I see the future hyperintelligent AI as something more like Iain M Banks "Culture" Minds, but hey, maybe I just can't comprehend it with my puny brain :)
And then extend it again by hooking it up to a co-processor? Still you?
And then keep extending it, until the meat bits are only 5% of the structure, and not necessary for the running of the whole? Still you?
Is You-ness (or identity) fluid and variable, or is it binary - something is either "you" or "not you"?
Yeah.
> co-processor?
What's that mean, even?
A directly accessible computer hooked to your brain, to augment your processing capabilities rather than just memory.
I think it's a wrong question. "You" is in the map, not in the territory. It's how algorithms in our brain factorize the world model.
I think Penrose was on right track with his ideas about brain using quantum effects (our words and comprehension follows rules that are eerily familiar of some quantum effects).
With that in mind, I don't think it's possible to do an easy copy of it without disrupting the way it works.
Probably "still me" in the same sense as the person I was five minutes ago is the same person as the one I'll be in 5 minutes.
"The ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's paradox, is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object which has had all its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The paradox is most notably recorded by Plutarch in Life of Theseus from the late 1st century. Plutarch asked whether a ship which was restored by replacing each and every one of its wooden parts, remained the same ship."
There's an early AI researcher who brought up the neuron-by-neuron replacement too, but I can't remember who off-hand (might have been Moravec)
Of course, the question then of who to trust to be your cloud provider running your conciousness-as-a-service process becomes a very serious one. I don't think there's a single company around today that I would trust to run me.
The main problem is the lawyers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E
If there's one service I don't want to be freemium....
reminds me of "how to get ahead in advertising", or William Burroughs' "Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk" heh..
It's a fascinating question.
(And before you can answer, the clones all respond "yes").
The notion that evolution is exponential is, to me at least, very well supported. This article criticizes the fact that Kurzweil crosses the barrier between biological evolution and technological evolution without mentioning it, and that the utility function used to plot the exponential across evolution barriers is ill-defined. Both observations are true, but I don't think they shake the observation of exponential behaviour in these evolution functions.
The conclusion that this will all end in our minds being uploaded to the ether is more difficult to swallow, I concede. It is a philosophical can of worms, and it is a question that will be left unanswered, even after we can replicate human consciousness in a computer.
However, if you assume there is nothing magical about our brains, that our consciousness is merely the result of (biological) computation, then @AndrewDucker's approach [1] is an easy way to wrap your head around the concept. Instead of thinking about a clicking moment when you get transferred into silicon, think of a continual transferral process, where you get silicon additions, while your organic brain continuously dies. Imagine this process takes ten years. When do "you" stop being "you"? I'd wager: never.
BTW, the same problems you have with brain uploading, I have with star-trek teleporters. If the same machine that can teleport me can copy me, then it is killing me and creating an identical twin. I'd rather not die in transportation, thank you.
What exactly do you mean by consciousness? (I personally don't believe that a turing machine can be consciouss.)
Even if it was (I don't think so), it's possible that consciousness is a passive observer of the universe.
Personally, I define my consciousness barrier at the level of Turing machine running any program that evolves. I also believe consciousness is not binary, it is a continuum. Is a dog a consciousness? Of course. Is a plant a form of consciousness? Yes, at a lower level. A bacteria or a virus? Yes. Sediment rocks? No.
My hypothesis isn't testable. It is also probably wrong. I know that. I am, however, accompanied by any other hypothesis out there :)
I can confirm, experienced this couple of times :)
The way I define consciousness is very simple, it's my current feelings, thoughts and perceptions. It's also the only "thing" that I can be 100% sure about.
I think, therefore I am. However, I also observe what seem to be many consciousnesses. If I am the only provable consciousness, then I also am all the other consciousnesses. How can that be? By the Fermi paradox, I must be the first consciousness. If that is so, the most probable sequence of events is that I (my consciousness) appeared into the the void by pure randomness. Then I got bored, and created all this to pass the time. I am you, and I am every conscious being out there (so, that's why there is this "do unto others" golden rule!)
This is kind of the unified theory of all religions, from mid-eastern origin all the way to Buddhism.
Religion: solved. Now, on to the unified theory of physics.
No, you observe a lot of other people that behave similarly to you. If you define consciosuenss as "behaves like me to a certain extent", than yes, there are mutliple consciousnesses. But consciousness is defined as something subjective, so by that definition, there's only one consciousness. Perhaps you're in a dream and imagining everything. Or in a Matrix and other people are just computer programs.
The idea of the singularity implies that the complexity of technology moves above anything humanity can understand. It is unclear whether there still be any use for our kind of individual conscious mind. At what scale will cognition happen? Will the world itself turn into a kind of brain?
But I'm with you in hoping that the Minds will be like the culture's and keep us around as pets in a sort of enlightened hedonism :-)
There's nothing inherently contradictory of a higher intelligence being composed of many active smaller conscious experiences - arguably this is what the internet already is, just a very slow version of it. We need a better interconnect (and some more durable subprocessors).
The 'cells' in the case of the hypothetical technological singularity will be computer hardware, not organic cells or human brains. There is the tacit assumption that silicon-based AI tech is somehow superior to our own carbon-based 'tech' and will displace it.
Human brains forming into a kind of super-organism would be a different phenomenon. It wouldn't even need AI, or much more advanced technology. It could indeed be argued that this is the case already with the internet and even printing press before it.
I doubt it's superior or will replace carbon-based tech (no quotes here; biology is but nanotechnology that was not made by us), but there are two particular improvements introducing human-designed technology could bring:
- electrical signals in the brain run at 200Hz; minds could in principle work much faster, were they made of something different
- human-designed technology is easier to modify, reprogram and adapt (mostly becasue we built it, so we know how to do it); the idea is that a mind built with it could be made to be able to rewrite/rebuild itself, with luck launching into recursive improvement loop, where a mind redesigns itself to be better, which then goes on to improve itself more, etc.
Consiousness is a different problem. I personally came to the conclusion that a deterministic machine cannot be consciouss.
Is the difference between being conscious or not defined by reading from /dev/random? Most theories of consciousness that point to quantum theory read like that. Unless you assume quantum randomness is god's invisible hand, and then religion infiltrates the argument. (not that God isn't in /dev/random anyhow)
If you accept this view on consciousness, you can conclude that a deterministic system cannot be consciouss.
Of course, you'll probably argue that my view on consciousness is ridiculously unfounded. I disagree, I think there are very strong arguments for it :) A very brief version: (1) There are good reasons to believe that consciousness is more than a complex interaction of physical particles. But physical particles can affect consicousness, so the mind is at least a passive observer. (2) It's actually an active observer, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this. (3) If it's an active observer, the mind must have a way to affect brain's matter.
But the singularity is more than just mind uploading. Technology could advance and people just choose not to upload. You could probably live at least a few thousand years with advanced nanotechnology repairing your brain and body.
If you were going to be sedated in a blue-painted room, and then an exact copy of you would be made in a red-painted room, what color of wall would you expect to see when you woke up?
It won't be you but you'll be the only one to tell the difference.
Thinking of the social pressure (from family, work etc.) of "uploading" yourself is more fun.
Most neuroscientists believe that there's much more to the human brain than that - there are things going on in our brains like interactions between close synapses using quantum effects. Perhaps we could model that if we understood it better, but the reality is we don't, so we can't really predict whether or not it's something we can copy.