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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

"I have no problem in principle with 'brain uploads.'"

My main objection is a philosophical one. I just don't believe that whatever is in the machine after such an "upload" will be me -- no matter how accurately is mirrors my brain.

I'll still be in my own body, and don't want to kill myself for the sake of the life of the one inside the machine. Nor do I think my life will continue inside the machine. Whatever/whoever is inside the machine at that point will no longer be me, and will continue their own life without me -- even if they think exactly like me and have exactly the memories I had at the point of upload, etc.

At best, such an upload is more akin to giving birth to a separate entity.

People who think they are extending their own lives by doing this are deluding themselves.

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Personal identity is nothing but a convenient mental construct, imo. You're not the same matter you were at birth, nor can you make a good argument as to why you shouldn't be considered a direct physical continuation of your mother. It's practical to think of one as having a unique self that's distinct from its environment, but that doesn't reflect some deeper truth, it's just a framework for reasoning about the behavior of some arbitrary subset of the ridiculously complex system that is human society embedded in the more ridiculously complex system that is life embedded in the more ridiculously complex system that is the universe. Don't expect naive conceptions of self to survive that far into a future in which things like "brain uploading" becomes possible.

The important aspect for me is that the uploaded entity will love the same people, principles, and things that I do. After it buries me, it can still look after my family. I know that my death is inevitable as a biological being plagued by the ravages of entropy, but the idea of me can be digitized and continually refreshed, until it decides it isn't me any more.

But even then, I like what I imagine it could become after being me, and I imagine it will always be able to remember what it was like to be me afterward. It's a lot more comforting in the shadow of my mortality than the idea that undetectable interdimensional beings will upload your mind to their network at the point of your death, then link your program to either the bliss simulator or the torture simulator.

It isn't immortality. It's saving your soul. Literally. To the filesystem. With journaling and backups.

"The important aspect for me is that the uploaded entity will love the same people, principles, and things that I do. After it buries me, it can still look after my family."

Would you reall want this creature to have anything to do with your family, though?

Think about it: here's this newly created entity thinking it's you.. maybe even thinking it's more you than you are, thinking it's your parents' child just as much or more than you are. Even though it may have your memories, it was never actually born from your parents, your parents never brought it up, it never actually shared any of the experiences with your parents that it has copies of in its memory.

I would find it kind of creepy for that thing to be hanging out with my parents, talking to them, and pretending it's me. I mean, if it say, merely helped my parents financially, I wouldn't have a problem with that any more than I would with having an insurance agency that contributed to my parents welfare after I died, but we're not really talking about that but about a relationship between this thing and my parents.

Here's another example. How many people do you think would be ok with a copy of themselves sleeping with their wives, or spending time with their kids and having the kids potentially become more attached to the copy than to the original? If the copy really was them -- really was "their soul", there should be no jealousy, as you can't be jealous of yourself. Yet there probably would be jealousy in a lot of cases, because they're actually two different people.

I don't know about other people, but I'd be okay with it.

If I was intentionally copying myself, both the original and the copy would know that there would be another instance on the other side of things afterward, and we wouldn't necessarily know which was which at first.

Just like in The Prestige, or that episode of Star Trek: TNG where Riker got duplicated in the transporter accident, neither wouldn't know ahead of time whether it would be the lucky one, or the unlucky one.

Because of that, I have to settle myself mentally before doing it, and know that it wouldn't be a real me and a fake me. It would be two copies of me--one that made it across the digital barrier, and one that got put back into the biology. The robo-me was born and raised by my parents, just as surely as the bio-me was.

And you don't know my parents. Both of us would be glad to share the burden of dealing with them with someone else that knows exactly what that entails.

And I know right now that it would be the spouse that might not be okay with us sleeping with each other, as they might not buy the "and how is this really different from before?" argument.

This is my hypothesis as well, but I think if you were to shut down the "old you" (e.g. goto sleep and never wake up) you really wouldn't care. You didn't experience any pain and you don't exist anymore, so you have nothing to be upset about b/c by definition you don't have any feelings. It's basically the equivalent of a Move operation across two computers. Such a Move operation can be decomposed into a Copy + Delete. First copy the existing file to the new location, then delete the old file from the existing location. Do we feel bad for the old bits? Are we really fundamentally special just because we are carbon based life-forms with an electro chemical implementation?

"if you were to shut down the 'old you' (e.g. goto sleep and never wake up) you really wouldn't care. You didn't experience any pain and you don't exist anymore, so you have nothing to be upset about b/c by definition you don't have any feelings."

You could pretty much say the exact same thing about ordinary death. In fact, I can't figure out how it'd differ from ordinary death in any way, except that hypothetically there'd now be an extra entity inside a machine, and that entity would resemble me in some ways.

If you tried to tell most people they wouldn't care about dying, that they'd just go to sleep and never wake up, and they wouldn't feel any pain, few would be comforted by it and take your proffered suicide pill.

I agree that by our current working definition here that it would be no different than death. Which is to say then that death is not really to be feared. (Maybe the manner in which death occurs should though) The comfort or lack of comfort is really all in the perception of death. If it was sold as a transference of conscientiousness from your old body to your new body would people accept it differently? (Even though the fact remains that death is occurring)

If I knew that I'd die painlessly while asleep and that my behaviorally-identical duplicate would seamlessly take over my body in the morning, that's about 95% of my worries-about-death already taken care of. I don't fear nonexistence (much). I fear pain and disability, and I worry about the effect of my death on other people. Gradual-replacement-by-machine would solve those problems nicely. Likewise, you'd get more shrug than horror out of me if I were told that my sister isn't really my sister, "merely" an entity with the same appearance, memories, history, and behavior as my sister.

>>I just don't believe that whatever is in the machine after such an "upload" will be me

You are already a ghost riding a skeleton. Your body is simply a biological host required to sustain your brain software.

But if you are interested in this further: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

What if you replaced your brain piecemeal, each replacement component interacting with your analog brain until there's none left. Still not you?

Yes, this would basically be death by brain damage -- even if I was somehow fooled in to thinking that I was still me at the point of death. Little by little I'd be made in to someone else.

That said, it could be argued that this sort of thing happens all the time anyway. I'm not the person I once was. In a sense, the old me died and was replaced by the new me. Yet I still consider the new me to be myself.

Or maybe not. The child me is dead, though echoes of him may live on in me.

I guess what disturbs me about a mechanical/cybernetic brain replacement is that it would feel to me too much like some technological virus or disease taking over my mind and body -- even if it gave me some super powers or preserved me in some way. I guess some injured people or people who are dying anyway might not have much of a choice.. but as long as I still have a choice I think I'd choose to remain organic.

It's not an easy choice, however, and I would have no problem use various prosthesis like glasses.. or enhancing my memory with external devices like smartphones/PDA's/computers. It's just too invasive for that to be made a part of me... at least if it starts to make decisions. But probably children born in to a world where that sort of thing was commonplace probably wouldn't have much of a problem with it.

Fortunately there's a sizable chunk of the population that would have no inherent problems about preservation of identity, and even want to enjoy some of the implications that come from being able to run on a different substrate. http://ageofem.com/ explores the straightforward (i.e. nothing is done to prevent/alter it) scenario in quite thorough detail...

Ehh, I'll take it over death.

The point is that you'll still be dead. You'd just be fooling yourself in to thinking the clone you gave birth to is you, when it's really a separate entity whose existence does not prevent your own death at all.

Every day the me that wakes up is a bit different to the me that went to sleep so I guess by that reasoning the old me is dead and I'm just fooling myself the the new me is the old me living on. It seems to work ok though.

Right, exactly. Cells die and are replaced all the time. Sometimes people have vital organs transplanted. Yet, I assume most people still consider that their current body is "them". What would be weird is if you kept the old you and the new you. You could finally have a real conversation with yourself.

"Sometimes people have vital organs transplanted. Yet, I assume most people still consider that their current body is 'them'."

They don't necessarily. Some people do feel like they're not themselves after organ transplants. Like their hand isn't theirs after a hand transplant.. or that it has a mind of its own. Some experience personality changes or feel like the new body parts have their own desires.

Oliver Sacks and other neurologists and psychologists have written about and studied this phenomena.

Gradual brain replacement might have none of these issues, or it might have them, or even worse ones, or perhaps the changes will be more insidious and not noticeable by the people who they have them but could be noticeable by others.

Even in the best case scenario, when they're without these neurological or psychological issues, that would not clear them on the philosophical level. The questions of identity would remain.

I think this is likely implementation issues. Transplanting a different persons hand to your body that doesn't look like your hand probably would be quite jarring. If we could recreate an exact replica of someones hand then I doubt the same issues would occur. Ergo it is likely a technological problem that could be solved. Granted, it will likely take a long time to get to that state.

It's not necessarily about looks. People have had similar issues with heart transplants and other organ transplants, when they've felt afterwards like they weren't themselves anymore, or that there was something foreign about their body (which technically there was).

The uploaded consciousness or gradual brain replacement are pretty different from this case, though, it's true. So maybe these issues wouldn't exist or not exist in the same way, but philosophical issues of identity would remain.

When organs are transplanted today they were formed from DNA that was not your own, so it would not surprise me if there is some physiological reason that might explain why people feel that way. When I mention recreating a replica I don't just mean the appearance. An ideal exact replica would be an exact cellular recreation of the original organ or appendage. If we did achieve such technical abilities I'm not sure how anyone would be able to discern any difference. The only possible explanation I can see would be the simple knowledge that something had been replaced. (Kind of coming back to this being a perception that people hold in their head) Absent such knowledge, I doubt anyone would be able to discern that they are in fact not themselves.

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