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‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

theguardian.com

381–390 of 499 posts

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

#381
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I imagine the poor will want their mind state covered by copyright/intellectual property laws, and the rich will ignore that if it can help them amass more wealth - just like LLM and diffusion model training was bootstrapped off the back of creatives without payment. i.e. the law doesn't apply if you're rich enough.

> just like LLM and diffusion model training was bootstrapped off the back of creatives without payment. i.e. the law doesn't apply if you're rich enough.

Or search engines.

I don't know how the legal cases will go, all I can say is that my suspicion is that, like search, such AI are simply too useful to be outlawed… but my armchair opinions are almost as far as possible from a guarantee, and even search had to change in response to copyright infringement laws.

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

#382

“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…

Coming from an atheist, what if there is a metaphysical dimension, and the computing structure of a processor, brain, whatever, necessarily positions it in a unique space within that dimension, and this dimension is what holds consciousness? The idea doesn't really matter, what matters is that perhaps copying a brain actually does move its consciousness. Easy to prove/disprove once you can actually copy a human being…

Numbers are metaphysical, as is music. They both can manifest physically (three cars and three cats, or a Bach concerto making sound waves that vibrate my eardrum). But what makes music musical is that it's a pattern of sounds over time. Patterns are not physical. Patterns map to the physical, but they are above the physical. You, too, are a pattern that plays out over time. You are mapped to your physical body, but you are the pattern that is embedded in the body. You are a pattern.

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

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because you are more than atoms. You are a pattern. A pattern plays out over time. Like music. Music has a physical component, of course, but music is enjoyable because it's a pattern over time.

Which is the "real" Moonlight Sonata: Beethoven's original sheet music, the first performance, the photons carrying some radio broadcast, some physical vinyl or CD master copy, a lossless encoded digital copy?

The thing about a copy, it reproduces that pattern. The question is, how good does a copy need to be to retain the important features? For now, I suspect that any attempt to actually scan a brain would be a cargo-cult copy of a mind… but I don't know that for sure, I'm just going with what I hear from the occasional neuroscientist who bothers to comment on misconceptions in this field.

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

#384
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That distinction should be very clear - killing vs dying.

Both are dying. One killed by age one by gas. My grandfather and his brother went those ways. I'm not sure the years of Alzheimer's were much better than Auschwitz.

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

#385

“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 think the difference here is that we share our bodies with the copy and share our memories. The difference between us at night and us in the morning is small. A copy in the cloud doesn't pass memories on to us when it sleeps and it's experience is very different. It's digital and could technically have a billion instances with no experience sync between them. Which one is 'you' then?

The best way to go about this IMO, is nano bots first augmenting the brain, connecting to the cloud, then replacing the brain slowly and introducing syncing consciousness when online. Replace a little every night and then it would still be you IMO since you're replicating most closely what the brain already does.

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

#386
post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah it's probably not 'reasonable' to expect to live on. But sometimes the technical possibilities open up to do something new.

Shaw quote: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’

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

#387

“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…

>Every time you go to sleep your consciousness shuts down.

Sure, but I'm ok with sidestepping that totally pedantic concern and still considering me the same person, like I do every single day.

Mere point-in-time-copying to another substrate, though, not so much.

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

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but if I died tonight and a copy of me took over tomorrow, what good did that do for me personally? I'm still dead. Selfishly, I don't care if a copy of me continues on, I only care that I don't.

Let's say you just found out that this is actually happening. Every night you die and are replaced with a perfect copy of yourself. Would you do anything differently?

Yes, I probably would do something differently.

First, how did I find out about it? If someone else discovered it and proved it and then told me, but they have not yet published or told anyone else I'd seriously consider immediately killing them (or waiting until they fall asleep and then killing them).

Widespread knowledge that everyone dies every day and is replaced by a perfect copy would be devastating for the world.

Assuming that I'm the only one who knows this (either because I discovered and proved it somehow, or because I just killed everyone else who knows), then I'd probably treat it the same as I would treat finding that I have an incurable illness that is going to painlessly kill me that night. I then have two options:

• Let that happen.

• Die by some other means before then.

In favor of the first option, letting it happen, is that the next day the world has a perfect copy of me that, assuming that most other people do not know that everyone dies and is replaced nightly, the rest of the world believes is me and that behaves identically to how I would have behaved had I survived to that day.

But I have no one that actually depends on me. The world does not actually need me to still be here tomorrow. Some friends would be sad if I were gone, but eventually the line of copies of me is going to end when one of them dies other than by going to sleep, so my friend's copies are eventually going to be saddened by the end of the line of tzs copies anyway.

That brings us to the second option. There are people whose lines of copies are bad for the world. So why not get some guns and take a few of them out? That has a good chance of getting me killed but since I'm dying anyway that night, so what?

There's the moral issue of taking another life, but the people I'd be killing are also going to die anyway that night. I would be preventing a line of copies of them from coming into existence, but preventing something from coming into existence is usually not seen as equivalent to killing something--the widespread acceptance of birth control is evidence of that.

As a practical matter, there would probably not be time enough to actually do this before falling asleep--but my copy tomorrow would know all this too, as would the next copy the day after tomorrow and so on, so could continue with the plan.

It is possible that I (or one of my future copies) would decided that killing is sufficiently wrong that even killing a very bad person who is going to die anyway in a few hours to prevent future bad acts of their future copies is not acceptable.

In that case I'd still consider the second option, but instead of death by going vigilante on evil people I'd probably just start doing things that I've always thought might be fun but had too high a risk of death to consider.

Not quite the same scenario, but the short story "All the Myriad Ways" by Larry Niven covers a kind of similar situation. In that story people develop travel to parallel universes, and discover that the idea that every possible decision creates parallel universes where that decision went different ways is true. The story is about the social implications of that as many people decide that nothing they do actually matters.

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

#389

“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…

> That's not immortality, not for me personally, not if I die.

What if: at the point of copying there are two of you, both of whom don't want to die?

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

#390

Just want to plug Pantheon as a TV series exploring this idea with excellent storytelling. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series) )

Really can't recommend this show enough. As soon as they brought out the dining philosophers problem I was hooked.
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