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

technologyreview.com

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

#401

Post by ajuc »

projektir wrote: post #398
ajuc wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Or you can decide the leave everything and become a monk. I don't see how that's an argument one way or another. You seem to have missed what I said. I mean that, if I don't wash the dishes today, and I go to sleep, it's still me who's going to have to wash those dishes tomorrow. It's not someone else. It's me. That "me" is the question. I can't just not wake up as "me" tomorrow. If continuity wasn't a thing then t…

> I can't just not wake up as "me" tomorrow

You sure can. You could have a stroke and change personality completely. The fact that it's still considered "you" by society and the future you doesn't mean it's true.

> "the person who didn't wash the dishes and the person who then suffers the consequences is a continual entity"

This only requires you to believe that the future you is you, it doesn't require it to be true. It's similar to arguing "There must be a God, because why else would I pray". Well you can simply be wrong.

> If continuity wasn't a thing then the concept of "me" shouldn't exist at all

Why? There's a lot of concepts out there that exist contrary to facts. Free will probably doesn't exist. Absolute time doesn't exist yet people use it routinely as their model of reality.

> I can't wake up and control two people at the same time. That doesn't even happen in the case of multiple personality disorder.

You could make a device that controls muscles of another body basing on your neural impulses. Would that change your opinion about identity and consciousness? I doubt it. If I'm right, then that's not your real argument.

Give me your real argument, please.

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

#402

Post by rajacombinator »

cwkoss wrote: post #75
PeanutNore wrote: post #42

“Burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems?” Hendricks told me this week after reviewing Nectome’s website. “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 on the backs of their descendants. I mean, it’s a joke, right? Th…

Anyone who is cryopreserved, but is viewed as a villian in the zeitgeist of the future, could end up being booted up into a personal hell for the amusement/vindictiveness of future people. If a 'Hitler' VM was publicly available online, how many people would torture it? What are the ethics around torturing virtual consciousnesses of evil people?

Because it’s fine and dandy to torture or dehumanize people you disagree with like evil Nazis, left/right wingers, people who eat pizza on tuesdays - so long as the powers that be sanction and approve it. I look forward to our future “torture Hitler” VR amusement parks.

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

#403

Post by rajacombinator »

matte_black wrote: post #163
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.

If you've ever suffered from Depersonalization/Derealization disorder, it will become very clear that your mind and your consciousness are not the same thing at all . DP/DR is quite possibly the worst mental disorder you can ever fall into. It is the feeling where you are convinced everything around you is not real, you see people you know, you know they are significant, but they just feel like actors in a show and y…

Interesting topic to ponder! Sadly will be written off in our age of pseudoscientism. If you want to explore further there are definitely ways to temporarily induce this state!

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

#404

Post by rajacombinator »

This is treading a very thin line between a typical voluntary snake oil (with a hint of reverse Pascal’s wager) transaction and unethical exploitation (and murder for profit, one could easily argue) of the desperately ill and naive. Although I suspect many involved (investors...) may themselves be naive enough to imagine this works. Merging it with a YC/VC “do anything and break any rule to produce growth” mentality - which is great for a business - is wildly unethical. There’s no theoretical basis for “brain uploads” other than middlebrow “tech solves everything” pie-in-the-skyism. There’s no economic basis for getting people in the far future to do you favors. And there’s no medical basis for brain embalming/freezing. If they could do this on pigs and resurrect them after x number of days it would be a different story.

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

#405

Post by dragonwriter »

projektir wrote: post #344
kerkeslager wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the case when you die, but your brain still exists, and it starts processing it again in a new host (computer or organic), isn't that not you anymore? I've yet to come across any evidence of a "self" that exists outside a brain. > Is this a solved philosophical problem for which literature exists? It's a problem that was hypothesized (and not solved) by philosophy, but as far as I know there's no evidence the pr…

This is really NOT the topic that most people are OK handwaving away simply because the evidence isn't there, because this topic is older than the concept of science itself and it's the #1 thing that gives anything around here any meaning whatsoever. Inventing the scientific method doesn't mean you get a carte blanche to call invalid everything you haven't gotten around to understanding with it. This is not a solved…

> This is really NOT the topic that most people are OK handwaving away simply because the evidence isn't there

Sure it is, people handwave it away all the time, since it's exactly the same problem as temporal continuity of the self in a changing body.

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

#406

Post by ketralnis »

Zanni wrote: post #328
bulletsvshumans wrote: post #151

If folks really want to make sure they come back from the dead, they might also think about setting up proper incentives for performing the potentially highly laborious process that resurrection might entail even 100+ years from now. It might be helpful to place a sort of back-to-life bounty on yourself, to be held in escrow, and only to be paid out upon successful resurrection. The bigger the bounty, the higher your…

If they can bring your mind to life inside a computer, then you're essentially a simulation of yourself. In that case, how can you ever know that the person you're giving the password to is real? And that you haven't just been revived in a sandbox for the express purpose of getting your password, which they can then pass on themselves. Shades of Rick and Morty ...

How do you know that’s not the case right now?

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

#407

Post by simplify »

devgutt wrote: post #395
chronolitus wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My comment was related to the OP comment. When you were born, you didn't have any reminiscent memory, because memory is intrinsically related to your physical brain. If you damage your brain, you could lose memory or change completely what you call "self". If you are a Christian and believe in after-life, a good way to reconcile this is downplaying the importance of memory itself (overrated). But this is related the…

FYI, I still believe in an afterlife. The bible talks about a resurrection where all will be raised from the dead for judgement. It's common misconception to think we float off to heaven or hell as disembodied souls. The difference is we will again have physical bodies, and thus have the capacity for consciousness and memory again.

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

#408

Post by Veedrac »

rajacombinator wrote: post #404

This is treading a very thin line between a typical voluntary snake oil (with a hint of reverse Pascal’s wager) transaction and unethical exploitation (and murder for profit, one could easily argue) of the desperately ill and naive. Although I suspect many involved (investors...) may themselves be naive enough to imagine this works. Merging it with a YC/VC “do anything and break any rule to produce growth” mentality…

By the time we can do this on pigs, the ethical disaster of the fact that billions of people will have died preventable deaths will be at holocaust levels. The only ethical action is to do this well before it's possible, roughly at the point where the probability of it happening at some point in the future crosses the cost-benefit threshold.

The idea that there is a less than 1-in-10000 chance that in 10,000 years we will be unable to run brains in simulation given over the last ~50y of development we've produced hardware literally nine orders of magnitude faster than that of the brain, done so in a mass-producible fashion, made unbelievable strides in neuroscience, discovered CRISPR and make synthetic biology, gone from AI-as-theory to computers that can talk, describe images, and synthesise photorealistic faces, gone from technology as niche to CPUs on plastic that cost literally a since cent... is frankly an blunt unwillingness to consider the issue.

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

#409

Post by Jesus_Jones »

piracykills wrote: post #38
Jesus_Jones wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meets Altered Carbon. But if you wake up in virtual reality, when you enter your key, how can you keep them from taking it from you? You'll never know if you are being man-in-the-middled.

We constructed a whole reality to steal your keys - the world's most advanced phishing attack.

In the world of altered carbon, it's pretty trivial to boot someone's mind up in a vr, even poor people at home can do it.

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

#410

Post by Veedrac »

PeanutNore wrote: post #42

“Burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems?” Hendricks told me this week after reviewing Nectome’s website. “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 on the backs of their descendants. I mean, it’s a joke, right? Th…

That part of the article was frankly outright disgusting. Laughing and mocking people for trying to save people's lives is cartoon bad guy. Making deluded strawman argument in order to discourage life-saving measures is horrifically unethical.

Dying is not something to be paraded around as a virtue. I only hope people figure it out sooner rather than later.

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