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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’

#151

Post by wutwutwat »

suzzer99 wrote: post #146
wutwutwat wrote: post #141

“Take very high resolution scans of brain structure to characterise how someone’s neurons work, recreate it in a digital format then put it in another robotic, virtual or biological body.” This isn't preserving, it's copying. A copy of your brain/personality/you... isn't you... it's a copy. It's a cassette tape playing back the radio you recorded onto it. It's really kind of odd that people talk about brain transplan…

Suppose you died every night in your sleep and were replaced in the morning with a perfect copy of yourself with all your memories intact. Would you know the difference?

No, but if I died tonight and a copy of me took over tomorrow, what good did that do for me personally? I'm still dead. Selfishly, I don't care if a copy of me continues on, I only care that I don't.

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

#152

Post by adventured »

wutwutwat wrote: post #141

“Take very high resolution scans of brain structure to characterise how someone’s neurons work, recreate it in a digital format then put it in another robotic, virtual or biological body.” This isn't preserving, it's copying. A copy of your brain/personality/you... isn't you... it's a copy. It's a cassette tape playing back the radio you recorded onto it. It's really kind of odd that people talk about brain transplan…

We can't copy a person anyway. We're going to find out that it requires an order of events - order of experiences - aspect that can't be recreated to get the actual person. Everything else will end up being a weak simulation (even if it gets a bit closer over time with improvements in simulating).

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

#153

Post by johnea »

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 agree completely. This is unsubstantiated hype.

Transferring our consciousness into "the net", or some other fuzzy concepts are so far removed from reality as to be complete fiction. This includes freezing our brains and reanimating them later to resuscitate our lives.

They not only massively overestimate the functionality of today's tech to receive something like our consciousnesses, but even more so, by orders of magnitude, underestimate just how complex our living bodies are.

We only have the vaguest of ideas about how our physiology works (while we might be able to replicate flesh cells for "fake meat", we have 0 understanding or control over how those cells organize to form macroscopic organs). Applying this to the brain, our understanding is even more primitive. An example would be recent news that perhaps the brain is not sterile, but hosts a microbiome. Whether or not the brain hosts a microbiome is still "controversial".

We're still hundreds of years away from a comprehensive understanding of physiology.

But of course, we're never going to live that long, because we still believe (statistically as a species) in invisible guys in outer space that tell us we need to dismember people who believe in the WRONG invisible guy in outer space.

Our primitive violent ape species will extinct itself long before we ever have a comprehensive grasp of how life works, especially to the level of understanding consciousnesses...

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

#154

Post by sdwr »

svara wrote: post #117
ashleyn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, you can argue the same thing about going to sleep, there's no guarantee that the same "you" wakes up.

From the outside, an "identical clone" is indistinguishable.

On the inside, the clone feels exactly how you would feel.

The only problem is the "I don't want my 'me' to die" feeling.

I bet most people would be fine with death/rebirth teleportation.

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

#155

Post by suzzer99 »

wutwutwat wrote: post #151
suzzer99 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose you died every night in your sleep and were replaced in the morning with a perfect copy of yourself with all your memories intact. Would you know the difference?

No, but if I died tonight and a copy of me took over tomorrow, what good did that do for me personally? I'm still dead. Selfishly, I don't care if a copy of me continues on, I only care that I don't.

Let's say you just found out that this is actually happening. Every night you die and are replaced with a perfect copy of yourself. Would you do anything differently?

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

#156

Post by snakeyjake »

augusto-moura wrote: post #133
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 don't think I agree with you. There are multiple examples in society of damaged nervous system connections with the brain, spine cord damage for example, where the personality of the pacient changes little. In the same sense, losing limbs or entire sections of your body (aside from psychological trauma and other psychological consequences) don't affect personality that much Of course the nervous system is much more…

>In the same sense, losing limbs or entire sections of your body (aside from psychological trauma and other psychological consequences) don't affect personality that much

"There aren't any changes except for all of the changes, but those changes don't count because reasons."

I don't know how many amputees you know; you may know many. I was in the army for 10 years during the height of the global war on terror and know more than most. Not a single one is the same as they were pre-amputation. Could be the trauma that caused the amputation, could be the amputation. I'm not an amputationologist.

I do assert that a holo-techno-brain will need a shit-ton of e-drugs to deal with being amputated from its fucking body.

The bacteria in your butthole are a part of you just like your brain, maybe less, but they ARE a part of you.

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

#158

Post by Balgair »

So, I've seen Bredo Morstoel, the Frozen Dead Guy of Nederland, Colorado[0]. The 'tour' you could go on was ... something. But, at the end, we were asked to help keep Bredo frozen and helped pile on dry ice. So, they had to open the sarcophagus and get the CO2 in there.

And, yeah...

Bredo looks like Otzi the ice man [1]. He's just a dead body, there's no saving him, he's gone.

It was a good lesson in any thoughts I ever may have had about cryopreservation. Unless you pay someone a LOT of money, for a very long time, and somehow manage to get them to actually really truly care about you, you are just having a really strange and long funeral.

Good excuse for a party though. Those dead salmon tossers are something else.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_Dead_Guy_Days

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi

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

#159

Post by suzzer99 »

adventured wrote: post #152
wutwutwat wrote: post #141

“Take very high resolution scans of brain structure to characterise how someone’s neurons work, recreate it in a digital format then put it in another robotic, virtual or biological body.” This isn't preserving, it's copying. A copy of your brain/personality/you... isn't you... it's a copy. It's a cassette tape playing back the radio you recorded onto it. It's really kind of odd that people talk about brain transplan…

We can't copy a person anyway. We're going to find out that it requires an order of events - order of experiences - aspect that can't be recreated to get the actual person. Everything else will end up being a weak simulation (even if it gets a bit closer over time with improvements in simulating).

In theory if you had an atomic replicator you should be able to make a copy of a person. I'm not saying it will ever be practically possible. But I don't see any fundamental laws of nature that make it impossible.

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

#160

Post by wutwutwat »

suzzer99 wrote: post #155
wutwutwat wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but if I died tonight and a copy of me took over tomorrow, what good did that do for me personally? I'm still dead. Selfishly, I don't care if a copy of me continues on, I only care that I don't.

Let's say you just found out that this is actually happening. Every night you die and are replaced with a perfect copy of yourself. Would you do anything differently?

I would probably get a concentrated dose of existential dread knowing that by EOD I would cease to exist. Usually I'm able to delay that dread with the silly reasoning that I still have many years left before I die, but I wouldn't have that mind hack if I knew I had no time left.
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