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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’

#431

Post by throwaway924t2 »

tzs wrote: post #388
suzzer99 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

Death affects other people, so why would you kill yourself or another?

If you had the choice of pushing a button that would kill a total stranger that you never met, would you do it? If not, you can use the same argument for your friends. Sure they may be replaced by identical copies, but they will still experience feelings, although they are technically not your old friends

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

#432

Post by throwaway924t2 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #213
suzzer99 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose you died every night in your sleep and were replaced in the morning with a perfect copy of yourself with all your memories intact. Would you know the difference?

How do you think Star Trek transporters would work?

There was an episode with a transporter accident, but the energy/essence ("soul") still remained and could be transferred to a backup copy. This implies that the energy/soul is also transported.

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

#433

Post by spicyusername »

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…

A gap in awareness is definitely not the same as creating a new copy of your consciousness and annihilating the old one.

Although, I'll grant that the subjective experience may be fairly similar. If you were to theoretically be copied, your copy would probably feel quite continuous with the original.

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

#434

Post by skeaker »

giantg2 wrote: post #137
hinkley wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want to go on in a world that has either left you behind or keeps making the same mistakes over and over in a cycle and won't listen to you because you're too old to understand? And conversely, I think Kim Stanley Robinson puts it best in the Mars trilogy. Scientific progress often has to wait for the old guard to die so new ideas can be tried. Sometimes there are actually new things and they need to be…

Just imagine someone who died 50 years ago coming back and hearing skibidi toilet, no cap, ohio, etc. Then not being allowed to board a plane without a body scan, and not having money for a plane anyways since bread was dime and a gallon of gas was a quarter last you checked. You can't even get a job you're just a brain and all the knowledge work you could do is 50 years out of date.

I gotta say, none of that would make me rather want to be dead.

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

#435

Post by Vampiero »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #427
xpl wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Perhaps a "Ship of Theseus"-style approach would work — gradually replacing neurons one by one, or brain sections piece by piece. 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…

> There's certainly a certain subset of the brain you can take out and still have no effect on consciousness

If we don't even know what consciousness is, how do you measure the effect on consciousness of removing arbitrary amounts of brain matter?

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

#436

Post by Vampiero »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #428
roordan wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "me" in this case?

To define "me" in this context basically requires solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness [0]. 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-pers…

> 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.

That's because you live in Plato's cave, we all do.

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

#437

Post by skeaker »

giantg2 wrote: post #302
kelnos wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine, but please don't stand in the way of those of us who would love to experience the world on a longer time frame, and are frustrated that the current level of medical knowledge doesn't allow it.

It seems odd to me that you would be frustrated about a fact of the natural world that you have no entitlement to expect it to be different.

Ironic that you would post this to a digital forum, the very concept of which would never be found and nature to the point that it would be beyond fiction and magic only a few hundred years ago. Nature has no inherent will and very often does things that are awful, like cancer. If anything it's our obligation to correct its failures where we can.

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

#438

Post by geye1234 »

dinfinity wrote: post #418
geye1234 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It's inevitably going to be a mere copy of you. You don't get to experience any of it. > You can make the same argument for 'you before you went to sleep' and 'you after you woke up'. The only real link you have to that previous consciousness are memories of experiences, which are all produced by your current body/brain. Except I know, empirically, that people go to sleep all the time and wake up, and remain the s…

> that people go to sleep all the time and wake up, and remain the same person You have absolutely no way of knowing that last part is true. You can only see their behavior, which is identical whether they are the same consciousness or a different one from the one it was yesterday. You don't even know whether they have any conscious experience at all. > And I know (for practical purposes) I do the same. You do not. T…

> You can only see their behavior, which is identical whether they are the same consciousness or a different one from the one it was yesterday.

The first clause of the sentence is true, but the second is not.

You never directly see a thing itself, you only ever see its effects on the world. You rationally postulate the presence of water because of its clear colour, its hydrating effect on you, its tendency to become a gas at 100C, its tendency to dissolve salt, and so on. Similarly, you rationally postulate the presence of the same person, at 10pm on Monday and 7am on Tuesday, because he has the same personality, the same look, the same eye and hair colour, the same body shape, etc. We know about the presence of a thing from the presence of its effects and behaviour. If these remain the same, it is rational to believe that the person remains the same.

> You don't even know whether they have any conscious experience at all.

Again, knowledge of effects leads to knowledge of the thing causing said effects. I am aware of my own conscious experience, I see Bob affects the world in ways that are very similar to myself and other human beings, and so I rationally postulate that he is a conscious, rational being like I am. You never see a person's mind directly, but you see the effects of the person's mind the whole time. You see such effects through their body. If the effects remain the same, or change only in certain, limited ways, it's reasonable to believe that the cause remains the same (and frankly crazy to believe otherwise).

> The "for practical purposes" points at your _body_. There is no evidence that an organic body is in any way special.

The mind and the body form one substance. The idea that "my mind is one thing, my body another" has been tried and failed as a philosophical idea several times in history. It raises far more problems than it purports to solve. I know I continue through time in part because my body continues through time. You say the body isn't "special"; I don't know what this means, but I know my body, and other people's bodies, are different from other things, because they walk, talk, reason, sense, desire, and so on. (Once again, the effects and behaviour of a thing lead us to knowledge of that thing.) The idea that consciousness or self can be 'uploaded', even in theory, is pure fantasy. You and your body are one thing.

> You can spin the illusion of a continuous conscious experience every way you want. It is still just that, an illusion.

If this is so, explain how rational thought is possible. Given that rational thought involves you reasoning from A to B to C through time, how is this possible if there is no continuous 'you' that is going through time?

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

#439

Post by speed_spread »

PaulHoule wrote: post #4
dtagames wrote: post #3

Like so many scientific pursuits, this one has its roots in science fiction. A terrific trashy futuristic novel from the 70's by Lawrence Sanders called The Tomorrow File [0] features preserved heads that are kept around to spout ideas in the future, when they might become useful, among many other Brave New World -type concepts. [0] https://archive.org/details/tomorrowfile0000sand_t5i1

Way older https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rip_Van_Winkle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleeper_Awakes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Door_into_Summer and for anything fantastic you can find it in mythology and ancient literature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sleepers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muchukunda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Immortals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranka_(legend) A good re…

I also liked David Brin's Kiln People. Very creative and fun.

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

#440

Post by rcxdude »

akira2501 wrote: post #417
rcxdude wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yet you dream and can remember your dreams. Your dreams can be influenced by things occurring around you in your sleep. Some people do this on purpose and find that they are more reliably able to do it with practice. So how are you defining "discontinuity?" I don't see one at all. Dreams aren't continuous throughout sleep, so this seems pretty irrelevant to whether there's a discontinuity in the first place, you're…

> Dreams aren't continuous throughout sleep What do you base this assertion on? > so this seems pretty irrelevant to whether there's a discontinuity in the first place Have you proven there is one? Or are you just saying "sleep is really weird so that must be a 'conscious discontinuity.'" I'm pointing out the obvious flaws in this logic. > you're just saying there may be multiple during a given night's sleep. No, you…

>What do you base this assertion on?

It's a pretty well understood part of sleep research. Sleep has different phases, only REM, the lightest part of sleep, is associated with dreaming. Also, it matches up with my experience of dreams and basically all the reports I've seen from others on dreams: there's not a continuous experience from falling asleep to dreams, there's being in the process of falling asleep, then there's being in a dream, and the experience is discontinuous, the transition between wakefullness and dreaming is not experienced, nor is the transition between different dreams.

(I've also personally experienced a very sharp discontinuity around sleep, once or twice, where I have literally 'blinked' while looking out my bedroom window and seen it go from dark to bright light, experiencing nothing of the hours in between. Though I suppose in many ways this is a much more continuous conscious experience than I normally have when sleeping, where waking up feels much more disjoint from falling asleep)

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