Is copying your brain into another body == bringing you back to life?
The game SOMA explores a lot of the topics being brought up in this discussion:
The game SOMA explores a lot of the topics being brought up in this discussion:
We still don't know if we stay we or become something different.
Experience says we are not the same person we were and we often feel disconnected from who we were or who people that know us think we should be.
From our perspective we just accept who we became and simply remember who we were, without being able to be that person ever again.
That is not true at all. Please don't perpetuate these old wives' tales on HN.
A lot of your cells do die and are replaced, sperm cells for example have a life span of 3 days, white blood cells about a year, but brain cells (especially relevant to the context of this thread) are with you for life.
So it is possible that not only your body gets completely replaced many times over, but your identity and memories and thinking processes get replaced by imperfect copies.
After that, you will have the experience of "dying and being resurrected" and since everything went fine that last time, the next time is less of a concern.
The duplicate that steps out would be identical to the original and have no memory of having been ground.
Would you step into such a machine, safe in the knowledge that from the point of view of the universe and all other living beings, you would emerge unharmed?
1. Credible threat of ceaseless torture as an alternative.
2. Credible threat death to your offspring.
3. Credible threat of death and injury to many other people.
All of these are reasons people are frequently documented to willfully cause their own demise.
I wasn’t looking for a generic list - I was curious about Symmetry’s examples for themselves.
To your consciousness, there is no gap, just the novel experience of watching someone who looks an awful lot like you die. If the consciousness is copied perfectly from a to b, is there a difference in it at that point?
A simple thought experiment: We somehow copy me, but leave the original alive after reviving the copy. Then we kill the original. As the original, I'm gonna be unhappy about that. The exact time you kill me doesn't change that, so killing me then copying me then reviving the copy at the very least isn't a trivially unobjectionable process. As to whether it's actually unobjectionable, that's probably way above our paygrades philosophically.
There's a great star trek episode where Riker gets duplicated in the transporter, leading to years of jokes (and philosophical debates) that the transporter doesn't send you anywhere, it just copies you and kills the original. Real fun to think about.
From the individual's point of view, which is the only one that matters from their perspective, they are dead. Their consciousness no longer exists.
I feel like this has been discussed somewhere already in history.
No matter how many times I say that I'm speaking from the individual's point of view, some readers seem incapable of looking at it from an individual perspective.
In the case of your statement, it would solely depend on how the copy was made. If it's copied by somehow reading the consciousness, storing it as data, and perfectly restoring it in a new brain, then no, it is not the same consciousness, and from your perspective you are dead.
If it's copied through some kind of direct transfer, where the electrical impulses move, through some kind of biological link, to a new brain, then it is possible that the same continuous consciousness could now exist in the new brain.
(to be clear, I don't mean any of what I said to be insulting. I'm just observing that there are perspectives on this issue that I don't quite understand)
Under this premise (as you stated), copying your entire state and spawning it elsewhere (then killing the original) means your original version experiences a stopping of their continuity.
But if you analyze that premise, you realize that the only reason we believe we existed a second ago is because of our memory (the same reason the clone believes it was always alive).
How can you know that you aren't being cloned, in-place, right now? ie. Copied, killed, and spawned in place almost instantaneously. At every instant you carry all your memories and thus "feel" continuity, but it's a new you.
In this view, being killed and spawned elsewhere is no different. It isn't taking anything away from you because you never had it.
Obviously this is just a thought experiment, but just the fact that right now, while you were questioning if being cloned and killed was bad for the original you, this process could have been happening to you without your knowledge, might mean it is irrelevant.
The opposite scenario is that there are now two consciousnesses. If the original dies so does its consciousness and you failed to achieve immortality. Your clone is just your offspring with an identical body and set of memories.
So which is it? I personally picked it based on what I want to believe in, because even if it is a lie it helps me shape the world into one in which I want to life in, rather than one that I do not like and would prefer to get rid of.
Ship of Theseus paradox, if you replace the planks and beams of a ship over and over until they are all replaced, is it still the original ship?
Difference is, humans have a perspective on the world which ships and brooms do not have. If you watched a team busying about with a machine for a few hours, and then a human stepped out of it, and then one of the team members turned to you and said "OK we've got a clone of you, now we're going to shoot you in the head" would you say "yes I see that new person out there across the room looks exactly like me, so it IS me, so go on, shoot me?"
Some things stay rather permanent though, as they're dynamically reinforced, short of serious trauma. Those parts are likely to survive stepped replacement, or rather both the replacement and original adjust to get to the original state. It's like trying to replace a component of a feedback system while it's live, it will be out of whack for a while but if control is good enough will return to baseline.
It's a handle of convenience. If it points to something useful it's useful if not then not there never was or will be a ship of theseus so whether it's the same ship means nothing.
This is easy to say if you're not the one dying. If you know a perfect clone of your current self is going to live from this point forward, are you still comfortable with being killed?
For example: general anesthesia is something I think most people having these conversations should experience (which is to say, generally a lot of people don't). Because it's very different to sleep. Waking up from GA, it's as though no time has passed at all - you were one place, suddenly you're another.
In the case where a person is duplicated exactly, sometime during that period of GA - what's the difference?
It takes a special pleading that somehow, someone would know the difference. While under general anesthesia it's worth considering that people can and do actually die. And unless something metaphysical happens at that point, then the reality is they never know. They went under, expected to wake up, and just don't.
Personally, most nights of normal sleep are like that for me as well. Dreams (or at least the remembrance thereof) are a rare occurrence rather than the norm.
(For reference, yes, I have been under GA. I didn't really find it to be all that different, other than the onset being somewhat more sudden and waking up in a different place.)
This all assumes a destructive copy process -- if a non-destructive teleporter is possible, you don't need to destroy remaining copy, but all kinds of legal issues arise. Maybe you'd want to have one copy destroyed to avoid paying double for lunch.
To your consciousness, there is no gap, just the novel experience of watching someone who looks an awful lot like you die.
This could be rephrased as:
To your consciousness, there is no gap, just the novel experience of dying as someone who looks an awful lot like you watches.
I would argue no. Because for you, your consciousness, it's as if you are still the same person. The first doesn't matter, because it's just turned off. But you still exist.
Unless you're arguing for a 'soul', there is no difference between the two consciousnesses. Therefore, you are still alive.
Externally, no. But it matters to me, the original.
> I would argue no. Because for you, your consciousness, it's as if you are still the same person.
Yes, for the copy, it is as if they are the original.
> The first doesn't matter, because it's just turned off.
What if the copy is made non-destructively?
> But you still exist.
A version of you still exists.
> Unless you're arguing for a 'soul', there is no difference between the two consciousnesses. Therefore, you are still alive.
The causal chain of events matters. If a copy of your consciousness is made, it can be done without you ever knowing about it.
You may now commit suicide, safe in the knowledge that it doesn't matter, because there's no difference between the current you and the distant you.
Unless you're now going to change tack and say it only counts if you're in each other's Light cone, and have seen each other, and understand the cloning machine's workings, and trust it was built correctly, and an endless amount of other procrastinating which proves that it does matter to you which one dies, and no matter what words you type, your behavior will show that you recognize a stark difference between "you" and "someone else".
Clearly a condition "I know they exist" doesn't change whether you two are the same person or not, so that can't be an important part of it.
If you decide to commit suicide, then any identical copies of yourself will also have the same thought process and decide to commit suicide too, so you'll have killed all identical copies of yourself. That's very different than deciding to do something (like use a scan-clone-destroy teleporter) that will create a copy of yourself and then destroy one copy of yourself.
Now is it any different to stepping into the teleporter?
If there were truly infinite worlds and infinite of each variation, and you could somehow play russian roulette instead with an entire world, so that each one has a risk of just entirely blinking out of existence ... it feels superficially wrong, but I find it hard to argue against. I'd worry that there's a risk of if it was done infinitely, then by some logic the infinite sum could eventually lead to all worlds not existing eventually, but if that was definitely known not to be a risk then I would find it hard to care about whether the world played russian roulette or not.
A destructive copy is strictly more feasible (as far as such things are feasible at all). But it comes with a possibility to print copies once the reading is done. Then you can get multiple clones made and they will be you, but will start diverge from each other right away due to slightly different experiences.
There is a transition point - at least for b.
a gets to the transition point and dies. b "awakes" with a's memories.
So: you are a ... > [transition] ... you are ?
How do you know you (formerly a) become b at that point? Certainly from b's perspective that is the case - but from former a's perspective? Which do you "switch to"? Death or b?
You need to consider 3 perspectives:
a then after the transition:
b (live a)
c (dead a)
If you don't want to consider dead a, then consider this: what if the experiment went wrong?
a isn't killed in the process, but a copy of their consciousness is loaded into b.
Same situation as before, but both a and b think they are former a.
Which are you (formerly a) in that circumstance? Why?
I would argue a has a strong case to be considered the correct version - which means you die in the first case.
It's set in the far future where editing your memories, copying them to other bodies, editing those bodies, is as common as smartphones today.
People get bad memories removed, download fake good memories (like Total Recall), transfer their consciousness into "designer bodies", and of course there's even a fetish for having sex with yourself (your clone, who knows best how to please you.)
[0] https://myanimelist.net/anime/3701/Kaiba (possible spoilers; avoid reading any more if you want the max enjoyment.)
I'm an instance of an object, not a class.
Since this thread is full of references I thought I'd throw in http://ageofem.com/ -- a baseline scenario book of the future that reads like history should we get brain emulation tech.
How do you know this is true? How do you know there isn't a John K Clark-ish person in Australia or South Africa or Alpha Centauri?
What does it mean to say there is a John K Clark-ish lump of matter in Alpha Centauri, why is it useful to say that matter is "you"? You can't meet it, you can't share stories with it, you can't experience what it experiences through spooky action at a distance effects, you can't feel full when it eats, you presumably wouldn't want your spouse abandoning Earth and going to live with it instead, you presumably wouldn't want it spending out of your bank account; in what useful way is it "you" just because it's a similarly patterned organisation of matter?
If you relax the accuracy in the organization a little, is this any different from saying "your twin sibling is you" or "all humans are the same person"? And if you don't relax the accuracy in the pattern, where do you draw the line? Isn't that a bit of a joke to argue that all "similar enough" people are you, while carefully and deliberately excluding every candidate until nobody counts in that group?
This is not correct because it is possible to experience the same John K Clark from multiple different frames of reference.
Further, I'll be pissed if the one I'm on sinks. The identical one sailing off into the distance is cold comfort to me.
If it is perfectly transferred to another vessel, as a series of direct connections (maybe some kind of neuron-based "wire"), then maybe it could be considered the same continuous consciousness.
The body around it, from the perspective of the system, doesn't matter. It can be replaced forever as long as the system remains continuous.
You could build an empirically accurate copy of the ship in this way - not perfect but very close.
The first command God gave Adam was to name every animal, which is the act of categorizing abstract concepts and building language to concretize these relationships. It’s in our human nature, but especially programmers. But any philosophy approaching the cross is to be damned lest we be convinced we must carry it and die. So we killed Socrates instead. And when the Greeks came back to ask Jesus to be their new Socrates, he explained that a seed must first die alone to become a fruit-bearing tree. The only people alive today that I know who might understand these things are programmers.
But no, even if a copy is made of you, it’s not you. Your brain is a channel for your mind, it is not it’s source.
There is a more “real” level of existence where all our actions really exist. This life is basically a metaphor for that more real life. The physical world is an analogy of what’s really happening. When we eat a plant or animal for example, we are actually consuming some of its life force to replenish part of our finite and diminishing life source. That’s why we can only eat things that were recently alive. We can’t eat rocks or very old meat.
You exist both inside and outside this physical world. A clone with an exact memory of yours is not you. It’s someone else.
Total agree, programmers are professional thinkers after all =)
> There is a more “real” level of existence where all our actions really exist.
Yea I go with that. Hm, but do you think that your life force analogy is what is the more real level? I think it is just another analogy or explanation for whats really going on.
Your "life force" concept actually reminds me of thermodynamic entropy from physics: On which life force does a plant feed? Mostly it is energy from the sun or geothermal processes (think deep-see geysers). So we can say it "feeds" on the entropy of these celestial bodies. Similar we feed on matter configured in a specific way. Containing energy in the specific configuration of atoms which we transform into other more unstructured ones. We fuel our batteries by increasing disorder in our nutrients(including oxygen) and therefore our environment.
Now going with the life force concept: I think in your life force concept air should also have some kind of life force. Otherwise how do you explain that people die when locked in air tight room but with enough food and water and everything else? Do you say they life on? Don't they die because the "life force" of the air is all consumed?
Similar probably everything else has to get some life force.
The word spirit originally meant breath and the way we became alive is that God breathed into the nostrils of Adam. In the beginning, the spirit of God was said to be upon the face of the earth and it still is, hence wind. But when we cut ourselves off from the spirit of God, we will soon run out of what spirit of God we last breathed in and this die.
we digest the nutrient, it's all below the level of structural appletreeness