Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain?
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While his time frame estimates might be sound given that context, I'd argue they're wildly inaccurate given a more likely scenario: such things will be brought into existence first via a super-intelligent agent, if at all.
If that proves to be the case, the time frame for brain uploading becomes roughly bound to the advent of AGI. When that happens, the same entity capable of creating our brain upload mechanism would likely be capable of endowing humans with effectively immortal bodies just the same.
In other words, technology like this is almost certainly going to be part of a post-singularity world (assuming there is a singularity in the first place), and who knows what that will look like.
Suppose we develop an AI that's 100x better than that, or 10 times as fast as any person as in they can do in 1 hour what it would take a highly trained and educated person 10 hours to do. Well, after a year or two they could probably be roughly as capable as a really good 20 person team due to lower communication overhead, but adding one more 20 person team is not going to change the world much. A million of them, might double the rate that the world progresses, but that's both a long time coming and probably not going to change things much.
To really get the singularity type progress, you need an AI that can make it's self smarter though better software and hardware, which seem like a far harder problem than just building a working AI. After all what if the first thousand just want to sit around and read Fan-fiction all day.
I could see someone investing in a factory to manufacture a billion of them within 10 years, once someone has demonstrated that it's possible.
Combined with the notion of computing overhang[0], it's possible that our very first AGI could far exceed human intelligence, such that it would have capacity for rapid self-improvement right from the start.
I'm not saying this will necessarily be the case; slower takeoff scenarios are certainly a possibility, albeit an unlikely one (IMHO).
Another point to consider is that computing hardware is vastly superior to the human brain both in its capacity for raw calculation, and its sheer speed in terms of raw latency.
Keeping that in mind, assume we have created an AGI simulation that's approximately equal in complexity relative to the human brain. Not intelligence, just complexity of the simulation itself.
Now consider that AGI is not bound by biological constraints, and would not necessarily be structured in similar fashion to the human brain. This lends itself to potentially far more efficient architectures, and with that, the realization of AGI at a computational cost far below that of simulating a complete human brain.
Moreover, given a completely alien architecture, it's not hard to imagine the cognitive side of such a simulation interfacing rather directly with traditional modes of computation.
To illustrate, imagine comparing a human being to an identical human being that has a microprocessor integrated into their brain. Both humans may have nearly identical capacity for abstract intelligence, but the one with the microprocessor is going to be effectively far more intelligent, simply because their capacity for dealing with raw data and calculations is vastly superior. It's not hard to imagine a similar dynamic coming into play with AGI.
Still, it's pretty easy to imagine this not resulting in the sort of "runaway" intelligence most often associated with the notion of singularity. What if general intelligence is inherently extremely computationally complex? Imagine that the level of intelligence is represented by a number n, and say that human intelligence is n=100. If the computational complexity of intelligence is, say, O(1000^n), we won't expect to see hardware that's twice as intelligent as humans any time soon even if we know the algorithm.
My main point was that either we have the computational capacity, or we do not. If we do, the chances of overshooting the human-level mark by a large margin are quite high, hence the risk.
Another angle on this is that perhaps human cognition has an unnecessarily high degree of computational complexity, a degree that's far above the threshold required for an AGI to be dangerous.
The Paperclip Maximizer[0] is an excellent example of this. Perhaps due to low computational complexity of its architecture, the thing wouldn't even be sentient in any sense of the word, and yet it'd still be perfectly capable of destroying the world.
Why? Because its initial intelligence would be determined by the amount of computing power allocated to it. Allocate enough computing power, and assuming you've passed the magic threshold, it would start allocating itself computing power in short order.
Perhaps what we should fear most is not sentient AGI capable of thought similar to humans, but AGI that's a structured amalgamation of existing AI technology—if only because the latter is far more likely to be feasible first.
Some brains will want to run on some sort of trusted infrastructure and be stored in an immutable datastore. Mine for example. Or...
Consider for a moment there will be a singularity in the future. What if it's a critical, recursive part of existence? If there is a singularity coming, it's likely to have happened before now. I'm not saying we're not experiencing it for the first time here, but maybe this is the nature of things...to be recursive in creation of a thing and then that thing eventually discovering its true nature of oneness. Maybe we're the big uploaded uni-brain already, but sliver of it chose this reality for ourselves because we can all come here and exist together separately on a somewhat level playing field. Some may choose something else for themselves eventually, like uploading their brains to...wherever this is running.
Me? I sorta like it here and want to stick around for a while.
My personal cracked-out theory is that time and space are both infinite, and thus computation is infinite. As such, our observable universe may be the result of an infinite number of ancestor simulations.
Another facet of that theory which I enjoy pondering is the notion that the supernatural may exist (souls, ghosts, reincarnation, etc)—just in a simulation layer that exists above our own, but one that is still tied to our physical universe. Inaccessible but real.
A more grim yet equally interesting twist on that would be the supernatural existing within our current physical universe, quantifiable and ultimately accessible (some day), but presently not yet discovered by science. Often all things supernatural or spiritual have a sense of morality imposed upon them, but I imagine such a finding would strongly suggest that the supernatural, if it existed, would be just as uncaring and cold as the physical universe, since it would itself part of the physical universe.
I don't see that assumption anywhere in his text, nor in any of his arguments, and I don't see how a non-human mechanism is not susceptible to any of the physical requirements that he lays out.
> technology like this is almost certainly going to be
part of a post-singularity world
Perhaps you've heard of Clarke's Third Law?
Well, isn't that the whole idea? Objectively, there is no difference. If there was, uploading wouldn't ever be possible.
The only potential difference is the subjective impression of "this consciousness that I am now is the same consciousness that I was yesterday" versus "this new consciousness is an exact clone of mine, but is not really 'me'".
This incremental upload technique simply tricks your subjective self into thinking there is absolutely no change in continuity.
In other words, your subjective consciousness is somehow changed but you can't subjectively tell? What does that even mean?
If one of your neurons randomly dies right this instant, you would probably not subjectively notice, even though that neuron composes your subjective consciousness. Your neural network is highly redundant and fault-tolerant.
It depends where those neurons were sent off to in the meantime and what they were doing, but with such a big jolt, it's quite possible they would perceive themselves as "clone" (after understanding the situation at large) while you in your new machine self would be the "original you".
[1] Greg Egan - The Jewel
I found that really fascinating as an idea. Being identical is one thing, but does being arbitrarily close to your behaviour make it you?
The deconstructionist concepts that our constituent atoms cycle through a complete change-over in less than a decade, does not equal total organ replacement with a non-biological surrogate. Those sorts of ideas sweep a grand swath of what-it-is-to-be-alive under the carpet with a sentence-long sound bite.
Replace a knee or a hip with a comparable structure of equivalent practical necessity, and that person will still be missing those body parts.
Claims such that, simply because the replacement is infinitesimally complex, that this sufficiently satisfies the requirements of "being a living human" will still be wrong.
You might enjoy a puppet that acts just like your dog, or your grandma, but it won't bring them back, or keep them alive beyond their expiration date. Put your grandma's Moravec replacement brain inside your dog's body, and tell me she's still alive.
A human without a human brain is not a human, but instead a soothing, reassuring puppet, perhaps hoisted aloft by hypothetical autonomous, and nigh-imperceptible nano-cyber-strings.
But still a lifeless corpse all the same.
How can you possibly know this? And I'll point out that no one but you has posited that the result would still be a human brain.
What do you think happens if you freeze a brain in liquid nitrogen, then safely thaw it out and restart it?
That's an ontological conundrum that's far from settled. I'd argue the information we have points to our biological intelligence not being particularly special or more "real" than other forms.
What I can tell you is that your hypothetical monstrosity there would probably play fetch and bake some really good cookies. Heck, I'd probably name it Dogma.
(Thanks for this by the way, I've long thought about this idea but didn't know it had a name.)
facing my copy, there wouldn't be a reason to feel immortal - I would die anyway, and the other guy would continue to live. so immortality for me means preserving my own instance of me, anything else is just not there. it seems to me this would be much harder to implement compared to creating a copy, so this would be available much later, and who knows with what consequences.
this is not possible in our timelines, and frankly, I don't mind. kids are good enough solution, and as previous generations made space for our, I will make some space for next ones, hoping they'll get a bit closer to stars than we did. once we settle through Milky way, our extinction on short or medium time scale should be less probable compared to single-planet situation.
Do it while you're unconscious. You go to sleep, then wake up in a different body. No existential crises needed.
If this analogy has any use as a model beyond a cursory observation then a focus on machines that solve hard problems will bear more fruit and earlier (maybe ever) than attempts to fully replicate the human brain.
Today is it possible to build an (outwardly) anatomically correct and functioning sparrow (in all respects) out of synthetic materials? I don't know but surely it is hard. To make one certainly would have been impossible for the Wright brothers.
Today we have things like the F22, A380, and little drones. Each is quite complex but the complexity accreted over time, each layer a pragmatic solution to a problem at hand.
If we take the same approach what kind of "thinking machine" might we end up with in 100 years time?
Whereas with flight the Wright brothers and before them Richard pearce understood it well enough to make an approximation and thus working implementations, we don't have anything close to that kind of understanding.
IMO the neuron pathways that exist in our physical brain are determined based on "rides of thoughts" we have taken in our life so far. But there's no visual or physical proof to locate the consciousness that does this observation and takes the ride.
So uploading brains means uploading only "the experiences" you have got in your life but as long as the rider isn't there, these are just mere memories with no further rides possible.
If consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the physical properties of the brain, then surely it will also emerge from a sufficiently accurate simulation of those physical properties.
It's possible, but it may not be the "same" consciousness, and indeed, may not even consider itself to be. Perhaps better terminology to explore this line of theory would be to replace "thoughts" with "memories" and "consciousness" with "self".
No! No body does this. People make up excuses. People spin death to be a positive, often under some guise of Deep Wisdom. People come up with all sorts of ways to cope with death, but calling any of them a solution is just false. Death is a vile, atrocious thing, the biggest enemy humanity has.
We don't say that slaves all found solutions to slavery. Or that everyone finds solutions to domestic abuse. Or solutions to dementia or Alzheimer's. Death is a far greater evil.[1] So how disgusting is it to say everyone finds a solution.
I admit the author probably didn't intend to imply this, but it's exactly that kind of thinking that we should be aware of and fight. Just because it seems inevitable, we should not make it socially acceptable to give up and view death as anything but the wickedness it is.
1: Yes there are atrocities worse than death, but many of those involve death, or are worse because of the limited timespans caused by death. Apart from having your mind destroyed, I'm guessing most things would be healed by rather long periods of time, than sufferers would prefer a period of suffering+long OK life, vs suffering+death.
One might argue that death is bad on counterfactual grounds: if a person had not died, they could still be alive and happy, and isn't that better than them not existing? But this argument leads to the Repugnant Conclusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox)! So be very careful if you take this line of argument that you understand what you are saying.
I happen to be a total-happiness utilitarian, and do accept the repugnant conclusion. But ultimately all this means is that death is a mirror-image of birth - it ceases one hopefully-happy life; birth begins one. There is grief attached to death and joy attached to birth, but apart from that there is just as much imperative to maximize births as there is to prevent deaths - and one of these is far easier. This is, however, a deeply counterintuitive position that I don't expect many others to share.
This isn't Deep Wisdom. It's just utilitarianism, taken seriously.
Unfortunately any viable technology for brain uploading would also allow bad actors to simulate huge amounts of suffering and conceal it from detection. I guess some technologies really are too scary to be released into the world, unless we can create a central benevolent overseer first.
Also, presumably in this future world, most suffering will be greatly, greatly reduced through other advances.
The experience after death is exactly the same as the experience before birth. Was it a vile, atrocious thing you weren't born until you were? Death is about returning to that state. The disintegration of your mind is the mirror image of the creation of it. A world where you have left without right, top without bottom, beginning without end is like the universe before the big bang, or the universe after the heat death, where we, you, me, and everything else, is returned to being one.
Lengthening life span? That's a different matter. But I can tell you, you will never stop death from happening. It's perfectly acceptable to accept death will happen, and more isn't always better. ;)
Heat death of the universe is definitely a problem but for a later time. I think having lifespans on the terms of millions of years or longer is qualitatively different than what we have now.
I don't find the before-birth argument very compelling. I just don't see how it's relevant.
> Since death is inevitable (either on millions of years or a decades scale)
Think of the difference even a single order of magnitude would make. The Founding Fathers would still be here to settle the arguments about what exactly they meant in this or that amendment when the Supreme Court argues guns or personhood, for instance.
They fact that you completely disregard the difference between decades and millions of years because if someone is eventually going to die anyways, it's all the same....just wow.
Would we really want that? They would be elevated to an even greater stature than they are now when they're dead, greater than what they probably wanted individual men to be in the government they devised[0]. They could become corrupted, or change their minds, so that "what the Founding Fathers wanted" becomes an actual moving target, rather than just something that can appear to change by us debating it. What's the point of writing a law if you plan to indefinitely query the writer on what they "really meant"? Why have a representative government at all, if the Founding Fathers are so great that they did everything perfectly and they are still around to run it for us?
Maybe it's better that people die, and all we're left with is our memories of them, or written statements of their ideas or accounts of their deeds. We pick up what we find useful from them, and have the freedom to discard what isn't. Every political movement has a built-in time limit based on the deaths of its most powerful leaders. Greater diversity in people and thoughts grows, because we don't have the luxury of keeping them the same forever. Many mistakes will die with their creator, and everyone else can move on.
Longer lives would amplify the negative effects of human frailties, just as you hope it would amplify the positive effects of smart and noble people. It's possible the Founding Fathers' ideas were only good for 50-100 years around their lives, and that as rigid adults they would be unable to formulate better versions for the changing world.[1]
The world would be a vastly different place without death, or with much longer lives. I think it's naive to simply assume it would be better. I've explained some reasons it could be worse, but I'm open to more detailed analysis of why it would be better (for humanity collectively, not just the recipients of longer lives.)
[0] Though to be fair, maybe they would have thought differently if they planned to live hundreds, thousands of years.
[1] Assuming immortal or very long-lived people become "set in their ways" as we do now. How much of this is internally self-generated, based on watching our "biological clock" tick away? To be fair, maybe we would behave differently in this respect if we had more time. Or, maybe we would just reach peak open-mindedness (or whatever the metric) at 300 years instead of 30.
Presidents have 4 year terms. Why can't people have 80 years where they're allowed to vote, and then lose that right forever? Or maybe they can be sent to a separate society where they're permitted to vote and debate things that apply to their own sphere, but must still follow universal laws set by a "central society", to prevent deeply immoral actions. For example, maybe alcohol is permitted to be permanently illegal in their society, but they still aren't allowed to lynch people or prosecute people without due process.
These are certainly very difficult problems to solve, and there are many counter-arguments to that particular. But I think there are solutions to these issues other than death, and I think many of those solutions are much preferable to death.
A society that adapts to become biologically immortal will find their own ways to adapt to dealing with zeitgeists and progress.
I don't think so. That is just wishful thinking. Our current society cannot even produce leaders who are remotely capable of solving current problems. And a group of immortals, once in power, cannot be trusted to not try to remain in office indefinitely using the powers they already have. They can subtly influence society and people with their power so that they can continue in power without actually rigging the elections..
However, I think the benefits of life longevity are very serious, and if we can overcome some of the issues they cause, we should do everything in our power to find new ways to extend life longer and longer (or at least provide it as an option for people).
In the next 100+ years when this starts looking a little more feasible, hopefully people will have better perspective and insight into these issues, and will establish ways of allowing society to progress and not be anchored by a group of early-immortal voters, legislators, or perhaps tyrants.
I think that the adaptation phase would be a very turbulent one,because we would experience the giant gap between reality and our heritage. Most our motivators, values and culture in general are founded around the idea that we do not have that much time (think about stuff like taking care of others, parenthood, work-life balance, achievements etc.) Without the time constraints many of these would become obsolete. But they're "hard wired" inside our organisms. And would cause problems just like adrenaline rushes and other (once useful) reactions to stress cause problems today.
Fantastic points. I was about to type something along the same lines when I saw your reply. You said it much better than I could have.
Death is bad, it's scary and meaningless, and we construct really complex and elaborate excuses to deal with it.
> do you want to die?
No. I also want an infinite supply of resources (for me, and for everybody else, why not), the ability to experience any scenario I can dream up with any people I want even if they don't want it, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. The inevitability of death is perhaps a classic denial, but there are infinite other ways you can't always have what you want. (At the risk of sounding defeatist, trite, and in favor of The Order of Things.) If you could wave a wand and force any person to love you, would it be meaningful? If you were guaranteed to get whatever you wanted in any other sphere? Maybe I'm rambling here, but the point is, how will removing death solve all the other problems that come with billions of autonomous agents with generally incompatible wills existing together in a single, inherently meaningless universe with (probably) immutable physical laws and finite time, matter, and energy?
OK, so solving death is an incremental improvement, and thus may be worth it to some... but perhaps I've described a reason not everybody is going to be obsessed with it -- it's just one form of a vastly large general problem.
Also, I'm wondering what "more people car[ing]" about eradicating death would look like to you. The article discusses "digitizing the brain", there are thousands of scientists and dollars spent on eradicating certain cancers and other diseases, and many other sciences that could be applied to this problem. You're welcome to fund/conduct your own research, but apparently other people have more pressing concerns.
> OK, so solving death is an incremental improvement, and thus may be worth it to some... but perhaps I've described a reason not everybody is going to be obsessed with it -- it's just one form of a vastly large general problem.
You answered it yourself. It won't. Removing death will just solve the problem of death. But having more time to live and study would probably be a big step in the direction of solving other problems.
> I also want an infinite supply of resources (for me, and for everybody else, why not), the ability to experience any scenario I can dream up with any people I want even if they don't want it, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence.
Well, you can't get absolutely everything you imagine, but that doesn't mean it's not worth going after things you can. Getting rid of death is something we could get. Full omniscience and omnipotence maybe not, but a subset of it is something worth aiming for, and personally I am going to try. That's what science and technology is for - multiplying our power, both collective and individual.
I don't think making people immortal would "prevent change" because there are plenty of kinds of change that don't involve ending a person's life without their consent. Is that not obvious?
That boils down to "life is stuff happening", which is true, useless, and does nothing to answer the question posed. It is trivially obvious that it's impossible to stop all death, or even all human death, so I think it's also obvious that what's being talked about is not the elimination of death, but the elimination of the current main cause of death, which is aging.
Just because it seems inevitable, we should not make it socially acceptable to give up and view death as anything but the wickedness it is.
As I said before,
Lengthening life span? That's a different matter.
In other words, I think there is no real difference of opinion, just a difference in terms making it seem so. This appears to have been exacerbated slightly through your flowery description of your point, which I take to be: "Death of is impossible to stop in the end, and giving the false impression that it is may be harmful. That said, if we can retard it in humans to a large degree, that's useful. Additionally, death serves a useful purpose in many systems, so we shouldn't lose sight of this."
>The experience after death is exactly the same as the experience before birth. Was it a vile, atrocious thing you weren't born until you were? Death is about returning to that state.
This argument never really re-assured me. I know it's most likely the case that that's what happens, but it brings me no peace of mind. The issue is not the state transition or the fear of "where I will be". My issue is the permanent loss of all potential future utility to oneself, to loved ones, and to the world at large. Before I was born, there was no concrete potential. After you are already alive, you are forever erasing proven potential.
This is why it can be ethical to kill an early-stage zygote, but it isn't ethical to kill an infant.
It is important to accept what is and isn't possible, but this discussion hypothesizes a world where what isn't possible can actually be possible. And in that world, I think biological immortality (no death by aging or disease) is far preferable to mortality. I think death is a powerful evil in this world, except in cases where someone chooses to die of their own free will.
> there are plenty of kinds of change that don't involve ending a person's life without their consent
Is "without consent" another reference to murder, or just the fact that most people don't want to die? I assume the latter. How do you know that the kinds of change that do happen, aren't mostly because death as we know it exists and subtly influences all our decisions? Maybe there really would be less change without death.
As for "death is good" vs. "death is necessary", I disagree and it looks to me that "necessary" comes out of trying to come to terms with the fact it's inevitable. You could argue in the past in the same way that diseases are necessary for various reasons, and yet we decided to cure them instead, invented antibiotics and hygiene and other medicine.
> Clearly there's a difference between a body becoming frail vs. somebody intentionally fatally injuring it.
Comparing to murder may not be the best. Try comparing to accidents. Both dying of old age and of an accident is unintentional. Yet as a society we accept the former while rejecting the latter. This is strange and IMO happens only because we know we can prevent accidents, but we don't know how to prevent aging. Yet.
We'd already know if more people cared instead of delegating the problem to deities or thinking it's Good to die because it's the Natural Order of Things.
And it's socially acceptable for people to choose that. People ought to be allowed to delegate the problem to deities, and they ought to be allowed believe in a myth for death, and allowed to believe it's part of the natural order of things.
We should never make it socially unacceptable.
This planet can feed many more people than it does now, without famines. But there is a limit, and looking how most people just don't care about these things as long as they get their paycheck and can watch their favorite TV show, let's be realistic.
Honestly, I don't see what's all the fuss with death - I am atheist/agnostic, so no hope for some eternal afterlife (but happy to be proven wrong :)). But in no way I find it disturbing or worrying, just human business as usual (there have been roughly 120 billions of human deaths already, and I am not special anyhow). It's actually quite nice to be perfectly OK with death internally, it brings peace with oneself and the world on more than one level.
On the disease comparison, admittedly I was only thinking of viral and bacterial disease. Death is much like a genetic disorder we all have. On the other hand, isn't "health" usually defined as how a "normal" person's body works? If death is normal, then it can't be a disease. OK, enough semantic games. ;) I still see a qualitative difference between keeping a body healthy enough that it doesn't die until that universal process wears it down vs. something earlier.
I'm not sure I agree with the idea that society accepts death and rejects accidents. Is the grief of accidental death really universally distinguishable from that of old age or illness? On both sides, you'll have anger/sadness it happened so soon, or reluctant acknowledgement that it was going to happen some day and we can't predict it or prepare.
(The following is somewhat OT in the context of "uploading the brain":) On grievous injury, I don't know if commenters have been including vastly improved ability to recover from those in "immortality." I wonder though, if fatal injury were the only way to die, would it cause people to lock themselves away in a bubble to live forever, rather than risk dying? Maybe in the first stages of the science, the body will still get frailer as the years pass, so that sudden accidental death becomes more likely the longer you live. Would such an eternal sheltered existence, lived in constant fear of losing it one day, be worth having? If not, why do you want it? If so, why is it really that different than what you already have? After 1,000 years are you going to say "I've accomplished enough, experienced enough, that I am now more comfortable with possibly dying than I was when I was 25."?
Presumably the likelihood and number of possible accident scenarios will decrease over time, so maybe most people won't worry too much. Murder could still be a big fear/threat though.
> I'm not sure I agree with the idea that society accepts death and rejects accidents. Is the grief of accidental death really universally distinguishable from that of old age or illness? On both sides, you'll have anger/sadness it happened so soon, or reluctant acknowledgement that it was going to happen some day and we can't predict it or prepare.
The difference is that an accident is treated as an unnecessary death. After it happens, changes are introduced to improve safety and to make sure such accident doesn't happen again. Yet in case of aging, we're just accepting death and moving forward, and only few of us ask how we could make so that such deaths don't happen anymore.
As for your last paragraps - I don't think that longer lifespans will necessarily make people more risk-averse than they're already are. Why would someone choose a sheltered life having 1000 years in front of him and not choose such life having perspective for only 50 more years? I would expect people to start caring about (what we now call) long-term effects of decisions because the consequences would come within the lifetime of the decision maker.
You have a time on this earth. When it is up, you make way for new generations. What is atrocious about it? What is atrocious and vile is the longing of some people for living indefinitely. We have a name for things that does not die and multiply uncontrollably. Cancer. Human beings are already cancerous in nature by their disregard/disrespect for everything that has been given by nature. Now you want to perpetuate that indefinitely by not dying?
>Just because it seems inevitable, we should not make it socially acceptable to give up and view death as anything but the wickedness it is.
Socially acceptable? Death? You put it as some kind of social custom that we obediently follow.
>People spin death to be a positive, often under some guise of Deep Wisdom.
Deep wisdom? How much wisdom do you need to see that the resources are limited? Human beings have no right to even want to live indefinitely until they have figured out how to live the limited time we got here without fighting and killing each other, how to live and expand without reckless destruction of nature/environment, how to expand life to other worlds, planets etc etc.
Because we do. We mourn and go on, and we expect to obediently die when our time is up. Your whole comment is the reflection of that custom.
If it weren't for it, then any reasonable human would be doing everything in their power to get rid of death entirely. As a civilization we'd be probably already done, but we aren't, because almost everyone is used to death as a "natural order of things" and/or delegates ending it to a deity.
> Human beings have no right to even want to live indefinitely until they have figured out how to live the limited time we got here without fighting and killing each other, how to live and expand without reckless destruction of nature/environment, how to expand life to other worlds, planets etc etc.
Human beings have all the rights they give themselves, there's no external entity to tell us what we're allowed or not allowed to do. Maybe you want to die. Go ahead then, nobody will stop you. But I, and many others, don't. Living is better than being dead. And it doesn't mean being in conflict with limits of our planet, maybe if people lived longer than ~80 years they'd actually start thinking about the long run, since they'd have a stake in it. Part of the reason we're exploiting the planet so much is that because we're not going to be around to see the consequences.
It is. That you don't like it doesn't make a difference.
We are the first beings on this planet with capability to transcend it all. We invented aspirine, got rid of smallpox, are in progress of eliminating polio, and we do our best to limit war and destructive competition. We're the first living things to decide what's Good and what's Bad, and we know that natural order of things is not Good, it's just the default.
Ok. But human beings are horribly short sighted. Something that may appear beneficial in the short term and on a small scale. but may turn out to be horrible in the long term and on a larger scale.
We have eliminated some diseases. But we have also created new, much horrible and powerful ones. We have discovered antibiotics, but that have also created disease causing agents that are resistant to them.
When ever we change something fundamental, that has resulted in the creation of much bigger evil. I think this is because we don't have capability to see the whole picture. We look at a small portion of it and think. "hey, we can make it better". But ends up messing up the bigger picture making it grotesque. So my point is, this is not an easy decision that should be made so lightly.
> When ever we change something fundamental, that has resulted in the creation of much bigger evil.
I disagree with the assertion. Sure, sometimes we screwed things up big time (e.g. climate), but sometimes the change really was for the better. For instance, even though we're facing super-germs, life is much better for everyone than before we had antibiotics. Sure, we may end up defeated by the resistant germs, but it's not certain - that's why we have to push science and technology further, develop new methods like bacteriophages, because we can keep up with nature and have it our, better way.
> I think this is because we don't have capability to see the whole picture. We look at a small portion of it and think. "hey, we can make it better". But ends up messing up the bigger picture making it grotesque. So my point is, this is not an easy decision that should be made so lightly.
That I will agree with. We often suck at seeing the bigger picture. That doesn't mean we're screwed, because a lot of things can be dynamically adjusted and fixed as needed, but it does mean we should be careful with significant interventions into established systems. Death itself, for instance, is something that underpins a lot of our social structures and systems, so it is something we need to be extra careful about, but it doesn't mean we can't, or shouldn't change it.
If it is the former (which I really doubt), then longer lives can help. Or else, it will be just the same.
A more realistic answer might be publically funded companies are answerable to the masses (people who buy shares), and the masses only care about the quarterly reports. And again, longer lives will not help much here. Because you buy a share for you to make a profit out of it. Even if the public is fully aware of the environmental issues, I am not sure people will take that into consideration while buying shares.
Again, longer lives won't help us there.
The level of trust that I'd require is pretty high. You could imagine it once again being relevant to check the pedigree of a company. Ideally there'd be a cloud provider already running now that is known for its trustworthiness. 'established 2013' might actually mean something one day.
My main hope is for indistinguishability encryption to reach the level where I wouldn't really have to trust the provider, but as long as you pay a significant performance penalty you're going to end up massively disadvantaged.
One should note that he says people shouldn't expect to just sit down and read a book, but should use a pencil and paper to help figure things out. Though that doesn't apply so much to Permutation City, it does to other stuff like Orthogonal and Incandescence. (From what I've heard Schild's Ladder, too).
Even though I don't think it will ever happen I enjoyed reading the hard science fiction novel "Hegemony" by Mark Kalina. It presents an interesting vision of what life would be like in the far future with mind uploading.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/atomicnovel.php
Agreed, seemingly simple processes like photosynthesis cannot be effective without considering the quantum weirdness at play. Certainly the human brain, one of the most complex systems known to us would also heavily rely on something so foundational as quantum majesteria.
And you have a strong reason to believe that emulating or implementing those quantum effects in a structure other than the human brain is impossible?
As a secondary argument - if an reacts to all stimuli and behaves in all ways exactly as the corresponding human would, claiming that it "lacks the essence of a person's mind" prompts a pretty obvious (and well-considered) question.. how do I know you're not just an essence-less entity that acts exactly like a Real Human would act?
Or are you claiming that correct emulation of a human's behavior is impossible, because 'quantum'?
There isn't a theoretical way (yet) to measure and store the whole electrical state either - why bring quantum mechanics into it?
1) P = NP or something almost equally amazing is possible algorithmically, and nature found it.
2) quantum computing
So I definitely concur.
I don't think we know enough about consciousness to even speculate usefully about it.
See e.g.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/1114444...
And I think uploading has become a bit of a cliche now. If brain copying were possible, then brain merging and direct experience/memory sharing would likely be possible too.
What if instead of worrying about uploading brains for individual survival, we started turning into a connected colony organism? We already are in physical ways, but our consciousness is lagging behind.
Many (maybe most, maybe even all) agents will still desire fundamental autonomy and privilege/consciousness separation, though. Perhaps humans may eventually all be set up with a "dual-homed" network, but there will be many humans who won't want to disconnect from their original LAN. And to do that, there needs to be a way of uploading what they were initially given and subjectively "switching" to that upload.
At the least, the option needs to be there, I think. I think entirely merging your mind into a "hivemind" is a form of death, even if it's something less bad than conventional death. People can choose to do that if they wish it, but those who do not want to to should still have other alternatives.
Firstly our perceived autonomy and freedom of choice is an illusion. Humans are more similar than different, and if we were genuinely individualistic we wouldn't be nearly as primed to create collaborative social structures such as countries and corporations - which can be so anti-individualistic they regularly create significant individual harm or death.
Secondly, there seems to be a trend in evolution towards greater collaborative complexity at the expense of individual organisms.
So I think we're at the pre-Cambrian soup phase of consciousness, with a few random and not very coherent evolutionary structures emerging from a mess of interactions and acting in rather blind and unsentient ways.
A conscious network would be a reasonable extrapolation, and if it was stable it would have the potential to be self-aware at a higher level.
This would maybe involve wearing a camera 24/7 to record everything we see and hear, and also some feedback on our own inner thoughts and our own recording of our emotional responses to things. When we finally die, a computer crunches all this data using neural networks to create a consciousness based on our life experiences and emotional responses.
This would initially be maybe not fantastic, but as technology progresses the crunching of the source data improves and every decade a new iteration of our consciousness can be produced, hopefully coming closer and closer to the real us.
Then there is the network of vasculature, the flow of cerebrospinal fluid, interactions with hormones, and just generally all the interfacing with other bodily systems. All this would have to measured and modelled somehow too, in addition to all the billions of neurons.
I agree with the author, there's no way all this is going to solved any time soon.
If it's completely overwriting your brain's current state, then you're replacing yourself with someone similar to you but who'll be _obviously_ different to anyone who knows you.
If it's more a merge scenario, then you're (effectively) killing yourself and the copy, and maybe the copy won't want to rejoin you if it means losing its own distinct state.
Continuity of consciousness is weird to think about.
>While progress is swift, no one has any realistic estimate of how long it will take to arrive at brain-size connectomes. (My wild guess: centuries.)
It's not so hard to estimate. Just extrapolate progress on scanning, computing etc. About 2050 plus or minus a couple of decades. We had a 20um scan in 2013 and you'd probably want to get that down to 20nm for a connectome so if you assume resolution doubling every couple of years that would be about 2035.
(2013 scan: http://io9.com/see-the-first-ultra-high-resolution-3d-scan-o...
Images showing neural connections: http://book.bionumbers.org/how-big-is-a-synapse/)
Of course as the article points out a connectome misses a lot of chemical detail.
>It will almost certainly be a very long time before we can hope to preserve a brain in sufficient detail and for sufficient time that some civilization much farther in the future, perhaps thousands or even millions of years from now, might have the technological capacity to “upload” and recreate that individual’s mind.
Or quite possibly we can do it just now for $30k or so by sticking the body in liquid nitrogen. (http://www.cryonics.org/membership/ ). Maybe that won't work but maybe it will.
A new, entirely different technology is far more likely than creeping improvements, as in semiconductors. However, these are far harder to predict.
Facebook AI research is probably playing with such models right now.
If this can be scaled to human-like learning remains to be seen, but training a conversation RNN model that remembers some details of past conversations and acts on them should be possible.
This article sounds a lot like SOMA the video game. brain scans, uploading your brain, etc http://somagame.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Great-Mambo-Chicken-Transhuman-Conditi...
Very interesting book.
Why's that?
To demonstrate the nonlinearity of these models there was an experiment http://www.pnas.org/content/105/9/3593.full where researchers excluded a single spike from the large scale brain simulation. The global state of simulation has diverged after 100 timesteps, compared to the version where this spike was present.
Thank you for your response.
Assuming it works well why not keep in touch with the loved ones. Funerals are so gloomy. Why not an upload party? You could make the virtual environment like the versions of heaven in the various religious books and have that stuff for real rather than make believe.
It could not properly deal with the problem of my moral imperfection.
Also, a computer would have only finitely many states, so it would only delay death, not prevent it, as having the same exact mental state an infinite number of times would, I think, be indistinguishable from having it only once.
Feel free to skip it, then, but many others want the option.
> It could not properly deal with the problem of my moral imperfection.
Morals depend on the ability to empathize, evaluate the effects of your actions on others, and act accordingly. So, you can indeed give yourself the tools to become far more moral.
> Also, a computer would have only finitely many states, so it would only delay death, not prevent it, as having the same exact mental state an infinite number of times would, I think, be indistinguishable from having it only once.
There's a huge amount of theory on how fun and novelty work with enhanced cognitive ability, with many potential solutions to that problem.
Beyond that, long before we deal with the finite number of interesting mental states, we'll have to deal with the heat death of the universe. Given a few billion years to work on both problems, I think we'll manage a solution. I'm far more concerned about whether we can solve mortality before the next existential threat to humanity than about whether we can solve problems like the heat death of the universe in billions of years.
Also, I'm not a consequentialist; I don't think morality is entirely determined by what impacts the choices have on others.
I'm not saying that it would be bad to extend life in this way, only that it would not be the same as what I believe is after life here.
And it would not be an end to death.
> There's a huge amount of theory on how fun and novelty work with enhanced cognitive ability, with many potential solutions to that problem.
I am not speaking of becoming merely bored. Mere entertainment is nothing much.
I am speaking of one's experiences ceasing to have an after which one can distinguish from one's before.
I am speaking of death, of ceasing to be * .
A finite state machine must either reach the same exact state more than once (in which case it cannot distinguish whether it is the first time it has entered that state or not, as that would be part of the state), or it must halt. And if it does reach the same exact state more than once, there is no difference for it whether it reaches a state a third time or not. If its experiences map 1 to 1 with its state, then its experiences have a finite length corresponding to something not more than its total number of states.
(If you don't find this convincing, I expect I could provide a more convincing argument based on secret sharing schemes.)
Current understanding of physics includes the Bekenstein bound. I see no justification for your apparent belief that a problem with the Bekenstein bound will be found. If the understanding of the Bekenstein bound is correct (and I see no reason to assume that it is not), then to have an unlimited lifespan in the universe, one's volume must increase without bound. This is of course, a very slow rate of expansion, with the lower bound being something like, your radius has to be at least sqrt(log(age × K_1) + K_2), where K_1 and K_2 are some constants.
I see no reason to expect that the Bekenstein bound will be broken, and not replaced with something at least similar.
* rather, ceasing to be/live in the universe as it is, which I think you would consider to be what death is.
This goes beyond consequentialism. Purely saying that the ends justify the means can lead to some really broken morality, mostly because people don't normally count everything as "ends" that should be.
Of course, knowing all the consequences of an action doesn't, prevent you from knowingly doing something wrong anyway. And I certainly agree that increased cognitive function does not automatically imply increased morality, let alone perfect morality. (Assuming the value system in use can usefully define the latter at all.)
> A finite state machine must either reach the same exact state more than once (in which case it cannot distinguish whether it is the first time it has entered that state or not, as that would be part of the state), or it must halt. And if it does reach the same exact state more than once, there is no difference for it whether it reaches a state a third time or not. If its experiences map 1 to 1 with its state, then its experiences have a finite length corresponding to something not more than its total number of states.
I understand your argument. First, however, note that that applies to an entirely self-contained system, devoid of external stimulus; you can't necessarily evaluate a single mind in isolation, so you'd have to account for the state of the entire state machine that handles all consciousnesses and their interactions. Second, your consciousness and continued awareness/existence does not depend on having novel states in a state machine; if you've ever re-read a book purely for fun, without expecting to get anything new out of it, you can perhaps imagine finding the same state satisfying more than once. And third, the sheer number of states here dwarfs the age of the universe by myriad orders of magnitude; beyond just "age of the universe" problems, you'd have to start asking "what form does life take when it spans the course of that many eons?".
While I can see a parallel between this problem and the existential failure mode of becoming a wirehead, I see massive and fundamental differences there as well.
In short, I don't find this even remotely problematic compared to not existing at all. And given the current rate at which we permanently lose sapient minds, I see a strong argument for fixing that now and taking eons to think about some of the other problems, rather than using it as a reason to not improve the situation due to lack of perfection in the solution.
> Current understanding of physics includes the Bekenstein bound. I see no justification for your apparent belief that a problem with the Bekenstein bound will be found.
That a finite space can contain only a finite entropy seems obvious. We don't, however, yet know that the universe is finite, or self-contained, in either space or time.
Have you seen religious beliefs about the afterlife? Actually attempting such a virtual environment will wind up being the nail in the coffin for religious belief in a bodily afterlife, because it will be unenjoyable and ridiculous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_Transhumanist_Associati...