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Comment by nico | Hacker News Reader

In case like me, you were also wondering what Transhumanists are supposed to believe in (what the article says is):

> transhumanists have deepened their belief in a fated future in which the human species will achieve “augmented” evolution through fusing with machines, leading to the emergence of an artificial superintelligence that will far outstrip all human knowledge and achieve God-like powers (The Singularity). This digital deity will lead us to a new era, in which all human biological limitations will be transcended; bringing about end to sickness, suffering and even death, and leading us to colonise the cosmos

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Well, when you put it like that, it doesn't not sound like a cult at all.

Phrasing does a lot of things.

If I rephrased the quoted passage as:

> transhumanists have deepened their hope for future in which the human species will augment evolution by fusing with machines (as we already do with brain-computer interfaces, but better), and the potential that current AI — which is already helping us decode proteins, perform and write up scientific research — will continue to improve, helping us to expand our medical knowledge even faster and help us develop cures for things currently beyond us. As the AI we already have has allowed us read the complete connectome — neural structure — in small animals, there's even a possibility we may expand this to human brains (though we don't know how long this will take us to do!), and if we manage that, then it would allow us to back up and restore our minds as we already do with digital documents.

Doesn't seem nuts, unless you believe humans have souls that can't be digitised.

That said, I'm skeptical about any specific future: when the only flying machine you've heard of is an airship, it's easy to imagine a future filled with them — what's our airship? What's the thing everyone expects but which won't happen?

> Doesn't seem nuts, unless you believe humans have souls that can't be digitised.

Let’s ignore souls: humans have bodies which cannot be digitised. Our bodies are real matter, not some dross to be jettisoned.

I wonder if Black Mirror ever did an episode about someone unwillingly personality-cloned into a computer, then killed, with everyone around him acting as though this were normal and he — still conscious — was a non-person?

Right now, nobody knows from whence personhood rises. There's not even any way to prove that all natural humans have the same thing whenever we speak of consciousness — indeed, we know that our conscious experiences vary wildly, not only between individuals but for any individual over time, and there's 40 or so competing definitions of the word.

Some of the stuff that happens to the body clearly impacts our states of consciousness. Blood-alcohol levels, for example. So if I take your statement at face value: OK, so you simulate at least some of the rest of the body, perhaps all of it. So what? Still a simulation.

You can also think of it this from the opposite direction, where someone might try to argue against a purely material origins of consciousness by saying "the brain doesn't work if you take it out of the body" — that this is in fact true, doesn't mean the brain isn't the bit doing the thinking.

You can take Searle's position (why yes, I do have a philosophy qualification, albeit a mediocre one): "No one supposes that computer simulations of a five-alarm fire will burn the neighborhood down or that a computer simulation of a rainstorm will leave us all drenched."[0], but that only works if a mind is a substance of its own kind rather than the emergent result of the processes that gave rise to it. The components of a simulated rainstorm will still interact with each other as those of a real one, if given sufficient fidelity.

Perhaps minds are emergent from some quantum shenanigans, as Penrose says[1]. Then it would take a quantum computer rather than a classical one[2].

> I wonder if Black Mirror ever did an episode about someone unwillingly personality-cloned into a computer, then killed, with everyone around him acting as though this were normal and he — still conscious — was a non-person?

What you describe is a P-zombie, and as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie will show, there's no consensus over this even amongst philosophers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_intelligence#:~:text...

[1] but it would be horrifying if he's right specifically about microtubules, because those are in basically every living cell, and hence if they do mediate consciousness then potatoes would be conscious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...

[2] While it's technically possible to simulate quantum processes classically with an exponential slowdown, those kinds of technicality also make the entire universe and everything in it into a Markov chain, I prefer to only point out such things to show the limitations of making such arguments.

How do you get from “ Right now, nobody knows from whence personhood rises” to (paraphrasing) “once we can recreate the connectome, we can back people up?”

If we don’t know what it even is, why is it so inevitable that we’ll be able to recreate it in another medium?

My original comment said:

> connectome — neural structure — in small animals, there's even a possibility we may expand this to human brains (though we don't know how long this will take us to do!)

I don't know how to phrase it as any less "inevitable" without saying it's "impossible".

That said, a restore from backup may be easier than understanding/accurately simulating at exactly the correct depth to do whatever the important thing turns out to be and not waste effort on unnecessary things*: we've known for a long time that it's possible to encourage neurons to grow in certain ways with electrical stimulation. At some point in the research process, I expect someone to try to use this to replicate an existing pattern (probably in something simple like a fruit fly) — if that organism seems to remember things that only the original had learned, that would be interesting.

I expect that people will do the same test with the digital version of the connectome and eventually get it to also remember something from the original living brain, and that people will even then continue argue that the the digital version is still missing something. And that this argument will continue even if the simulation is scaled up to a human.

And even if we can not simply store the copy but allow it to develop in the simulation (human brains do change over time), I expect these arguments to continue even if that digital human connectome simulation learns something, then is downloaded into an organic brain in the fashion I have described, and the new living human brain discusses things that only the simulation had experienced.

Right now, on the topic of personhood, we don't even know the right questions.

* in one extreme, a computer can simulate any physical process. Right now, it looks like quantum mechanics is sufficient for all chemistry, and hence all biology, and hence brains. But it may be wildly excessive to simulate all the way down to that level — we don't know, we have much to learn. On the other, neural nets in AI are widely recognised to be toy models, and lots of people assume they're too simple to explain biological cognition — again, we don't know, we have much to learn.

It doesn't seem nuts, it just seems to miss the point, even ignoring souls. No matter how perfect the copy it'll still be a new instance, and the original meat brain instance of myself will one day fail and that consciousness will cease. A copy may fire up and it may be perfect could be a brand new "me", but the consciousness that is the running instance of me will be no more. There's no escape from that. I don't care about copies of myself running around, I'm not that egotistical to think the world needs more of me, but the eternal dark of death scares me, and duplication does nothing to assuage those fears.

This already happens to you every time you go to sleep and wake up. You have absolutely no way of discerning whether the consciousness you are now experiencing is a new consciousness created by your body when you woke up, or whether it is the same consciousness as before you went to sleep.

A body produces consciousness, consciousness does not 'inhabit' a body.

This is not factually true, it’s a philosophical statement.

Some care about that, others don't.

The eternal dark that I can't experience doesn't scare me, but I'd still like to have a backup — or at least, I did, then I started seriously considering what else can be done with those backups besides restoring from them…

I probably still would, but I'm much less optimistic about people than I used to be.

A backup of what? And why do you want a copy of yourself? To what purpose?

And yeah, wait for someone to create 1,000 instances of you to do whatever they want with.

Backup of my brain. Lost two relatives to Alzheimer's, seems plausible that I might benefit from a freshly printed brain in 30 years, even if the scan, reprinting, and transplant are all done on the same day under general anaesthetic.

(Today such a thing is totally implausible; perhaps it still will be in 30 years, but I'll only find out by living until then).

I'm sure from your previous comment that you don't see that as a continuation of self, but I do see it as such.

Similar works for any potentially dangerous activity.

Which is gross mischaracterization. Many transhumanists do not think the singularity is real. It is just a prediction of simplified model, where in reality technological progress would hit limitations not accounted in the model. And even if the singulary happened, it would be unpredictable what it would bring.

This is what I believe your pal Scott calls a "motte-and-bailey argument."

Who is doing which?

Wikipedia says: """ […] one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the "bailey") […] """

The claim "the article is mischaracterising transhumanism" is saying the article's definition of transhumanism is a bailey, surrounded by the motte of "huh, these ideas sound a bit like Christianity and Revelations…"

I don't know the actual distribution of transhumanists who believe in any specific outcome of the singularity, but I would at least point at the simultaneous existence of e/acc (who think it will be good) and LessWrong (who mostly think it's going to be misaligned, meaning it goes off and does its own thing even when we don't want it to).

But even the most extreme ideas of what might be possible are still couched in terms of atoms, not magic.

People get hung up on the Pascal's Basilisk stuff, but "hard-takeoff singularity" is also semiotically indistinguishable from the Christian eschaton. Someone who shapes their life around the belief this is possible definitionally participates in what we need not also recognize as a Christian heresy - though a well-catechized Christian would - to recognize for the new religious movement (itself a term of art) which it is.

That's the bailey. The motte - where one such as my prior interlocutor seeks resort when challenged on the obvious and barely disguised roots of a faith no longer stabilized by the tradition from which it was severed - is "atoms, not magic" and "transhumanists don't actually believe the singularity is real." No actual defense of the concept, on which enough enthusiastically favorable not to say Marinettiesque ink has been spent over the last quarter century to exhaust an entire universe of squid. Just a Gish gallop of excuses, in the hope this will serve the role of the squid's own obscurantist jet - not yet, I'm sorry to say.

Back when I was at school, I actually read the Book of Revelation[0]. I don't see anything that matches it to hard-takeoff — when AI folks talks of gates, it's the logical kind, not what existed when Revelation was written; nothing about seals, final battles, falling stars, imprisoning of seven-headed dragons in bottomless pits, etc. — while I wouldn't be surprised to see some connections (given how little imagination most people show), I just don't see any meaningful connection with any singularity stuff to the eschaton I was raised with.

So, I assume you mean something of a non-Catholic eschaton? And specifically, you have in mind something from a denomination that, regardless of what it says about biblical literalism, doesn't actually pay much attention to what's written in Revelation?

Hard-takeoff only differs from soft-takeoff in the speed of events; given how slow Revelations is ("thousand years" of peace, which I assume was written to mean "a really long time" and not even intended literally), I think that if anything, slow-takeoff is a closer fit than hard-takeoff.

Also, and this is kinda important, the Christian eschaton seems to assume the "good guys" will win[1]. AI-driven singularities just says that some AI — possibly plural, possibly singular — will win, but doesn't tell you anything about the morality of the AI, or if it's a replicated single mind, or a pantheon of different minds. The default assumption from many is more like the Cthulhu Mythos than like anything recognised as a real religion. There's no ten commandments for humans to follow to get into the AI's good books. Even if there was, digital copies of minds and a complete control over matter are much closer to the Hindu and Buddhist ideas of reincarnation than to the various Christian heaven/hell/purgatory combinations.

Even just upvotes and downvotes get me "karma", after all.

[0] I was raised Catholic to get me into a Catholic school, but that's not directly why I read it. My mum thought I wasn't reading enough, so paid me more pocket money for reading more books, and it just happened to be available.

[1] Christ/Yahweh and 12,000 from each of the 12 tribes of Israel, the latter of which makes a lot more sense when considering that the thing was at that point still an offshoot of Judaism, and had not yet developed a long-running antisemitic streak

The Revelation of St. John the Divine is taken as a true eschatology by a smallish and very novel heretical splinter sect, arising in a land known for its tendency to produce such wild-eyed, footless new religious movements, and which has had a lately outsized profile. Don't mistake that for the doctrine of any of the Eastern or Western orthodoxies, or indeed even any of the mainline Protestant denominations. And "divine," in this usage, is a countable synonym for "mystic."

You said yourself you weren't catechized in that stuff. Neither was I, and I was also raised by Catholics. Your catechists should have warned you off this crap when they noticed you getting into it, the way mine did, and told you not to presume to know the mind of God. Not that that helped me a few years later, but at least I knew enough then to take the happy-clappy foot-washing Southern Baptist stuff as cynically as it deserved.

It's hard to argue much else in direct response here, since that confusion seems so pervasive - not precisely a criticism, only I would rather we start from a true axiom. I guess I would say I also see the cosmic horror aspect of it - something Land knows he's doing and Bostrom doesn't, though for the latter this is only one case of his pervasive confusion of genres - but I don't really see much cause to credit with similar insight most people who actually cherish the belief.

(Note specially also the phrase 'semiotically indistinguishable,' which is unusual. One example might be that stories based intentionally closely on Campbell's 'monomyth' structure tend rarely to be very semiotically distinct from one another. Here of course we discuss not a thousand-faced hero but a Tausendjährige kingdom of God, but in both cases we see the same superficial variation in expression of a consistent animating myth.)

Frankly, this is wrong. The singularity is first of all, mischaracterized. The singularity is the point in time when AI has become smarter(however you may define it) than humans. The point is, we don't know what will happen beyond that point. It does not necessarily imply "God-like powers". It is the "not knowing" I think that is interesting.

Transhumanists simply believe in augmenting their bodies beyond their natural capabilities. The rest is just misrepresentation.

Me personally, I believe we should throw a wrench in the whole thing because the people who are in control are some of the worst people. Unless that changes, it would be a mistake to develop this technology further.

> Transhumanists simply believe in augmenting their bodies beyond their natural capabilities. The rest is just misrepresentation.

I have trouble with this characterization, because if you use it, then 99% of the human race is transhumanist, so the term loses any meaning. I’d argue the landscape isn't fenced to body modification, either, but that’s not really important. We’re clearly talking about something else here. Everybody knows it—don’t play coy.

As far as I’ve been able to discern over the years, a transhumanist advocates for the use of technology to improve human experience irrespective of the implications to humanity. And the way they rationalize this is with a specific set of beliefs that conveniently skirt issues of consciousness and soul. I am not saying they are wrong, they’re operating off arguable axioms, all of which may be end up being true. I’m saying they have to hold a set of beliefs in those axioms that are not shared by 99% of humans to rationalize their worldview.

I don't think this accurately defines transhumanism, at all.

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