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Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

Ship of Theseus argument applies here - done gradually enough there's no perceptual difference between a brain running in a computer and on a biological substrate. You 'die' in that sense every time you lose conciousness - a different you wakes up.

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.

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Slightly off-topic: Fusion power keeps being "50 years away" because nobody funds it. See this interview on Slashdot from 2012

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusi...

In particular note the funding graph in question 3.

And what about the following scenario: your brain and DNA gets transferred to a computer, and after millenia you get a young body and your brain transferred back. In this case we need to get funded only the brain to computer transfer technology.

Excellent point. But do we ever lose consciousness, though? Arguably, a continuum of consciousness is what defines us as individuals. If there was an absolute loss of consciousness, you would indeed die every time you fell asleep, but this is never the case. The impression of loss of consciousness is related to the fact that memories cannot (usually) be transferred between different states of consciousness.

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.

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 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.

I think the point here is, that even the you from "now" and the you from "a moment ago" aren't the same. Consciousness is an illusion.

But like someone else already said; it doesn't solve the dumping of the brain and the feeling of self. Copy the brain onto a different substrate (I have no problem seeing that as a real possibility) but after you did that the two 'you's (one human, one something else) look at each other and only 1 is you. There is no magic 'soul' or whatever flying over during the transfer taking the self with it. The clone you won't believe it's you as he/she is aware of the procedure. And the original you will die as every human always did before.

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.

>but after you did that the two 'you's (one human, one something else) look at each other and only 1 is you.

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?

I don't think I agree with you; you are doing a magical movement of 'self' here. Even a sharing of 'self' in your first example. If there is 2 copies of you then 1 of you is you, the other is not. The thought experiment is very simple; sit yourself in a chamber with a glass mirror; your side says 'original' the other side says 'copy'. You are aware you will be copied in 1 second. The other you appears on the 'copy' side of the mirror. The original (you) now knows that the copy is the copy as he saw this process. And the copy knows he's the copy as he always is aware of the process the same you are.

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.

Your thought experiment doesn't really prove anything except that you can have two identical beings in the same room and they can be aware they are made of different atoms. But they are still the same person.

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://lesswrong.com/lw/pm/identity_isnt_in_specific_atoms/

Not a biologist here. However, haven't all the cells I was born with died a long time ago? Am I not a whole new set of cells, just with some stored electrical impulses in my brain?

I'm skeptical that it will happen in the planned timescale - but the current estimates for "effective fusion power" are actually 20 years away. This is based on ITER (currently being built) going well and the DEMO plant - which will actually generated power, being built after that.

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.

"there's no perceptual difference between a brain running in a computer and on a biological substrate"

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.

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