology would support a high population.
> So what are the figures? There are currently seven billion people alive today and the Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 107 billion people have ever lived.
> This means that we are nowhere near close to having more alive than dead. In fact, there are 15 dead people for every person living.
So it is not wildly impossible that you’d be alive now, but it is fairly unlikely.
Also, hard to say what’s in the future of course, but even if population growth levels off, you’d expect to be born in the future, right? Which brings up another question, why not?
If we are going to go along on the fully ridiculous implications here and reinterpret all probabilities as conditioned on your immortality, why weren’t you born in the far future? I’d expect people born in the future to have easier access to immortality.
Maybe birth rates will go way down if we discover immortality (lowering your odds of being born later). Or maybe pre-immortality minds will be seen as more interesting and worth preserving (increasing your odds of being kept around).
I don't think I agree with you. There are multiple examples in society of damaged nervous system connections with the brain, spine cord damage for example, where the personality of the pacient changes little. In the same sense, losing limbs or entire sections of your body (aside from psychological trauma and other psychological consequences) don't affect personality that much
Of course the nervous system is much more complex, but damage to the brain almost always result in some sort of cognitive dysfunction or personality change, see the Phineas Gage case for example.
I see what you mean- but consider that the gut does seem to play a significant role in mood and mental health. The enteric nervous system may not hold memories, but it seems to have something to do with personality and digestion issues can have negative cognitive effects.
Agree that discomfort can cause temporary problems, and sometimes chronic problems in parts of the body can cause life long cognitive impairment. But that is not to say that these represent "you" or your personality. You brain could still function perfectly without those body conditions.
And for the gut example the brain actually does work normally, stomach and instetines removal (and other related surgeries) are fairly common procedures and I don't hear of people complaining about personality changes. Of course, those types of procedures are extremely invasive in a sistemic way, and not only your mental state, but multiple other parts of the body need to re-adapt. But I truly believe "you" will be still be "you" inside your brain
PS.: I quoted "you" because discussions about the identity of one-self are much more complex, just regard it as the most high level definition of the concept
>In the same sense, losing limbs or entire sections of your body (aside from psychological trauma and other psychological consequences) don't affect personality that much
"There aren't any changes except for all of the changes, but those changes don't count because reasons."
I don't know how many amputees you know; you may know many. I was in the army for 10 years during the height of the global war on terror and know more than most. Not a single one is the same as they were pre-amputation. Could be the trauma that caused the amputation, could be the amputation. I'm not an amputationologist.
I do assert that a holo-techno-brain will need a shit-ton of e-drugs to deal with being amputated from its fucking body.
The bacteria in your butthole are a part of you just like your brain, maybe less, but they ARE a part of you.
> Could be the trauma that caused the amputation, could be the amputation.
Given the personality changes seen in people who go off to fight in the military and who end up coming back fully physically intact, I think it's more likely that the personality changes here were caused by the trauma, not by the amputation.
I'm not saying the latter isn't possible, but absent evidence to the contrary, it doesn't make much sense to assume the personality changes occurred because of the amputation alone.
Also consider that amputation -- even ignoring whatever trauma precipitated it -- is its own sort of trauma. I imagine if someone came up to me, perfectly physically healthy, knocked me out, and cut off my leg, I would wake up and develop emotional trauma that would cause personality changes.
Transferring our consciousness into "the net", or some other fuzzy concepts are so far removed from reality as to be complete fiction. This includes freezing our brains and reanimating them later to resuscitate our lives.
They not only massively overestimate the functionality of today's tech to receive something like our consciousnesses, but even more so, by orders of magnitude, underestimate just how complex our living bodies are.
We only have the vaguest of ideas about how our physiology works (while we might be able to replicate flesh cells for "fake meat", we have 0 understanding or control over how those cells organize to form macroscopic organs). Applying this to the brain, our understanding is even more primitive. An example would be recent news that perhaps the brain is not sterile, but hosts a microbiome. Whether or not the brain hosts a microbiome is still "controversial".
We're still hundreds of years away from a comprehensive understanding of physiology.
But of course, we're never going to live that long, because we still believe (statistically as a species) in invisible guys in outer space that tell us we need to dismember people who believe in the WRONG invisible guy in outer space.
Our primitive violent ape species will extinct itself long before we ever have a comprehensive grasp of how life works, especially to the level of understanding consciousnesses...
>Our nervous system extends into our bodies. We feel emotions in our bodies. People with certain kinds of brain damage that prevents them from feeling emotions normally also experience trouble making rational decisions.
I think that may be true enough, but it doesn't have the upshot you seem to think it does.
It just means that what we need to sustain not just a brain itself but the totality of the environmental conditions on which it depends. No easy task for sure, but not something that presents an in-principle impossibility of preserving brains.
I think there's a major philosophical error here in thinking that the added logistics present this kind of in-principle impossibility.
Also, talking like this starts to play with anti-science speculation a bit. Octopi actually have neurons extending through their limbs. We don't. So when we talk about consciousness being "embodied", I'm sorry, it's an attempt to romanticize the question in a way that loses sight of our scientific understanding. Consciousness happens in the brain.
Sure, the brain needs stimulus from its embodied nervous system, and may even depend on those data and interactions in significant ways, but everything we know about consciousness suggests its in the brain. And so the data from "embodied" nervous systems may be important but there's no in-principle reason why it can't be accounted for in the context of preservation.
Very well, you think that preserving the brain, or even preserving the nervous system, is futile. But what of total biostasis, preserving the entire organism, just like the archaebacteria that live for thousands of years in ice or other extreme environments by slowing their metabolisms to a crawl?
To me, excessive negativity about the possibility of immortality smacks of weakness and defeatism. You either love life and want as much of it as possible, which makes you a friend of humanity, or prefer death, which makes you an enemy of humanity. I take a stronger line than the neuroscientist in the article. “Death positivity” like that of Viktor Frankl, anti-natalism, even faith in magical spiritual resurrections—all are anti-human viewpoints, only excusable in the past because they were copes with the inevitability of death. Now that we have reason to believe it can be averted, we owe our potential future selves every possible effort to save them from oblivion.
> More recent research has been hinting that we may even hold certain types of memories outside our brains.
Not just hinting - the evidence is strong and accumulating rapidly. The gut, in particular, has so many neurons that it is considered the body’s “second brain”, to say nothing about the impact that gut bacteria have on your mind.
If you really wanted to create a copy of your “mind”, you’d have to image every neuron in your body for a thoroughly accurate copy. And then accept the fact that your entire behavioural profile is then missing the input of your gut bacteria, which appears to have a significant and non-trivial impact.
If it was preserving my original brain it would definitely still be me at the core. Would everything be exactly the same? Probably not but that paradigm is more than good enough.
Jeroen Lanier in his book "You Are Not a Gadget" uses the example of a MIDI file: they can describe music, but even though they sound like the real thing, they are limited by the digital world. E.g. according to ChatGPT the minimum interval between 2 MIDI messages is 0.77 milliseconds.
And then he asks what sort of limitations might we have if our minds are software, and how would we not notice it?
> according to ChatGPT the minimum interval between 2 MIDI messages is 0.77 milliseconds.
Thank you for stating your source. However, ChatGPT isn’t deterministic. I asked it the same thing and it responded it depends on several factors, including the MIDI protocol version and the device or software used, and that the minimum between two messages is between 1 and 2 milliseconds.
Which of those is true? Perhaps neither. A quick web search didn’t provide a straightforward answer. Point being that we should avoid propagating even more wrong information, especially since it’s not relevant to your point (which makes sense).
Eternal life doesn’t necessarily mean being impervious to harm. If you live indeterminably because your flesh brain was preserved or there’s a digital copy of you on a hard drive, a simple drop on the floor could terminate your existence.
And if we’re talking about fiction, there’s no obligation to make those lives unbearably immortal either.
> Our flesh is indestructible. Our lives are never ending. But not even in the dumb vampire way where after a while you hate it and you can’t die. We can die whenever we want. We just don’t have to.
Catholic theology actually justifies the belief in Hell by arguing that an eternity of suffering in Hell is a blessing, because it admits the one benefit of existence itself, while total annihilation has no redeeming factors whatsoever.
I'm kinda surprised everyone in that show doesn't walk around with full neck armor to protect their stacks. Metal gorgets should be all the rage in this universe.
I think it’s more likely we can preserve our ego rather than our consciousness. For instance, create an AI replica of yourself that accurately behaves the same way you do. Although you would be dead, your ego can carry on living and responding to changes in the external world, and people could have interactions with you that accurately simulate how you would respond to them long after you’re gone. And as your ego learns about the world, it develops opinions closely similar to opinions you would have based on your life experience. Perhaps in this way people in power could remain in power indefinitely.
Setting aside the actual physical and technological limitations here, I think such immortality would create a whole new kind of population problem. Population growth, in some sense, would explode. Or, more realistically, you’d have two classes of people: those living, and those “immortal,” those who could afford immortality, and those who were poor and would have to die permanently.
That said, I think this is all a pipe dream and totally infeasible.
I wish we'd reframe the way this gets talked about. It's pedantic, but we can't escape death. All matter in the universe will eventually decay or transmute into something very different from what it now is. And my answer to the question posed of when you'd want to die is unknown. I can't say 150 years. I can't imagine a specific age I'd hit at which I'd want to die. But at the same time, while I might want to outlive the Earth, I don't want to outlive all baryonic matter and somehow persist into the age of the universe in which all other matter is black holes, and there is neither light nor sound, nothing to touch, and all I would ever experience is quadrillions of years of utter loneliness. There is no immortality and nobody would want it if they really thought about what it would entail.
But cessation of aging would be wonderful. I'd love to live indefinitely and not have my body or mind noticeably decay. Research like this should be done, but we need to be honest about what we're trying to accomplish. Nobody will ever escape death, and when you start getting large enough numbers, I'm not sure it would make any difference to live longer. Even if we somehow achieve brain uploading, which I don't see entails you living longer so much as making copies of yourself with different identities, every storage medium has a capacity limit. At some point, the only way to form new memories to evict old ones, and the experience of living 90 trillion years won't be any different than 1 trillion years if 1 trillion years of experience is all you can store.
That said, we need to also be humble about what is even achievable. The very idea of a high resolution scan capturing the entirety of your brain state is already science fiction. We have another home page story right now about controversy over whether the brain has a microbiome. The only reason that's a question is because we have no means of opening up a living brain to see. We can't even accurately measure a person's body fat without dissection. The limitations of non-invasive remote imaging that don't kill the animal being imaged are quite severe and constitute a large reason medicine isn't more effective than it is. There is no technology we are on a known arc toward achieving that will make it possible to capture molecular-level detail of an entire brain as it is still running. I don't see how you can base an entire research project on a premise that doesn't exist and we have no idea if it ever will exist.
What if the constituent of the brain changes, would you feel you or would it be like another person just go on being conscious. If you don’t know what makes consciousness, most likely you just “die” after the brain freeze. This ain’t like sleeping or coma where your system is kept running continuously
A somewhat different question, but interesting! I assume by clone you mean an exact physical copy, down to a molecular level.
In my view, there would now be two separate instances of "my" consciousness simultaneously. "I" would continue to see through the original one, but the copy would essentially feel the same as me, although increasingly diverging as our experiences would not be the same from that point.
One of Don DeLillo's later good novels is about this stuff (Zero K).
I always think people's attitude toward possible future worlds is interesting. You can see a wide spread of opinion in this thread -- whether you think functional immortality would be a good thing says a lot about who you are. Ditto for colonizing other planets, automating all work, building AGI, and so on.
I suppose I'm on the side of the technologists. I think immortality is probably possible and humans should try to achieve it. But along the way it will mostly be snake oil and cults. And, of course, it's all but guaranteed that everyone in this thread isn't going to make the cut-off.
I'm certain immortality is possible, and it's also likely to be achieved, because we always do everything we can do, regardless of consequences.
But I think this is the acme of selfishness. I don't want to be immortal, and I wouldn't want to live in a world with 500-year-old know-it-alls running around "oldsplaining" everything to everyone else.
I have, thankfully, a fairly good chance of dying before that happens.
They'll decide when they're ready. I would love a little more time on this planet. And when it's time, I'll hop in the nitrogen pod. People are already making that decision in some parts of the world.
They'll decide when they want to decide. Some might choose to actually live forever, and that's fine. Others will choose a more current-human type lifespan, and that's fine. Some will choose 150, some 300, some 1000, some 10,000. All of those numbers are fine.
> And how will they do it?
There are already humane forms of medical euthanasia performed in progressive places in the world; this question already has answers, and likely more will be developed over time. I don't think it's an important question or issue to discuss, as long as people have legal options.
How is immortality selfish? Selfishness requires taking from other “selves” who have unmet needs of their own. But there’s every reason to believe a society of immortals could either function perfectly well without producing new selves, or that it could choose to reproduce at a slow rate sustainable with its ability to extract resources to support itself. Any new selves that were born would be provided the same opportunities that we provide new selves in the present day—breastfeeding, education, healthcare. How would that be “selfish?”
Is it selfish when a centenarian lives past 100? Is each additional year of life obtained by a centenarian “selfishly” stolen from some hypothetical unborn self?
Life expectancy has been increasing over time, especially in the past century or so. I don't think it's credible to suggest that civilizations have progressed meaningfully slower now that people live to be 80 or so instead of only 30, which was common in recent history.
And even if immortality "stalls" humanity, so what? People matter, not technology or some amorphous concept of "progress".
Ultimately, I am going to quote one of my favorite writers [0] and say that I am not afraid of a life that ends.
I don't want to be a brain in a jar. Or in a computer either. I enjoy experiencing physical sensations and interacting with the world in meatspace. And if I can't enjoy either, then just let me die.
And I apply this to not just brain preservation, but any attempt to artificially prolong the quantity of my life at the expense of the quality of my life. I do not want to spend my last years in a hospital bed hooked up to machines and unable to move. That was how my dad died, and even then he was lucky enough his partner (who he had discussed this with before and who had the authority to make the decision) eventually agreed to switch him to palliative care in his final hours. Similarly, I have seen what chemotherapy does to people, and I have long since decided that if I ever get cancer, I will refuse chemo and let myself die. I am also having a living will drawn up that includes a DNR order, multiple scenarios where doctors will be ordered to pull the plug, and a prohibition against anyone amputating any of my limbs or sensory organs even if it's necessary to save my life.
I will make sure I die with my autonomy and my dignity intact.
[0] Al Ewing. He writes comics. Read his stuff, he's good.
> (…) and a prohibition against anyone amputating any of my limbs or sensory organs even if it's necessary to save my life.
> I will make sure I die with my autonomy and my dignity intact.
Amputees have autonomy, dignity, and rich lives. To believe that the loss of a limb is so severe that death is preferable is absurd and insensitive.
What if instead of requiring an amputation, he loses faculties by accident like suffering from parosmia due to COVID or having a weight crush a body part? Did he suddenly lose his dignity? He certainly lost some autonomy. What’s the next step then?
> To believe that the loss of a limb is so severe that death is preferable is absurd and insensitive.
No. Denigrating someone expressing their personal opinion seems absurd. Since the commenter did not impose their opinions on other people you had to put those words in their mouth to call them insensitive.
I prefer to die with autonomy and dignity as well, meaning I would like to pull my own plug. That other people might have a different threshold, or want to die differently than I might, seems neither absurd nor insensitive. The commenter just described their threshold, they didn't judge other people.
> Denigrating someone expressing their personal opinion seems absurd. (…) The commenter just described their threshold, they didn't judge other people.
My sentence does not judge the person, it criticises the belief. Learn to differentiate or you’ll be doomed to a life of ad hominem attacks and taking things personally.
If person A says they love spiders and person B replies they find spiders repulsive, there’s no value judgement passed on person A.
My remark was not a commentary on yourself, your world view, the author, or your approval of them. I don’t know you.
> I prefer to die with autonomy and dignity as well
Who wouldn’t? By itself that statement is meaningless. What’s in question is how one defines the terms.
I invite you to take a closer look at that quote and understand what it means to the people who live those situations. Let’s exaggerate to make a point: If someone said they refused to be treated by a black doctor even if their life depended on it, and followed up with the remark they would make sure to die with dignity, do you not see how that would be insensitive to black people? A writer, especially an ostensibly good one, would understand that basic sentence structure.
Again, that is a purposeful exaggeration to make a point. I’m not making a remark on yourself or the author, I am disagreeing with the belief.
> My sentence does not judge the person, it criticises the belief.
An opinion or belief can't "be" insensitive. A person may intend to say something insensitive, another person may interpret an opinion as insensitive (as you did when dragging in amputees and people suffering from other conditions and injuries). "Insensitive" can only refer to a person's intention or another person's reaction. So calling someone insensitive for their expressed opinion does indeed judge the person.
> Learn to differentiate or you’ll be doomed to a life of ad hominem attacks and taking things personally.
Surely someone as skilled in rhetoric as yourself can see the irony of you warning me about "a life of ad hominem attacks" embedded in an ad hominem attack. Then you followed up with the implication that I don't understand "basic sentence structure." Address my actual comment rather than telling me what I need to learn and how I will get doomed for not thinking like you.
As for spiders and racists, those have nothing to do with anything in this thread. If someone says they don't want to live if they lose a limb or face chemotherapy, whether you agree with their stated choice or not, no other person or race got mentioned or implicated in the comment you replied to. Setting up a false and deliberately inflammatory analogy to make your point, equating an opinion about perceived quality of life with racism, doesn't help your argument. Try sticking with countering the arguments the commenter (and I) expressed.
Personal opinions about end-of-life care, personal autonomy, dignity have the same flavor as religious beliefs: you can't counter them with logic. Just calling someone wrong or "insensitive" or "nuts" as some other commenters have misses the mark, because the subject involves beliefs, not facts that we can argue. One can express their own different opinion, but going beyond that starts to verge into attacks on personal beliefs, which requires making assumptions about another person's faculties, judgment, and ad hominem, all of which you have deployed in your comments.
Urk, clearly continuing this conversation is fruitless. Even after mentioning twice and with emphasis that I’d use a purposefully exaggerated example, you decide to latch on to it as if it were the central thesis, calling it “false and deliberately inflammatory”. Do you understand the meaning of “purposefully exaggerated”, of analogies and hyperbole as a means to explain a point? Stop assuming bad faith, and please go fresh up on what an ad hominem is, as you keep mischaracterising it. My original comment had nothing to do with you, unless you’re Al Ewing and pretending not to be. Stop taking it personally, this isn’t even about you. You’re also conflating what other people said with my points, which is unproductive.
If someone else is free to decide that they'd rather die than lose an eye, or rather die than have to experience a few months of chemotherapy in order to be cancer-free, then I am also free to decide that those views are absurd and extreme, and reflect a deep misunderstanding of medical outcomes.
> Denigrating someone expressing their personal opinion seems absurd.
There's a difference between saying someone is foolish and saying their beliefs/opinions are foolish. The former is not what the GP did.
> then I am also free to decide that those views are absurd and extreme, and reflect a deep misunderstanding of medical outcomes.
I don't agree. You can decide that another person's expressed opinions don't align with yours, according to what you believe and think you understand about medical outcomes. The original comment didn't mention medical outcomes so I hesitate to judge how much the commenter knows about that. And I hesitate to call someone's personal views absurd. They have opinions I may or may not share. I can't make a rational argument to prove them wrong.
A person's beliefs can't "be" foolish or even wrong. Belief by definition does not come from an objective and rational evaluation of facts and probabilities. I can say I hold different beliefs, but no more.
We most often encounter this kind of argument around religion. Someone can sincerely hold religious beliefs that don't submit to rational and objective argument. We can have different beliefs but we can't prove someone else's beliefs wrong. To call a belief that you can't argue against with reason "foolish" or wrong equals calling the person holding the belief foolish and wrong. You can show that chemo can work and people with cancer can recover. You can't say how any individual should feel about that, or how they should choose to deal with a cancer diagnosis. The original comment didn't make any statement about whether chemo works or not, or whether some people can thrive with dignity after losing a limb. Rather the original comment expressed one person's belief about how they feel about those possibilities, for their own definitions of autonomy, dignity, and quality of life.
Many people end their life when they find it's too painful to live. Many more wish they could -- the debate around end-of-life issues is raging in many countries.
What’s your point? I support the right to euthanasia, nothing in my comment contradicts that.
We’re not talking about someone in pain wishing to die, we’re talking about someone vehemently arguing they would rather die than live without a limb, without having experienced it. And their reasoning is a lack of autonomy and dignity, none of which are a given.
There are literally millions of people without limbs, half a million new ones per year in the US alone. They’re not poor invalids, they’re people who adapt and can do things we only dream off while living normal lives.
If having to undergo a few months of chemotherapy in order for your cancer to go into remission is "too painful to live", then I think someone's threshold for pain is way below that of the average person, to a point where that's kinda sad.
I know several people who have gone through chemo and came out the other side happy and healthy, after recovery. They live full, rich lives. They are much happier living than dead.
Sure, there are some cancers where you end up with declining quality of life for months or years before you eventually die. I wouldn't fault anyone with deciding to opt out of that from the very start. But that's not what we're talking about, exclusively: the person upthread was very absolutist and rejects chemotherapy in it entirety.
Do you have a source for this quote? Googling just returns this page.
I was particularly struck by:
> if I ever get cancer, I will refuse chemo and let myself die
And figured this quote must be at least 20 or 30 years ago? Cancer isn't necessarily a death-sentence, and many treatments are much less harsh than they were 20+ years ago.
I suspect part of extending human life much beyond 120 years is going to be finding ways to delay physical adulthood, so that proportionally you still have the same time to learn and grow, and those growth hormones are still kicking around repairing things for longer. Because the quality of life 100 years after your organs have stopped repairing themselves is not going to be that great, but if you could reduce that to 80-90 years then maybe.
This seems a bit extreme. Chemotherapy and its effects can be a very temporary thing, and your quality of life can go back to normal after you've finished your course and the cancer has gone into remission. Certainly there are aggressive cancers where you'd be fighting a painful battle of attrition, but there are many cancers where prognoses are good, and quality of life once treatment is done is more or less the same as before. A blanket personal ban on chemo is reckless and shortsighted.
The prohibition against amputation and sensory organ removal is a bit nuts too. You'd rather die than have someone remove one of your eyes or ears, or say a hand or arm or foot or leg? That is profoundly sad, and intensely insulting to anyone who has had to deal with that sort of thing and has nonetheless lived a full, rich life.
I get that many medical interventions do actually have a terrible, permanent effect on quality of life, but these seem like pretty extreme views that ignore reality.
I don't know what the commenter who posted about chemo and amputation actually thinks or believes. But I hesitate to call them "nuts" or to lecture them about how they have a wrong opinion. And I would not expand their personal opinion as a judgment on people who decide they can live with the effects of chemo, or amputation, or loss of an eye, because nothing in the original comment included a judgment on other people. Everyone has their own threshold for what they consider a life worth continuing, but we should not impose our own thresholds on other people, or judge them for making different choices.
For me the question goes beyond "Can I survive chemo (or amputation) and resume something like a normal life?" When you have to face cancer or loss of a limb or any illness or injury that threatens your life, or perceived quality of life, or dignity and autonomy, you necessarily have to think about what that means for your future. Until you get a diagnosis of (for example) cancer you don't know what it feels like, or how you will react, to the fact that no matter if you survive the treatment or not, you will always have that threat and reminder of your mortality in your conscious thoughts. You think about how you might not get so lucky the next time, how much your treatments might cost, what your illness might put your loved ones through, how far you will go to keep yourself alive even when it imposes costs and obligations on other people. And you think that maybe other people will have to make hard decisions about your future if you can't. A cancer diagnosis doesn't just affect me, in other words. If I lost a leg or arm that would impose burdens on my wife and family, affect my ability to make a living. Those thoughts more than the medical condition itself lead people to arrive at opinions such as the original commenter expressed.
Having faced my own mortality already I know I think more about how my own end of life scenarios affect other people more than how they will affect me. I worry that I will suffer a stroke, or slip into dementia, before I can pull my own plug, leaving people I care deeply about with that awful obligation, and the burden of caring for me rather than living their own life. And it's that thought, not the fear of disease or dying, that leads me to my own ideas about how much I might endure, because I won't endure it alone or without cost to others.
Cancer is no longer a definite death sentence and chemotherapy can make it go away for good, depending on what kind of cancer that is. I'd refuse too chemo after chemo in a very aggressive form of cancer though.
I love how people have wet dreams about living forever by uploading their mind to a computer but put absolutely 0 fucking effort actually increasing their health/life span in real life, and/or waste their days/week/years doing stuff they hate to "enjoy life" later (when their body is already half way rotten). As long as it's sci fi and they have 0 effort to provide they'll suck every single drop of hope but as soon as there is something actually actionable they recoil in horror
imho if you're not lean and exercising every day you have no business talking about living longer, you've already refused the only magic pill there is. It makes all the difference between having one foot in the grave at 60 or still chopping your own fire wood at 80, and all it takes besides a bit of luck is to move your ass 45 minutes a day
There's no contradiction here. You're talking about people who have already detached the concept of self from their physical body. They think of 'me' as their brain, so why maintain the body they're 'trapped' in.
People who try to solve all their problems with intellect tend to suffer from this. And many of them never learned that being in shape makes you feel a whole lot better.
Those hundred years won't exist for the dying. I would personally find comfort in knowing that I will feel waking up right away into a technologically much more advanced world
It's really debatable if religious people actually believe in eternal life. If they did, they would immediately see that their behavior drives them straight to eternal damnation.
They don't seem to care about that, and the only rational explanation is that they don't believe there's anything after death. They're nihilists. We all are.
From what I've seen of research on apparently-dispersed storage of memories in worms, I'd not be at all surprised to find that a human brain separated from a body has (assuming we could "boot it up" in that state, as you put it) lost a lot of memories or functionality beyond the obvious, even assuming we could perfectly preserve everything present in the brain per se.
Not volatile storage for most of it. If you get knocked out or similar you have most of the memories. It probably is partly down to the structure of what's connected to what and parly chemical changes at the synapses, although I don't think it's fully understood.
It'd make it pretty hard to get memories out of a brain sample as it's hard enough just to see the structure in an electron microscope. I don't think they have any way to log the chemical changes in the synapses presently.
"1918 when diabetes had no known treatment"
What nonsense. A history of diabetes shows knowledge and treatment for the disease for thousands of years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_diabetes
One of the absolute best short movies I've ever seen is The World of Tomorrow.
The whole thing is cute, but every time I read about brains in boxes I can't help but think of this scene about grandpa's consciousness being uploaded into a cube:
We are also able to download correspondence from him. [...] I will read one of his letters to you now.
"Oh. Oh God. Oh God. Oh my God. Oh Holy Mother of God. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh God."
If all the theory is correct, yes you are still you. Maybe damaged you, but you nonetheless.
Imagine the ship of theseus thought experiment, but instead of replacing part by part you store it on a dry dock (lost its function), some time after you put it in the sea again (recover the function), for all effects this still is the ship of Theseus
I like how the video game Soma showed it. If you fork a brain you kind of have a 50% chance of it continuing into the copy, and 50% chance of you being "left behind".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x790AjID0FA
I get the point, but I think the most self-consistent answer is that your conscious experience has a 100% chance of staying in the original body. (And similarly for destroy-and-remake teleporters.)
Indeed, the coin toss explanation "Catharine" uses on the Simon copies is merely a manipulation to ensure he continues following her instructions so that the ARK is launched, obscured to the player by the necessary mechanic of always controlling the surviving Simon copy. The only "real" Simon died in Toronto.
Yeah, I find the need to live forever kind of.. juvenile? You can’t let go of your ego for long enough to realise that at some point it’s better to make room for a new human with new perspectives and new ideas?
I like to think of it this way: if life was a game would you want to play the same character forever? No.. if you’re gonna keep playing the game it’s more interesting to start from scratch now and then. I don’t believe in reincarnation. There’s no need to. What you really are deep down is an instance of humanity. Almost all your genes and all your culture comes from and is shared with other humans. Any new instance (new human) is you playing a new character, essentially. If you’ve contributed to shaping the world you’re leaving behind this is even more true.
Unless you’re believe in a soul in the christian/jewish/muslim sense I guess, but then why would you fear death?
IMO the pursuit of immortality is far more dangerous and far more likely to kill humanity than AI. At least it may make us deteriorate to insignificance. Humanity is a super organism and we have a name for the phenomenon where parts of an organism figures out how to die and yet still replicates: cancer
We don't need to live forever as shown by the fact we've got by without it so far but death is kind of depressing. I've never really got the distinction that say killing millions in the holocaust is terrible but similar millions dying through age is desirable.
Both are dying. One killed by age one by gas. My grandfather and his brother went those ways. I'm not sure the years of Alzheimer's were much better than Auschwitz.
You're missing that one is avoidable and was intentionally caused. It's not reasonable to expect to be murdered. It is reasonable to expect to die eventually of some natural cause or accident. It is a necessity that previous generations need to die for the new ones, given constrained resources.
You’re being defeatist and ignoring the evidence presented in the article—even hospice patients want to live longer. You, too, will desire to live before (and hopefully: if!) you breathe your last.
This is because the entire goal of the sentient consciousness is simply to preserve itself as long as possible. DNA has the essential goal of replicating itself in reproduction. Consciousness, by contrast, appears to have no goal other than self-preservation. People sometimes choose to sacrifice themselves, but usually only when death is inevitable and they wish to save someone else from it (Lily/Harry Potter and Medal of Honor type situations).
I'm not really being defeatist nor ignoring evidence. Perhaps I just have a different perspective. There can be moral/ethical arguments for why mortality is a good, or at least useful, thing.
That's fine, but please don't stand in the way of those of us who would love to experience the world on a longer time frame, and are frustrated that the current level of medical knowledge doesn't allow it.
Why shouldn't we be frustrated by aspects of the natural world? Bad weather, disease, death and so on. Was eliminating smallpox odd because we had no entitlement expect to that?
Those things are about the timeliness - bad weather one day vs another, some people get the disease and others don't, early death verses a longer life. It's about what is reasonable to expect. It might be reasonable to expect good weather on a specific day, or even to live past the age of 50. It's unreasonable to expect to live indefinitely.
Yeah it's probably not 'reasonable' to expect to live on. But sometimes the technical possibilities open up to do something new.
Shaw quote: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’
Ironic that you would post this to a digital forum, the very concept of which would never be found and nature to the point that it would be beyond fiction and magic only a few hundred years ago. Nature has no inherent will and very often does things that are awful, like cancer. If anything it's our obligation to correct its failures where we can.
Why 100? You can also make way for the next generation by living 80, or 60, or 40 years. Yet no one would be okay with that option. Funny thing is historically speaking 40 is a lot closer to the useful human lifespan than 100. So this strong belief of yours is really driven by advancements in society and healthcare over the last few decades. Why do you think that won't change drastically another few decades from now?
"Funny thing is historically speaking 40 is a lot closer to the useful human lifespan than 100."
That isn't really true. Life expectancy was historically driven down by high infant mortality and lack of medicine. The meaningful human lifespan has been in the 70s for the majority of history. (Lifespan is different from life expectancy)
"So this strong belief of yours is really driven by advancements in society and healthcare over the last few decades."
Who says it's a strong belief?
"Why do you think that won't change drastically another few decades from now?"
Because there's no real evidence to support that. Life expectancy hasn't gone up drastically over the past 50 years. Rates of chronic illnesses, including things like dementia, have gone up drastically. So even if people are living a couple years longer, they're generally sicker and it's costing more. Even if medicine makes drastic improvements, 100 is still a lofty goal. I'd be fine making it only 80 too. I'm actually skeptical that will even happen. What I do know is that I don't want it to take more than 100 years.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 378 ms ] threadNothing says "life" like being dead.
- We currently only have one world that all living humans must share. - Imagine the sickening amount of power some people would be able to gather given a few centuries. That can't be good for everyone else.
It doesn't matter how much you like sci fi, even if it was technically possible it would be reserved to the 0.001% and you'd still be grinding your whole life just as you are doing now
I choose life.
If I didn't only have 30-40ish productive years to achieve whatever I will in this life it would be much easier to donate money or time to charitable pursuits.
Not even talking about the fact that we live in a very finite system
purge the xenos
We certainly have not.
> If I didn't only have 30-40ish productive years to achieve whatever I will in this life it would be much easier to donate money or time to charitable pursuits.
True, but if you lived forever that would mean that it wouldn't be realistic for new people to come into the world, which means far fewer new ideas and ways of looking at the world. That would a net loss for humanity.
2) Trivial argument: if people already lived indefinitely would you advocate murdering them to "make room"? Telling people they shouldn't be able to pursue a longer life is equivalent. Making that decision for yourself is perfectly fine; making it for others is not.
3) 150k people die every day, nearly 2 people per second. If fixing that tragedy creates new problems, bring them on; we'll solve those problems too.
2) Not true from most moral perspectives, including 'common sense morality'. In a pure utilitarian sense, sure, but most people don't subscribe to that. For example, choosing to not save someone from a burning fire is not the same as choosing to burn them to death. Both the actor and their intention matter.
3) I don't disagree with the first half of your point (that this is a tragedy) but I cannot share your optimism re.: us solving the consequent problems. If there's anything that the last fifty years of modernity have shown, it's that we're actually quite bad at solving broader social problems, with new and even-worse problems often arising well after we thought the original problem settled. Consider global warming (to which the 'solution' looks to be the further impoverishment of the third world, and probably mass deaths due to famine/drought/heat waves), or how we in the US 'solved' mobility by destroying main streets and replacing established public transportation with cars and mazes of concrete. Now we've "solved" loneliness by giving everyone a phone and -- well, I'm sure you know how that went.
2) The equivalence here isn't "choosing to not save". Choosing to push someone back into a burning building, or preventing them from trying to escape, is equivalent to choosing to burn them to death.
3) I am an incorrigible optimist and don't intend to ever stop being one. Humanity is incredible and it's amazing what we can solve over time. I don't believe that any potential solution we might come up with is worse than doing nothing and letting 150k people die every day.
Spoiler: The haves are not going to get any more generous when they've got thousand year lifespans. You would just have end up having to spend hundreds of years grinding away at the bottom of the ladder instead of 30 or 40.
A transcended/uploaded mind won't have the earthly needs and would be a lot cheaper to maintain, leaving it to achieve otherwise impossible results.
The only thing to gain by abolishing biological death is perpetual civil war.
If you could put an 80 year olds mind in a 20 year old body they would probably approach life with the same optimism of other young people.
I think our behavior is more a product of our environment than some internal 'self' that is built over our lifetime. If you altered the environment from "75 years old, achy and slow body, limited future" to "25 years old, infinite future, healthy body" I would be amazed if there was not a humongous shift in behavior as well.
They say science advances one death at a time. Looking at congress, I think you can say the same for politics as well.
Success of something like this entails a way to regulate reproduction at a far more draconian level than even China's one-child policy. I don't think any civilized nation could impose a "no child" policy and remain intact.
I don’t think this is a given. Most developed nations have bad birth rates for example
Ok, that maybe part of how 'WE' define life, but, for me, that looks a lot like an arbitrary definition.
It's much simpler to accept and live within your constraints than to waste your life and mental energy wishing you could be/do something you will never be/do.
If you think about it most of the things we "fix" are extremely wonky, even something such as a bone fracture isn't guaranteed to heal 100%, most medicine have massive side effects, organ transplants have something like 50% survival at 15 years on average, &c. We think we're getting more and more control on things but most of it is a hack job temporarily delaying the inevitable
Also, anyone thinking being uploaded to a computer forever is heaven on earth must live a pretty fucking terrible life to begin with
Some folks are scared of rogue AI, when biggest threat to mankind always was, is and will be other, properly messed up humans with certain capabilities.
[0] https://archive.org/details/tomorrowfile0000sand_t5i1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rip_Van_Winkle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleeper_Awakes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Door_into_Summer
and for anything fantastic you can find it in mythology and ancient literature
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sleepers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muchukunda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Immortals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranka_(legend)
A good recent book series is
https://bobiverse.fandom.com/wiki/Bobiverse_Wiki
might be the most optimistic story of the genre.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21617.Buying_Time
particularly since my esteem for Haldeman has gone up (https://sff180.com/reviews/h/haldeman/worlds.html changed my life)
Our nervous system extends into our bodies. We feel emotions in our bodies. People with certain kinds of brain damage that prevents them from feeling emotions normally also experience trouble making rational decisions.
More recent research has been hinting that we may even hold certain types of memories outside our brains.
Humans have always been drawn to neat, tidy ideas, especially ones that draw clean boundaries: it's an appealing idea that our consciousness lives solely in our brains, and that our brains could function independently of our bodies, but it seems unlikely that it's really that simple.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3821155/
...................
>World's first human head transplant successfully performed on a corpse, scientists say (2017)
https://nationalpost.com/health/worlds-first-human-head-tran...
.............
First Human Head Transplantation: Surgically Challenging, Ethically Controversial and Historically Tempting – an Experimental Endeavor or a Scientific Landmark? (2019)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6511668/
..........
>No Doctor Has Ever Performed a Human Head Transplant. This Neurosurgeon Says He’s Ready to Do It. (2024)
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a62831709/human-hea...
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-3943/5/1/2
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/
In my PhD work, I helped conduct the human portion of a study on this topic, contributing to some discussions at the FDA [1]. The idea was a bit controversial then, and I've had a few anesthesiologists get mad at me for it, but the general pattern has now been replicated quite a few times now, such that the field has largely moved on from 'Is something bad happening?' to 'Why does it happen, and how do we prevent that bad thing from happening?'[2]. So it has been a gratifying excursion from my typical research before and since then.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4168665/
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9750936/
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2020&q=postoperati... [2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo...
I suppose there are valid use cases for this, but I'm not that narcissistic to think the world needs eternal copies of me.
The continued subjective experience of the original consciousness is where I believe the real value lies. Digitisation of consciousness, assuming it has any sound scientific basis in the first place, would practically need to look more like the gradual replacement of brain (and bodily) matter with something more durable, enduring, and controllable. A slow process in which carbon is exchanged for silicon, or cellular damage is continuously reversed and aging kept at bay.
There is no continuity of subjective experience even within the same brain, you can be deeply unconscious for extended periods of time and come back.
From the outside, an "identical clone" is indistinguishable.
On the inside, the clone feels exactly how you would feel.
The only problem is the "I don't want my 'me' to die" feeling.
I bet most people would be fine with death/rebirth teleportation.
You can make the same argument for 'you before you went to sleep' and 'you after you woke up'. The only real link you have to that previous consciousness are memories of experiences, which are all produced by your current body/brain.
Think about this: For every consciousness (including you right now) it is _impossible_ to experience anything other than what the thing producing that consciousness produces (memories, sensations, etc.). It doesn't matter whether the different conscious entities or whatever produces them are separated by time or space. They _will_ be produced, and they _will_ experience exactly what the thing that produces them produces.
With an analogy: If you drop pebbles in either the same pond at different times or in different ponds at the same time, waves will be produced in all cases. From the perspectives of the waves themselves, what they interact with is always _exactly_ the stuff that interacts with the water they're made up of. To them, the question of identity or continuity is fully irrelevant. They're just them.
Similarly, it makes no difference whether you only have the memories of the previous conscious experiences, or if 'you' really experienced them. Those situations are indistinguishable to you. The link to future consciousnesses inhabiting your body is effectively the same.
> You can make the same argument for 'you before you went to sleep' and 'you after you woke up'. The only real link you have to that previous consciousness are memories of experiences, which are all produced by your current body/brain.
Except I know, empirically, that people go to sleep all the time and wake up, and remain the same person. And I know (for practical purposes) I do the same. I -- my mind/body composite -- lie down, and get up the next morning. I remain the same person.
Simply 'copying' or 'uploading' my consciousness, like a computer file, is impossible even in theory, because I'm not just a conscious mind, but a conscious mind which is also a body. Consciousness cannot be split from the material body, even in theory. Somebody upthread said that he'd seen many amputees undergo personality changes as a result of their operations -- this is an informative (if very sad) example.
You have absolutely no way of knowing that last part is true. You can only see their behavior, which is identical whether they are the same consciousness or a different one from the one it was yesterday. You don't even know whether they have any conscious experience at all.
> And I know (for practical purposes) I do the same.
You do not. The "for practical purposes" points at your _body_. There is no evidence that an organic body is in any way special. If you upload your consciousness and the resulting computer 'body' works as a normal body, it _will_ generate a consciousness and that consciousness _will_ feel that it is 'you' (itself). Note that we're talking about hypothetical practically perfect computer bodies (which may be completely virtual, as longs as its sensors and actuators live fully in that virtual world).
You can spin the illusion of a continuous conscious experience every way you want. It is still just that, an illusion.
The first clause of the sentence is true, but the second is not.
You never directly see a thing itself, you only ever see its effects on the world. You rationally postulate the presence of water because of its clear colour, its hydrating effect on you, its tendency to become a gas at 100C, its tendency to dissolve salt, and so on. Similarly, you rationally postulate the presence of the same person, at 10pm on Monday and 7am on Tuesday, because he has the same personality, the same look, the same eye and hair colour, the same body shape, etc. We know about the presence of a thing from the presence of its effects and behaviour. If these remain the same, it is rational to believe that the person remains the same.
> You don't even know whether they have any conscious experience at all.
Again, knowledge of effects leads to knowledge of the thing causing said effects. I am aware of my own conscious experience, I see Bob affects the world in ways that are very similar to myself and other human beings, and so I rationally postulate that he is a conscious, rational being like I am. You never see a person's mind directly, but you see the effects of the person's mind the whole time. You see such effects through their body. If the effects remain the same, or change only in certain, limited ways, it's reasonable to believe that the cause remains the same (and frankly crazy to believe otherwise).
> The "for practical purposes" points at your _body_. There is no evidence that an organic body is in any way special.
The mind and the body form one substance. The idea that "my mind is one thing, my body another" has been tried and failed as a philosophical idea several times in history. It raises far more problems than it purports to solve. I know I continue through time in part because my body continues through time. You say the body isn't "special"; I don't know what this means, but I know my body, and other people's bodies, are different from other things, because they walk, talk, reason, sense, desire, and so on. (Once again, the effects and behaviour of a thing lead us to knowledge of that thing.) The idea that consciousness or self can be 'uploaded', even in theory, is pure fantasy. You and your body are one thing.
> You can spin the illusion of a continuous conscious experience every way you want. It is still just that, an illusion.
If this is so, explain how rational thought is possible. Given that rational thought involves you reasoning from A to B to C through time, how is this possible if there is no continuous 'you' that is going through time?
Anyone claiming to take your brain and slice it up and have a working model right now is currently selling snake oil. It's not impossible, but neuroscience has to progress a ways before this is a reasonable proposition. The alternative is to take the brain and preserve it, but even a frozen or perfused brain may have degraded in ways that would make it hard to recover important aspects that we don't yet understand.
It is, however, fascinating to do the research required to answer these questions, and that should be funded and continue, even if just to understand the underlying biology.
(I'm just a programmer so it's fascinating to me to consider how actual brain scientists model consciousness in their work.)
Well anyway that's my airchair crackpot neuroscience theory for the world to consume ;). I'm sure there must already be a name for the idea though.
Six of the sheep were given a single higher dose of ketamine, 24mg/kg. This is at the high end of the anesthetic range. Initially, the same response was seen as with a lower dose. But within two minutes of administering the drug, the brain activity of five of these six sheep stopped completely, one of them for several minutes – a phenomenon that has never been seen before.
“This wasn’t just reduced brain activity. After the high dose of ketamine the brains of these sheep completely stopped. We’ve never seen that before,” said Morton. Although the anesthetized sheep looked as though they were asleep, their brains had switched off. “A few minutes later their brains were functioning normally again – it was as though they had just been switched off and on.”
0: https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/sedated...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/consciousness-mig...
An article suggesting that consciousness is embodied in the active fields, not the synapses themselves.
At that time we are going to be accustomed to glitching artificial minds creates, modified, bugged, debugged that current moral conundrums "is the copy me or not", "is it ok to create a hobbled copy of someone" are going to be as quaint bit akin to counting angels on a head of the pin. Mangled and molded consciousness will be as mundane as computation itself.
On the other hand, the idea of "simulating your consciousness" raises questions beyond just cognition or personality. A mechanistically perfect simulation of your brain might not be conscious at all. Spooky stuff.
But I would assume that bringing someone back would be tied to a physical or simulated body that provided a compatible context.
Not a bad assumption to solidify in your brain preservation/restoration contract.
But I usually move the hard drive (or at least its contents) between machines when I get a new computer, and that's enough for me to think of it as the "same", even if I reinstall the OS on the new machine and just copy my home directory onto the new one.
And conversely, I think Kim Stanley Robinson puts it best in the Mars trilogy. Scientific progress often has to wait for the old guard to die so new ideas can be tried. Sometimes there are actually new things and they need to be allowed to cook.
Plus there are a lot of assholes in the world. Come on, there isn’t anybody you’d enjoy watching get Ozymandias‘d? I’d enjoy it.
A scientist like Einstein experienced scientific revolutions within his lifetime. That's hardly going to be the norm in the history of science, and also a horrible assumption to think revolutions would endlessly be occurring and reoccurring.
Also, we know when we're on the edge of knowledge, especially in cosmology and physics. We're waiting for revolution there. There's dark energy and dark matter. It doesn't matter if you're old or young, you knew that your theories isn't good enough to explain whatever these are.
Scientific knowledge don't get swept away especially if they're rock solid. Newtonian physics still has a lot of relevance after all. It's just that relativity is even more accurate.
German physicist Max Planck somewhat cynically declared, science advances one funeral at a time. Planck noted “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Most people are alive right now. The population historically has been much lower, so odds are you would be born around the time high technology would support a high population.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16870579
> So what are the figures? There are currently seven billion people alive today and the Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 107 billion people have ever lived.
> This means that we are nowhere near close to having more alive than dead. In fact, there are 15 dead people for every person living.
So it is not wildly impossible that you’d be alive now, but it is fairly unlikely.
Also, hard to say what’s in the future of course, but even if population growth levels off, you’d expect to be born in the future, right? Which brings up another question, why not?
If we are going to go along on the fully ridiculous implications here and reinterpret all probabilities as conditioned on your immortality, why weren’t you born in the far future? I’d expect people born in the future to have easier access to immortality.
Maybe birth rates will go way down if we discover immortality (lowering your odds of being born later). Or maybe pre-immortality minds will be seen as more interesting and worth preserving (increasing your odds of being kept around).
Of course the nervous system is much more complex, but damage to the brain almost always result in some sort of cognitive dysfunction or personality change, see the Phineas Gage case for example.
And for the gut example the brain actually does work normally, stomach and instetines removal (and other related surgeries) are fairly common procedures and I don't hear of people complaining about personality changes. Of course, those types of procedures are extremely invasive in a sistemic way, and not only your mental state, but multiple other parts of the body need to re-adapt. But I truly believe "you" will be still be "you" inside your brain
PS.: I quoted "you" because discussions about the identity of one-self are much more complex, just regard it as the most high level definition of the concept
"There aren't any changes except for all of the changes, but those changes don't count because reasons."
I don't know how many amputees you know; you may know many. I was in the army for 10 years during the height of the global war on terror and know more than most. Not a single one is the same as they were pre-amputation. Could be the trauma that caused the amputation, could be the amputation. I'm not an amputationologist.
I do assert that a holo-techno-brain will need a shit-ton of e-drugs to deal with being amputated from its fucking body.
The bacteria in your butthole are a part of you just like your brain, maybe less, but they ARE a part of you.
Given the personality changes seen in people who go off to fight in the military and who end up coming back fully physically intact, I think it's more likely that the personality changes here were caused by the trauma, not by the amputation.
I'm not saying the latter isn't possible, but absent evidence to the contrary, it doesn't make much sense to assume the personality changes occurred because of the amputation alone.
Also consider that amputation -- even ignoring whatever trauma precipitated it -- is its own sort of trauma. I imagine if someone came up to me, perfectly physically healthy, knocked me out, and cut off my leg, I would wake up and develop emotional trauma that would cause personality changes.
Transferring our consciousness into "the net", or some other fuzzy concepts are so far removed from reality as to be complete fiction. This includes freezing our brains and reanimating them later to resuscitate our lives.
They not only massively overestimate the functionality of today's tech to receive something like our consciousnesses, but even more so, by orders of magnitude, underestimate just how complex our living bodies are.
We only have the vaguest of ideas about how our physiology works (while we might be able to replicate flesh cells for "fake meat", we have 0 understanding or control over how those cells organize to form macroscopic organs). Applying this to the brain, our understanding is even more primitive. An example would be recent news that perhaps the brain is not sterile, but hosts a microbiome. Whether or not the brain hosts a microbiome is still "controversial".
We're still hundreds of years away from a comprehensive understanding of physiology.
But of course, we're never going to live that long, because we still believe (statistically as a species) in invisible guys in outer space that tell us we need to dismember people who believe in the WRONG invisible guy in outer space.
Our primitive violent ape species will extinct itself long before we ever have a comprehensive grasp of how life works, especially to the level of understanding consciousnesses...
I think that may be true enough, but it doesn't have the upshot you seem to think it does.
It just means that what we need to sustain not just a brain itself but the totality of the environmental conditions on which it depends. No easy task for sure, but not something that presents an in-principle impossibility of preserving brains.
I think there's a major philosophical error here in thinking that the added logistics present this kind of in-principle impossibility.
Also, talking like this starts to play with anti-science speculation a bit. Octopi actually have neurons extending through their limbs. We don't. So when we talk about consciousness being "embodied", I'm sorry, it's an attempt to romanticize the question in a way that loses sight of our scientific understanding. Consciousness happens in the brain.
Sure, the brain needs stimulus from its embodied nervous system, and may even depend on those data and interactions in significant ways, but everything we know about consciousness suggests its in the brain. And so the data from "embodied" nervous systems may be important but there's no in-principle reason why it can't be accounted for in the context of preservation.
You don't have neurons extending through your limbs?
To me, excessive negativity about the possibility of immortality smacks of weakness and defeatism. You either love life and want as much of it as possible, which makes you a friend of humanity, or prefer death, which makes you an enemy of humanity. I take a stronger line than the neuroscientist in the article. “Death positivity” like that of Viktor Frankl, anti-natalism, even faith in magical spiritual resurrections—all are anti-human viewpoints, only excusable in the past because they were copes with the inevitability of death. Now that we have reason to believe it can be averted, we owe our potential future selves every possible effort to save them from oblivion.
Not just hinting - the evidence is strong and accumulating rapidly. The gut, in particular, has so many neurons that it is considered the body’s “second brain”, to say nothing about the impact that gut bacteria have on your mind.
If you really wanted to create a copy of your “mind”, you’d have to image every neuron in your body for a thoroughly accurate copy. And then accept the fact that your entire behavioural profile is then missing the input of your gut bacteria, which appears to have a significant and non-trivial impact.
And then he asks what sort of limitations might we have if our minds are software, and how would we not notice it?
Thank you for stating your source. However, ChatGPT isn’t deterministic. I asked it the same thing and it responded it depends on several factors, including the MIDI protocol version and the device or software used, and that the minimum between two messages is between 1 and 2 milliseconds.
Which of those is true? Perhaps neither. A quick web search didn’t provide a straightforward answer. Point being that we should avoid propagating even more wrong information, especially since it’s not relevant to your point (which makes sense).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42006265
https://repaer.earth/
And if we’re talking about fiction, there’s no obligation to make those lives unbearably immortal either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlcxokM970M
> Our flesh is indestructible. Our lives are never ending. But not even in the dumb vampire way where after a while you hate it and you can’t die. We can die whenever we want. We just don’t have to.
Not after Vatican II anyway.
https://qntm.org/lena
"What is this, some kind of altered carbon?"
Without death, our fragile democracies will die. Tyrants will be in power forever.
That said, I think this is all a pipe dream and totally infeasible.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53922-x https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2024/novemb...
But cessation of aging would be wonderful. I'd love to live indefinitely and not have my body or mind noticeably decay. Research like this should be done, but we need to be honest about what we're trying to accomplish. Nobody will ever escape death, and when you start getting large enough numbers, I'm not sure it would make any difference to live longer. Even if we somehow achieve brain uploading, which I don't see entails you living longer so much as making copies of yourself with different identities, every storage medium has a capacity limit. At some point, the only way to form new memories to evict old ones, and the experience of living 90 trillion years won't be any different than 1 trillion years if 1 trillion years of experience is all you can store.
That said, we need to also be humble about what is even achievable. The very idea of a high resolution scan capturing the entirety of your brain state is already science fiction. We have another home page story right now about controversy over whether the brain has a microbiome. The only reason that's a question is because we have no means of opening up a living brain to see. We can't even accurately measure a person's body fat without dissection. The limitations of non-invasive remote imaging that don't kill the animal being imaged are quite severe and constitute a large reason medicine isn't more effective than it is. There is no technology we are on a known arc toward achieving that will make it possible to capture molecular-level detail of an entire brain as it is still running. I don't see how you can base an entire research project on a premise that doesn't exist and we have no idea if it ever will exist.
In my view, there would now be two separate instances of "my" consciousness simultaneously. "I" would continue to see through the original one, but the copy would essentially feel the same as me, although increasingly diverging as our experiences would not be the same from that point.
I always think people's attitude toward possible future worlds is interesting. You can see a wide spread of opinion in this thread -- whether you think functional immortality would be a good thing says a lot about who you are. Ditto for colonizing other planets, automating all work, building AGI, and so on.
I suppose I'm on the side of the technologists. I think immortality is probably possible and humans should try to achieve it. But along the way it will mostly be snake oil and cults. And, of course, it's all but guaranteed that everyone in this thread isn't going to make the cut-off.
But I think this is the acme of selfishness. I don't want to be immortal, and I wouldn't want to live in a world with 500-year-old know-it-alls running around "oldsplaining" everything to everyone else.
I have, thankfully, a fairly good chance of dying before that happens.
"Do you want to live longer?"
"Yes"
"OH YOU WANT TO LIVE A MILLION BILLION YEARS?!?!"
There are values in between immortality and ~80 years.
They'll decide when they want to decide. Some might choose to actually live forever, and that's fine. Others will choose a more current-human type lifespan, and that's fine. Some will choose 150, some 300, some 1000, some 10,000. All of those numbers are fine.
> And how will they do it?
There are already humane forms of medical euthanasia performed in progressive places in the world; this question already has answers, and likely more will be developed over time. I don't think it's an important question or issue to discuss, as long as people have legal options.
Is it selfish when a centenarian lives past 100? Is each additional year of life obtained by a centenarian “selfishly” stolen from some hypothetical unborn self?
Life expectancy has been increasing over time, especially in the past century or so. I don't think it's credible to suggest that civilizations have progressed meaningfully slower now that people live to be 80 or so instead of only 30, which was common in recent history.
And even if immortality "stalls" humanity, so what? People matter, not technology or some amorphous concept of "progress".
I don't want to be a brain in a jar. Or in a computer either. I enjoy experiencing physical sensations and interacting with the world in meatspace. And if I can't enjoy either, then just let me die.
And I apply this to not just brain preservation, but any attempt to artificially prolong the quantity of my life at the expense of the quality of my life. I do not want to spend my last years in a hospital bed hooked up to machines and unable to move. That was how my dad died, and even then he was lucky enough his partner (who he had discussed this with before and who had the authority to make the decision) eventually agreed to switch him to palliative care in his final hours. Similarly, I have seen what chemotherapy does to people, and I have long since decided that if I ever get cancer, I will refuse chemo and let myself die. I am also having a living will drawn up that includes a DNR order, multiple scenarios where doctors will be ordered to pull the plug, and a prohibition against anyone amputating any of my limbs or sensory organs even if it's necessary to save my life.
I will make sure I die with my autonomy and my dignity intact.
[0] Al Ewing. He writes comics. Read his stuff, he's good.
> I will make sure I die with my autonomy and my dignity intact.
Amputees have autonomy, dignity, and rich lives. To believe that the loss of a limb is so severe that death is preferable is absurd and insensitive.
What if instead of requiring an amputation, he loses faculties by accident like suffering from parosmia due to COVID or having a weight crush a body part? Did he suddenly lose his dignity? He certainly lost some autonomy. What’s the next step then?
No. Denigrating someone expressing their personal opinion seems absurd. Since the commenter did not impose their opinions on other people you had to put those words in their mouth to call them insensitive.
I prefer to die with autonomy and dignity as well, meaning I would like to pull my own plug. That other people might have a different threshold, or want to die differently than I might, seems neither absurd nor insensitive. The commenter just described their threshold, they didn't judge other people.
My sentence does not judge the person, it criticises the belief. Learn to differentiate or you’ll be doomed to a life of ad hominem attacks and taking things personally.
If person A says they love spiders and person B replies they find spiders repulsive, there’s no value judgement passed on person A.
My remark was not a commentary on yourself, your world view, the author, or your approval of them. I don’t know you.
> I prefer to die with autonomy and dignity as well
Who wouldn’t? By itself that statement is meaningless. What’s in question is how one defines the terms.
I invite you to take a closer look at that quote and understand what it means to the people who live those situations. Let’s exaggerate to make a point: If someone said they refused to be treated by a black doctor even if their life depended on it, and followed up with the remark they would make sure to die with dignity, do you not see how that would be insensitive to black people? A writer, especially an ostensibly good one, would understand that basic sentence structure.
Again, that is a purposeful exaggeration to make a point. I’m not making a remark on yourself or the author, I am disagreeing with the belief.
An opinion or belief can't "be" insensitive. A person may intend to say something insensitive, another person may interpret an opinion as insensitive (as you did when dragging in amputees and people suffering from other conditions and injuries). "Insensitive" can only refer to a person's intention or another person's reaction. So calling someone insensitive for their expressed opinion does indeed judge the person.
> Learn to differentiate or you’ll be doomed to a life of ad hominem attacks and taking things personally.
Surely someone as skilled in rhetoric as yourself can see the irony of you warning me about "a life of ad hominem attacks" embedded in an ad hominem attack. Then you followed up with the implication that I don't understand "basic sentence structure." Address my actual comment rather than telling me what I need to learn and how I will get doomed for not thinking like you.
As for spiders and racists, those have nothing to do with anything in this thread. If someone says they don't want to live if they lose a limb or face chemotherapy, whether you agree with their stated choice or not, no other person or race got mentioned or implicated in the comment you replied to. Setting up a false and deliberately inflammatory analogy to make your point, equating an opinion about perceived quality of life with racism, doesn't help your argument. Try sticking with countering the arguments the commenter (and I) expressed.
Personal opinions about end-of-life care, personal autonomy, dignity have the same flavor as religious beliefs: you can't counter them with logic. Just calling someone wrong or "insensitive" or "nuts" as some other commenters have misses the mark, because the subject involves beliefs, not facts that we can argue. One can express their own different opinion, but going beyond that starts to verge into attacks on personal beliefs, which requires making assumptions about another person's faculties, judgment, and ad hominem, all of which you have deployed in your comments.
> Denigrating someone expressing their personal opinion seems absurd.
There's a difference between saying someone is foolish and saying their beliefs/opinions are foolish. The former is not what the GP did.
I don't agree. You can decide that another person's expressed opinions don't align with yours, according to what you believe and think you understand about medical outcomes. The original comment didn't mention medical outcomes so I hesitate to judge how much the commenter knows about that. And I hesitate to call someone's personal views absurd. They have opinions I may or may not share. I can't make a rational argument to prove them wrong.
A person's beliefs can't "be" foolish or even wrong. Belief by definition does not come from an objective and rational evaluation of facts and probabilities. I can say I hold different beliefs, but no more.
We most often encounter this kind of argument around religion. Someone can sincerely hold religious beliefs that don't submit to rational and objective argument. We can have different beliefs but we can't prove someone else's beliefs wrong. To call a belief that you can't argue against with reason "foolish" or wrong equals calling the person holding the belief foolish and wrong. You can show that chemo can work and people with cancer can recover. You can't say how any individual should feel about that, or how they should choose to deal with a cancer diagnosis. The original comment didn't make any statement about whether chemo works or not, or whether some people can thrive with dignity after losing a limb. Rather the original comment expressed one person's belief about how they feel about those possibilities, for their own definitions of autonomy, dignity, and quality of life.
We’re not talking about someone in pain wishing to die, we’re talking about someone vehemently arguing they would rather die than live without a limb, without having experienced it. And their reasoning is a lack of autonomy and dignity, none of which are a given.
There are literally millions of people without limbs, half a million new ones per year in the US alone. They’re not poor invalids, they’re people who adapt and can do things we only dream off while living normal lives.
I know several people who have gone through chemo and came out the other side happy and healthy, after recovery. They live full, rich lives. They are much happier living than dead.
Sure, there are some cancers where you end up with declining quality of life for months or years before you eventually die. I wouldn't fault anyone with deciding to opt out of that from the very start. But that's not what we're talking about, exclusively: the person upthread was very absolutist and rejects chemotherapy in it entirety.
I was particularly struck by:
> if I ever get cancer, I will refuse chemo and let myself die
And figured this quote must be at least 20 or 30 years ago? Cancer isn't necessarily a death-sentence, and many treatments are much less harsh than they were 20+ years ago.
The prohibition against amputation and sensory organ removal is a bit nuts too. You'd rather die than have someone remove one of your eyes or ears, or say a hand or arm or foot or leg? That is profoundly sad, and intensely insulting to anyone who has had to deal with that sort of thing and has nonetheless lived a full, rich life.
I get that many medical interventions do actually have a terrible, permanent effect on quality of life, but these seem like pretty extreme views that ignore reality.
For me the question goes beyond "Can I survive chemo (or amputation) and resume something like a normal life?" When you have to face cancer or loss of a limb or any illness or injury that threatens your life, or perceived quality of life, or dignity and autonomy, you necessarily have to think about what that means for your future. Until you get a diagnosis of (for example) cancer you don't know what it feels like, or how you will react, to the fact that no matter if you survive the treatment or not, you will always have that threat and reminder of your mortality in your conscious thoughts. You think about how you might not get so lucky the next time, how much your treatments might cost, what your illness might put your loved ones through, how far you will go to keep yourself alive even when it imposes costs and obligations on other people. And you think that maybe other people will have to make hard decisions about your future if you can't. A cancer diagnosis doesn't just affect me, in other words. If I lost a leg or arm that would impose burdens on my wife and family, affect my ability to make a living. Those thoughts more than the medical condition itself lead people to arrive at opinions such as the original commenter expressed.
Having faced my own mortality already I know I think more about how my own end of life scenarios affect other people more than how they will affect me. I worry that I will suffer a stroke, or slip into dementia, before I can pull my own plug, leaving people I care deeply about with that awful obligation, and the burden of caring for me rather than living their own life. And it's that thought, not the fear of disease or dying, that leads me to my own ideas about how much I might endure, because I won't endure it alone or without cost to others.
Who says a brain in a jar can't enjoy either of these? Who says that isn't, in fact, what you are enjoying right now?
imho if you're not lean and exercising every day you have no business talking about living longer, you've already refused the only magic pill there is. It makes all the difference between having one foot in the grave at 60 or still chopping your own fire wood at 80, and all it takes besides a bit of luck is to move your ass 45 minutes a day
People who try to solve all their problems with intellect tend to suffer from this. And many of them never learned that being in shape makes you feel a whole lot better.
Even if the tech doesn't work, I wonder how much relief from suffering the idea that it will in a hundred years could be
They don't seem to care about that, and the only rational explanation is that they don't believe there's anything after death. They're nihilists. We all are.
How our brain works may rely on more than the structure of the brain. When you are brought back (booted?), things may not work the same.
It'd make it pretty hard to get memories out of a brain sample as it's hard enough just to see the structure in an electron microscope. I don't think they have any way to log the chemical changes in the synapses presently.
The whole thing is cute, but every time I read about brains in boxes I can't help but think of this scene about grandpa's consciousness being uploaded into a cube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PUIxEWmsvI&t=88s
Used to go a little bit crazy thinking about this when watching people getting transported in StarTrek.
"Ah can I have his laptop? He's got some saved games he wanted me to have"
Imagine the ship of theseus thought experiment, but instead of replacing part by part you store it on a dry dock (lost its function), some time after you put it in the sea again (recover the function), for all effects this still is the ship of Theseus
If there's only one you at a time, neither you nor an outside observer can tell the difference.
I like to think of it this way: if life was a game would you want to play the same character forever? No.. if you’re gonna keep playing the game it’s more interesting to start from scratch now and then. I don’t believe in reincarnation. There’s no need to. What you really are deep down is an instance of humanity. Almost all your genes and all your culture comes from and is shared with other humans. Any new instance (new human) is you playing a new character, essentially. If you’ve contributed to shaping the world you’re leaving behind this is even more true.
Unless you’re believe in a soul in the christian/jewish/muslim sense I guess, but then why would you fear death?
IMO the pursuit of immortality is far more dangerous and far more likely to kill humanity than AI. At least it may make us deteriorate to insignificance. Humanity is a super organism and we have a name for the phenomenon where parts of an organism figures out how to die and yet still replicates: cancer
This is because the entire goal of the sentient consciousness is simply to preserve itself as long as possible. DNA has the essential goal of replicating itself in reproduction. Consciousness, by contrast, appears to have no goal other than self-preservation. People sometimes choose to sacrifice themselves, but usually only when death is inevitable and they wish to save someone else from it (Lily/Harry Potter and Medal of Honor type situations).
Shaw quote: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’
That isn't really true. Life expectancy was historically driven down by high infant mortality and lack of medicine. The meaningful human lifespan has been in the 70s for the majority of history. (Lifespan is different from life expectancy)
"So this strong belief of yours is really driven by advancements in society and healthcare over the last few decades."
Who says it's a strong belief?
"Why do you think that won't change drastically another few decades from now?"
Because there's no real evidence to support that. Life expectancy hasn't gone up drastically over the past 50 years. Rates of chronic illnesses, including things like dementia, have gone up drastically. So even if people are living a couple years longer, they're generally sicker and it's costing more. Even if medicine makes drastic improvements, 100 is still a lofty goal. I'd be fine making it only 80 too. I'm actually skeptical that will even happen. What I do know is that I don't want it to take more than 100 years.