We Don’t Have to Die
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
This feels wrong to me.
No, not on an ethical level or anything like that, but rather the fact that it wouldn't be you that continues living, but rather a copy of you, much like cloning an HDD and putting the new one in the computer, while the old one probably gets tossed away (though some forms of getting to this emulation with brains might also be destructive during the process).
Your present consciousness is not just the pattern itself, but rather the pattern within a specific brain - yours. If you are currently reading this and are experiencing this (not just remembering this as a memory that you had a thousand years ago), then it's a given that you're on the losing side of this equation, unless we develop viable cryopreservation or something to reverse aging.
Otherwise, there's probably nothing but a final cessation of consciousness for you in store, at some point in time. One moment you'll be thinking and experiencing the world around you, the next you'll stop and will never have a thought or an experience again, at least with our present understanding of the universe (Boltzmann brains and Quantum immortality both seem unlikely).
Sure, you can argue semantics and the Ship of Theseus, but i don't care much about preserving an instance of my brain/memories that's not me, much like how i find the claims that a person can "live on" in others' memories to be nonsensical.
I've never gotten around to reading about why they take this position - presumably there's a lengthy sequence or post about it.
And by the way, your judgment of permanent death is ignorant of the ancient Hellenic state of mind which actually germinated the European Scientific Revolution which your scientific thoughts are predicated upon. They didn't believe in death; indeed the Christian religious concept of the resurrection is paragonal to enlightenment scientific pursuits; in that the titans of Europe believed Heaven is justified. The "random-walk" experience of human cellular life which you are inferring is actually a century's old aberration in this great ascension of man towards everlasting life.
The planet-wide human computer happens to run its computation by transferring some state from the current generation of humans to the next via a mixture of lip flapping, squiggles on paper, and backlit screens panels. In doing so it performs pruning of the state: every detail is not transferred.
In essence, a person pushing for immortality is a single selfish genome with a singular purpose: replicate to the detriment of maximizing the global utility of the system. The system by design will try its best to thwart this effort.
It’s an understatement to say this has yet to be established. The human body is very much hardware and includes our incredible cognitive system that we haven’t and may never be able to simulate accurately. Everything from quantum interactions of particles composing neurons to physically interacting with the world etc may prove irreducibly complex to intelligence so as to make simulation essentially just cloning. The “mind as software” meme really needs to have better evidence for its arrogant presentation.
It never will because it is fundamentally a bad metaphor in reverse. The proper metaphor doesn't apply in reverse to mind and brain. Mind is not an algorithm or a series of instructions that gets executed on brain, the notion is absurd.
Mind is also not something else, it is not some thing, as it has no substance, has no weight, color, smell, etc. Though we are certain the brain is the seat of the mind, you can slice up brain as many ways as possible and never find the mind. Near as experts can figure, mind is a phenomenon of personal experience that arises from healthy brain.
Conversely, Strong AI, a living but artificial mind in a digital machine, is unattainable and will remain the domain of science fiction, though it is easy enough to have a convincing enough AI fool us into believing an AI has personal experience, it is simply physically and logically impossible, at least until two things occur: 1) we actually fully understand mind (unlikely to occur) and 2) we attain the ability to create neurons at the scale of what makes neurons (may be impossible). But if it ever occurs, what a horrendous and cruel thing to create. Imagine being consciousness under those conditions.
I'm no expert, but I wonder just how much of the distinction is entirely artificial and the only fundamental difference between our intelligence and what we call AI is the set of input data, and the rest of the difference can be attributed to scale. After all, scale has an effect on cell-based wetware too. Does a cat have a mind? Could one pass for a human?
The poster said we shouldn’t seek immortality as it goes against evolution. By the exact same logic we shouldn’t lift a finger to medically help people beyond child rearing age. It’s the same argument. And if we really believe that evolutionary incentives define morality, than we might as well cull that population to eliminate dead weight.
Sounds horrific? That’s because our sense of right and wrong has very little to do with what benefits evolution. And as a consequence, evolution has little if anything to contribute to this discussion of whether we should research immortality or not.
Self-preservation is very important, and anything that puts it in question tends to elicit a very negative visceral reaction. However, I do think you mischaracterized what I said. Not putting one's survival first and foremost is not always horrific in the grand scheme of things. We tend to call people who sacrifice their life to save others heroes. In the end, continued survival of the group outweighs the survival of an individual in human societies.
So far we have a working method for maintaining and evolving culture by way of knowledge transfer as well as replacement of the bodies that run this "software". And yes, it is absolutely "co-designed": our neural patterns shape the way we think as much as the collective knowledge does. With immortality the author is proposing to do away with a significant driver of cognitive evolution, and it's unclear to me what the benefit of this is, other than pandering to a selfish desire of self-preservation.
I also agree that if immortality was a thing humanity would still continue to evolve. It would just be a very different path, and it's not clear that it would be better.
No it isn't, and if it seems that way then you're oversimplifying. For one, someone living forever is a far bigger insult to "evolution" than someone living 20 years past "child rearing age." You only get to "gas the elderly" by being over-literal and over-strict. Living a little longer doesn't disrupt the system, but living indefinitely longer does.
So? The point was your reductio ad absurdum fails. You said "exact same logic" gets you both places, when it doesn't actually, especially once you start adding in real-world complexities.
Let's start by assuming science-fiction is true...
Lets start by assuming time-travel exists, but it only goes back to the point where you turned on the machine. Or lets assume hyperdrives were invented and we're entering a period of space exploration (Star Trek), etc. etc.
It turns out to be pretty fun.
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So lets say it were possible that "saving your brain to software" was possible. How would it work?
We know that worms and jellyfish have memories but no brains for example. Their simple nervous systems store memories in the nerves themselves. Surely, our nerves in our muscles and fingertips are storing some of our memories: the "software" we download out of our bodies would probably have to include that!
(A common joke is that my fingers know my passwords but my brain does not. Maybe its true: muscle memory is a real thing after all).
Ultimately, it is clear that to "transfer our memories", we need to rebuild a nervous system, and maybe a good chunk of our bodies (if memories are truly stored in the nerves in our muscles, then to perform an adequate transfer, we need to recreate those nerves with the same "settings" as our hypothetically downloaded software)
Its fun to think about, because we don't actually have to solve the problem. Its just fantasy. We can think and discuss the problem as much or as little as we'd like, without in fact doing any hard work.
IE: The fun part.