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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe "mind uploading" will ever go anywhere. There's a real Ship of Theseus philosophical problem here and it's never provable so I expect many people would just think you've created a copy that superficially acts like the original while destroying the original.

Technologically speaking, I'm not sure it's even possible to replicate the complex state of an entire nervous system. Maybe you could do this incrementally (ie by replacing parts of the brain with machines that can be replicated) but we're awfully sentimental about our own meat bags.

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It doesn't matter what people think when they're philosophizing alone; peer pressure will win out. Do you want to be the luddite left behind when all your friends are zipping around the world on optical fibers, London to New Tokyo in 200 ms? Do you want to be the only delicate mortal in the room, where everyone else has a full mind backup on rsync.net?

There's a lot of terrible stuff in today's technology world that no thinking person would accept, if they paused to make a deliberated choice. But no one has time to stop. You either go with the flow, and swallow your concerns, or you put massive friction between you and the rest of society. I think it will be the some going forwards: all the decisions will continue to be made collectively and blindly, and without realizing we're making great decisions until we've already made them.

Badly paraphrasing "Rapture of the Nerds" (co-written by TFA's author): [Immortal uploads] did not have to win the debate against the anti-upload faction - they only had to outlive them

Yes, I want to be the only friend to not kill myself so that an online simulation can "go" to Tokyo.

No I would not drink the Kool-Aid out of peer pressure.

There's a game called "SOMA" which does a great job of exploring this question.

Ultimately it comes to the same conclusion, using the player character as a foil who spends most of the game refusing to understand what is going on.

That game was amazing, one of the best horror games I ever played and leaves you thinking when finished. Highly recommend.

Was looking for SOMA in the comments, I love the story it tells.

I was going to mention SOMA as well. I was thinking about the poor tormented person that was stuck in a robot body, but had no idea it was in a robot body.

The problem with this argument is that some people obviously don’t care about the philosophical problem, and so they will use the mind uploader.

Sure, many people will think “it’s not _me_ that lives on”. And the rest of the normal people will see their loved ones apparently (from the outside) living on in digital form, and ignore the philosophical questions entirely.

Even if only .1% of people upload their minds, that still produces a massive sociological shift.

That's my thought on Stargates. Wouldn't your consciousness just stop as you were ripped apart? And a clone of you would then continue but it wouldn't be your stream. The more I think about this, about what my stream of consciousness is, my "session" if you will, the weirder it all gets.

Especially when you consider sleeping.

Do we die every night, with a copy continuing on tomorrow?

I think dreams are evidence that consciousness has continuity across sleep.

You're not dreaming all of the time, so that doesn't work. Dreams only occur during REM sleep phases, which tend to cluster closer to the end of the sleep cycle.

I wasn't trying to argue for constant consciousness, just saying that if we can be aware of and remember some things that happen during REM sleep, that suggests that perhaps there's more continuity there than was being suggested above.

Consider the case of drinking or drugs to the point of waking up not remembering what happened the night before.

And then consider people who, knowing very well that they are going to be in a state of mind where they will do things that they will not remember the next day, still choose to do it.

To me this is even crazier than mind uploading. They are lending their body to someone with which they don't have stream continuity.

That's a relevant point.

I'm right there with you on getting blackout drunk. I've never had any interest in mind-altering substances.

It is a commonplace in surgery rooms that anesthetic is administered, and after it dissipates the patient continues speaking exactly where they left off, not noticing any gap.

That has to mean something about the physics and chemistry of consciousness as manifested in our meat brains.

Wow, that's interesting. I had not heard of that before. Thanks for sharing.

After a bunch of struggling with the knowledge that my consciousness will one day cease I've recently come upon this thought myself and I find it strangely reassuring.

I was out walking with a friend in San Francisco, and ran into one of his old friends he hadn't seen in three years. This guy said he had been abducted by aliens a thousand times, since. I only realized later that meant every time he slept.

After you have been Probed, how can you assume the you they let go was the original?

I believe the stargate concept is that your atoms are ripped apart, transported via wormhole, then reintegrated in an identical state to how they were. From a continuity of your stream perspective, this is no different than being knocked out.

> we're awfully sentimental about our own meat bags

As much as I've enjoyed my meat bag and worked towards making it better through different means like diet or weightlifting, the older I get and the more ailments appear, the more I think about being able to live long enough to acquire my new and improved robot body, Chappie [0] style!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappie_(film)

I'm sorry sir, the Chappie™ bodies are on back order due to their superior hashing ability when mining crypto. Your consciousness will be uploaded to a toaster for the foreseeable future.

Interestingly, many films depicting these future events tend to view things like nervous systems/pain etc. as things that are disadvantages and that technology would remove but humanity is built upon pain, fear, weakness and ultimately death so I wonder if some fully automated but artifical beings could ever be anything more than mundane, they would lack urgency and ambition because they wouldn't suffer the same desire for power and significance because it would be meaningless.

Most people believe that they're the same person who went to bed last night despite all the changes that happened in their brain while they were asleep. They even believe that they'er the same person after a full decade despite the huge differences in behavior and memory that occur after such a large interval!

So yeah, after seeing uploads act the same way as the original they'll end up being treated as the original just like we treat people as the same individual over periods of unconsciousness.

For myself I don't think it's proper to answer questions like these with a binary but rather I prefer to think about how much alike two individuals are.

> so I expect many people would just think you've created a copy that superficially acts like the original while destroying the original.

Prove otherwise.

Star Trek transporters have the same issue.

That episode of TNG where Barclay sees and even interacts with weird slug things that turn out to be people while transporting seems to indicate that there's a continuity of awareness, which really raises even more questions and should probably be best ignored.

>I expect many people would just think you've created a copy that superficially acts like the original while destroying the original

That is literally the same as moving the original. The way you describe it is different of course, but that’s where differences end.

I don't think so. Imagine someone wrote an AI that is able to act exactly like you. To the point that no one you know can differentiate between you and the AI. Would it be OK at that point if they just killed you? No one can tell the difference, right?

The point is, on the outside they look the same, but we don't understand enough about consciousness to possibly know if or how it can be transferred to another system.

heh that's interesting to think about. Imagine the executioner leaves the room and then comes back. How would they know which version of you to kill?

> Would it be OK at that point if they just killed you? No one can tell the difference, right?

No, because copying has created two individuals, so you're still killing an individual for no reason.

You fork a project on Github, is it ok to delete the original? No. Both will grow separately and slowly diverge / become their own personalities.

Let both live on their own and after a while, if both you and the AI consent to it, merge the brain state back together.

>I don't think so. Imagine someone wrote an AI that is able to act exactly like you. To the point that no one you know can differentiate between you and the AI. Would it be OK at that point if they just killed you? No one can tell the difference, right?

Everyone can tell the difference, because there's a dead body. Killing is killing. Doesn't matter that there's another instance living. Also making a clone of me would be a gross violation of my privacy rights. The situation in the previous post - the "transporter" - is different, because I'm agreeing to one of my instances to be killed.

I wonder what would be the legal status of one's own instances ("clones"). I mean, they are all persons, but at the same time they are inherently connected, from DNA to memories.

Ignore the clone part though. That's just how I'm extending the time frame. The same problem exists with a "transporter". The instance coming out the other side appears to be identical, but there's no way to know if that instance is actually a continuation or yourself. Is it the same consciousness/self? Is that even possible to know?

It is just somebody else who knows your passwords, and can convince your bank and spouse that they are you.

It’s not somebody else though - it’s me, they know the exact same things I know, and thus have the same feelings about them.

And of course it’s also their account and their spouse. It’s not like an original and a copy, it’s not even fork, where you still have the parent and child - in this case here all “mes” are equal.

That is how people confuse themselves.

If you have an "identical twin", that also is not you. You started diverging the moment you both existed. Which of you owns the bank account, or is married, is a matter of law, and there is nothing that transfers either.

I don't know why you imagine there is no "original and a copy". You existed before, the copy did not. The copy thinks of itself as you, but isn't. It carries a delusion.

It will start by trying to steal your stuff, so is an adversary.

Yes, we started diverging at “fork” - the other me is different than current me, but we are both the old me. And the legal stuff is indeed down to law, although I believe even from that point of view both “yous” are still you, because there is no way to tell you apart. That’s also why there is no “original” and the copy - of there was a way to tell which is which, you wouldn’t be identical. And there is no delusion - the other me is the “old me” same way I am.

I think the essential problem with this point of view is similar to many words theory - to most people the idea of “cheap fork” sounds quite alien; I’m not sure if there’s anything similar in our usual reality. It is however common in the internets, from Unix to Git.

If it’s a faithful copy, its acting like the original isn’t superficial.

Nobody is sure it's possible! But it might be.

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