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A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

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Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#381

Post by chronolitus »

serans wrote: post #114
noetic_techy wrote: post #107

This is going to sound a bit out there, but what if your brain is simply an antenna for your consciousness to come through from wherever. Has anyone actually tried to boot up an artificial brain derived from a real organism? I'd like to see a proof of concept that your brain IS indeed the seat of your consciousness, and not just a fancy quantum antenna.

That's pretty much what Descartes proposed! ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactionism_(philosophy_of_... . My favourite argument against this idea is that it would violate the law of conservation of energy. In any case it looks to me that all these dualist theories of mind are non-falsifiable

It's irrelevant anyways, I would argue that what makes you you is not the emergent/transferred via antenna/magic consciousness - a.k.a. sensation of being a aware of your brain's processes.

Rather, the brain's processes themselves are probably what makes you you. Regardless of whether they generate consciousness, the biochemical sensory-processing, storage-and-modelling, and decision-making algorithms (which we can detect by looking at synapses) are where you lie.

If your brain was somehow modified to take completely different decisions and make different statements ('dumb' magic-less rewiring), with the magic/antenna/emergent/quantum/whatever consciousness part kept intact, I am pretty sure that I would not consider the resulting being 'me'.

Of course everyone is free to believe otherwise.

Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#382

Post by ajuc »

ericb wrote: post #246
kolpa wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> second me isn't actually me Then who is it? It remembers being you.

Ok, I have a clone of you in the other room and a gun. I am going to kill either you or them. You pick. Who do you pick? Why? My suspicion is that most people suddenly realize they prefer the instance of their consciousness they are inhabiting.

If you merge our memories afterwards it doesn't matter who you kill. Otherways it's a murder.

Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#383

Post by chronolitus »

devgutt wrote: post #179
simplify wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even as a Christian, I think the idea of a human being more than the dust they're made of is only wishful thinking. If consciousness is not sourced from the brain, then why is memory so dependent on the brain?

Maybe memory is overrated in the great scheme of things.

sure, remove memory. and decision making, that's biochemical too. And personality? probably. Remove some impulses and reflexes and primordial pathways. Now that's the real you! What's left, though?

Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#384

Post by noetic_techy »

AgentME wrote: post #260
noetic_techy wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you explain being normal and having almost no brain at all: http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/the-medical-mystery-of-a-man...

This looks like a good example of the 80/20 rule: 80% of our brain matter is dedicated to the hardest last 20% of IQ points. (Only being slightly tongue-in-cheek here.) Also, there's probably usually a lot of brain matter dedicated to redundancy, memories, and enabling connections between ideas to foster creativity, and this person may be lacking in these areas in hard-to-measure ways. If most of our brain truly had…

I agree this could be the other side of the coin. I'm not totally one sided on this. Its possible that consciousness and sentience arises from sheer complexity, I'm just not totally convinced, and there appear to be outliers and unaccounted for anomalies. In this case, 10% = IQ of 80 and totally functional within society. Pretty astonishing still.

Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#385

Post by noetic_techy »

welterde wrote: post #273
noetic_techy wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you explain being normal and having almost no brain at all: http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/the-medical-mystery-of-a-man...

This argument works just as well (or badly) against the brain is just an antenna hypothesis..

I agree. I point this out purely as an outlier that doesn't fit well with the "you are a product of the complexity of your brain matter, period." In this case, only 10% of your brain! Pretty astonishing. The man was totally functional in society, even though he had an IQ in the 80s. A broken antenna still gets most of the signal maybe, just not the high definition stuff.

Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#386

Post by ajuc »

projektir wrote: post #342
ajuc wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unless my consciousness somehow jumps to the clone You don't have conciousness when you sleep (at least during some parts of it). Your conciousness disappears every night for several hours and is recreated every morning. Why is it not a problem, but when there is 2 of you - it suddenly becomes a problem? If you were sleeping while someone made a clone - would that make it OK? If no - why? There's no evidence of any…

I'm not sure, are you comfortable living one day only, and leaving all the problems to be for future you to take care of? Because for that logic, you basically don't exist that much at all, and the moment you go to sleep, the rest of your life is somebody else's problem, because you effectively die. That is what you're saying (and that is what people like us would expect from mind upload). So you tell me why it's a p…

> all my problems are still my own.

Or you can decide the leave everything and become a monk. I don't see how that's an argument one way or another.

> There's only one of "me" to go around.

Why? It seems to be the crux of your argument, but you don't justify it in any way.

Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#387

Post by ajuc »

salawat wrote: post #172
ajuc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it still you when you wake up every day? What about after general anesthesia? You only know you are you because of your memories. The future brain will have the memories, so it will think it's you, just like you think today that you are the same you that were awake 3 days ago and 10 years ago. Are you afraid of nonexistence when you fall asleep, and envy the tommorow's you that he will live in your body and get to…

I think the question you seem to be asking flippantly deserves more thought than you are giving it. Even if memories are structural, network theory tells us that all parts of a network are not necessarily visible or accessible from all points at all times. The "You" making an executive decision could only be seeing a subset of your entire memory structure. This difficulty can be even more clearly expressed by looking…

Maybe it seems I'm being flippant, but I gave it quite a lot of thought. It's one of a recurrent themes of "rationalist" sci-fi, a genre I like very much.

> You'd have the hardware to run your person on, but you'd have no information on the full informational state stored by which circuits are firing, which are building up to fire, and how fast each one is building up.

You just include that in the brainscan.

> It would be "You" to itself.

Yes. And I think this is enough. Current me would be a stranger to me 20 years ago.

> How do you measure a successful reboot? What is your error tolerance?

There was a sci-fi story where people had backup chips in their brains that measured all activity and learned over years to simulate that activity. If the simulated and real activity agreed to 99.999% over a long period of time the biological brains were euthanized and the chip took over the body.

IMHO it's quite good standard for error tolerance. If all measurable effects are the same for a long period of time (let's say a year).

I'm not persuaded Pauli Exclusion Principle is making this impossible, it depends on how sensitive our brains are to quantum effects, and I don't think we have data one way or another (do correct me if I'm wrong).

It might be impossibly high standard, but even then - if my future decisions depend on quantum fluctuations that will be simulated differently on a different hardware - my current identity isn't built on these future decisions YET. If we're really throwing dice making some decisions - I don't consider these dice or these results to be part of my identity now. If I reverted time and got a different decision the second time - I'd still think of that person as me, just in a different mood.

As for disruption of society, economy, etc - sure, these are big concerns. But we're talking philosophy here, not sociology.

Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#388

Post by anentropic »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #115
debrisapron wrote: post #100

"I hope future people are appalled that in the 21st century, the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever" I hope nobody tells this guy about chemotherapy, he's gonna flip.

> I hope nobody tells this guy about chemotherapy, he's gonna flip. Or about vaccines. Or about antibiotics. Or about sterile surgery procedures. Or about running water and electricity. Or about.... Just about everything that makes up our modern quality of life was only available to a privileged class when it first came on the scene. My bet is that future people won't be appalled in the slightest. Something tells me…

these are all significantly different from living forever

Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#389

Post by monort »

Erlangolem wrote: post #330
monort wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not hidden, we don't have a complete physical theory - quantum mechanics and general relativity are not compatible. As an additional fun fact - we don't know how general anesthesia works.

Gaps in knowledge don’t imply gods in them, and especially really tight gaps imply nothing more than a gap in knowledge. The precise mechanism of GA isn’t certain, but it is known that disruption of hippocampal function is key, and no one is seriously suggesting thst it’s disconnection from “the soul” that does it. A theory of quantum gravity would be complementary to QM and GR, and that leaves no room for remote sou…

Nobody saying there is a god or soul, but explanation can be in unknown parts of physics and surprisingly we have that unknown parts.

We have unexplained phenomenon - consciousness, everyone (well, at least me) experience it. We don't have the mechanism for it, so we reject that phenomenon exists. I don't think it's a good idea to outright reject hypothesis, that have evidences behind it, but don't have a mechanism. Remember what happened to theory of washing hands for surgeons or to continental drift (it took half a century for it to be taken seriously!)

Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#390

Post by imtringued »

chronolitus wrote: post #381
serans wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much what Descartes proposed! ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactionism_(philosophy_of_... . My favourite argument against this idea is that it would violate the law of conservation of energy. In any case it looks to me that all these dualist theories of mind are non-falsifiable

It's irrelevant anyways, I would argue that what makes you you is not the emergent/transferred via antenna/magic consciousness - a.k.a. sensation of being a aware of your brain's processes. Rather, the brain's processes themselves are probably what makes you you. Regardless of whether they generate consciousness, the biochemical sensory-processing, storage-and-modelling, and decision-making algorithms (which we can d…

Your "me" is going to disappear. How do you convince your "me" that it is necessary to disappear? One possible explanation is that you will get another "me".
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