Anyone else feel the solution isn’t figuring out how to create or find a new earth but move our consciousness to silicon so that it does not have such a fragile requirement to exist?
We're well out of the realm of science into science fiction, but I feel it's a valid question to ask - all of our consciousnesses have developed in ape bodies adapted for the savanna, with a bunch of survival related traits and sub-processes.
If we remove our "selves" from our bodies, are we still us?
We are not the individual cells of our body because most of them will be replaced in the next weeks/months/years. We also don't think of any body with a knee replacement as any less human. Even altering the genetic code of a huge part of your body, like after stem cell transplantation, is not commonly seen as making us less us.
Also suppose it was possible to build a synthentic neuron that behaved just like the ones inside your brain. If you started replacing your neurons with the synthetic ones, no individual neuron would "change" you. So were would you draw the line? At 10% synthetic neurons? At 20%? At 100%?
If we see ourselves as biological beings another interesting point is how you would view a 1:1 copy of yourself. If we constructed a synthetic human that had the exact same number of molecules in the exact same place as you, would that human be you? (Leaving aside that that's basically impossible, just as a thought experiment)
If you answered the last question with "no", that would also mean that not even the way we process information and think makes us us, since the 1:1 molecular clone would behave exactly the same as you in the same environment (in a purely deterministic universe at least, leaving aside probability and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle).
So are we instead an uninterrupted instance of a thinking process? That would allow us to differentiate us from the exact clone. However in that case, would you be another person after being unconsciousness? What about general anesthesia? This really keeps me up at night.
It's next to impossible to define what we are and that we think of us as independent, unique beings might just be an illusion.
Why? You're pretty close to the right answer:
> are we instead an uninterrupted instance of a thinking process?
No, for the reasons you described. What we are is thinking-processes with a coherent series of more-or-less-uninterrupted links to the past. When you undergo general anesthesia you wake up as the same person because you can remember who you were before anesthesia, and you feel and act like that person.
The interesting case is not anesthesia (or sleep) but amnesia and traumatic brain injury or mental illness that changes your personality.
But of course the conditions you mention are also very interesting and make it non-trivial to define the "true" essence of the person. Another interesting one would be dementia.
That's right. Why is that a problem?
Imagine you had this done to you, and imagine that in order to clone your brain you have to be put under anesthesia (because the process takes time and you need to capture a coherent snapshot). When you wake up, how are you going to tell whether you are the clone or the original?
As far as I’m concerned we might very well be just processes that can in theory be copied and recreated. In that case the person in the thought experiment would exist twice at a single point in time and then diverge into to different persons due to different environments and probabilistic processes in the body.
that being:
> If we remove our "selves" from our bodies, are we still us?
But answering this is now a straightforward thought experiment. You just approach it incrementally.
If you replace your limbs with prosthetics, are you still you?
If you get a heart-lung transplant, are you still you?
If you get an artificial heart, are you still you?
etc.
> a somehow unique, identifiable self which ... is how most people view themselves
Well, yeah, but that's a limit of our present technology, not necessarily a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. Technology redefines the answer to that question all the time.
This already happens, though before the formation of any memories. We call them identical twins.
The divergence is more limited than you might imagine. One striking experiment found that if you separate identical twins and give them the instructions "just draw whatever comes into your head", they are likely to draw the same things.
For what it’s worth, I think that in the process of gradual replacement of human organs with their “mechanical” equivalents, the brain will not be the last one to be replaced.
I think the free will lectures from John Conway also go in that direction: because some properties cannot be predetermined, free will must exist. Something must make a decision in order to have an outcome.
This all goes far over my head and I may have misinterpreted the great John Conway. In that case I beg your pardon and would love to hear your thoughts on it.
In the great scheme of things, making environments safe for human levels of tolerance is extremely wasteful. You need the right atmosphere, temperature, radiation freedom, freedom of toxic materials (and guess what, many chemical processes create tons of them), noise freedom, etc. This causes huge costs already now because industrial processes need to be engineered in ways to reduce emissions, it makes nuclear energy unavailable, people not wanting to live near airports, etc.
Even gravity is an extremely wasteful thing. In order to have it, you need a giant planet full of precious construction material for dyson spheres, anything->iron fusion/fission reactors and hawking radiation matter->energy converters, all unavailable because some individuals chose to colonize the surface of it...
The optimal approach for intelligent life is to architect computers that can run in the vacuum of space with minimal shielding and then deploy them across the galaxy to convert the available energy into intelligent thoughts and experiences. What the computers will run is up to us.
Adtech and cryptocurrency mining?
Our bodies (and culture & environment) are part of our minds. They cannot be separated without destroying that mind. Also, most of what we think is our own “intelligence” actually exists outside our brains, in our culture & civilization.
“Uploading our minds” only seems plausible if you have a cargo cult understanding of what is actually happening.
You make my point, we are not just our mind, but a mind dynamically interconnected with a civilization in amazingly complex ways. Whether its the medieval catholic church, the interstate highway system, WoW, or the Internet.
Cognition scientists are pretty sure that we think with our bodies, not just our brain. If you totally separated the human body from the human mind, it is by definition not a human anymore. At best it would be closer to the ghost we leave behind online after we die. Just a shadow or footprints. I dont expect us to ever do better than making really convincing animatronic ghosts.
This is getting off the rails into of science fiction I guess, but it raises the question of how do you transfer the "you" into the new brain? That way you could destroy the body or let it die and still have continuity. It's not clear that merely making a "bit-for-bit" copy is enough.
There's no loss for the rest of the world. What if actual sleep is analogous to that? The you that wakes in the morning is a fresh copy with memories up until you 'died' last night.
Definitely digressing into sci-fi thought experiments.
the robot wouldn't, you'd be dead
Yeah this is the big question: what constitutes as "you"?
Your body? You can lose a limb or parts of your brain and still remain "you". Your memories? they are constantly re-forming with people forgetting things and new memories being made. Your way of thinking? Neurons are extremely long lived cells.
Unless you believe in souls (which many religions do), the experience of "you" is entirely defined by the matter of your body and maybe your surroundings.
Let's assume we can build machines that can fully emulate human minds. Let's assume this emulation is good enough to also emulate the self-ness experience we are interested in.
Your question was (and the question of LoSboccacc), that if you have this technology, can you somehow transfer the self-ness so that the real, legitimate, "you" gets there, and not a copy? How do you know it's really you?
I'd argue that consciousness and self-ness is weirder than humans usually experience it: it can do more things than you'd think.
Let's take Bob, someone born in the simulation, that is, he has spent his entire life being simulated in silicon. For all purposes, his self-ness is the only true legitimate one. There is no difference in legitimacy between his simulation and a human in flesh and blood. That's just a simple conclusion of the basic assumption that there are machines that can do this.
Now if we have such a machine, then it runs some kind of program that can at least store Bob's state as a finite set of bytes. Whether it's a petabyte (less likely) or a yottabyte (maybe) is less relevant, what's more important is that it's a set of bytes.
Now you can do interesting things with this data. What happens if you pause the emulation, save the data to disk, and then decide to either a) stop the emulation and load it from the saved state or b) delete the saved copy and resume the emulation. In both scenarios a and b you'd resume with the same state for Bob as in a) you load the same data you just stored and in b) you just create a disk backup and delete it. Nothing would really change. It would be the same Bob afterwards in both scenarios.
In the next experiment, you save it to disk, turn off the emulating computer for a day, then turn it on, loading the disk again? It would be the same Bob, right?
Let's combine the two experiments. Let's pause the emulation, save the data to disk, and then decide whether to either a) turn off the computer for a day or b) resume the emulation and run it for a day. After the day concluded we power cycle the computer and load the data we stored to disk yesterday. Now my argument is that it's still the same Bob in both scenarios. Scenario a) is our second experiment. As for scenario b), at the point of the pausing, we haven't decided yet about whether to choose a) or b). So clearly, the Bob stored on disk must be the legitimate one, otherwise a) would end up "killing" Bob. So it follows that in scenario b) it's the same Bob as well.
Next I'd argue that whether there is a decision or not isn't really relevant for which data is being stored. It'd be the same Bob if you always chose b). In the fourth experiment, you'd just always go with b).
If we apply this thought experiment to the boundary between emulated and incarnated minds, the conclusion to be drawn is that the cloud copy is always [1] legitimate, whether the original host dies during the copy, after the copy, or not at all.
This conclusion is a bit humbling and it's understandable that people are critical, in fact I'm myself. But I believe this is just because the way we experience life on earth as separate individuals and consciousnesses, simply because our bodies are made like that. Our perception of what a consciousness is is blinded by the fact that each human starts with a blank set of memories and has their own way of deciding things, own skills etc. But once we get the ability to copy entire brains, those new experiences with consciousnesses in our society will fold the perceptions of individuals. Of course there will always be people who still believe in souls, and maybe there are in fact souls we just don't have the detection technology for. But 100 years ago people were superstitious of being photographed as they'd think you are stealing their soul. Maybe in 100 years we'll think that the old kind of thinking about consciousness is the same kind of superstition.
I'd say it's an artifact of our self-preservation drive. Of course it's very important to quality control whether the simulation is really doing what's promised.
To conclude, I think it's much easier to believe in life after death if you've seen your friends and family do it before your own eyes. Even Thomas ended up believing!
Uhh the comment has gotten a bit longer than I anticipated.
[1]: Note that this opens the question: can you just make any kind of copy and call it legitimate? Of course not. Consciousnesses are even weirder. The transition between legitimate and illegitimate is fluid. I'd consider someone who had a stroke and can't talk or walk any more as a weakly legitimate copy of the person pre-stroke. My argument assumes legitimate copies, but of course people can have different opinions/standards on what constitutes a legitimate copy. The question will become especially interesting if billionaires will get access to different copying methods than poor people.
I'll see myself out
http://seanwilliams.com/words/books/sci-fi/the-resurrected-m...