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‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

theguardian.com

341–350 of 499 posts

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

#341

“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'm not a huge Trekkie but I recall the reason Bones McCoy wouldn't go in a transporter was he believed it killed the person and created a copy.

there was an episode where it didn't go as planned

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

#342
post #340

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.

Why 100? You can also make way for the next generation by living 80, or 60, or 40 years. Yet no one would be okay with that option. Funny thing is historically speaking 40 is a lot closer to the useful human lifespan than 100. So this strong belief of yours is really driven by advancements in society and healthcare over the last few decades. Why do you think that won't change drastically another few decades from now?

"Funny thing is historically speaking 40 is a lot closer to the useful human lifespan than 100."

That isn't really true. Life expectancy was historically driven down by high infant mortality and lack of medicine. The meaningful human lifespan has been in the 70s for the majority of history. (Lifespan is different from life expectancy)

"So this strong belief of yours is really driven by advancements in society and healthcare over the last few decades."

Who says it's a strong belief?

"Why do you think that won't change drastically another few decades from now?"

Because there's no real evidence to support that. Life expectancy hasn't gone up drastically over the past 50 years. Rates of chronic illnesses, including things like dementia, have gone up drastically. So even if people are living a couple years longer, they're generally sicker and it's costing more. Even if medicine makes drastic improvements, 100 is still a lofty goal. I'd be fine making it only 80 too. I'm actually skeptical that will even happen. What I do know is that I don't want it to take more than 100 years.

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if we copy you into a robot and the copying process leaves you unharmed and awake, are they both you?

I think it would both be me until it started to drift, which would be almost instantly.

As long as we're dreaming up stuff, why do we assume the consciousness wouldn't be shared? what if you woke up and there was one mind but two bodies?

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

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for the response. I will return to what I meant by 'complex' in a minute. But nothing in your response undermines my point, which is that similarity between thought and object-of-thought is made impossible by materialism. It is true that "a chain of physical causality [runs] from the outside world to brain states via sense organs", and it is also true that brain states will be different based on the causality…

Why do you have to show the likeness ? There’s a strict level of fidelity being imposed here.

The brain has to only represent the sensations it encodes.

The tree and the brain are both material, so the phenomenon of the brain encoding it will also be material.

There’s no need for a soul to represent a further reality.

Even if a soul exists, wouldn’t that result in the same issue again?

The argument sounds like we are saying that there has to be a tiny tree in our heads for reality to be perceived. Since there is no tiny tree, we have to perceive it in our immaterial soul. Which just bumps the issue to the immaterial.

But then how is the immaterial perceiving the material ?

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

#345
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think Star Trek transporters would work?

Star Trek's lore includes some technobabble about transporters operating in "quantum" mode to assuage concerns that the person at the transporter destination is not the same as at the source.

Except all those times people got cloned or worse.

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

#346

“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…

Your memories and biology are you. If someone makes a perfect copy of you, disintegrates your old “you” and then wakes the “new you” up how is it any different?

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

#347

“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…

The line I like to use here when people talk about this sort of 'transferring' your consciousness - imagine there was a 'perfect' chatbot trained on your every experience, thought, and sensation, and mind.

OK, now your consciousness is 'transferred'. I promise to run you.exe plenty. It's just an exercise in self delusion, even if this was possible. That's not you anymore than a 'you' created by a taxidermist and shoved in a closet is.

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

#348

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.

It is the same person but a different human. Even if they drift apart, by all means, their own personal identity is the same, same as if we split the universe with 1 human taking path 1 and in another universe the human taking path 2.

The moment they change, they are not the same person, just as I am not the same person I was when I started writing this reply, and yet, I still am "me", irrespective of the drift.

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

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for the response. I will return to what I meant by 'complex' in a minute. But nothing in your response undermines my point, which is that similarity between thought and object-of-thought is made impossible by materialism. It is true that "a chain of physical causality [runs] from the outside world to brain states via sense organs", and it is also true that brain states will be different based on the causality…

I can see from your response that there are a number of points that I need to clarify.

Firstly, I am not at all surprised that you, personally, do not feel that your position has been undermined, and I don't suppose you ever will, but one of the themes of my response is that neither your intuition, nor that of like-minded people, is particularly persuasive; for that, you need something that would give a skeptic persuasive reasons for abandoning their skepticism.

From your statement "causality is not likeness", I see that I need to clarify the point I made in my penultimate paragraph. To do so, we need to go back to your second post in this thread [1], and in particular, to the paragraph beginning "for a thought to be about reality, there must be something about that thought that makes it about reality... And for the thought to be about the reality, there must in one way or another be similarity between thought and reality."

The point in my penultimate paragraph is this: If we suppose that there is a causal flow from the real world to brain states via the sense organs, and adopt the premise that (changes in) mental states are caused by (changes in) brain states, then we have at least the outlines of an answer to your tacit initial question (what is it that makes a thought being one about reality?) that does not invoke or depend on any concept of likeness or similarity. In what I quoted above, you certainly seem to be saying that the only thing that could make a thought about reality is that it has a similarity (in some nebulous sense, at least) to reality, but here we have another way for a thought to be about reality that does not depend on likeness in any sense.

At this point, I can imagine someone saying "... but this causal chain could well result in brain states that are, in some sense, similar to reality." I don't dispute this, as I am not arguing against the idea that such a similarity can be seen, I am arguing that a link between reality and thoughts can plausibly be postulated without an appeal to similarity or likeness in any sense, let alone an appeal to a likeness about which it is asserted, apparently purely on the basis of intuition, that cannot possibly be physical in any sense.

In the light of the above, my misunderstanding of what you were calling complex seems moot - an understanding of causality may potentially lead us to being able to say, with some specificity, in what way thoughts are similar to reality, so it is not inconsistent with the claim that there are no complex issues in seeing that there must be a similarity, even if it does not do anything to endorse that view. In the same way, it is consistent with your claim that the only likeness for materialism can be a physical likeness, without actually requiring it.

The above physicalist story has another thing going for it: it contains at least the outlines of a possible explanation of how thoughts are related to reality, while your story does not - as far as I can tell, it is confined to saying that whatever it is, it can't be physical. If you have anything affirmative to say about how thoughts come to resemble reality and what the similarity is, now would be a good time to present it.

Your response to my CD analogy does not need much attention, as it is just an analogy, but I see I did not make it clear what point I was aiming at, which is that while "how can it be that..." questions can be insightful when the person asking has a good grasp of what is going on, they can merely reflect ignorance when the questioner lacks that understanding - and when it comes to how the mind works, we are all ignorant to a considerable degree.

By now it should be clear that what you claim in your final paragraph is wrong: in order to show that your argument has failed to make its case, I neither need to show how there can be likeness that is not physical likeness if materialism is true, and nor do I need to show that likeness is not necessary for a thought to be about reality. On the contrary, you have chosen to make a strong claim - essentially that the mind cannot possibly be the result of physical processes - and to sustain that, you need more than arguments grounded in appeals to intuition about how things either must or cannot be. In particular, anything resembling 'so prove me wrong' would amount to burden-shifting, and while we are about it, the alternative to 'the mind cannot be a physical phenomenon' is not 'the mind must be a physical phenomenon', it is 'the mind might be a physical phenomenon' (something that I believe is probably true, but which I do not claim to know.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42312450

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

#350
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're essentially suggesting 'maybe the laws of physics would stop applying here for unknown reasons' , but it's not plausible that would happen absent evidence.

I was trying to elegantly hint there is probably lot we don't understand. :) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936 / https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10671017/

That is true (in that it is a statement always true of all subjects), and I don't think anyone was disputing that. Simply pointing out that we don't know of any reason an identical copy in an identical state wouldn't obey the laws of physics and perform identically.
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