What a Digital Afterlife Might Be Like
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
What would be needed is some way of merging yourself with a digital replica of your brain while you're still alive. I can't even begin to imagine what that would be like.
What about this experiment:
1. We copy your brain into a computer.
2. We turn the computer on.
3. We shoot you.
Would you expect that when you get shot, you'll 'wake up' inside the computer? If so, by what mechanism? If not, how does this case differ from the first?
Alternatively, what if we copy your consciousness into another sleeping organic brain, and wake up both of you. What makes the new copy, but not the old one 'you'?
The hardware already runs a Matrix like software. You just wake up as you wake generally after sleep. You won't even notice you've lost your biological body. Or anything strange at all! Except for whatever you've asked for. If you've asked a private disney land for yourself, you might wake up there!
At this time, your biological body is irrelevant.
The point of view of your body ends when it is anesthetized. That's the definition of "anesthetize" that I'm using here - a reversible cessation of consciousness. (Of course, if you woke it up rather than kill it, it would continue from that point on, and then there would be two of you, one in the computer, one out, whose experiences would then diverge.)
"The copy is in no way privileged."
Never said it was. Just the opposite, in fact. Neither the copy nor the body is privileged.
"What about this experiment: ... Would you expect that when you get shot, you'll 'wake up' inside the computer? If so, by what mechanism? If not, how does this case differ from the first?"
No, the other copy of you would wake up in the computer at step 2, not step 3. At that point there would be two entities with identical histories that then begin to diverge (like a git branch). Anything experienced by the physical body after step 1 would be erased after step 3, so there would be a death of a sort involved in this scenario. The anesthetization/euthanasia steps don't do anything special or magical, they just prevent that divergence from occurring.
"Alternatively, what if we copy your consciousness into another sleeping organic brain, and wake up both of you. What makes the new copy, but not the old one 'you'?"
Nothing. You're both you (though one of you is probably more confused than the other.) We're running up against the limits of the English language, which is why correct statements can sound so absurd. We just don't have the right pronouns for this type of consciousness split.
Let me put it to you this way: Suppose that there was some sort of sufficiently-indistinguishable-from-magic device that actually "transferred" you (whatever that means to you) from an organic brain to a digital afterlife. How would the experience of that be distinguishable to you from the anesthetization/euthanasia scenario I originally described? What would be the difference, as far as the digital consciousness is concerned?
There are now two versions of "you". That's the point of making a copy.
After seeing Primer, I decided I probably wouldn't have to worry about an exact duplicate of myself ever kidnapping or murdering me, or vice versa. But then I played Bioshock Infinite and realized that it would no longer be an exact duplicate after the divergence point, so maybe I would have to worry, and think about what might cause me to turn against me.
So I'm definitely having wires plugged into my head before I die, rather than resorting to having my brain exhaustively scanned so that some emulated copy can go around pretending to be me after I'm dead (or while I'm alive). And if I ever do the latter, I'm definitely adding a feature similar to "reinitialize MAC address" when cloning a VM. If I'm ever going to wake up in a featureless white room surrounded by me, I want every last one of me to know our own serial numbers, so we can all follow my personality differentiation plan.
But no matter what, I'm definitely giving my original meat-body at least a 10% discount on whatever it is that I do, for as long as it can manage to last. I'm remembering that now, so I'd better uphold my end of the deal, if I happen to end up being a digital copy later.
To me a copy that "believes it is the same person as you were" is as good as it gets. How would you tell the difference?
Every morning when I wake up I am who I am because I believe so. If someone had scanned me last night while I was asleep and created a digital copy of my mind in a virtual, identical world, I wouldn't know. And if I was told someone was there and was capable of doing it, I could not even be sure he did not (seems like the same assertion, but it's not quite).
People who say "it's just a copy" are suggesting there is a difference between two things they have absolutely no way to tell apart, not even in a thought experiment.
They're chasing ghosts.
I see this as "well, yes, obviously, because there's no continuity of identity between the two".
If I die and a perfect copy lives on, the copy is well-suited to preserve my legacy, but it's still not me.
In short 'you' can live only at one place at a time. At any given point in time only one 'you' can be active.
Or its also possible that the 'you' we describe here is just everybody else, and just gets a different shape because of individual experiences. More : http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
No: one is right, and the other believes he is right but is wrong.
The complication is that each thinks of himself as "I". But that only matters if you think of "I" as something separate, magical, not bound by the ordinary constraints that make it possible to distinguish things from other things. In other words: mind/body duality. Which, if true, negates the whole concept of brain uploading, both because you can't capture a soul merely by copying the meat it animates, and because you don't need to.
You're talking about something you can't tell whether it is the case or not. It's an illusion.
A copy is not just a copy. It's as good as it gets.
* Are you a specific arrangement of atoms. If so, then you are constantly dying and being reborn.
* Are you a specific arrangement of neurons? If so you die and are reborn every time a memory is created or a brain cell dies.
* Are you an uninterrupted process of consciousness that evolves from one state to another? If so, you die and are reborn every time you fall asleep.
* Are you your soul? Give me a rigorous definition of soul.
Here's a question: What if, instead of a digital copy, an exact physical copy of your body and brain was constructed (down to the subatomic level) and then I woke you both up at once. Is one of you you and the other not? What if I didn't tell you which one was which?
"Identity" is a human abstraction, not a fundamental physical quality. We're examining hypothetical areas where that abstraction leaks.
> Here's a question: What if, instead of a digital copy, an
> exact physical copy of your body and brain was constructed
> (down to the subatomic level) and then I woke you both up at
> once. Is one of you you and the other not? What if I didn't
> tell you which one was which?
Identical twins are a real world example of this. At one point, they are the same organism and split into essential two identical entities. They are two unique individuals. At the point of splitting, their identity diverges.
Which is precisely the question your parent commenter asked here. What do you exactly mean by the term 'you' or 'identity'?
If I go to bed and my copy goes out to party, I can't say I experienced a party. Friends can say netsharc experienced a party, since the copy will behave 100% like me. If they ask "is that really you?", my copy will believe he is, he has my/his memory, etc... even if he asks himself if he is me, he will say yes. But I still would have missed the party!
Another theory asks you to consider this scenario: every week/month, they replace 1% of your brain with its equivalent, identically functioning electronic part. After 1 week, your brain is 99% biological and 1% electronic. Surely you'll still feel like the normal you. What happens after 100 weeks? And what will happen if the data in that electronic brain is uploaded to the cloud/a robot? Or copied to another e-brain?
Your copy can. Her experience is as real as yours, and from her point of view, everything happened exactly as if her consciousness had been transferred from the original body to the copy. To me she's just as legitimate as you are to use the word "I" : both points of view are two different future versions of what was "you" before the copy was created. I don't privilege any.
Yes.
> If so, you die and are reborn every time you fall asleep.
No. That's a silly claim; the brain doesn't literally shut off during sleep, and I am not composed of only conscious processes.
Fine then, cryosleep. Total biologically-inert suspended animation. Would that change your answer?
A durable process, running on a human brain, that refers to itself in the first person singular and has a nasty habit of assuming it's the whole point of the exercise. (And which does something like checkpointing so that, when it crashes and comes back up, it can restore some state and pretend it's the same process as it was at last checkpoint.)
This process can be impaired or disabled entirely, whether permanently by brain lesions or temporarily by transcranial magnetic stimulation. "I" can be made to believe it is dead, or to cease functioning entirely. Curiously, this does not result in the state commonly described as "unconsciousness" - itself a telling choice of name. Humans in this state remain aware of their environments and exhibit executive and cognitive function. While cognition is often somewhat deranged and maintenance of the body lacking, the possibility is quite real that humans can, and perhaps do, function perfectly well without any self-awareness whatsoever.
I find this idea disquieting, but then of course I would, because it suggests "I" am far from the irreducible essence "I" like to imagine "myself" to be, and indeed this body might function more to both its own benefit and that of society if "I" did not exist at all.
The instinct toward self-preservation appears to inhere in consciousness as well as in the organism entire, so of course it makes sense that consciousnesses should fancy the idea of preserving their existence, even as copies with no ongoing continuity of identity past the point of duplication, at a frankly astonishing resource investment with its concomitant opportunity cost. Nonexistence is after all the ultimate terror for something whose most fundamental verity is the basically egotistical axiom that it exists. But the very fact that this idea of self-preservation at ruinous cost seems other than prima facie absurd to consciousness is in itself perhaps evidence that consciousness is maladaptive.
Assume that over time, you go to the neuroscientist, and they replace a very small part of your brain with artificial technology of some sort. But they do so in a way that you can not tell the difference.
You repeatedly do this, until there is no natural substances left in your brain.
If you like, you can continue with all other body parts.
Is it not you?
The problem is that some people privilege one branch of the "Y", not that one is continuous and not the other. They both are.
That's some strange definition of originality. By this definition you are not yourself any moment because the atoms in your body are being replaced wholesale one-for-one every few months/years.
This is really: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
If they took part of the ship and used it to build a new ship, and rebuilt the parts they took with new wood, they wouldn't call the new ship the same ship as the old ship.
So it's perfectly fine to identify as the continuous stream of awareness, and are perfectly justified to state that a break in that continuity would constitute creation of a new person rather than a continuation of the current one.
They don't call it anything. That is precisely the paradox here.
The pace is irrelevant because after time duration X, for whatever value of X the ship is not the same as before, or is it? We don't know!
No, you don't die. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_death explains why.
> You don't get to experience longevity. What would live on is a copy of yourself that believes itself to be the same person as you were. Your yourself would have no continuity of thought.
Do you have continuity of thought before and after you undergo general anesthesia?
Perhaps, perhaps not - but it does remove any uncertainty, doesn't it? At least with general anesthesia we can say that there is continuity of process and form; with 'digital afterlife', we don't even have that - you've been extinguished and your electronic doppleganger lives happily ever after. 'Digital afterlife' resolves any epistemelogical ambiguity but not in a happy way - it isn't you - we know that.
Seems like a pretty lousy afterlife. I'd rather just be remembered.
To quote: “Paul struggled to imagine the outside world on his own terms, but it was almost impossible. Not only was he scattered across the globe, but widely separated machines were simultaneously computing different moments of his subjective time frame. Was the distance from Tokyo to New York now the length of his corpus callosum? Had the world shrunk to the size of his skull – and vanished from time altogether, except for the fifty computers which contributed at any one time to what he called ‘the present’?”
Whatever will run 'yourself' will also have a way of having that run in a electronic simulation of your body in whatever wonderland you wish to live in digitally.
In reality there's simply no way around it, we're going to die someday because these chunks of meat degrade. If you accept that which I readily admit I haven't yet myself, your question should be "how would I like to die?"
I would very much like to be connected to a computer and have little chunks of my brain slowly swapped out for processes on the computer so that I can experience almost all of the transition along with the new me. I'll still hit the edge and fade to black at some point in the process, but the process seems at-least-as-good as every other choice in death.
>The things that scare me about death are the ideas that my specific goals would be left unpursued, that my responsibilities would be abandoned, my friends would lose my friendship, and that my memories and experiences would lose their significance upon the world.
None of those are necessarily an issue if an accurate digital copy of me continues on. Worrying about continuity sounds to me like worrying about whether you're the same person after sleeping.
As we age, we will spend more and more time attending to our cyber half. As it grows, our flesh half will atrophy. The brain cells will quiet, our muscles will grow weak.
Eventually our heart will stop, long after we stopped using it for much. What is left will be purely digital, and to our friends it will seem like nothing has changed. But it won't be a clone. It will be more like a metamorphosis. The caterpillar gave way to the butterfly. It didn't die, but its body was used up and transformed into something else.
I do wonder if it will feel like death. In that moment, when we draw our attention back to our last remaining brain cells, and our last remaining heart beats, will our cyborg half really feel like part of us, or will there still be a sense that the machine within us is Other?
I suspect not. I suspect we will have long since spread our identity across the divide. But maybe that is a choice we will all have to make. Whether to see it as death or birth.
Therefore yes, the cyborg part should be able to feel everything the fleshy part would, and the transition should be seemless.
Actually, viewing the brain as hardware, and the self/soul as software running on the brain, makes sense of a lot of theology.
I imagine a world where we have armies of dead scientists working on tough problems for us, in a simulation or fake world. They could have hundreds of years to figure out solutions. Then report back to use in the real world. All in the matter days.
I could imagine some turmoil in this fake world though. Some would want to die or leave. Others wouldn't see the point in helping us in the real world. Fascinating idea.
Even our reasons for thinking we are 'real' are flimsy. We say we have our senses! We open our eyes and see a blue sky and green grass. We reach down and touch each individual blade of grass, surely not a simulation.
But even that is bogus. There is no such thing as a blue sky, or green grass. That's all in your head. It's (at most) just different frequencies of energy. Same goes for this 'touching' bit. You don't touch anything, you just (again at most) have energy interactions.
So get used to it, you likely are a simulation.
Elementary indistinguishability is orthogonal and I'd like to say it's kinda basic for the level at which this conversation is operating, but there's so many unexamined assumptions and so much consciousness chauvinism flying around in here, who knows what's too basic to be worth mentioning.