Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Personal immortality isn't the goal. I believe my thought patterns are conducive to long-term human or post-human species success. I have chosen (or have had chosen for me by biology) as an axiom that this is desirable. I can create copies enhanced by partner genetics and trained by me who have the ability to fit themselves to circumstances I cannot foresee. My personal death is required for evolution, and permits washing out overfitting to local conditions.

The brain upload isn't for power or personal immortality. It is for the thought patterns of the time to be accessible as a library or intelligent servant so that later generations may prosper.

If I am fortunate, I will be so preserved, and they will overrule me most of the time, using me the way I use (say) Karl Popper's books: as a reference, not as immutable truth, and not as the sole tool to make decisions. My mind is far more general purpose than a book, so it will be tempting for them to treat it as a sole tool, but I'm counting on them being smarter than me.

And if they deem me, Gen 1 uploadee, only worthy of jokes like we see Alicebot, so be it. If I am to be deleted as I am superseded, so be it.

We don't need evolution and death to redesign our future selves.

Evolution is massively inefficient as a design process, and gives no guarantees about what you get.

Personal immortality is the goal.

Sorry, personal immortality isn't my goal. I permit that it can be a goal for others. I trust my current self to be mutable. I do not trust a society of people like me to desire mutability on the large scale.

I desire that death is not conquered because of that fear.

Your desires don't matter at all after you're dead.

Very Diogenes of you. And very true. Hence why I work towards putting them in action when I'm alive.

I have an even better idea: Cloning a female in her own womb, using her body cells as a base.

Well, that's the part¹ with

> I can create copies enhanced by partner genetics and trained by me who have the ability to fit themselves to circumstances I cannot foresee.

Normal reproduction is good for passing on advantageous genetics and parenting is a short-term transfer of advantageous memetics. The brain upload is for advantageous non-degrading memetics. Think of the uploaded brain as just a book with an intelligent query engine.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if we're able to make servants of uploaded brains it will be as vast a leap in human capability as when we got the written text. We gained the technology to pass ideas across time and hit a hockey stick in growth. If we gain the technology to increase that fidelity and permit querying informed by additional information? Making 10 copies of me, with varying plasticity, and then feeding them information to see if they find novel solutions to problems?

Forget training a neural network to detect answers. Just emulate the brain and you get a never-tiring never-bored (since you can programmatically dopamine-train this being) eternal intelligent searcher who understands all your queries.

¹ Not strictly, since it's not a clone, but clones are shitty anyway since they're less capable of genetic adaptation.

That's clever, but how do we account for replication errors? Wouldn't it be better to infuse the host with DNA from another of the same species? Sure, you wouldn't get perfect clones, but this also opens us up to the possibility of combining desirable traits from multiple people.

That method would be useful to produce the master copy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com