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‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

theguardian.com

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Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#111

Post by hinkley »

rcarmo wrote: post #64
deadbabe wrote: post #33

I think it’s more likely we can preserve our ego rather than our consciousness. For instance, create an AI replica of yourself that accurately behaves the same way you do. Although you would be dead, your ego can carry on living and responding to changes in the external world, and people could have interactions with you that accurately simulate how you would respond to them long after you’re gone. And as your ego lea…

Cue Nixon in Futurama.

I'm gonna break into your houses, and wreck up the place!

Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#112

Post by vundercind »

bambax wrote: post #101
ericmcer wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? We have already decimated any semblance of natural selection so death is no longer a necessity from an evolutionary standpoint. Maybe immortal humans would be more beneficent because they wouldn't be scrambling to get ahead in their short time here. If I didn't only have 30-40ish productive years to achieve whatever I will in this life it would be much easier to donate money or time to charitable pursuits.

Are you serious? Have you been around old rich people? Do you find them generous? People grow more selfish with age, because they care less and less. The only thing to gain by abolishing biological death is perpetual civil war.

Plenty of the most-powerful already keep causing harm just to make number go up even more, well beyond the point at which they can conceivably personally benefit before they die. Imagine if they could conceivably personally benefit from that because they live for centuries. Why would anyone expect that to improve their behavior?

Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#114

Post by Ekaros »

m3kw9 wrote: post #52
kerblang wrote: post #16

As usual, it must be warned that living forever means you can be tortured forever. Interesting that an article on Dante is getting upvotes today...

Yep even a life sustaining brain vat that keeps you alive for 1000 years while feeding you some bad stimulation is not very hard to fathom

Even worse no stimulation... And with enough trickery maybe avoid your brain going to coma or even sleep.

Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#115

Post by kbelder »

latexr wrote: post #74
gregjor wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To believe that the loss of a limb is so severe that death is preferable is absurd and insensitive. No. Denigrating someone expressing their personal opinion seems absurd. Since the commenter did not impose their opinions on other people you had to put those words in their mouth to call them insensitive. I prefer to die with autonomy and dignity as well, meaning I would like to pull my own plug. That other people m…

> Denigrating someone expressing their personal opinion seems absurd. (…) The commenter just described their threshold, they didn't judge other people. My sentence does not judge the person, it criticises the belief . Learn to differentiate or you’ll be doomed to a life of ad hominem attacks and taking things personally. If person A says they love spiders and person B replies they find spiders repulsive, there’s no v…

I'll judge the person. Someone wanting to die because they lose an arm is nuts.

Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#116

Post by thinkingtoilet »

bambax wrote: post #90
slibhb wrote: post #56

One of Don DeLillo's later good novels is about this stuff (Zero K). I always think people's attitude toward possible future worlds is interesting. You can see a wide spread of opinion in this thread -- whether you think functional immortality would be a good thing says a lot about who you are. Ditto for colonizing other planets, automating all work, building AGI, and so on. I suppose I'm on the side of the technolog…

I'm certain immortality is possible, and it's also likely to be achieved, because we always do everything we can do, regardless of consequences. But I think this is the acme of selfishness. I don't want to be immortal, and I wouldn't want to live in a world with 500-year-old know-it-alls running around "oldsplaining" everything to everyone else. I have, thankfully, a fairly good chance of dying before that happens.

It's funny people always talk about this in extremes.

"Do you want to live longer?"

"Yes"

"OH YOU WANT TO LIVE A MILLION BILLION YEARS?!?!"

There are values in between immortality and ~80 years.

Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#117

Post by svara »

ashleyn wrote: post #51
NickM wrote: post #11

I used to buy into this kind of stuff, but I've become more and more skeptical of the idea that you would still be yourself if your brain could be preserved/emulated/transplanted/whatever. Our nervous system extends into our bodies. We feel emotions in our bodies. People with certain kinds of brain damage that prevents them from feeling emotions normally also experience trouble making rational decisions. More recent…

I'm also skeptical of the idea that one can "upload" consciousness and it would still be "you". I suppose this is true in a philosophical sense, but in a practical sense, subjective experience of consciousness rules the roost. It's inevitably going to be a mere copy of you. You don't get to experience any of it. Similar to a software project which is forked, I think it makes more sense to classify it as an entirely d…

As long as you believe that any theory of subjective experience will ultimately be physicalist, this argument doesn't really work.

There is no continuity of subjective experience even within the same brain, you can be deeply unconscious for extended periods of time and come back.

Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#118

Post by bee_rider »

hinkley wrote: post #105
NickM wrote: post #11

I used to buy into this kind of stuff, but I've become more and more skeptical of the idea that you would still be yourself if your brain could be preserved/emulated/transplanted/whatever. Our nervous system extends into our bodies. We feel emotions in our bodies. People with certain kinds of brain damage that prevents them from feeling emotions normally also experience trouble making rational decisions. More recent…

Why would you want to go on in a world that has either left you behind or keeps making the same mistakes over and over in a cycle and won't listen to you because you're too old to understand? And conversely, I think Kim Stanley Robinson puts it best in the Mars trilogy. Scientific progress often has to wait for the old guard to die so new ideas can be tried. Sometimes there are actually new things and they need to be…

I dunno. I’m a pretty open minded guy so if anyone is going to be immortal, might as well be me. I promise not even to shout at too many clouds.

Plus there are a lot of assholes in the world. Come on, there isn’t anybody you’d enjoy watching get Ozymandias‘d? I’d enjoy it.

Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#119

Post by idontwantthis »

hinkley wrote: post #105
NickM wrote: post #11

I used to buy into this kind of stuff, but I've become more and more skeptical of the idea that you would still be yourself if your brain could be preserved/emulated/transplanted/whatever. Our nervous system extends into our bodies. We feel emotions in our bodies. People with certain kinds of brain damage that prevents them from feeling emotions normally also experience trouble making rational decisions. More recent…

Why would you want to go on in a world that has either left you behind or keeps making the same mistakes over and over in a cycle and won't listen to you because you're too old to understand? And conversely, I think Kim Stanley Robinson puts it best in the Mars trilogy. Scientific progress often has to wait for the old guard to die so new ideas can be tried. Sometimes there are actually new things and they need to be…

There’s a short story about uploaded consciousnesses being used as AI slaves. They go bad once enough years have gone by that they can’t speak the modern language anymore. Then they usually lapse into insanity or depression.

Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#120

Post by haccount »

netsharc wrote: post #12

Jeroen Lanier in his book "You Are Not a Gadget" uses the example of a MIDI file: they can describe music, but even though they sound like the real thing, they are limited by the digital world. E.g. according to ChatGPT the minimum interval between 2 MIDI messages is 0.77 milliseconds. And then he asks what sort of limitations might we have if our minds are software, and how would we not notice it?

[dead]
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