Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 499 posts

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

#451

Post by gadilif »

Vampiero wrote: post #435
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The thing is, it's not about removing brain matter, it's about replacing brain matter (with a manufactured copy, for example), and applying the same process in a secondary location (physical or digital, I guess). Will 'you' at some point stop being 'you'? Will the secondary copy at some point become you?

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

#453

Post by danparsonson »

fragmede wrote: post #343
bhhaskin wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would both be me until it started to drift, which would be almost instantly.

As long as we're dreaming up stuff, why do we assume the consciousness wouldn't be shared? what if you woke up and there was one mind but two bodies?

For myself at least, consciousness is the product of the body and in particular the brain. Without any kind of high bandwidth connection between two bodies, I don't see how your proposal could work.

That said, I wonder if that offers a possible way to 'transfer consciousness' between a human and their robot copy - link both brains together and then once synchronised (whatever that means), shutdown the biological half. Like a sort of extended Ship of Theseus idea.

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

#454

Post by krageon »

geye1234 wrote: post #218
ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't believe in a soul in the sense of a "ghost in a machine", since it introduces so many problems. Nonetheless, it's pretty clear that there is an immaterial component to thought, and therefore to our existence, for various reasons. Examples: 1. If we are entirely material, we can't know anything. For example, if you're thinking about a tree, there must be something about you that has 'grasped' what it is to be…

The arguments your making have a hypothesis that isn't supported by your examples. Mostly because they're not falsifiable. They're therefore incredibly uninteresting.

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

#455

Post by monkeyfun »

rcxdude wrote: post #440
akira2501 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Dreaming absolutely does not only occur during REM.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7377375/

https://www.jneurosci.org/content/38/43/9175

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

#456

Post by rcxdude »

monkeyfun wrote: post #455
rcxdude wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 th…

Dreaming absolutely does not only occur during REM. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7377375/ https://www.jneurosci.org/content/38/43/9175

Ah, TIL, and fair point then, though I think there's still not much support for continuous consciousness throughout sleep.

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

#457

Post by exe34 »

nkrisc wrote: post #441
exe34 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Based on this entire thread it did seem necessary to state.

Clearly, otherwise you would not have stated it.

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

#458

Post by dartos »

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…

No it doesn’t.

You’re not unconscious while you’re sleeping.

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

#459

Post by mannykannot »

geye1234 wrote: post #407
mannykannot wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see from your response that there are a number of points that I need to clarify. Firstly, I am not at all surprised that you, personally, do not feel that your position has been undermined, and I don't suppose you ever will, but one of the themes of my response is that neither your intuition, nor that of like-minded people, is particularly persuasive; for that, you need something that would give a skeptic persu…

Very briefly, it's not my 'intuition' that a thought must be like reality for it to be about reality. It's a claim I hold to be grounded in reason. My reasoning may be right or wrong, but either way, it's not an intuition (or a feeling, or anything else of the sort). Anyway, to the main point. You wrote: > The point in my penultimate paragraph is this: If we suppose that there is a causal flow from the real world to…

I am rather busy today, but don't worry - I have a rather comprehensive response in the works, and I will post it within a day - stay tuned, as they used to say...
Post reply on HN