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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’

#251

Post by [deleted] »

kiba wrote: post #129
hinkley wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A questionable assumption. A scientist like Einstein experienced scientific revolutions within his lifetime. That's hardly going to be the norm in the history of science, and also a horrible assumption to think revolutions would endlessly be occurring and reoccurring. Also, we know when we're on the edge of knowledge, especially in cosmology and physics. We're waiting for revolution there. There's dark energy and dar…

[deleted]

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

#252

Post by thephyber »

geye1234 wrote: post #218
ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't believe in a soul in the sense of a "ghost in a machine", since it introduces so many problems. Nonetheless, it's pretty clear that there is an immaterial component to thought, and therefore to our existence, for various reasons. Examples: 1. If we are entirely material, we can't know anything. For example, if you're thinking about a tree, there must be something about you that has 'grasped' what it is to be…

How sure are you about (1)?

Is there no chance that “thinking” (or your term “grasping”) is not simply an emergent property of certain matter+states? A computer with a machine learning process seems to be able to “grasp” what it is to be tree (as opposed to a cat or a crosswalk).

You seem to be engaging in difficult philosophical concepts and jumping over important steps (like rigorous definitions or showing why something “must be”).

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

#253

Post by akira2501 »

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…

> your consciousness shuts down.

Consciousness not a single isolated process and describing a lull in activity as "shutting down" is incorrect.

> So, each morning is a copy of you wakes up?

Obviously not. Many of these processes also happen in reverse when you are awake. So when I go to sleep I'm tired and in a different mood. When did that "copy" get made exactly?

> Or do you draw a line in the sand and say that is different.

You can easily ask "how much of my conscious state is controlled by my body's chemical state?" If that's a non trivial amount then simply copying and hoisting my memories into a different body is clearly going to have a non trivial impact. To the extent that it's easy to say "that would not be /me/."

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

#254

Post by groos »

There are so many ifs and buts in this idea of resurrecting the brain that it's laughable, yet "brilliant scientists" make press with it. What about the completely unknown mind-body problem that scientism pretends doesn't really exist but each one of us knows is very real? What if you wake up 500 years later but plugged into a matrix? Who guarantees cryo-maintenance of the frozen brain?

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

#255

Post by ben_w »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #224
TrainedMonkey wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Consciousness has, I'm told, 40 identifiable meanings. Makes it hard to get to grips with it.

For example, I sometimes have direct awareness of the nature of my consciousness changing with tiredness. Sometimes that has been what I can only describe as if my homunculus has switched to autopilot and is now just watching a cinema of my senses.

But that's probably a terrible description if you've never experienced that yourself.

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

#256

Post by akira2501 »

xyst wrote: post #223

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 com…

> We can barely even do “artificial intelligence” correctly

Even if we could the brain is an amazingly efficient mechanism for computation. It uses such a low amount of power that it's hard to imagine a computer based AI model ever genuinely competing with it.

If the environment and entropy are human scale concerns than AI is decidedly a dead end for us.

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

#258

Post by wutwutwat »

nitwit005 wrote: post #206
ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not an issue of the soul, if you make a copy there are two people now, which are clearly physically separate, and think independently. Even if you somehow made a perfect instant copy, they'll start drifting apart, as they'll be experiencing different things.

this ^

Soul or not, it wouldn't be me. Imagine that I was alive and existed next to the cloud copy of me. It would be 2 different minds with a common core. A database restore to a new cluster, that immediately became different afterward because our two experiences would drift. Funny enough, the db term for a db cluster which has two writable primary instances, which have received differing sets of writes containing different sets of data, is called a "split-brain".

So if I exist and have my own thoughts and the cloud copy exists and has its own thoughts, and we are taking in reality differently than each other, we are 2 distinct minds. Now imagine I died. What has that changed for the copy of me? Nothing. It's still a different mind than mine. My mind is dead. I'm dead. A copy of me existing after I die does not change the fact that I died. It does not help me, literally me, live forever.

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

#259

Post by throw__away7391 »

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…

I do wonder sometimes if each period of being awake is the entire subjective experience of a sequence of independent conscious entities. Like I woke up today with the memory of yesterday, but possibly that version of me that had the subjective experience of being was an ephemeral phenomenon that ceased to exist when I fell asleep, just as I will tonight.

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

#260

Post by gowld »

wutwutwat wrote: post #160
suzzer99 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it calms your dread, know that most people who died expectedly (long illness) want to die.

So you have no need to fear the inevitability of death, only fear the inevitability of the desire for death.

Finally, to cure the fear the inevitability of the desire for death, live your life so well that even if you die accidentally, it's worth it.

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