A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

I guess they could just kill you again. But would the threat of that happening in the future deter you from lying at time of death, when you have nothing else to lose?

It seems like there would need to be system of proving possession of a password that would have to last 100 years. I have not thought through this kind of scenario (sorry!). Perhaps this has been considered before by those studying the problem in detail (e.g. science fiction authors)? What are the solutions?

And of course let everyone know that's the case beforehand!

Edit: I read the article. So they are assuming in the future that they won't bother making a new human, but just load the brain state into a computer simulation, which would be even cheaper.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities

You don't want to be the first but you want to be the tenth or so. Once the process takes off all the bounties will drastically lose their worth because such technology will likely disrupt a lot of what humans place value on.

Why bother resurrecting you fully?

There is a short chapter that is narrated by the detached consciousness of one of the patrons. She has lost all sense of self and is trapped in a dim loop of pure thought, constantly questioning what she is. Probably one of the most quietly terrifying things I have ever read.

Be aware that running code on a computer is just the computation of numbers. So if computing a number makes a consciousness, then all possible states of your consciousness are happening. All the numbers are there.

Nonetheless, here in our time, it brilliantly crosses/combines...

funeral services, a highly lucrative field

scifi, including all its expansiveness

the desperate compensatory technological hubris of people who know deep down that the world is quietly going down the shitter

and/or narcissism (on which nobody ever went broke)

If a 'Hitler' VM was publicly available online, how many people would torture it? What are the ethics around torturing virtual consciousnesses of evil people?

> Altman tells MIT Technology Review he’s pretty sure minds will be digitized in his lifetime. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” he says.

It's like the cloud is _still_ just a pseudo-magical place [0] we just need to get access to, then all our dreams can come true.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digimon

Guy needs to not be so pessimistic.

Dying is not something to be paraded around as a virtue. I only hope people figure it out sooner rather than later.

That fact that people sometimes survive lightning strikes and epileptic fits suggests that normal brain activity can be restarted after a disruption.

[citation needed]

Is this really the case? If so why do salaries increase with age? What do you mean by "young"? The bottom half of living people by age? How do you explain the years our children spend in school generating no value at all?

My favourite argument against this idea is that it would violate the law of conservation of energy. In any case it looks to me that all these dualist theories of mind are non-falsifiable

Of course, everything we perceive the material world to be is merely a concept we are holding in our mind.

DNA is an idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm

Still, I find it at least as likely as the "consciousness just sort of happens when information processing gets complex enough" explanation.

You might find this interesting https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-spin-on-the-quantum-bra...

I prefer to believe instead that I'm a character in an MMORPG. But if that's true, my consciousness still resides within the simulation. At best, the entity controlling me has some superset of my consciousness. At worst, my consciousness is still totally disposable, and my player is just interested in a fun ride.

The concept of "multiple realizability" says that a brain/consciousness/mental state can arise from non-biological matter, like digital computers.

Modern proponents of this view do not view the brain as a seat of consciousness. To them, the view of a singular consciousness that houses in the brain like a theatre, is like a Descartesian illusion. Consciousness is distributed and all parts of "you" and your environment contribute.

As for "out there": I am always a bit worried when archeologists unearth some treasures with our current state of technology. Likely, in a 100 years they will have much better methods to research and preserve unearthed treasure, and so we may be spoiling their more effective methods by digging it up and putting it on display. What if, after the 8th great AI hype, another YC company claims it has found successful methods to upload your consciousness, which is 100% fatal to your preserved brain in the process? You'll be stuck in the MVP FORTRAN digital world of uploaded consciousnesses.

Or maybe they take our current infatuation with AGI to mean permission to create a huge ensemble of preserved brains, filling an entire room like did our 1960s computers, because it turned out that consciousness is only transferable to biological "organisms", and the only way to superhuman intelligence is to combine 20 human intelligences. The AI hype bubble will become a literal fulfilling prophecy.

I personally would either jail these consciousnesses (honor their will, but put them in a boring digital world with Archive.org access to the internet) or put them on display, much like we do with preserved Egyptian Pharaoh's. I'd call it Earth, and make Trump a president.

DP/DR is quite possibly the worst mental disorder you can ever fall into. It is the feeling where you are convinced everything around you is not real, you see people you know, you know they are significant, but they just feel like actors in a show and you don't care. You look in the mirror, and you don't recognize yourself as you, you just see a body. Worse, your body just moves around the world and accomplish things on autopilot, while you watch everything unfold on what feels like a screen, completely detached. If you died, you wouldn't care much, because you wouldn't feel it's you dying, in fact you want to die, because you are trapped in a hell from which there is no escape.

I've never suffered from this disorder, but I investigated it for some time and am convinced it reveals something we do not yet understand about our existence in this world. The source of our existence may not be where we think it is.

In other words, we know with certainty that there is no physical mechanism by which some "external consciousness" could influence the brain. So the answer to that hypothesis is a definitive "nope, that's not how it works."

CalTech quantum physicist Sean Carrol explains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x26a-ztpQs8&t=836

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

This is like the guys who says "prove to me god doesn't exist". Well, it doesn't work that way. You came to me with the "god exists" or "there is an antenna that connects my brain to some magic world". You prove that it is there and show me how it works.

No: 100% chance of death.

Yes: 100-X% chance of death, X% chance of getting to see a super-interesting future.

For me, X wouldn't have to be very high to make it worth trying.

I agree that there's research to be done, which is why we're not offering a product at this time, and may not for years.

I would say that even more research needs to be done for any hope of a protocol that preserves synaptic details in postmortem cases hours after death (as many cryonics companies seem to be peddling). If you're saying "recently" to mean <20 minutes after death, that complicates the distribution enormously, but it's not outside the realm of what Nectome may develop later.

Or about vaccines. Or about antibiotics. Or about sterile surgery procedures. Or about running water and electricity. Or about....

Just about everything that makes up our modern quality of life was only available to a privileged class when it first came on the scene.

My bet is that future people won't be appalled in the slightest.

Something tells me that Professor Hendricks isn't living a Neanderthal lifestyle (or even a modern Third World lifestyle).

What an unnuanced way of stating your opinion. Views on what "identity" is differ, clearly.

I disagree. I bet they'll learn all kinds of useful stuff from this, however it turns out.

Assuming the taxes collected this year are even remotely similar, and assuming this grant came 100% from income tax, and assuming you pay an equal amount in taxes as everyone else, this grant cost you (960000/1.23 trillion)=1/1281250 of the taxes you paid. I know that's a lot of assumptions, but even if that calculation is off by several orders of magnitude, the tax burden is pretty darn small. If you earned $100,000 last year you paid roughly 8 cents for this. It could open up doors to a lot of interesting research. Maybe nothing will come of it. I'd pay 8 cents to find out though.

Also, who says this is "the elite" wanting to live forever and us schlubs footing the bill?

[0] https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...

Reminds me of Alcor and Ted Williams. Or the myriads of "companies" that promise preserving your stem cells but in reality it's just one guy with a LN2 tank in his basement.

Public key verifies the value and there’s a smart contract with some percentage to the successful recoverer.

Depending on the recoverer’s profit margin they will restore whenever there’s enough value to make it worthwhile.

Whether bitcoin will exist and whether it will appreciate is a different story. But assuming bitcoin exists, resurrection is a certainty.

Or I'll do it myself if I can.

Obviously it's a huge punt with no guarantee of success, but I would think that in a future that supports such a procedure, the concept of "expensive" won't exist to the same degree as it does now.

"[H]e devotes all his energies for a decade prior to his freezing, in becoming an expert primary source on the musically notable people of his era. Assuming that if you become the world's foremost expert in any subject, and given infinite time, someone will want to write a book on that exact subject."

If I recall correctly, the protagonist intentionally leaves tantalizing bits out of his books, so future historians will want to wake him up to ask him personally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_and_Tomorrow_(novel)

Obviously several things could go wrong, but the plan isn't obviously doomed.

1. Logic to accumulate wealth. This would need an API to create and manage an investment account for stocks, bonds, crypto, whatever. It analyses current and historical data for a time, then makes investment decisions based on minimizing risks and long term gains.

2. A reproduction module. This would be responsible for finding a freelance programmer to produce new versions of each module keeping the system current. This would need methods like findReliableFreelancer or provideSpec runTests and issuePayment.

3. Cloning. Like the Reproduction module, but this will be done entirely with the system's own code and not recruiting a new developer. E.g. create a new AWS account, get a new host, copy your modules, get it running, do the sanity checks, provide it seed money.

4. Orchestration. The various hosts running this code would need to communicate, reporting their existence, the money they have available, etc. If the system winds up having some purpose (e.g. convincing someone to restore me after death) then orchestration might come up. Otherwise this could be used to limit reproduction, stop sharing resources with bad actors, and share resources with good actors. This would also need to track which systems we were already running on (e.g. if we are currently 80% on AWS we should direct expansion towards Digital Ocean, or future equivalents, try to expand into different languages, countries, and planets).

I imagine kicking the project off a decade or two before my anticipated death in order to work out kinks and to hopefully live long enough to verify it will actually work and grow in real life conditions.

After my death, I imagine it running for centuries, slowly accumulating more and more wealth. Perhaps disbursing some amount every decade if I could think of a way to track descendents. Maybe asking people to restore me from cryo freezing. Maybe just creating a legal puzzle for folks 500 years from now, when they have to unwind what might be a multibillion dollar fortune belonging to someone long gone.

CGP Grey has a good look at the question wrt Star Trek teleportation[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus [1] https://youtu.be/nQHBAdShgYI

The "is it still me?" question pops up over and over throughout the game. It's incredibly thought provoking.

I've yet to come across any evidence of a "self" that exists outside a brain.

> Is this a solved philosophical problem for which literature exists?

It's a problem that was hypothesized (and not solved) by philosophy, but as far as I know there's no evidence the problem exists.

You can hypothesize any number of problems but if there isn't any evidence they exist, there's not much urgency in solving these problems.

What if invisible monsters are breeding all around us and building up numbers before they wipe out the human race? There's equal evidence that this could be happening, and the consequences are more immediately dire, so perhaps we should discuss that first?

What about after general anesthesia?

You only know you are you because of your memories. The future brain will have the memories, so it will think it's you, just like you think today that you are the same you that were awake 3 days ago and 10 years ago.

Are you afraid of nonexistence when you fall asleep, and envy the tommorow's you that he will live in your body and get to see what the future brings?

I don't think there's much difference between these scenarios - the conciousness is interrupted in both cases.

- general anesthesia is definitely, to some extent a discontinuity of consciousness. You lose time.

- more extremely, Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest actually (temporarily) causes brain death by cooling the body to between 10˚C and 20˚C. All brain activity ceases for the duration of this deep hypothermia.

Are there risks to these practices? Definitely. Some may argue that someone who undergoes general anesthesia isn't the same person. But I would argue that it is, despite the discontinuity, and despite some risk of personality changes.

The you that is now, pre-preservation, will be dead.

The you that is then, post-restoration, will be alive and believe and behave as if they are you.

It's convenient that this process (as described) kills you, because that simplifies things quite a lot. Scanning is more complicated, and I suspect if technology ever arrives that allows for it we will treat such scans as "heirs of the body" -- meaning they will only have such assets as you give them, although of course the IRS will still find a way to get them to pay your taxes.

Let's say we find a way to eliminate death or aging. It's expensive at first so only the very wealthy can afford it. Now you have a set of rich people in positions of control that won't age out of them. They'll live forever so they'll continue amassing wealth, if they don't give up control then a new generation with new ways of thinking about the world won't be able to take the helm. I mean, lots of people aren't able to really internalize new ideas in their own current lifetimes, let alone these hypothetically endless ones. The people in control get wealthier, inequality increases, new ideas have a harder time taking hold. Even if this life extension eventually trickles down to the rest of humanity would they ever be able to catch up? Would they want to live an eternal life subjugated by the elite?

Also, assuming this life extension is biological and not digital all of a sudden we have lots of people. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that so hopefully we figure out a way to move excess people to other planets/space colonies, but what if that takes too much time? What if we increase the number of people faster than we can solve the scaling problems? Food, energy, waste, ways of transporting these excess people elsewhere. If we don't solve all of them we're talking about periods of extreme pain and tumult. What happens if we need to put a cap on the number of people while we figure some of them out? Are some people now not allowed to have children? Are some people not allowed to live forever? Who decides the answer to these questions? Hopefully not the ultra rich & powerful class that's formed - that might not be good for the average folks.

Anyways, maybe I'm being pessimistic and on the time scales we're talking about we'd figure out reasonable solutions but it still feels like this whole area feels pretty hand-wavy today when I hear people talk about eliminating death. Death, for better or worse is a sort of equalizer, remove it and a lot of the problems that exist today could get worse.

This is even putting aside questions about what happens to a hypothetical brain that lives forever. Do we run out of space for new memories? Do we start forgetting things after enough time? If so, is the person we are 500 years from now that can no longer remember it's first 100 years the same person as us today?

In the short term, that's great, incredible even: everyone lives! In the long term though, do we stagnate on the same set of brains, who are set in their ways from potentially hundreds of years of life and only capable of offering a certain amount of insight on any given topic? There's less incentive to have children (you can always do it later), and there may be physical constraints that limit the number of people the world can support. Without that infusion of new ideas, does human development grind to a halt (or at least slow considerably)? There's no fresh eyes coming to scientific endeavours, maybe restricting the sparks of innovation or new ways of thinking that lead to breakthroughs, and culturally there's no one unburdened by the past pushing the boundaries of the arts etc.

Now you may say (and I might even agree with you) that you'd rather be alive in a stagnant world than dead in one that keeps moving, but I feel there has to be limits to that. There's probably enough going on to keep you engaged for hundreds of years, but beyond that, a stagnant, unchanging world, with the same people, the same cultural, the same knowledge etc. in perpetuity seems incredibly daunting. Would people need to choose to die when they've had their fill to keep the ball rolling? Would enough people choose that, rather than clinging to a merger existence, to matter? Would that first generation of post-death humans last long enough that recovering the pace of development would even be (reasonably) possible?

Let's just say that on a personal level, I don't want to die (and a life _extension_ would be incredibly welcomed as there's plenty to do beyond the 80-or-so years people generally live), but the societal consequences of such a thing could be deeply negative.

Sounds interesting

https://www.jefftk.com/p/whole-brain-emulation-and-nematodes

https://www.theonion.com/popular-new-amazon-service-just-com...

I completely disagree. Natural death is not a beautiful thing, and is sometimes painful. Even if I don't want to live forever, I'd like to be given the choice of when to die, basically when I'm tired of living.

Maybe you still don't agree, but would you have thought differently if all your friends and family also have that choice?

The idea that there is a less than 1-in-10000 chance that in 10,000 years we will be unable to run brains in simulation given over the last ~50y of development we've produced hardware literally nine orders of magnitude faster than that of the brain, done so in a mass-producible fashion, made unbelievable strides in neuroscience, discovered CRISPR and make synthetic biology, gone from AI-as-theory to computers that can talk, describe images, and synthesise photorealistic faces, gone from technology as niche to CPUs on plastic that cost literally a since cent... is frankly an blunt unwillingness to consider the issue.

Because science doesn't have evidence for the presence of "you"s, and it's fashionable among intellectuals these days to only believe scientific ideas have validity.