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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’

#221

Post by Freebytes »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #75
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…

The way various hormones influence the brain alone makes it pretty clear to me already that you'd be a completely different person when taken out of your body, and I'm pretty sure that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The 'people' that undergo this first will experience the most incredible pain imaginable if we do not figure out a way to block such pain first.

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

#223

Post by xyst »

We can barely even do “artificial intelligence” correctly. Let alone mapping the human brain to a digital representation. It’s an interesting concept but in order to “preserve” the brain, wouldn’t one have to get their brain dissected layer by layer and thus killing the subject in the first place?

Then storing all of that information without any loss would likely well exceed current technological limits. Then the computing power need to run the brain would have to be immense.

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

#224

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #173
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…

Every time you go to sleep your consciousness shuts down. What wakes up is something slightly different due to biological processes. You are not tired, your mood is different, part of cells in your brain got replaced, memories become more stable and maybe linked to other similar memories, etc... This is way more pronounced for people waking up from a coma. Philosophers thought of this for a while, see https://philoso…

> Every time you go to sleep your consciousness shuts down.

What consciousness? Yes, I am aware that "sleep" means that a person becomes unconscious (trivially demonstrated), but that is not the same thing as "consciousness shutting down". Supposing there is such a thing as consciousness, it doesn't seem to be anything that is suspended by the sleep process. And that's also a big "if", because consciousness is just woo-woo nonsense talked about but never defined by people who haven't quite gotten over the idea that humans don't have some immaterial soul.

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

#225

Post by prometheus76 »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #183
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…

This makes sense if you believe in a non-materialist self, like a soul. That model wouldn't be falsifiable- we can't measure it, so it can have whatever properties are convenient. You could then rule out the possibility that your soul would inhabit the copied 'you' by fiat. Scientifically, though: of course an exact copy of you is you. If you don't believe in souls but still feel like this is not the case, that indic…

If I copy the contents of an Apple II disk onto my pc and try to "run" it...nothing happens. Isn't mapped to the new hardware. So who is going to write the "human mind/consciousness" emulator that will map onto a hard drive? Will they simulate all the inputs from your body, nervous system, senses, etc.?

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

#226

Post by imron »

gowld wrote: post #205
nkrisc wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a difference when there could conceivably be two of you. There will never be two of me in my bed when I wake up, so I’m the same. If my mind could be copied and embedded in a robot or whatever, then there are two of me, each now diverging. That other one is not me, as far as I, the other, am concerned.

You'll need to be more clear in your last sentence. If you are cloned while you are sleeping, and both the original and the copy are moved into different rooms before you wake up, both of you think themself is you, and both of you think the other is not you. So, who is correct?

> So, who is correct?

The one that wasn’t the clone.

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

#227

Post by gowld »

smeej wrote: post #195
stetrain wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The copy who woke up wouldn't know the difference. There would be thousands of copies that experienced going to bed and then nothing afterwards.

I had a great deal of difficulty going to sleep the night after this first occurred to me. I only really managed to assuage my fear by realizing there would be an incredible number of dead bodies to deal with if this were happening to everyone every night, and it was extremely unlikely it was only happening to me.

See The Real Transported Man

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

#228

Post by jiveturkey »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #203
smeej wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between "I have changed" and "I have been copied." This seems obvious enough to me that I don't question it, but is it not obvious to everyone?

Copies are impossible because every moment is change with bounded but non-zero uncertainty.

true quantum scale copies may be impossible but that resolution may not be necessary to fully copy a person.

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

#229

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

radarsat1 wrote: post #131
etrautmann wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a neuroscientist working on brain computer interfaces, it's painfully clear to me that we are absolutely nowhere close to understanding the full complexity of the human brain in a manner required to simulate or reboot someone's consciousness. It's not even clear yet what level of abstraction is required. Do we need to map all of the synapses to get a connection graph, or do we need to map all synapses plus the syn…

In addition to all that we don't know about synapses etc, I've often wondered if even mapping all the "hardware connections" so to speak would even be enough. You'd have everything in the right place, but what about the "signals" running on it? Does a certain amount of constant activity on these circuits constitute signs of a "living" brain vs a dead one? How much of our consciousness is really in the topology of the…

This article [0] may help here:

Six of the sheep were given a single higher dose of ketamine, 24mg/kg. This is at the high end of the anesthetic range. Initially, the same response was seen as with a lower dose. But within two minutes of administering the drug, the brain activity of five of these six sheep stopped completely, one of them for several minutes – a phenomenon that has never been seen before.

“This wasn’t just reduced brain activity. After the high dose of ketamine the brains of these sheep completely stopped. We’ve never seen that before,” said Morton. Although the anesthetized sheep looked as though they were asleep, their brains had switched off. “A few minutes later their brains were functioning normally again – it was as though they had just been switched off and on.”

0: https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/sedated...

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

#230

Post by qwertox »

robbomacrae wrote: post #163
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…

That all makes sense. But let's run with this way beyond the foreseeable tech. What if you can replace each neuron in situ one by one up to X%. Then what if it was reversible (the neurons were initially just bypassed, commented out). Someone could then dial it up to 5%.. 50% and if they still felt the same throughout and then went up to 100%. In that scenario would they have copied themselves? I find it fascinatingly…

If you further develop this thought, systems might be capable enough to implant core desires into you before transferring the copy into your new body. "You'll love Coca Cola no matter what, and capitalism".

The above scenario is if you get re-implanted into a self-evolving, autonomous biological entity, unlinked again from the system. If this is not feasible and the only solution is to embed you into a robot with an uplink to the internet, because "why not?", then my biggest issue with a digital self is that there are no guarantees of having a proper firewall, which would equal to total surveillance:

  Thoughts are free, who can guess them?
  They fly by like nocturnal shadows.
  No person can know them, no hunter can shoot them
  and so it'll always be: Thoughts are free!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Gedanken_sind_frei
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