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Comment by AndrewDucker | Hacker News Reader

How about if we extend your brain by hooking it up to a memory augmentation device. Still you?

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"?

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This question is even deeper than just a you or not you. It's been a tough question for a very, very long time. [1]

"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."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Oh yes. See also The Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, who replaced each part of himself as he chopped them off.

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)

Sometimes called the Moravec Procedure: http://www.ibiblio.org/jstrout/uploading/moravec.html

I'd be reasonably happy with the Moravec Procedure where I would be much less happy with most other ways of uploading (the whole thing is based on my irrational but hard to shake belief in my own persistence over time).

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.

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.

The main problem is the lawyers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E

Thanks for that link.

If there's one service I don't want to be freemium....

We know so little about our brain I don't think that is really, possible, not without some major breakthroughs in how brain functions.

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.

> How about if we extend your brain by hooking it up to a memory augmentation device. Still you?

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.

Only suddenly you start memorizing much more.

Perhaps the person's experience diminishes slowly as each part is replaced, until he is finally snuffed out without anyone noticing :)

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.

It's a bad argument because it can work the other way around. If I kill a single neuron from your brain are you still you? If I keep killing them 1 by 1, at no point is the transition very big, but at some point you are certainly not "you" anymore, maybe not even conscious.

And then you clone the uploaded conciousness 10^6 times, with each clone having continuity of experience back to your earliest memory. Still you?

(And before you can answer, the clones all respond "yes").

Nobody can answer those questions, because we don't understand much of the brain yet. Beyond philosophy, you need to understand what is really YOU.

> what is really YOU

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.

> memory augmentation device. Still you?

Yeah.

> co-processor?

What's that mean, even?

A simple calculator, for example. It could feel as if you had all answers to numerical calculations somehow memorized. You might wonder what the twelfth root of two was, and you would just suddenly "remember" the answer.

> What's that mean, even?

A directly accessible computer hooked to your brain, to augment your processing capabilities rather than just memory.

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