Cue the "are you still you?" crowd
If a fork or a copy can be made and run on a computer of some sort, it would be a technological marvel. But it’s not the sort of immortality I’d be interested in, if little old biological me still shuffles off and dies somewhere.
I think it would be a very difficult thing to teach people to associate normal machines (like a phone or tablet) with themselves, but cybernetic implants and perhaps mind/machine interfaced stuff would be able to trick the mind into thinking that they are really parts of itself.
Consider it this way: we duplicate you, and in an eyeblink you're either still in your body or still in VR. Subjectively to your body (because your still there) - there's a version of you which dies forever.
But there's also a version which remembers duplication worked. Life after death is assured. So now every version which spins off from that has the surety: duplication means continuance.
Much beyond that point I think it all very much becomes as you say, a psychotherapy problem: who's in the box and who's on the stage doesn't really matter provided you knock yourself out before doing the transfer and don't wake up later. Easy enough to arrange.
Of course, if you were really worried you can hang out till the high-tech "neuron by neuron replacement" process happens, but I think you'd wind up with a lot of people realizing it made very little difference as they moved over to a pure VR existence without quite realizing it had happened till it was done.
It might not matter to the new entity, it might not matter to an observer, but in that situation you've just killed the human, who is very much dead.
> Of course, if you were really worried you can hang out till the high-tech "neuron by neuron replacement" process happens
I think that's the only way that I would consider it a real transition, rather than a copy and a death.
I think that's quite a huge assertion to make, personally.
> In a very real sense, you are dying every day
I don't agree with this view, it would take some pretty hard science there to change my mind, to show that sleep and death are really equivalent, and I don't think we have that given the definition of consciousness is a little fuzzy in the first place.
This seems to be more a philosophical conjecture than any sort of hard fact.
Not really, especially in the context of the discussion which is privileging the continuity of experience which objectively breaks when you lose consciousness during sleep or anesthesia.
The idea that I should consider a copy as the same thing as myself is entirely alien, and seems quite unreasonable.
Perform this thought experiment: identify things that make you "you". Now, one by one, ask yourself "if that was stripped from me, would I still be me?". Are you still you without each of your memories? Without each of your talents? Your opinions? Your body? Your genes? Continue long enough and I believe you will see that there is literally nothing you can't strip away.
Consider things like Alien Hand Syndrome, or that people can live with half their brain removed and it doesn't even matter which half. Which hemisphere is the one that contains "you"?
Consider why people are willing to sacrifice their lives for others. Why do people voluntarily end their own existence for the betterment of their children, their community, their nation, or their ideals?
There are literally thousands of years of philosophical writing on the concept that I cannot hope to do justice to.
That is an assertion.
> Your body?
No, my body is part of me, it makes little sense to try to divorce what appears to be the emergent phenomenon of consciousness from the wetware that it runs on. There is no sense in which I am not tied to my brain.
> Your genes?
No, I likely would be different without my particular genetic makeup. It's an odd question to ask, there's not really a way to separate me from that.
> Consider things like Alien Hand Syndrome, or that people can live with half their brain removed and it doesn't even matter which half
People can live, but damage to parts of the brain very much changes them, and can change all aspects of their personality. At that point the "you" is very much changed or (usually) diminished. But that doesn't speak to continuity of experience or singularity either.
None of this makes any difference or even much sense in the context of my consciousness being continuous or singular. It's subject to change and physical damage. That doesn't mean if you copy my brain into a computer somehow that it's anything other than a copy, I will not experience its experiences, live its life.
> Consider why people are willing to sacrifice their lives for others
This seems entirely orthogonal to any question about whether consciousness is continuous or singular. There are many reasons that people may choose to do this, none of them maintains their conscious experience.
So would cutting someone like me off from the Internet and other sources of world knowledge.
> That is an assertion.
Yes.
> No, my body is part of me, it makes little sense to try to divorce what appears to be the emergent phenomenon of consciousness from the wetware that it runs on. There is no sense in which I am not tied to my brain.
Interesting that you used "brain" at the end when instead of the body as a whole, isn't it? If parts of your brain started to degrade and fail, but could be replaced with machine equivalents, would the result not be "you"? How much would need to be replaced before it stopped being "you"? How is that change different from the changes your brain underwent during your growth as a human being?
> People can live, but damage to parts of the brain very much changes them, and can change all aspects of their personality. At that point the "you" is very much changed or (usually) diminished. But that doesn't speak to continuity of experience or singularity either.
That just begs the question: how much change is necessary to make "you" no longer "you"? You have undoubtedly undergone extreme changes in both body and mind over the course of your life and will continue to do so but, for some reason, still consider yourself the same "you". Which is it, by the way? Is the conscious experience "you" or are "you" defined by your personality and traits?
> None of this makes any difference or even much sense in the context of my consciousness being continuous or singular. It's subject to change and physical damage. That doesn't mean if you copy my brain into a computer somehow that it's anything other than a copy, I will not experience its experiences, live its life.
I think it makes all the difference, because the only reason you assume this continuity exists is because you have memories, which are a property of how your mind works and provided by your brain with input from your body. Or at least that's what your memories of biology and neurology lessons tell you. Memories are, science tells us, pretty malleable. But the thing is, you do not experience the past, you only experience memories of the past, your conscious experience exists now and only now. There is no continuation. If you define "you" as your conscious experience, then your body and mind are irrelevant except as an interface to experience the world.
Your copy will also have memories and remember being you. It will believe it is the same "you" as you do, and the only reason you will believe it is wrong is that you remember being you and have the "original" (again, not a static entity) body. But if your conscious experience is what defines you as "you", then that is irrelevant.
> > Consider why people are willing to sacrifice their lives for others
> This seems entirely orthogonal to any question about whether consciousness is continuous or singular. There are many reasons that people may choose to do this, none of them maintains their conscious experience.
Yes, that's precisely the point. The reasons people do it are precisely the point. Remember this all started with your statement:
> If a fork or a copy can be made and run on a computer of some sort, it would be a technological marvel. But it’s not the sort of immortality I’d be interested in, if little old biological me still shuffles off and dies somewhere.
Yet parents are interested in the continuation of their children even if they themselves still shuffle off and die. In fact, they are so deeply devoted to it that they will often sacrifice their own lives prematurely to ensure it. Why should that matter to them more than the continuation of their self?
Here's another assertion for you: self can be greater than "I".
Not really, we know that consciousness arises from the brain, and can change if it's damaged.
> If parts of your brain started to degrade and fail, but could be replaced with machine equivalents, would the result not be "you"?
If it was replaced in such a way that the continuity is not broken, then I imagine you could slowly replace it all without necessarily impacting my experience of myself. However I don't personally believe that merely copying the information over to a new system would achieve the same, as I would be able to observe the copy go about a separate life, I would not have its experiences etc.
Perhaps you're right about that part, perhaps it could still be me without any of the current physical body, but only if that was achieved through a continuous transition, a copy that could just be extracted without affecting the original adds nothing to the original.
> That just begs the question: how much change is necessary to make "you" no longer "you"?
This question is relying on semantics for effect. You can still be a changed you without being someone else, and copy created without changing the individual is a separate thing.
> I think it makes all the difference, because the only reason you assume this continuity exists is because you have memories
Massive assumption/assertion. Memories are structural within the brain, they are not mere information, they are substance. I experience this continuity of being, and it shapes me.
> your conscious experience exists now and only now.
Everything exists now and only now, that doesn't mean that a copy of me is the same thing as me.
> Your copy will also have memories and remember being you.
Sure it will, but it will then lead a separate life, not one I will experience directly. So it is not me.
> Yet parents are interested in the continuation of their children even if they themselves still shuffle off and die. In fact, they are so deeply devoted to it that they will often sacrifice their own lives prematurely to ensure it. Why should that matter to them more than the continuation of their self?
That question is entirely orthogonal to whether or not it is the continuation of their own life. Which it's not, because they're dead and you've said as much. It could matter more to them for any number or reasons, from the biological drive to continue their line, to pure altruism. The consideration of whether a copied self would be you or not is entirely unrelated to how much people value themselves in relation to others, or why they might undertake such actions.
> self can be greater than "I".
Metaphorically, allegorically, narratively, certainly, but not in the concrete way we're talking about.
You appear to have some sort of metaphysical belief around this area, that a copy of yourself could be considered yourself in some sort of wider consideration of self that includes not only potential clones and virtual copies but even whole groups of other people. To me, that doesn't gel in the slightest - if I get copied, if I have offspring, if I sacrifice myself for whatever reason, I still die. Those others may continue, and that's great, and that might even make the sacrifice worth it in your hypothetical altruistic death scenario. But I still die in that scenario. That's not immortality for me.
I'm not trying to attach a moral value to immortality either, or say that's it's good, or more important than the survival of one's children, or altruism, or anything else. I'm literally just saying that I couldn't consider a copy to be the same thing as me, nor would children nor other people, as I would not experience their lives. Just as I am not experiencing your life right now.
My point being that you already went from defining "you" with your body included to narrowing it down to your brain. How much else can you strip away? What if all your memories were gone, are you now dead and replaced by some other being?
> If it was replaced in such a way that the continuity is not broken, then I imagine you could slowly replace it all without necessarily impacting my experience of myself. However I don't personally believe that merely copying the information over to a new system would achieve the same, as I would be able to observe the copy go about a separate life, I would not have its experiences etc.
Easy enough to fix if we simply ensure the process is fatal. Why do you think there is a difference in outcome between a more gradual replacement and a wholesale one? I submit this is merely intuition not based in reality.
Do you believe that consciousness arises from the purely material, in which case there is no reason to believe that an identical copy (let's assume the copy process is fatal to take this "2 at once" situation out of it) is not you, or do you believe there is something, some essence of being, that cannot be copied?
> Massive assumption/assertion. Memories are structural within the brain, they are not mere information, they are substance. I experience this continuity of being, and it shapes me.
Structures in the brain are mere information, the same way bits on a disk are. You experience having a memory, you don't experience the events that formed it. Sometimes our memories aren't even real. If a memory is not based in reality that means that your past self didn't experience the events it records, yet it is still a part of what you consider to be yourself. If that is the case, then why are you so certain your consciousness has been continuous?
> Sure it will, but it will then lead a separate life, not one I will experience directly. So it is not me.
You don't directly experience anything but the now. You 5 minutes from now will only experience what you've just experienced as a memory, probably one that you 5 years from now won't even experience as a memory.
> That question is entirely orthogonal to whether or not it is the continuation of their own life. Which it's not, because they're dead and you've said as much. It could matter more to them for any number or reasons, from the biological drive to continue their line, to pure altruism. The consideration of whether a copied self would be you or not is entirely unrelated to how much people value themselves in relation to others, or why they might undertake such actions.
Again, I disagree, and I think you are unable to see it because you are stuck on this notion that who "you" are is some easily definable self-contained unique unit of being.
> Metaphorically, allegorically, narratively, certainly, but not in the concrete way we're talking about.
I disagree, I think it is true in a very concrete fashion. I think if you spent significant amounts of time thinking about it you would say so as well.
> You appear to have some sort of metaphysical belief around this area, that a copy of yourself could be considered yourself in some sort of wider consideration of self that includes not only potential clones and virtual copies but even whole groups of other people. To me, that doesn't gel in the slightest - if I get copied, if I have offspring, if I sacrifice myself for whatever reason, I still die. Those others may continue, and that's great, and that might even make the sacrifice worth it in your hypothetical altruistic death scenario. But I still die in that scenario. That's not immortality for me.
What I'm trying to say is that the very concept of "self" is an abstract notion and you are choosing to arbitrarily define it such that only the continued extension of your biological being could ever be immortality.