Under current laws, wouldn't the way the Terms of Service are presented be considered a contract signed under duress? I mean, they are saying that if you don't sign the contract, they'll kill you, which is kind of the textbook definition of duress.
Welcome To Life
101–110 of 188 posts
Re: Welcome To Life
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that the experience of continuity is what makes these things entirely different. It is the experience of continuity that satisfies my hard-wired desire for self-preservation.
You experience discontinuities in consciousness every day: when you sleep. Why is it that we feel like the same person after we wake up from sleep, from anesthesia, or even a prolonged coma? You could go to sleep, have arbitrary operations done to the neurons in your brain while asleep, and presumably will awake into the "same body". This thought experiment leads me to believe that the most important consideration fo…
Considering the metamorphosis idea, by the time your whole brain was replaced, piece by piece, by devices simulating its behavior, you became an upload - it's just that all of your data is running inside your head (or that this illusion is maintained by very low-latency links to your root-self running elsewhere).
Still, the moment you move its dataset to a new device and deactivate the original, aren't you killing the original?
Re: Welcome To Life
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that human metamorphosis is extremely interesting, but this line I really don't get: > Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it regardless of how many mental copies are made. I don't understand how you can put out a statement like that, like it's taken for granted or something. It's far from granted, and I've never heard of something remotely approaching a proof for thi…
Granted that consciousness is not fully understood, can we not agree that it is entirely manifest in the brain? I mean, you don't believe that human consciousness somehow survives the body after brain death, do you? Even if the cloned memories could be streamed from your brain into a running simulation, allowing a memory of crossing the threshold from the physical world to the digital one to be created in the simulat…
> can we not agree that it is entirely manifest in the brain?
This is the old materialist vs idealist, monoist, dualist etc. debate in the philosophy of mind. It isn't as much of a slam dunk as you think it may be, and the gulf in opinion is broad and branches out into many tributaries.
Materialism is the belief that everything in the world, including mind, was material, but that has progressed into physicalism since late nineteenth century physics showed that not every force is made up of matter.
I used to be very interested in this topic and leaned towards the idealist argument of mind being made up of more than material, but I lost interest as the debate on both sides tends to spiral and involve religion and spirituality. But I still tend to believe that if we completely cloned a brain materially, we would still not have a mind, that it would be missing something.
My own conclusion is that we simply do not know, and that to me is more interesting than knowing as the pursuit is more rewarding than the end goal. There will always be open and unresolved questions in science and philosophy. We have yet to explain seemingly more simple phenomena such as gravity, so explaining the mind (or indeed altering it or cloning it) seems so far out of reach.
Re: Welcome To Life
#104Under current laws, wouldn't the way the Terms of Service are presented be considered a contract signed under duress? I mean, they are saying that if you don't sign the contract, they'll kill you, which is kind of the textbook definition of duress.
They could counter you are already dead and they are offering you the possibility of "post-mortem health care".
Re: Welcome To Life
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Granted that consciousness is not fully understood, can we not agree that it is entirely manifest in the brain? I mean, you don't believe that human consciousness somehow survives the body after brain death, do you? Even if the cloned memories could be streamed from your brain into a running simulation, allowing a memory of crossing the threshold from the physical world to the digital one to be created in the simulat…
Lets go over this carefully as the concepts are slippery. Lack of continuous experience of an event does not mean you died, it is merely memory loss. Assuming the very reasonable theory that consciousness is classical and emergent from the network structure and interactions of neurons and glia then it should be possible to encode this consciousness on a turing machine. If we go a step further and replace certain coll…
You not only misstate my assumptions, but seem to miss my point entirely.
Here is my point: the original human will not experience continuity, therefore it's instinct for self-preservation will not be satisfied. The best it can hope for is to take comfort in knowing that a copy will survive. Personally, this does not comfort me.
I don't doubt the possibility of a very high fidelity copy and supporting simulation, for all intents and purposes. I also think there may be sound reasons to pursue it. But I don't think it will benefit those who are copied, beyond any positive thoughts and feelings it may give them before they die.
Being selfish and programmed for self-preservation, I desire physical immortality instead. I have no interest in donating a copy of my memories to a simulation project.
I hope this clears it up; my interest is quickly waning, and I have work to do.
Re: Welcome To Life
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Granted that consciousness is not fully understood, can we not agree that it is entirely manifest in the brain? I mean, you don't believe that human consciousness somehow survives the body after brain death, do you? Even if the cloned memories could be streamed from your brain into a running simulation, allowing a memory of crossing the threshold from the physical world to the digital one to be created in the simulat…
> can we not agree that it is entirely manifest in the brain? This is the old materialist vs idealist, monoist, dualist etc. debate in the philosophy of mind. It isn't as much of a slam dunk as you think it may be, and the gulf in opinion is broad and branches out into many tributaries. Materialism is the belief that everything in the world, including mind, was material, but that has progressed into physicalism since…
You express views and attitudes very similar to mine.
For people who find these things interesting, I recommend checking out the so called hard problem of consciousness
James Trefil, physicist - so they aren't all dopey philosophers ;) - notes that "it is the only major question in the sciences that we don't even know how to ask."
Re: Welcome To Life
#107Under current laws, wouldn't the way the Terms of Service are presented be considered a contract signed under duress? I mean, they are saying that if you don't sign the contract, they'll kill you, which is kind of the textbook definition of duress.
They could counter you are already dead and they are offering you the possibility of "post-mortem health care".
That doesn't remove the duress. :)
However, before we get to a point where people are being uploaded into a system, we have a lot of legal president to set. The legal rights of the bits that are copied from your consciousness, for one.
Re: Welcome To Life
#108While it does make for some entertaining fiction, and may provide some benefits to the living, I do not believe that 'uploading' is a desirable experience. In fact, I don't believe that one can experience it at all. Imagine the procedure (for a conscious person): your brain is connected to a computer interface and a copy of your mind is taken. Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to…
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Re: Welcome To Life
#109There is a lot of the classical discussion on personal identity here. The argument about a copy being "identical to me but it's not me" is a very natural and intuitive reaction, but it's probably wrong. A very illuminating explanation is http://lesswrong.com/lw/pm/identity_isnt_in_specific_atoms and related posts. I'll try a personal approach: imagine a country with no computers, no photocopiers, no presses, and a ve…
Yes, of course both are. But still, you're only ever going to be conscious from the perspective contained within the original you. The copy may be mathematically identical, but it does not make sense that there would be any kind of a magical transition of consciousness from one to the other. The other "you" would have its own consciousness entirely separate from yours. I.e., if you copy yourself and kill the original, you will lose consciousness. You will not wake up.
Re: Welcome To Life
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I still do not think that the patient will experience being uploaded into a computer Creating a copy is like having a Siamese twin you didn't know about, because it was sharing 100% of your body and mind. But with the copy you are split apart for the first time. If you are being uploaded at the time of the split, then one of you experiences the seamless first-person transformation into digital form. The other you s…
But why bother? Unless you really think the world is worse off without you and your contributions, why would you participate in a service like this? It's not going to do you any good or let you live a day longer. Your copy will go on having a perfectly happy life being the new you, but why should any of us be excited about that?
You're discounting the experience of the copy and identifying solely with the original biological human. Instead you have to really internalize that both experiences are equally yours.
That said, I wouldn't get excited about it. Uploading is a bald afterlife myth with the same capacity to beguile as the religious versions. Better to focus on the here and now.