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‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

theguardian.com

321–330 of 499 posts

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

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

What if you have done the procedure and after it woke up in artificial environment. You'd be aware that there's biological remnant of pre-procedure you that will still experience other things than you will including dying and death. But he's separate entity and you are glad it's not you that are about to die.

Basically if you wake up after the cloning as your old biological self then you just drew the short straw. It's up to you if it helps you or not that there's another you that will continue on whatever you were doing without the nuisance of dying. Some people might find calmness in that they can freely die and nothing of value will be lost.

What about startrek transporters? Wouldn't you use them because you are getting disintegrated and what's create at destination is just a copy of you but not you?

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

#322

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 nanosecond the set of atoms constituting you changes, each of those are a different you.

switching a sesame seed on my burger bun is not the same thing as scanning it and uploading the file to the cloud.

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

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In reality, no two things are the same. When we categorize things in any way, we make an error in order to achieve some practical goal.

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

#324

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…

Imagine the bugs introduced in trying to make a digital copy of a brain. Terrifying for the subject.

There's gonna be million artificial minds of various levels of capacity before the first human mind is accurately simulated.

At that time we are going to be accustomed to glitching artificial minds creates, modified, bugged, debugged that current moral conundrums "is the copy me or not", "is it ok to create a hobbled copy of someone" are going to be as quaint bit akin to counting angels on a head of the pin. Mangled and molded consciousness will be as mundane as computation itself.

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

#325

Part of personality lives inside of our stomachs as well, apparently, and so much of who were are is driven by our interaction with our nerve endings. I think even with a perfect copy of consciousness, it's pointless without a perfect copy of our bodies as well. I think that AGI, when and if we ever reach that stage of technological innovation, will enable us to live in a utopian world where our bodies are impervious…

Perfect copies are overrated.

> Part of personality lives inside of our stomachs as well

Is it the part of your personality that you like or maybe it's the part you hate?

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

#326
post #192

Leaving aside whether or not I think this is A Good Idea[1], I am fascinated by what other limits people would run up against, if this were possible. Memory, for example. Is it even possible to retain a first person memory for hundreds of years? Is there some upper limit above which you can no longer form new memories? Would it become much harder to motivate yourself, without the pressures of a limited existence. How…

> Memory, for example. Is it even possible to retain a first person memory for hundreds of years?

It's not. But it's fine, because it's not even possible to retain memories of typical lifespan or even short one or even a decade or even a year. You lose way more than 90% of it and the rest gets largely altered anyways.

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

#327
post #74
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To believe that the loss of a limb is so severe that death is preferable is absurd and insensitive. No. Denigrating someone expressing their personal opinion seems absurd. Since the commenter did not impose their opinions on other people you had to put those words in their mouth to call them insensitive. I prefer to die with autonomy and dignity as well, meaning I would like to pull my own plug. That other people m…

> Denigrating someone expressing their personal opinion seems absurd. (…) The commenter just described their threshold, they didn't judge other people. My sentence does not judge the person, it criticises the belief . Learn to differentiate or you’ll be doomed to a life of ad hominem attacks and taking things personally. If person A says they love spiders and person B replies they find spiders repulsive, there’s no v…

> My sentence does not judge the person, it criticises the belief.

An opinion or belief can't "be" insensitive. A person may intend to say something insensitive, another person may interpret an opinion as insensitive (as you did when dragging in amputees and people suffering from other conditions and injuries). "Insensitive" can only refer to a person's intention or another person's reaction. So calling someone insensitive for their expressed opinion does indeed judge the person.

> Learn to differentiate or you’ll be doomed to a life of ad hominem attacks and taking things personally.

Surely someone as skilled in rhetoric as yourself can see the irony of you warning me about "a life of ad hominem attacks" embedded in an ad hominem attack. Then you followed up with the implication that I don't understand "basic sentence structure." Address my actual comment rather than telling me what I need to learn and how I will get doomed for not thinking like you.

As for spiders and racists, those have nothing to do with anything in this thread. If someone says they don't want to live if they lose a limb or face chemotherapy, whether you agree with their stated choice or not, no other person or race got mentioned or implicated in the comment you replied to. Setting up a false and deliberately inflammatory analogy to make your point, equating an opinion about perceived quality of life with racism, doesn't help your argument. Try sticking with countering the arguments the commenter (and I) expressed.

Personal opinions about end-of-life care, personal autonomy, dignity have the same flavor as religious beliefs: you can't counter them with logic. Just calling someone wrong or "insensitive" or "nuts" as some other commenters have misses the mark, because the subject involves beliefs, not facts that we can argue. One can express their own different opinion, but going beyond that starts to verge into attacks on personal beliefs, which requires making assumptions about another person's faculties, judgment, and ad hominem, all of which you have deployed in your comments.

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

#328
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Those things are about the timeliness - bad weather one day vs another, some people get the disease and others don't, early death verses a longer life. It's about what is reasonable to expect. It might be reasonable to expect good weather on a specific day, or even to live past the age of 50. It's unreasonable to expect to live indefinitely.

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

#329
post #287
post #62

Ultimately, I am going to quote one of my favorite writers [0] and say that I am not afraid of a life that ends. I don't want to be a brain in a jar. Or in a computer either. I enjoy experiencing physical sensations and interacting with the world in meatspace. And if I can't enjoy either, then just let me die. And I apply this to not just brain preservation, but any attempt to artificially prolong the quantity of my…

This seems a bit extreme. Chemotherapy and its effects can be a very temporary thing, and your quality of life can go back to normal after you've finished your course and the cancer has gone into remission. Certainly there are aggressive cancers where you'd be fighting a painful battle of attrition, but there are many cancers where prognoses are good, and quality of life once treatment is done is more or less the sam…

I don't know what the commenter who posted about chemo and amputation actually thinks or believes. But I hesitate to call them "nuts" or to lecture them about how they have a wrong opinion. And I would not expand their personal opinion as a judgment on people who decide they can live with the effects of chemo, or amputation, or loss of an eye, because nothing in the original comment included a judgment on other people. Everyone has their own threshold for what they consider a life worth continuing, but we should not impose our own thresholds on other people, or judge them for making different choices.

For me the question goes beyond "Can I survive chemo (or amputation) and resume something like a normal life?" When you have to face cancer or loss of a limb or any illness or injury that threatens your life, or perceived quality of life, or dignity and autonomy, you necessarily have to think about what that means for your future. Until you get a diagnosis of (for example) cancer you don't know what it feels like, or how you will react, to the fact that no matter if you survive the treatment or not, you will always have that threat and reminder of your mortality in your conscious thoughts. You think about how you might not get so lucky the next time, how much your treatments might cost, what your illness might put your loved ones through, how far you will go to keep yourself alive even when it imposes costs and obligations on other people. And you think that maybe other people will have to make hard decisions about your future if you can't. A cancer diagnosis doesn't just affect me, in other words. If I lost a leg or arm that would impose burdens on my wife and family, affect my ability to make a living. Those thoughts more than the medical condition itself lead people to arrive at opinions such as the original commenter expressed.

Having faced my own mortality already I know I think more about how my own end of life scenarios affect other people more than how they will affect me. I worry that I will suffer a stroke, or slip into dementia, before I can pull my own plug, leaving people I care deeply about with that awful obligation, and the burden of caring for me rather than living their own life. And it's that thought, not the fear of disease or dying, that leads me to my own ideas about how much I might endure, because I won't endure it alone or without cost to others.

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

#330
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that "you are different" does not mean a "different you" now exists, though. Change of this specific kind is already intrinsically integrated into your existence and identity.

Every moment of consciousness is different. It is a different you in that sense. What is the strand that keeps it the same ‘you’?

Honestly I'd like to have my mind copied, but may only be 'simulated' once the current me is dead. From my perspective I'll be dead and there's no changing that, but from the clone's perspective, life just goes on.
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