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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’

#311

Post by hitekker »

giantg2 wrote: post #302
kelnos wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Deep down, many people want to be a kind of god. Our technological progress lets that illusion of godhood seem achievable.

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

#312

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

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.

If you were only one person (big if), you would also experience things and drift. Would you stop being you at that point?

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

#313

Post by hackable_sand »

giantg2 wrote: post #302
kelnos wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some people just take longer than others. I'm gonna be as patient as I can be with them.

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

#314

Post by tim333 »

giantg2 wrote: post #302
kelnos wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why shouldn't we be frustrated by aspects of the natural world? Bad weather, disease, death and so on. Was eliminating smallpox odd because we had no entitlement expect to that?

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

#315

Post by tim333 »

audunw wrote: post #240
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.

Yeah, I find the need to live forever kind of.. juvenile? You can’t let go of your ego for long enough to realise that at some point it’s better to make room for a new human with new perspectives and new ideas? I like to think of it this way: if life was a game would you want to play the same character forever? No.. if you’re gonna keep playing the game it’s more interesting to start from scratch now and then. I don’…

We don't need to live forever as shown by the fact we've got by without it so far but death is kind of depressing. I've never really got the distinction that say killing millions in the holocaust is terrible but similar millions dying through age is desirable.

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

#316

Post by tim333 »

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…

It'd be a long way into the future to do brain uploading type stuff. We are not close yet but maybe in fifty years?

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

#317

Post by scotty79 »

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…

Is your savegame you loaded today still the same game you started yesterday? Or is it a copy of yesterday's game running forward? Does it matter?

Are electrical processes rebooted from chemical memory every morning when you wake up or after you have a seizure still the same you? Or is it just a fresh copy of your mind that dispersed when electrical signals in your brain lost continuity?

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

#318

Post by tim333 »

I've been thinking a bit about how living on could play out without being too futuristic with the technology. Coming back from cryopreservation is probably many decades out but we are quite close to being able to make a virtual AI version of you, working a bit like an actor playing you. Tech like Heygen is quite good with avatars and voices, and chatgpt type AI could pretend to be someone in a pretty terrible way just now but that stuff will get better and the virtual you could act as an assistant, learn your ways and help out.

Then when the physical you passes and maybe is cryopreserved the virtual you could conduct the funeral type service and say hey guys physical tim333 is gone but I'm still here and you can chat to me on the web etc. Virtual you could maybe have some investments and could buy gifts for the grandkids and post on HN etc. Then in a few decades virtual you could get data from cryopreserved you and incorporate it.

Perhaps it could be done as a startup?

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

#319

Post by evoke4908 »

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 is a pretty big philosophical question. There's no universal answer, just opinions. Your conclusion is not the obvious one for everybody.

What happens if you have an identical copy down to the atom. Totally impossible to distinguish. You're put to sleep and your mind is copied over. When you both wake, which one is "you"? Both copies think they're "you" and both are correct. Each has the same sense of self and continuity of identity. Maybe at the moment of synchronization "you" ceased to exist as you branched into two new identities.

Say you upload into a computer. From the copy's perspective, it is "you", it's the same self. It might view your biological body like you'd view an old computer after you finish migrating your files to a new one.

Say you destroy the biological body, or wipe its brain once you copy. Does that change the equation? If you destroyed one of the identical clones, is it even relevant to ask which is "you"?

Personally, I think Altered Carbon comes close to how our society will solve this problem. The original copy has its brain wiped and the new copy is "you" by cultural consensus. Truly duplicating a single identity is strongly taboo and illegal.

I think this is a question that either matters to you or it doesn't. In my opinion, it's irrelevant. I, the original "me" am totally free to agree with the copy that it is "me". I can choose to give it my social and legal identity and agree that "me" is no longer "I". My personal choice is to destroy the original, but one could also choose to let the original body continue and assume a new identity, live a new life or whatever.

I view this the same way I do my past self. The person I was ten years ago is not "me", it was a totally different person. That past self lived a different life and had a sense of identity that isn't at all like what I have today. That past me, the ego that called itself "me" died a long time ago and the "me" now is a different self identity built out of new pieces. In my worldview, "me" is a transient thing. The self is not one fixed thing, it changes over time and sometimes it's replaced. I don't see the idea of transferring my sense of self to a new body as anything more extreme than any other kind of ego death.

I choose to resolve this problem with practicality. I agree with myself that the new copy is "me". My social and legal identity, as well as my own sense of self transfer to the copy. My choice would be to destroy the original copy. Barring that, it would assume a new identity and live a different life far away. It'd get a memory wipe if available. I can make the choice to sacrifice my ego and allow "me" to be assumed by someone else. To me, even to the original copy, the new copy is me. In my opinion, "me" is immortal in the digital copy, even if "I" remain in a mortal body.

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

#320

Post by mannykannot »

geye1234 wrote: post #294
thephyber wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

> You seem to be engaging in difficult philosophical concepts and jumping over important steps (like rigorous definitions or showing why something “must be”). Yeah, sorry, I bashed that out too quickly. I'll try to slow down a bit, though I can't promise a full treatise :) For a thought to be about reality, there must be something about that thought that makes it about reality. How this might be the case is one thing…

There are a number of points where this thesis needs considerable work.

Perhaps the first is that you appear to be ambivalent about what you have in mind by 'similarity'. When you first discuss it, you say "...there must in one way or another be similarity between thought and reality. Again, the 'how' may be extremely complex...", but then you go on to say "...where is the likeness between Bob's mind and the tree? It cannot be the neurons or the physical structure of his brain or body, because these things don't have similarity with a tree..." - so this similarity could be extremely complex, yet you dismiss the possibility of it being anything physical without offering the slightest justification. You might find that convincing, but you have not said anything that presents a challenge to anyone skeptical of this claim.

You do not help your case by continuing "The atomic structure of a brain, in any state, is different from a tree's." This suggests that while you recognize that this similarity could be extremely complex, you do not completely grasp how complex a similarity between a physiological structure and something external to the body could be.

This impression is reinforced by your comments on emergence, which you appear to want to dismiss on the grounds that you struggle with it. Again, this is unlikely to be persuasive to people who do get it. For what it's worth, here's my go-to example of emergence: in the theory of evolution, fitness is a key concept, yet you will not find an organ of fitness by dissection - it is an emergent property of an organism's physiology in relation to its environment.

Much of the rest of your comment is in this vein, and it is rather like saying "how can music be recorded on a compact disk? CD burners use light, not sound." There is no point in belaboring this further, so let us instead return to your starting point - "for a thought to be about reality, there must be something about that thought that makes it about reality." A physicalist could respond by suggesting that there is a a chain of physical causality running from the outside world to brain states via sense organs. When we recognize that sense organs do not capture complete information, and also that brain states may be influenced by previous brain states, this view accommodates the fact that we can have incorrect thoughts about reality. How this works is opaque to us at our current state of knowledge, but that does not mean that it does not happen - in fact, it would be quite hard for an anti-physicalist to deny that it does.

The bottom line here is that the correspondence between mental states and reality is not the problem for physicalism that you think it is.

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