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It's funny people always talk about this in extremes. "Do you want to live longer?" "Yes" "OH YOU WANT TO LIVE A MILLION BILLION YEARS?!?!" There are values in between immortality and ~80 years.
Oh and when we have defeated death, when will people decide it's time to go? And how will they do it?
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People living forever will stall humanity. Generations and their old ways dying with them are necessary for civilizations to progress.
There's no proof of that. Life expectancy has been increasing over time, especially in the past century or so. I don't think it's credible to suggest that civilizations have progressed meaningfully slower now that people live to be 80 or so instead of only 30, which was common in recent history. And even if immortality "stalls" humanity, so what? People matter, not technology or some amorphous concept of "progress".
“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…
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There’s a short story about uploaded consciousnesses being used as AI slaves. They go bad once enough years have gone by that they can’t speak the modern language anymore. Then they usually lapse into insanity or depression.
Reminds me of: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
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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.’
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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.
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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. So, each morning is a copy of you wakes up I think it doesn't "shut down", maybe fades away to a different, low-power mode. When you go to sleep and then wake up, here is still a continuity , because of the same underlying structures and processes from which the consciousness emerges. So it is like a 4D thing. That continuity never really breaks (until death…
You just blew my mind (no pun intended).
In this thread, we're basically alluding to the Hard Problem of Consciousness[0]. Consciousness is hard to define, and even harder to prove, and so conversations that talk about it become difficult.
There's certainly a certain subset of the brain you can take out and still have no effect on consciousness. Assuming you could replace small parts at a time, what would happen? At what point does the "mind", "self", or "consciousness" get lost?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
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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?
To an external observer, all life, including humans, are nothing more than a complex set of electrical and chemical reactions, and in theory, with sufficient technology, you could take a perfect subatomic snapshot of someone's brain and predict exactly how they would react to any stimuli.
But then there are the first-person perspective experiences. We have words for it like "consciousness" or "mind", but no scientific explanation on how it works and why it shuts off when we go to sleep. The religious will explain it with the concept of a soul.
I don't think we can ever solve this Hard Problem. But I can claim to believe that if someone did snapshot my brain and recreate a perfect living replica in a new body, that I would not experience what that replica experiences. It might have a completely new consciousness behind it, or it could be a P-Zombie [1].
Maybe I'm actually the only conscious being in the entire universe and everyone else is a P-Zombie. Somehow, to me, that makes more sense than consciousness appearing out of nowhere.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
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> 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.
Which one is the original? Say we aren't making a computer copy but duplicate of your body. And we might have messed up the labels. How do you tell which one is the original? Atoms don't have labels. But atom-level copy isn't possible. Say we made the scan at large enough scale that has fidelity but it isn't identical.
Reality doesn't care about the labels. One of the two pre-existed, which is the original.
>How do you tell which one is the original? Atoms don't have labels.
That's a problem regarding our knowledge. There's still an original, regardless if we know which or not.
There's an original even regardless whether the original has a way to prove to themselves they are so (as opposed to simply believing they are, which the clone would believe too).
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I had a great deal of difficulty going to sleep the night after this first occurred to me. I only really managed to assuage my fear by realizing there would be an incredible number of dead bodies to deal with if this were happening to everyone every night, and it was extremely unlikely it was only happening to me.
This really hit me the first time I went under GA.