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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

I mean, we want to live longer and not get dementia.

I wanna know what happens. I want to download my brain into a computer and see what humanity does over the next couple million years.

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Even if that were possible, and theoretically we could take the entirety of a person's brain and emulate every synapse into digital storage, along with enough compute to run everything (which is a massive hurdle to overcome), would it really still be you?

I kind of think about it a bit like the transporter deck from Star Trek. Are those people really travelling somewhere else or are they getting cloned and then done like Hugh Jackman at the end of The Prestige?

How would anyone even know? A computer simulated you would seem like you to everyone else, but you'd already be gone.

Worse, still, unless the current me blinks out of existence, "old me" will still be around - unless we can replace neurons in-place with computational analogs, the original me is destined to die, almost no matter what, even if a copy/download is made. From the download's perspective, it continues, but the original, if not ended then and there, still faces a grim end and will know it.

If painless (or I don't remember it), I'm 100% fine with a fairly speedy destructive upload process.

You won't remember it as you'll cease to exist at all is the point.

My consciousness gets interrupted on a nightly basis. One more will be fine.

Yep. Part of me is terrified every time I go to sleep -- but the sleepiness wins.

> How would anyone even know?

If no one can ever know, I'm not sure I care. Transport me to cool places all you like.

The correct answer is that there is no "you". Continuity in consciousness is an illusion that can be deconstructed through deep enough meditation, or more accessibly through psychedelics. It certainly feels like there is as "you" at the center, but what you call "you" is sort of a narrative that your brain is stitching together at each moment, and it can be subject to distortion, revision, reinvention.

You are not the same "you" from moment to moment--you are just reassembled by your brain every second in a way that feels conscious. So I would say there is a false dichotomy in the center here. If "you" are already an illusion, digital emulation just manipulates that illusion in different ways. Whether or not "you" survive in a literal sense is not the right question, there was not a fixed "you" to keep or lose in the first place

I’m in the middle of a sci-fi book that explores this. The answer is that you won’t be the same person. Your mind will meld with the computer’s AI and you will go insane and try to exterminate the human race. I wouldn’t risk it.

> we want to live longer and not get dementia

...but why? Dying is natural. Dying is normal. It's what's supposed to happen.

> I wanna know what happens

I've reproduced three times so I've ticked that particular biological box.

My OH is away this week. Our eldest cooked lunch on Tuesday when a meeting I was in ran over by an hour. I stumbled into the kitchen an hour later than planned to find the three of them eating what he'd prepared from what he'd found in the fridge and he'd made enough for me, too. They're pretty well set.

> I want to download my brain into a computer and see what humanity does over the next couple million years

I'm absolutely, completely OK with not doing that :)

I'm confident the next generation will figure it out, just like ours did, and the one before us, and so on...

It's also natural and normal to die in infancy, but we've solved that and I don't hear many complaints

Edit: looked it up, 49% is the estimated rate for hunter-gatherer societies and 48% until ~200 years ago (depending on the country, may also be ~60% or as "low" as ~40%). In 1950 it was still more than a quarter; only within living memory has it truly become abnormal to die soon after birth. https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality

This argument of what's "natural" holds so little water to me, I don't understand in what state of belief anyone even brings this up. Is this a religious thing? Why say "it's natural to die and therefore we should always continue to do so"? Arguments of overpopulation, psychological issues (and unknown unknowns), and other real problems, I can certainly understand, but "it's natural"? Please explain

> It's what's supposed to happen.

I wear glasses, clothes, and my kids were born three months early. I, and they, were supposed to die.

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