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Comment by dsiroker | Hacker News Reader

(I’m the founder & CEO of the Mind Emulation Foundation)

Flattered to see this hit the front page! This is a project I’ve been passionate about for a while and been keeping it mostly under the radar.

Now that it’s public, I’m happy to answer any questions the HN community has.

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My feedback. I think if I were to donate I would like to see a clear roadmap for even getting in the ballpark of doing this.

I have donated to SENS for years, and particularly when they started, they didn't really say exactly "donate to cure aging", they said "these are the important known problems that we need to spend time/money on to make progress here."

I believe there are multiple large known problems doing brain emulation. What are they? How will donating to you progress those?

How do you think SENS is doing, sorry to go off topic.

I like them, and they give me hope, but i am not sure where they are.

Not really a question, more of a remark: both the destructive and non-destructive approaches result in the same thing: a copy of 'you', not actually 'you'. (The same is true when you go to sleep, of course. Whoever wakes up isn't you either)

What you would need is a Ship of Theseus approach - preserving the consciousness stream while neuron after neuron is being replaced by a digital version, slowly, to convince the stream into thinking it's still the same. You can't just take a single scan; you have to keep scanning continuously and keep a running feedback stream between the (decreasing) wetbrain and the (increasing) bitbrain to ensure the illusion of continuity.

(But to be honest, I don't actually believe in consciousness or a Self. Whoever started writing this short comment wasn't 'me', and neither am I, nothing is)

The gradual replacement approach (as you describe it) is a useful thought experiment that gets people more comfortable with the possibility of mind emulation but the end state is the same for both approaches. One just intuitively feels more you than the other, but as you said, it's likely all an illusion so doing it while you "sleep" is probably enough to make you sufficiently happy to be alive when you wake up non-biologically.

This would be like Bicentennial Man in reverse. Call me skeptic but it sounds like a good foundation for a new novel and not like a good basis for Foundation.

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

With the gradual replacement scenario it might be easier to detect any fundamental differences between start and end states. Like if the end state is actually a p-zombie. But I haven't really thought this through.

You seem to be conflicted on what you believe on many of these topics. Which is understandable for such a profound question.

There is a very good game called Soma which explores many of these topics, which may help explore your own beliefs and subconscious reactions to the questions of instantiation and your own relation to the various modes and levels of existence of consciousness and self. I highly recommend you play it if you have time and haven't already.

Can you be clearer about what’s going on behind the scenes here? Additionally, are you aware of the humanityplus and ##hplusroadmap communities?

Do you have any affiliation or contact with https://www.brainpreservation.org/ ?

> This digital emulation could then interact with the rest of the world using a simple text interface or a more sophisticated robotic avatar with digital representations of taste, sight, touch, smell, and sound.

I found this to be the most intriguing bit of the described process. I can digest the (theoretical) idea of reproducing the mind, mostly agreeing with a materialistic perspective of it. What I got myself imagining was the process of adaptation this mind would have to go to be capable of interacting with the new kinds of inputs and outputs it would have. Imagine you freeze a computer while it was running a VR game with max resolution settings. You then go on and move the machine to a different setup, with a CRT monitor and a keyboard to interact with it. How can any meaningful interaction happen in such a context? Unless you provide a virtual environment to interact with it and allow it to adapt... But then, how would such an environment look like to a copy of a mind? Would you have any insights on that?

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