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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’

#391

Post by coldtea »

chii wrote: post #356
akira2501 wrote: post #253

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?

>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".

That amounts to saying "every consciousness discontinuity is of the same level".

I.e. that waking from sleep has the same distance from "you" before sleeping, as would a replica of you created by scanning your brain and uploading it to it.

Let's put it this way: if we can co-exist, it's not me.

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

#392

Post by TrainedMonkey »

tschwimmer wrote: post #353
TrainedMonkey wrote: post #173

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…

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.

Same actually, if I follow the logic the conclusion is pretty grim. I've come up with silver lining to embrace the change. All life must change to survive and thrive. To wake up the same every time, to never change no matter what, to never learn - that is true horror to me.

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

#393

Post by coldtea »

gowld wrote: post #205
nkrisc wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a difference when there could conceivably be two of you. There will never be two of me in my bed when I wake up, so I’m the same. If my mind could be copied and embedded in a robot or whatever, then there are two of me, each now diverging. That other one is not me, as far as I, the other, am concerned.

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?

>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?

Obviously the original one is.

Whether the clone also things that it's me doesn't make it any more so, than if a paranoid person thought it was Napoleon would make them Napoleon.

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

#394

Post by coldtea »

exe34 wrote: post #273
nkrisc wrote: 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…

>if having copies of you walking around was a normal thing, our language and expectations would reflect that.

Yes, and if the law of excluded middle didn't hold, then all kind of magical things would happen too.

But it does, and they don't.

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

#395

Post by amenhotep »

tschwimmer wrote: post #353
TrainedMonkey wrote: post #173

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…

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.

You're absolutely not. There's two big differences as I see it - firstly, it's not clearly impossible for the instance to survive sleep. The brain exists continuously throughout. There is constant electrical activity. We don't know for sure that our awareness is "transmitted through" to when we wake up, but we can imagine ways it's possible.

In contrast, of course, transporters and mind uploads obviously kill us.

Secondly, we can't do anything about sleep. No matter how worrying it is. There's just no choice other than to accept it.

The first argument is nicer than the second, but, frankly, if I could avoid sleep I would and I really hope I never need general anesthesia.

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

#396

Post by dyauspitr »

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…

A copy is a copy. On the other hand, actually transplanting my brain into another body is definitely living forever because the brain is me.

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

#397

Post by dyauspitr »

NickM wrote: post #11

I used to buy into this kind of stuff, but I've become more and more skeptical of the idea that you would still be yourself if your brain could be preserved/emulated/transplanted/whatever. Our nervous system extends into our bodies. We feel emotions in our bodies. People with certain kinds of brain damage that prevents them from feeling emotions normally also experience trouble making rational decisions. More recent…

If it was preserving my original brain it would definitely still be me at the core. Would everything be exactly the same? Probably not but that paradigm is more than good enough.

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

#398

Post by roordan »

wutwutwat wrote: post #258
nitwit005 wrote: post #206

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 is "me" in this case?

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

#399

Post by fipar »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #173
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…

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 draw the line in the sand and say that is different because sleep has been working "forever", while the quote in the parent comment describes a process that, not only does not exist and therefore work now, if it ever gets to work, we won't know if it's the same as the daily process that happens when we sleep.

Otherwise I actually agree with your point ("every night another little death", as the Sonic Youth song says): I'm different every morning. Usually, the differences are subtle. Over the time span of a lifetime though, I've been through enough changes that I often say ghosts of former selves share this body, and what "I" am now will probably be another ghost by the time the biological substrate dies and takes whatever "I" will be then, along with all the ghosts, with it (in my case we'll go up in smoke since I'll be cremated).

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

#400

Post by smeej »

kelnos wrote: post #243
smeej wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If not, I should have had to do something with her body when I woke up where she went to sleep.

I don't think that's the thought experiment. We're not talking about physical bodies, we're talking about consciousness. When you go to sleep, does your consciousness cease to exist, to be replaced with a new one, with all your memories and behaviors and attitudes, when you wake up? I have memories of being me and doing me things yesterday, but was that really me doing those things, or was that a different consciousn…

I don't think consciousness exists separate from the body, so this sounds to me like a contradiction in terms more than an actual thought experiment. It's the kind of thing a technologist can propose because the syntax of the sentences makes sense, but from a philosophical one, it's no more a "thought experiment" than a 4-sided triangle.

There's a 1:1 relationship of consciousnesses and bodies they can possibly inhabit, and we do not now and never have had evidence to the contrary.

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