441–450 of 499 posts
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None of that is related to my point. A world where I get cloned and an unaware is distinctly divergent from a world where there is only one of me each time I wake up, regardless of how society handles it.
yes, a world where there are two of you is different from a world where there's one of you. I feel like this is something Aristotle must have covered, but it is important to point it out!
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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 You can't even get a job you're just a brain and all the knowledge work you could do is 50 years out of date.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.
“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…
Even 5 minutes from now, you don't know where you'll be, and you will be a completely different person based on the events of that 5 minutes.
Every moment that passes, the you of the moment dies.
What you can have, is a you in the future that remembers and understands the past you. That only happens if you preserve your memories either by not dying, or by preserving your internal memories in some other way.
That's all you get. A copy in the future that remembers, or nothing at all.
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> 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?
Damage a brain enough and brain death occurs. By the same token, after a certain number of neurons are lost, there is no self. Whatever consciousness is, it can’t be sustained with a sufficiently compromised brain.
This is observable in late stage dementia patients, it gradually becomes difficult to think and in the final dire stages their sense of self degrades too.
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> 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?
Doesn’t seem that hard to measure. It isn’t like the subject will become a mysterious P zombie, they will probably just become increasingly incoherent and then non verbal and then die. Damage a brain enough and brain death occurs. By the same token, after a certain number of neurons are lost, there is no self. Whatever consciousness is, it can’t be sustained with a sufficiently compromised brain. This is observable i…
At best, you can be an external observer. You can't truly understand what the person is experiencing.
A common thread I see among people with brain damage is that they don't recognize it. For example, with patients with hemispatial neglect [0], if you ask them to draw a clock, and then only draw the right-hand side of one with the numbers 12 through 6 and they don't draw 7-11, then try to ask them where the 9 is, they might insist it's there. If you ask them to point at the 9, they'll either point to the wrong number or not point at all. And if you tell them they're not pointing or are pointing to the wrong number, they'll insist they're right.
But even with all that knowledge, it's still hard to imagine what that person is actually experiencing.
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> 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?
Doesn’t seem that hard to measure. It isn’t like the subject will become a mysterious P zombie, they will probably just become increasingly incoherent and then non verbal and then die. Damage a brain enough and brain death occurs. By the same token, after a certain number of neurons are lost, there is no self. Whatever consciousness is, it can’t be sustained with a sufficiently compromised brain. This is observable i…
So called 'terminal lucidity' exists sometimes.
One theory is that is enabled by the immune systems shutdown, so inflammation ceases to interfere for a short time.
The problem with that is it still fails to explain the few cases, where shortly post-mortem it is found that there is not much healthy/able to function somewhat normally brain left to speak of.
Rather 'spooky'.
“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…
All subatomic particles, quantum-woo-woo including all their entanglings?
Weakest electromagnetic fields as resultant emergent pattern of these?
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So if we copy you into a robot and the copying process leaves you unharmed and awake, are they both you?
Yes, they are both me. It is admittedly a weird conclusion, but that doesn't make it false- we did a weird thing and got a weird result. Objectively, there is no case for saying either is not you.
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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…
Sounds rather solipsistic.
In that case you'd probably work on your Zen to make it more to your liking?
If only for more interesting NPCs at least :)
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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.