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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’

#301

Post by someuser2345 »

ben_w wrote: post #196
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…

I view (hypothetical, sufficiently good) brain upload and emulation the way I view git forks: both children are just as equally "the real one" even if only one of them is on the same physical hard drive. Looking forward from now, both bio-me and digital-fork-me (or indeed bio-fork-me if the upload gets revented) are equally "my future self", even though they would also each be distinct beings in their own rights and…

I think that from everyone else's perspective, an ideal copy of me would be me; by the definition of "ideal copy". I, however, would not consider the copy to be me; to me, there is only one me.

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

#302

Post by giantg2 »

kelnos wrote: post #293
giantg2 wrote: post #128

I don't want to live more than 100 years and I don't want to come back from the dead either. Make way for the next generation and their wants.

That's fine, but please don't stand in the way of those of us who would love to experience the world on a longer time frame, and are frustrated that the current level of medical knowledge doesn't allow it.

It seems odd to me that you would be frustrated about a fact of the natural world that you have no entitlement to expect it to be different.

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

#303

Post by giantg2 »

jaco6 wrote: post #276
giantg2 wrote: post #128

I don't want to live more than 100 years and I don't want to come back from the dead either. Make way for the next generation and their wants.

You’re being defeatist and ignoring the evidence presented in the article—even hospice patients want to live longer. You, too, will desire to live before (and hopefully: if!) you breathe your last. This is because the entire goal of the sentient consciousness is simply to preserve itself as long as possible. DNA has the essential goal of replicating itself in reproduction. Consciousness, by contrast, appears to have…

I'm not really being defeatist nor ignoring evidence. Perhaps I just have a different perspective. There can be moral/ethical arguments for why mortality is a good, or at least useful, thing.

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

#304

Post by [deleted] »

nkrisc wrote: post #188
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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#305

Post by tim333 »

idatum wrote: post #95

Do memories and/or brain functionality rely on volatile storage? So if you die, that storage is gone. How our brain works may rely on more than the structure of the brain. When you are brought back (booted?), things may not work the same.

Not volatile storage for most of it. If you get knocked out or similar you have most of the memories. It probably is partly down to the structure of what's connected to what and parly chemical changes at the synapses, although I don't think it's fully understood.

It'd make it pretty hard to get memories out of a brain sample as it's hard enough just to see the structure in an electron microscope. I don't think they have any way to log the chemical changes in the synapses presently.

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

#306

Post by wry_discontent »

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…

Something I think about a lot is that people tend to compare whatever the most recent innovation was to humans.

It used to be that what made you alive was electricity; you could Frankenstein shock yourself back to life.

It used to be that you were a clock. Your gears wound up at birth, and then eventually you wore out. You needed repairs.

People love to use metaphors, but none of these things are the full picture. Just because computers are so complex doesn't make you more correct. Your brain isn't the whole of your mind, we already know that's true. Why is this silly nonsense entertained?

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

#307

Post by m3kw9 »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #194
jryan49 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But did their "consciousness" continue? We currently have no way of telling.

Exactly whose consciousness would it be, if not theirs?

Let’s say you clone yourself l 1:1 who would you see thru?

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

#308

Post by danparsonson »

kelnos wrote: post #231
ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they are both me. It is admittedly a weird conclusion, but that doesn't make it false- we did a weird thing and got a weird result. Objectively, there is no case for saying either is not you.

I agree that they'd both be you, but I don't think that's what's at stake. "You" would only get to experience one of the two lives at that point: either the original's or the robot's. Presumably whatever consciousness was present before the duplication still resides with the original. So there's certainly an argument to be made that if someone created a copy of "you" and put it in a robot, and then destroyed your org…

I'm with you on this one - continuity is important too, it's not just about form. A robot version of me might be a suitable substitute to my loved ones, but it would always be outside my head and therefore not a continuous extension of my self.

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

#309

Post by concordDance »

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…

> A copy of your brain/personality/you... isn't you... it's a copy

This reads a bit like "a copy of Super Mario Bros isn't Super Mario Bros, it's a copy".

It has all of the bits that let you distinguish Super Mario Bros from Donkey Kong or Super Mario World. Why isn't it also Super Mario Bros?

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

#310

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

majormajor wrote: post #285
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…

> 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 indicates your model of 'you' is incorrect. How is that "scientifically" an "of course"? How is it more "an exact copy of you is you" than the alternative claim, "an exact copy of you is 'you (1)'" (to borrow from file manager nomenclature). The trivial example of that seems to…

An identical copy necessarily cannot be measured in a way that distinguishes itself from the original. So "scientifically" because we're restricting the space to measurements of the physical world, and "of course" because the conclusion falls almost tautologously out of the definitions, no experiment needed. How can the thing scientifically not be you if it is not materially different from you?

To your example- I am not sure which of two points are being made, so I'll address both. I'm not saying that everything that happens to entity 1 also happens to entity 2, just that both are you. Two things can both be apples, even though biting one leaves the other intact. And if something happening to you makes you not 'you' anymore, 'you' isn't really a coherent concept across even a fraction of a second; you'd cease to exist and be replaced multiple times in that time.

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