I think we have a much better chance of extending human life biologically in the next 40 years than we do running the brain in software. 100TB for a brain map is extremely optimistic - that's assuming a byte per connection, and I bet it's a lot higher than that.
Like effective fusion power, it's always 50 years away, unfortunately.
I don't remember which sci-fi book it was, but I read that book (or story) a long time ago where the brain itself was, in a flash (no losing consciousness), turned into a kind of 'plastic'; literally every part, so you are you and after that nano machines would create the new cells, destroy others and create connections from that plastic mimicking the exact way the brain works. Give me one of those.
Maybe someone has some good articles about this, but I have a feeling they mean to slowly (for the definition of slow applicable here) replace tissue in the brain so you gradually turn 'silicon' (or whatever it may be) and 'hope' that it mimics every cell close enough and slow enough so that you will remain you after the transition? In which there will never be 2 'you's in this process, however it will be possible to clone/backup your brain after the process? I'm concerned with the 'hope' of it being like this and it would be very optimistic to think we can reach this kind of understanding of the brain within 40 years imho.
Why? A copy of me IS me.
>There is no magic 'soul' or whatever flying over during the transfer taking the self with it.
The information in your brain IS your soul, basically. What else defines "you" if not that?
>Another instance of me is not me; everyone will think it's me (I will think so too, however I see a nice psychological Philip K Dickian mess coming up with you thinking the rest of your life that you are not you) but it's not. I wouldn't really care at all for that kind of 'immortality'.
I can not understand this preference, it just makes no sense to me. As long as one copy of me lives on that is all that matters. It doesn't matter which copy. The specific atoms that make me up don't matter. Why would it matter if I live on being made up of one set of atoms or another?
So you are talking either in a way where the 'self' is shared (both think they are the original even though that contradicts their own knowledge) or you don't care if you die as long as a clone of you lives on (but then you will die; for you as the original 'self' it's lights-out). The latter is not immortality to me, at least no more than having kids (which is actually a big reason many people have kids) and the first makes no logical sense.
Perhaps you are hung up over the fact they diverge by a few seconds of experience? I would trade losing some memories for immortality. People take drugs or suffer from brain damage which has similar effects and I don't consider them "dead". In any case making a copy of the person is likely to be a destructive process, so that isn't even an issue (there's no reason to keep your physical brain after you upload it to a computer.)
Making a copy of the person isn't any different than if I just took the person and replaced all the atoms in their brain instantly with different ones. Hell this could be happening to you every second and you would have no idea. (In our universe, at least, it isn't even possible, since atoms are all identical and don't have little tags saying "atom 1250". I'm just trying to give an idea why basing your identity on a physical object makes no sense.)
If you don't consider your experiences and brain state to be you, and you don't consider the physical object of your brain to be you, then I have no idea how you define personal identity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO
For fusion there is at least a plan for getting there, and some understanding of what the engineering challenges are.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusi...
In particular note the funding graph in question 3.
Moreover, when you talk about the substrate of consciousness, that begs the question of what consciousness actually is, and how it can be transferred. Creating an exact copy of the substrate (or an exact copy of the data pattern, but on a different kind of substrate), and then destroying the original substrate and crossing your fingers - this is a product of magical thinking on the part of scientists.
Who "perceives" a brain running? What do you mean? Is there some higher order process that can do a "perceptual" comparison between a brain running in the world and an identical brain running in a computer? Is the brain doing this comparison?
It may seem like I'm "nitpicking", but I'm not sure if your statement is even well-defined.
Just because you find a notion inconvenient to deal with doesn't mean it's not factually possible. It basically comes down to your view on the supernatural, and by extension the role of your brain. If you're a materialist, we can talk. Otherwise it's just about religion (which is fine if that works for you personally) and in that case a conversation isn't really possible.
Much like space flight and killer drones, this will one day mature from science fiction to reality and we'll have to deal with it in some form. At this point, you have a choice to make: either hang on to centuries worth of convoluted ideas about the soul made by people who didn't know anything about anything, or move on to a new substrate that is much better aligned with the way our minds actually work and better suited for moving us forward as a civilization.
And it's most likely not going to be a do-or-be-damned choice. Barring unforeseen social dynamics, nothing is going to prevent you from choosing to stick with a biological existence.
That is a completely unjust accusation.
Even from a materialist perspective, I think the guy was raising one of the most important questions.
> Even from a materialist perspective, I think the guy was raising one of the most important questions.
I fail to see how that's even a debate at this point. Either you see that the mind is a process being executed on a certain kind of substrate, or you believe that something from outside the physical universe is making up the mind and the brain is just an actuator. Pretty much everything else derives from one of these points of view.
If you think there is "special matter" and "ordinary matter", or that there is something special going on in the brain beyond its information theoretical content, that's not really a scientific/materialist position.
If there's any defensible position in between, I'm genuinely interested in hearing it. Again, I don't mean to attack or upset anyone, please forgive me if I inadvertently gave the wrong signals.
> But would a duplicate of me feel like I live forever?
Your duplicate is you, it doesn't even matter how many of you there are at the end. Unless the initial brain upload is a destructive scan, this pertains to your biological "original" as well. How things feel like in that situation would be pretty much down to your state of mind, so no difference there to how things are now.
Also, this doesn't mean you'll live forever. Nothing is forever. It's just another form of existence, albeit there is reason to be hopeful it will be longer and individually better than a biological existence.
> Won't I just feel it's my duplicate that lives on when my biological self dies?
Again, that depends on the tech level at the time. Most likely, the first forays into this territory will be made by dead people who have their brains scanned. There will be no biological self left in that case. Once technology moves further, it may become possible to do a non-destructive scan of the brain. In that case, people will most likely opt for this technology as a backup plan (though some - including myself - may not and choose to literally fork themselves).
> Maybe a little more satisfying than having a pyramid "live on" but still.
The difference, as I said, is that it is you who lives on.
Even if you could somehow confer upon a pyramid a portion of yourself, it's still just a static monument. Transferring your mind onto a virtual machine is not just a matter of preserving it for posterity, the point is to continue living and thereby changing. The concept of you is not a static thing.
> we will realize that we actually are just a program running on a brain
I think a lot of people realized this quite some time ago already, and they're fine with it :)
> it won't matter if we die.
That's a personal decision to make. It depends on your definition of importance, and whether you think that a mind can have value in of itself.
Still small relief compared to the existencial angst of dying to see your copy survive.
>The difference, as I said, is that it is you who lives on.
So, if I have managed to offload a complete and working copy of your brain and memories, you'd be OK with me killing you, right?
I already talked about that. You're the second commenter who wants to kill me, by the way. It's not just a matter of "offloading", it's about continuing my existence on another substrate. Just sitting on a hard drive somewhere doesn't mean anything.
Anyway, actually killing me would entail erasing both instances of me, so I'm against that. And like I said, from the moment of creation every instance will continue to live (if you let them) and make their own way through life, becoming an entity in its own right. So, again, no killing please.
I want you to let go of the notion of a "copy", this seems to be the major psychological hurdle here. Think of it as a fork, or rapidly diverging instances.
If I get "duplicated" then there are 2 consciousnesses of me.
They maybe an illusion, which gets created every moment in time, but it still feels like they exist.
> If I get "duplicated" then there are 2 consciousnesses of me.
They're both based on you. There is nothing in principle preventing multiple instances of yourself from existing at the same time. Of course, as already said, those instances diverge over time in the same way that you're not the same person as today when you wake up tomorrow.
>They maybe an illusion, which gets created every moment in time, but it still feels like they exist.
Consciousness doesn't have to be an illusion. It's just the sensation of existing, of being alive, of processing information. It is in a very real sense the feeling of being yourself. There is no contradiction here with the ability to fork it.
I think the main psychological hurdle here is your belief that the notion of self is a mere personal issue to be overcome by changing one's ideas about "copies".
In essense, you claim victory not by solving a very real issue (the fact that we identify with the notion of our self and its continuity) but by declaring it a "non problem".
It's not about "letting go"; can you solve the ACTUAL problem of our identification with our continuity of self?
A gradual process of replacement of our body/brain ("ship of Theseus" style) could be a valid answer to this.
Your "just accept that copies of you are just as you as you are" is not. For one, I could not give a flying fuck for my copies -- I'd only care for them as a means to save my memories externally, e.g like a more evolved hard disk.
At the end of the day its my memories and knowledge that I treasure, not the meat its running on. The real question is: can we make a synthetic analog for brain goo that can run the consciousness program?
The point is this:
> I don't see how transferring my brain to a computer does anything for me. I don't want a copy of me to live forever, I want to live forever myself.
Copying someone's brain is, unambiguously, a copy of that person. The original still dies. I'm the original. I don't want a copy of me to live forever. That doesn't do anything for me. I want to live forever.
I'm painfully aware of the point you are trying to make, and no, I still don't agree with the premise behind it. Death is two things: your mind stops being executed, and the information making up your mind is being destroyed. Neither of these things happens to an uploaded person if the upload is sufficiently recent. If you make a copy of yourself, they're both you. If you make a working copy of a dead person, that means there is still a you after the whole thing.
People wonder about strange things like continuity of consciousness, which does not exist to begin with, but it's always invoked nevertheless. How will it feel to be duplicated? And the hidden assumption is that by describing the proposed weirdness of the feeling it will somehow contradict and disprove the feasibility of the whole concept.
What it feels like to be duplicated will very much depend on the external circumstances at that time. If you get run over by a bus and wake up in a piece of silicon, that's how it will be. If you step into a matter replicator or a non-destructive scanner, you'll suddenly look at another instance of yourself. Twice. None of these things are spacetime-shattering paradoxons.
The notion of an "original" and a "copy" is not even applicable if the copy isn't degraded somehow.
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In closing I think I made a serious mistake during this whole discussion. Instead of challenging people to justify why they believe "a copy of you isn't you", I made the error of trying to explain why I think this is wrong - as opposed to you guys having to explain why you believe this is right. I just realized that nothing I wrote here today was actually accessible or useful to anyone and I'm actually turning into losethos as I realize that I'm producing content that makes no sense to anyone. ;)
What is aggravating is that you claim to be getting the point, but you're not.
> Death is two things: your mind stops being executed, and the information making up your mind is being destroyed. Neither of these things happens to an uploaded person if the upload is sufficiently recent.
This is an improper reduction.
If you want to extend the computer analogy: If I die, a particular instance of my mind's execution goes away forever.
You may argue that that doesn't matter for some reason (perhaps by analogy to going to sleep and then waking up, as I do every day), but you have to first accept the that it is a fact.
Your account pretends that it isn't a fact.
For example:
> The notion of an "original" and a "copy" is not even applicable if the copy isn't degraded somehow.
This ignores the fact that a copy is a different instance.
It's not the physical material that is important. It is the information in it, the pattern or algorithm that represents your consciousness.
An analogy can be made between two instances of a program running on a computer, or two instances of a particular class in OO programming.
Ultimately, all of my values reduce to physical pain and pleasure and the anticipation of my continued and increasing ability to experience more pleasure than pain. Sure, I have lots of higher-level, "spiritual" values, but the underlying biological process is what makes those possible. I have no biological or higher-level (rational) reason to care about a different instance of my body and consciousness. I only care about this one.
When I go to sleep, I am putting my conscious mental life on hold, but not my physical life. And I know that my concsiousness will resume in a few hours when I wake up. So making a copy of yourself and killing the original is not obviously analogous to sleeping.
That is the whole misconception I am trying to get rid of. There is no "this one". It would be like if you are a program running on a computer, and you move the entire program from one spot of the memory in RAM, to another. You could also save it to disk and then put it back later. It makes no difference to the user or the program or anything. The concept of "this" doesn't even make sense in terms of information like a computer program. A copy of some information is the same information.
You could also move your head around in space. And yet you are still the same person, are you not? How would it make any difference if you deleted all the atoms in your head and moved them a slight amount to the left. Or deleted all the bits in RAM and moved them to a different place.
If you make a copy of me, for a brief time there will be two of "me". After living for some time, those two will diverge increasingly. That's what living is, changing and developing.
So next after copying me, you want to kill me and you want to know if you're thereby extending my life? That seems like a non sequitur statement. What do you mean by killing "me", anyway? Killing both copies? Killing one copy? How does killing extend the life of anything?
> But there's a biological system with a nearly identical behavior that's living. That copy of you will have a similar conscious experience, but it won't be you.
Okay, now we're moving closer. The first mistake you make is assuming there's an "original" and a "copy". If they're functionally identical, they're both me in equal measures. Killing one is still murder, becoming more tragic the more time the two minds had to develop on their own.
Your are basing this example on the hidden assumption that a mind is trapped inside a body and forever bound to it, that a copy of my mind won't be "me". I recognize this sounds intuitively correct to a lot of people, but it's not actually reflecting physical reality. The atoms making up my mind are not specially tagged. The information they represent can be copied in principle, and the process that is "me" can be executed on other platforms. In this, the assumption of uniqueness is just not applicable.
> That's the point of the parent. The parent's not talking about a soul.
I realize that "soul" is a loaded term. But in the end, you're operating on those same loaded assumptions that seem obvious to yourself, but aren't really compatible with a purely physical model. It's an easy mistake to make without realizing it. Our everyday intuition is not always a good indicator of physical reality.
Everyday intuition suggest that there can only be one "me". It suggests that consciousness is one unbroken process, and that my mind is a fundamentally static kernel. It suggests that I'm a black box with unknowable inner workings. None of these things are actually true.
ok.
>What do you mean by killing "me", anyway? Killing both copies? Killing one copy? How does killing extend the life of anything?
I label you with 1. I label your copy as 2. I kill #1.
>The first mistake you make is assuming there's an "original" and a "copy".
That's not a mistake at all. I'm talking about biological systems. There are two distinct biological systems here in the sense that #1 and #2 occupy different portions of space. If there are two objects in different places in memory on a computer that represent the same thing, they are conceptually equal, but they are not equal if you compare their addresses.
>Your are basing this example on the hidden assumption that a mind is trapped inside a body and forever bound to it, that a copy of my mind won't be "me". I recognize this sounds intuitively correct to a lot of people, but it's not actually reflecting physical reality. The atoms making up my mind are not specially tagged. The information they represent can be copied in principle, and the process that is "me" can be executed on other platforms. In this, the assumption of uniqueness is just not applicable.
This is entirely a misinterpretation of what I've said.
>I realize that "soul" is a loaded term. But in the end, you're operating on those same loaded assumptions that seem obvious to yourself, but aren't really compatible with a purely physical model. It's an easy mistake to make without realizing it. Our everyday intuition is not always a good indicator of physical reality. Everyday intuition suggest that there can only be one "me". It suggests that consciousness is one unbroken process, and that my mind is a fundamentally static kernel. It suggests that I'm a black box with unknowable inner workings. None of these things are actually true.
Again, a misinterpretation.
Which one is "me" again?
> If there are two objects in different places in memory on a computer that represent the same thing, they are conceptually equal, but they are not equal if you compare their addresses.
Exactly my point. And once both minds exist separately, their both based on me, but are rapidly diverging forks of me at a certain point in time. The same thing happens to me without the fork, it's just that there is one "copy" in existence not two.
> This is entirely a misinterpretation of what I've said.
I didn't mean to do that.
There is a machine with a chair. The machine is linked to chamber with a door, where the "copy" exits. We put you in the chair. I hope you can identify yourself. We turn on the machine. A person comes out of the chamber. We write a #2 on the forehead of the person that comes out of the chamber. I call the person without the 2 "the original".
So do you believe there is something immaterial in my "original" body that could not be copied over? It sure sounds like you do, or am I missing something?
>So do you believe there is something immaterial in my "original" body that could not be copied over?
No.
... is a notion that I think is based on faulty assumptions. I've been trying to address why I believe this is only intuitively right but physically wrong in like 10 posts all over here against pretty much anyone who cared to comment, without a single voice of support.
I recognize I'm alone in this. I get this means I'm likely wrong about this, and you're right in some way to assume that I just don't understand (or to quote an email: don't have the mental capacity nor the education required to understand).
I don't understand how, once you introduce the concept of making an adequate copy, that still means there is an "original" and a "copy" which somehow isn't another instance of the original. I don't understand why the concept of making a copy is fine when we're talking about, say, a piece of text but then immediately seizes to be valid when we're talking about minds.
Collectively, you guys tried to make me understand by invoking several things. For example, the argument was raised that because you obviously can't have several instances of your consciousness at the same time, this can never work. There was the argument that any would-be left-over physical body somehow remains the home of the mind, and there would obviously be an impostor around pretending to be me but ultimately not being me. At two points, it was suggested that I (specifically, I, Udo) be killed to prove that I care about my existence and the existence of forks based on me, which I do and which does not really have any meaningful connection to the question of the feasibility of copying. I also said that the "problem" of the left-over body most likely won't arise due to technical limitations of the process. Still, that didn't count and people still think that uploading minds is like building pyramids. Finally, the argument was made that both instances are by necessity different, if only because they occupy a different positions in space, to which I tried to explain that, yes, they're different and they'll continue to become more different over time, and yet that doesn't have any real bearing on the proposed possibility or impossibility of the whole concept.
This is where I apologize and withdraw from the discussion. You certainly tried to explain it harder than most people here, but in the end that didn't work out. I'm old enough to have the strong feeling that at some point in the future, a populist Kurzweil 2.0 will come along and everybody will just come around to this conclusion as if it had just been invented.
And that's fine with me. I don't need to be right, but I do want to have the option of being uploaded. Repulsion to the very idea is deeply ingrained within our society. Attempts to prolong life are virtually unknown outside horror literature where it's always portrayed as monstrous. Even "progressive" sites such as io9 draw the line here. It goes against the foundation of most religions, and it contradicts the intuition of most people.
Of all things, a Buffy quote comes to mind here, allow me to paraphrase it: "You'll live again, but it won't be you. A demon sets up in your body, having your memories and thinking your thoughts, but you'll be gone." - I think this sums up the opinion of most people when it comes to transhumanism. And once again, you're right, I struggle to understand this at every level.
In fact, I'm not even so sure I'm not a copy, as most of the original stuff that made me is long gone.
So, you would copy most motor functions to a "brain emulator" first.
And after you have acclimated, you would continue to the copying process (I have very little doubt that if properly done, the brain wouldn't be able to readjust to this, just like a prosthetic limb or "seeing" through stimulation of nerves on the tongue).
And this process is gradually performed until the entire "consciousness" is running on the external artificial computer.
I wonder how the perception of self would be affected by such a method.
A copy of you IS you. If you change the atoms that make up your brain you are still the same person. It's not like the atoms themselves are sacred. Likewise if you replace the computational substrate your brain runs on it's still you. Why do you care if it's neurons or transistors? Consciousness is a pattern, an algorithm maybe, not a physical thing.
But let's suppose we are able to copy a human atom by atom. Even then a copy of me is not me. Maybe it is identical to me on a atomical level for a tiny fraction of time. But then it would be a different person with different impressions and different thoughts just because it looks in a different direction.
By your logic, the person who will call themselves "you" two seconds from now isn't "you" either. I'd still rather die with a copy of me with 1 second worth of different experiences then no copies at all.
Yes, I think you can say that the person I was yesterday is a different person than the one I am today or ten seconds ago.
I don't want to die but a copy of myself does not help I think. When my existence ends I don't experience the world anymore. It would be nice to know that someone very similar to me will be there but it does not really prevent me from dying. Transferring me to another (younger) body would be better. But what do we need to transfer and how?
If I instantly replaced all the atoms in your brain with different atoms, would you die? Would it still be you? Likewise if I made an exact copy of your brain.
Screw theory lets just do it and see what happens.