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‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

theguardian.com

351–360 of 499 posts

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

#351

“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 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…

The person who is you exist independently of any copy of yourself. While a replica of you would exist there would still be the original you manifest in your brain that would exist an independent life and die at some point without ever “resuming” in another body. This is similar to how you can never time travel yourself even through relativity. Your perception of time will be the same no matter what relativistic effects occur outside of your frame of reference. You will live your life span and die.

Your replica however would have a different experience and be able to draw on your memories etc. But you yourself will in fact live a natural life with no shared experience with your replica and will experience death no matter what. It’ll be little solace to you that a copy got to live your life after your passing.

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

#352
post #242
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll need to be more clear in your last sentence. If you are cloned while you are sleeping, and both the original and the copy are moved into different rooms before you wake up, both of you think themself is you, and both of you think the other is not you. So, who is correct?

For me, the relationship is non-transitive. If you tell me this will happen tonight, I would right now call both "me". Both of them after the event would agree that I am them. Both of them would agree they are different people to each other, even if they say so in perfect stereo unison.

Cue the "We are Bob" series, aka Bobiverse, by Dennis E. Taylor!

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

#353

“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 raised a similar objection to the GP comment many years ago, and someone made the same response to me. I wonder if I'm alone in that instead of making me feel more optimistic about mind transfer, it just made me slightly afraid to go to sleep.

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

#354

“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 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…

There's no need to believe in an immaterial soul to think that a copy is a different 'you'.

It is enough to understand that having an independent "command & control" structure (for lack of a better word; C&C) is by definition 'you'. C&C means that the individual can perform a self-contained sense-think-act cycle.

We can infer this from the following: 1. Identical twins, despite having identical genetic structures, have separate C&C, and therefore qualify as separate persons. 2. Two siamese twins conjoined by the body (including parts of the head) have two C&Cs, and therefore qualify as two persons (with varying level of bodily control per person). 3. An individual with additional parts of the body (e.g., in a special case of being conjoined with a twin) has only one C&C and therefore qualifies as one person. 4. Clones are a special case of identical twins, and still have separate C&Cs, therefore qualifying as two persons. 5. A person in a coma or with another condition nonetheless qualifies as a person with some sense-think-act autonomy, despite being dependent on someone else for continued bodily functions. 6. An individual with a transplant (e.g., heart) or an extension (e.g., pacemaker) is nonetheless a person because of their consistent C&C. 7. An individual with extreme memory loss remains a person with C&C (in brain, body, genetics for the most part).

Any other special but naturally occurring cases (e.g., individuals with two brains, individuals with completely separated hemispheres, conjoined twins sharing a brain) would require either that we: a. understand how brains and bodies work (and therefore, make a more quantified measure of how much of sense-think-act autonomy qualifies as personhood); or b. decide based on a heuristic (1 brain = 1 person) or principle (protection of bodily autonomy, i.e., 1 body = 1 person).

But none of these need you to believe in a soul, in order to think that a digital clone is not 'you'. Unless, of course, you can prove that an individual either: 1. can sense-think-act with both physical and digital 'bodies' simultaneously and/or sequentially*, which share an equivalent experience (i.e., central C&C coordinating distribution or maintaining strict consistency across bodies). 2. can sense-think-act with either physical or digital 'body' at will, upon establishing a 'connection' and successful transfer of state (i.e., remote access). 3. can transfer whatever is necessary for C&C to another 'body' (e.g., brain transplant), and demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that their C&C signatures in new body match the ones in the old one.

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

#356

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…

> 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…

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

but there is indeed a discontinuity in your consciousness when you sleep. This discontinuity cannot be distinguished from the discontinuity arising from a copy of your brain on first "restart".

So how do you reconcile this discontinuity?

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

#357
post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Consciousness not a single isolated process and describing a lull in activity as "shutting down" is incorrect. but there is indeed a discontinuity in your consciousness when you sleep. This discontinuity cannot be distinguished from the discontinuity arising from a copy of your brain on first "restart". So how do you reconcile this discontinuity?

> This discontinuity cannot be distinguished

It can be, though. I don’t see how the discontinuity bit is the defining factor.

Regardless equating humans with digital computers and using analogies like that doesn’t make a lot sense to begin with.

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

#358
post #273
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes no difference. If it’s possible for the two versions to meet (they exist simultaneously) then what you’re describing is simple deceit. A world where two of me exist is fundamentally and irreconcilably different than a world where I simply go to bed and wake up each day. It makes no difference if I personally am aware.

it's almost as if your thought patterns and language are a product of your experience of being the only copy of you... if having copies of you walking around was a normal thing, our language and expectations would reflect that. right now if another copy of you comes by and claims your wife and your house, you'd be miffed. but the whole concept of one of you owning the house is just an artefact of how individuality an…

Hopefully IP and copyright laws will evolve in parallel to prevent or highly penalize stuff like that.

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

#359
Even with transferring minds, as long as physical beings are in charge of that, all people will surely die because accidents happen and entropy rises. If I live for a hundred or a billion years, I am still mortal, so there will still be existential problems related to mortality. It doesn't matter how I likely die, by cancer or by a star collapse.

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

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Presumably it’s the version of you that’s destined to become the “biological remnant” that making the decision to be cloned/copied?

So spending money or participating in that procedure would be entirely irrational from their perspective. What could they ever gain from that? They’d still be dead regardless of what the copy thinks or feels (until that procedure is done happens)

Spending the same resources to prolong your existence (even in a suboptimal state) seems literally infinite times more rational.

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