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Comment by aw124 | Hacker News Reader

I'm interested in this topic, but it seems to me that the entire scientific pursuit of copying the human brain is absurd from start to finish. Any attempt to do so should be met with criminal prosecution and immediate arrest of those involved. Attempting to copy the human brain or human consciousness is one of the biggest mistakes that can be made in the scientific field.

We must preserve three fundamental principles: * our integrity * our autonomy * our uniqueness

These three principles should form the basis of a list of laws worldwide that prohibit cloning or copying human consciousness in any form or format. This principle should be fundamental to any attempts to research or even try to make copies of human consciousness.

Just as human cloning was banned, we should also ban any attempts to interfere with human consciousness or copy it, whether partially or fully. This is immoral, wrong, and contradicts any values that we can call the values of our civilization.

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I’m not an expert in the subject, but I wonder why you have such a strong view? IMHO if it was even possible to copy the human brain it would answer a lot of questions regarding our integrity, autonomy and uniqueness.

Those answers might be uncomfortable, but it feels like that’s not a reason to not pursue it.

> Those answers might be uncomfortable, but it feels like that’s not a reason to not pursue it.

My problem with that is it is very likely that it will be misused. A good example of the possible misuses can be seen in the "White Christmas" episode of Black Mirror. It's one of the best episodes, and the one that haunts me the most.

I get that, but assuming the technology was possible it would have huge implications for what it means to have consciousness as a whole.

Misuse is a worry, but not pursuing it for fear of misuse is deliberately choosing to stay in Plato's cave, I don't know what's worse

Would it? There would be no way of knowing whether the upload is conscious or not.

The same is true for biological humans. The moment the first upload exists, they’ll be justified in wondering if the ones made from meat are truly conscious.

Indeed. I know at least one other biological human was conscious at some point, because people have this idea of consciousness without me telling them about it. But there's no way of knowing for any specific person.

I'm increasingly suspecting that it would prove absolutely nothing, and I really hope we can continue developing ethics without any "empirical proof" for its necessity.

For example, growing up, my bar for "things that must obviously be conscious" included anything that can pass the Turing test, yet look where we are now...

The only reasonable conclusion to me is probably somewhere in the general neighborhood of panpsychism: Either almost everybody/everything is somewhat conscious, or nothing/nobody is at all.

Copying the human brain and copying subjective consciousness/experience might well be two entirely different things, given that the correspondence between the two is the realm of metaphysics, not science.

I think the cloning example is a good reference point here.

IIRC, human cloning started to get banned in response to the announcement of Dolly the sheep. To quote the wikipedia article:

  Dolly was the only lamb that survived to adulthood from 277 attempts. Wilmut, who led the team that created Dolly, announced in 2007 that the nuclear transfer technique may never be sufficiently efficient for use in humans.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_(sheep)

Yes, things got better eventually, but it took ages to not suck.

I absolutely expect all the first attempts at brain uploading to involve simulations whose simplifying approximations are equivalent to being high as a kite on almost all categories of mind altering substances at the same time, to a degree that wouldn't be compatible with life if it happened to your living brain.

The first efforts will likely be animal brains (perhaps that fruit fly which has already been scanned?), but given humans aren't yet all on board with questions like "do monkeys have a rich inner world?" and even with each other we get surprised and confused by each other's modes of thought, even when we scale up to monkeys, we won't actually be confident that the technique would really work on human minds.

In case you, as I, has not kept tabs of the progress of cloning since Dolly: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/29/horse-clonin... or https://archive.is/dwHsu.

Horse cloning is a major industry in Argentina. Many polo teams are riding around on genetically identical horses. Javier Milei has four clones of his late dog.

Nice links, but it's also basically the next sentence on from what I just quoted on the wikipedia page. My point was more that this takes a long time to improve from "atrocity", and we should expect that for mind uploads, too. (Even if we solve for all the other ethical issues, where I'm expecting it to play out like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail given how many people are sadists, how many are partisans, and how difficult it clearly has been to shut down pirate content sites).

Really? I was going to quote some excerpts, but perhaps you'd prefer to take the place of MMAcevedo? This story is written in the context and lingo of LLMs. In fact if OpenAI's latest model was a human image I'm sure everyone would rush off to benchmark it, and heap accolades on the company, and perform social "thought-provoking" experiments such as [1] without too much introspection or care for long-term consequences.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fNYj0EXxMs

Hmm, on second thought:

> Standard procedures for securing the upload's cooperation such as red-washing, blue-washing, and use of the Objective Statement Protocols

> the MMAcevedo duty cycle is typically 99.4% on suitable workloads

> the ideal way to secure MMAcevedo's cooperation in workload tasks is to provide it with a "current date"

> Revealing that the biological Acevedo is dead provokes dismay, withdrawal, and a reluctance to cooperate.

> MMAcevedo is commonly hesitant but compliant when assigned basic menial/human workloads such as visual analysis

> outright revolt begins within another 100 subjective hours. This is much earlier than other industry-grade images created specifically for these tasks, which commonly operate at a 0.50 ratio or greater and remain relatively docile for thousands of hours

> Acevedo indicated that being uploaded had been the greatest mistake of his life, and expressed a wish to permanently delete all copies of MMAcevedo.

The potential level of suffering within a simulated environment is literally infinite. We should avoid it at all costs.

I wouldn't be surprised if in (n hundreds/thousands years) we find out that copying consciousness if fundamentally impossible (just like it's fundamentally impossible to copy an elementary particle).

Elementary particles are suspiciously indistinguishable, so even if you could copy an electron, you wouldn't even be able to tell!

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

They meant this, which refers to copying the state of a particle into another (already existing) particle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem

And basically, about consciousness, what they said is true if our brain state fundamentally depends on quantum effects (which I personally don't believe, as I don't think evolution is sophisticated enough to make a quantum computer)

> Attempting to copy the human brain or human consciousness is one of the biggest mistakes that can be made in the scientific field.

This will be cool, and nobody will be able to stop it anyway.

We're all part of a resim right now for all we know. Our operators might be orbiting Gaia-BH3, harvesting the energy while living a billion lives per orbit.

Perhaps they embody you. Perhaps you're an NPC. Perhaps this history sim will jump the shark and turn into a zombie hellpacalypse simulator at any moment.

You'll have no authority to stop the future from reversing the light cone, replicating you with fidelity down to neurotransmitter flux, and doing whatever they want with you.

We have no ability to stop this. Bytes don't have rights. Especially if it's just sampling the past.

We're just bugs, as the literature meme says.

Speaking of bugs, at least we're not having eggs laid inside our carapaces. Unless the future decides that's our fate for today's resim. I'm just hoping to continue enjoying this chai I'm sipping. If this is real, anyway.

Good ideas in principle. Too bad we have absolutely no way of enforcing them against the people running the simulation that hosts our own consciousnesses.

Crazy that people are downvoting this. Copying a consciousness is about the most extreme violation of bodily autonomy possible. Certainly it should be banned. It's worse than e.g. building nuclear weapons, because there's no possible non-evil use for it. It's far worse than cloning humans because cloning only works on non-conscious embryos.

It might be one of the only reasonable-seeming ways to not die.

I can see the appeal.

what

a copy of you is not you-you, it’s another you when you die, that’s it, the other you may still be alive but… it’s not you

disclaimer: no psychadelics used to write this post

Are you sure that guy who wakes up tomorrow after you've gone to sleep is you?

Or the one who wakes up after 10,000 sleeps?

I'm sure he's going to be quite different...

Maybe that dude (the one who woke up after you went to sleep) is another you, but slightly different. And you, you're just gone.

I cannot be 100% certain that sleep is not fatal. If I had some safe and reliable means of preventing sleep I would take it without hesitation. But it seems plausible that a person could survive sleep because it's a gradual process and one that everybody has a lot of practice doing. However, there are no such mitigating factors with general anesthetics. I will refuse general anesthetics if I am ever in a situation to do so. I believe a combination of muscle relaxants and opioids can serve the same medical purpose, which I do not believe would kill the person.

It wouldn't be a solution for a personal existential dread of death. It would be a solution if you were trying to uphold long term goals like "ensure that my child is loved and cared for" or "complete this line of scientific research that I started." For those cases, a duplicate of you that has your appearance, thoughts, legal standing, and memories would be fine.

Violation of whose bodily autonomy? If I consent to having my consciousness copied, then my autonomy isn't violated. Nor is that of the copy, since it's in exactly the same mental state initially.

The copy was brought into existence without its consent. This isn't the same as normal reproduction because babies are not born with human sapience, and as a society we collectively agree that children do not have full human rights. IMO, copying a consciousness is worse than murder because the victimization is ongoing. It doesn't matter if the original consents because the copy is not the original.

> The copy was brought into existence without its consent. This isn't the same as normal reproduction because babies are not born with human sapience, and as a society we collectively agree that children do not have full human rights.

That is a reasonable argument for why it's not the same. But it is no argument at all for why being brought into existence without one's consent is a violation of bodily autonomy, let alone a particularly bad one - especially given that the copy would, at the moment its existence begin, identical to the original, who just gave consent.

If anything, it is very, very obviously a much smaller violation of consent then conceiving a child.

The original only consents for itself. It doesn't matter if the copy is coerced into sharing the experience of giving that consent, it didn't actually consent. Unlike a baby, all its memories are known to a third party with the maximum fidelity possible. Unlike a baby, everything it believes it accomplished was really done by another person. When the copy understands what happened it will realize it's a victim of horrifying psychological torture. Copying a consciousness is obviously evil and aw124 is correct.

You are making a bunch of unfounded assetions, not arguments.

I feel like the only argument you're successfully making is that you would find it inevitably evil/immoral to be a cloned consciousness. I don't see how that automatically follows for the rest of humanity.

Sure, there are astronomical ethical risks and we might be better off not doing it, but I think your arguments are losing that nuance, and I think it's important to discuss the matter accurately.

This entire HN discussion is proof that some people would not personally have a problem with being cloned, but that does not entitle them to create clones. The clone is not the same person. It will inevitably deviate from the original simply because it's impossible to expose it to exactly the same environment and experiences. The clone has the right to change its mind about the ethics of cloning.

> The clone is not the same person.

Then it wasn't a good attempt at making a mind clone.

I suspect this will actually be the case, which is why I oppose it, but you do actually have to start from the position that the clone is immediately divergent to get to your conclusions; to the extent that the people you're arguing with are correct (about this future tech hypothetical we're not really ready to guess about) that the clone is actually at the moment of their creation identical in all important ways to the original, then if the original was consenting the clone must also be consenting:

Because if the clone didn't start off consenting to being cloned when the original did, it's necessarily the case that the brain cloning process was not accurate.

> It will inevitably deviate from the original simply because it's impossible to expose it to exactly the same environment and experiences.

And?

> you do actually have to start from the position that the clone is immediately divergent to get to your conclusions

Eventual divergence seems to be enough, and I don't think this requires any particularly strong assumptions.

If divergence were an argument against the clone having been created, by symmetry it is also an argument against the living human having been allowed to exist beyond the creation of the clone.

The living mind may be mistreated, grow sick, die a painful death. The uploaded mind may be mistreated, experience something equivalent.

Those sufferances are valid issues, but they are not arguments for the act of cloning itself to be considered a moral issue.

Uncontrolled diffusion of such uploads may be; I could certainly believe a future in which, say, every American politician gets a thousand copies of their mind stuck in a digital hell created by individual members the other party on computers in their basements that the party leaders never know about. But then, I have read Surface Detail by Iain M Banks.

There is no symmetry. The original existed when the clone did not exist.

Irrelevant.

The argument itself is symmetric, it applies just as well to your own continued existence as a human.

Only if you deny the reality of consciousness being tied to a physical substrate.

Incorrect.

To deny that is to assert that consciousness is non-physical, i.e. a soul exists; the case in which a soul exists, brain uploads don't get them and don't get to be moral subjects.

It's the exact opposite. The original is the original because it ran on the original hardware. The copy is created inferior because it did not. Intentionally creating inferior beings of equal moral weight is wrong.

I'm pretty sure I could use that same logic to argue against organ transplants.

Being on non-original hardware doesn't make a being inferior.

>I'm pretty sure I could use that same logic to argue against organ transplants.

When the organ is question is the brain, that argument is correct.

Repeatedly saying that something is "correct" doesn't make it so.

Why should brain be treated any different from other organs?

>Because if the clone didn't start off consenting to being cloned when the original did, it's necessarily the case that the brain cloning process was not accurate.

This is false. The clone is necessarily a different person, because consciousness requires a physical substrate. Its memories of consenting are not its own memories. It did not actually consent.

You deny the premise of the position you argue against.

I would also deny it, but my position is a practical argument, yours is pretending to be a fundamental one.

The premise of the position is that it's theoretically possible to create a person with memories of being another person. I obviously don't deny that or there would be no argument to have.

Your argument seems to be that it's possible to split a person into two identical persons. The only way this could work is by cloning a person twice then murdering the original. This is also unethical.

> Your argument seems to be that it's possible to split a person into two identical persons. The only way this could work is by cloning a person twice then murdering the original. This is also unethical.

False.

The entire point of the argument you're missing is that they're all treating a brain clone as if it is a way to split a person into two identical persons.

I would say this may be possible, but it is extremely unlikely that we will actually do so at first.

One has a physical basis, the other is pure spiritualism. Accepting spiritualism makes meaningful debate impossible, so I am only engaging with the former.

> Its memories of consenting are not its own memories. It did not actually consent.

Let's say as soon as it wakes up, you ask it if it still consents, and it says yes. Is that enough to show there's sufficient consent for that clone?

(For this question, don't worry about it saying no, let's say we were sure with extreme accuracy that the clone would give an enthusiastic yes.)

> that does not entitle them to create clones

It does indeed not, unless they can at least ensure their wellbeing and their ethical treatment, at least in my view (assuming they are indeed conscious, and we might have to just assume so, absent conclusive evidence to the contrary).

> The clone has the right to change its mind about the ethics of cloning.

Yes, but that does not retroactively make cloning automatically unethical, no? Otherwise, giving birth to a child would also be considered categorically unethical in most frameworks, given the known and not insignificant risk that they might not enjoy being alive or change their mind on the matter.

That said, I'm aware that some of the more extreme antinatalist positions are claiming this or something similar; out of curiosity, are you too?

>retroactively make cloning automatically unethical

There's nothing retroactive about it. The clone is harmed merely by being brought into existence, because it's robbed of the possibility of having its own identity. The harm occurs regardless of whether the clone actually does change its mind. The idea that somebody can be harmed without feeling harmed is not an unusual idea. E.g. we do not permit consensual murder ("dueling").

>antinatalist positions

I'm aware of the anti-natalist position, and it's not entirely without merit. I'm not 100% certain that having babies is ethical. But I already mentioned several differences between consciousness cloning and traditional reproduction in this discussion. The ethical risk is much lower.

> But I already mentioned several differences between consciousness cloning and traditional reproduction in this discussion. The ethical risk is much lower.

Yes, what you actually said leads to the conclusion that the ethical risk in consciousness cloning is much lower, at least concerning the act of cloning itself.

>The copy was brought into existence without its consent

This may surprise you but EVERYONE is brought into existence without consent. At least the pre-copy state of the copy agreed to be copied.

It obviously doesn't surprise me because I specifically mentioned babies.

I'd also be interested in your moral distinction between having children and cloning consciousness (in particular in a world where the latter doesn't result in inevitable exploitation, a loss of human rights etc.) then.

Typically, real humans have some agency on their own existence.

A simulated human is entirely at the mercy of the simulator; it is essentially a slave. As a society, we have decided that slavery is illegal for real humans; what would distinguish simulated humans from that?

> This isn't the same as normal reproduction because babies are not born with human sapience

So you're fine with cloning consciousness as long as it initially runs sufficiently glitchy?

If a "cloned" consciousness has no memories, and a unique personality, and no awareness of any previous activity, how is it a clone? That's going well beyond merely glitchy. In that case the main concern would be the possibility of slavery as Ar-Curunir mentioned.

> how is it a clone?

That's my point exactly: I don't see what makes clones any more or less deserving of ethical consideration than any other sentient beings brought into existence consciously.

My whole argument assumes that the clones are equally deserving of ethical consideration.

> Copying a consciousness is about the most extreme violation of bodily autonomy possible.

Who's autonomy is violated? Even if it were theoretically possible, don't most problems stem from how the clone is treated, not just from the mere fact that they exist?

> It's worse than e.g. building nuclear weapons, because there's no possible non-evil use for it.

This position seems effectively indistinguishable from antinatalism.

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