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

371–380 of 499 posts

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

#371

Post by nkrisc »

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…

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.

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

#372

Post by rcxdude »

akira2501 wrote: post #366
chii wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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. > arising from a copy of your brain on first "restart". You're…

>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 just saying there may be multiple during a given night's sleep.

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

#373

Post by scotty79 »

wqaatwt wrote: post #360
scotty79 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you have done the procedure and after it woke up in artificial environment. You'd be aware that there's biological remnant of pre-procedure you that will still experience other things than you will including dying and death. But he's separate entity and you are glad it's not you that are about to die. Basically if you wake up after the cloning as your old biological self then you just drew the short straw. It…

Presumably it’s the version of you that’s destined to become the “biological remnant” that making the decision to be cloned/copied? So spending money or participating in that procedure would be entirely irrational from their perspective. What could they ever gain from that? They’d still be dead regardless of what the copy thinks or feels (until that procedure is done happens) Spending the same resources to prolong yo…

> spending money or participating in that procedure would be entirely irrational from their perspective.

Roughly as irrational as having children. Humans are not rational beings.

> What could they ever gain from that?

Continuation of what they were trying to achieve in life.

> Spending the same resources to prolong your existence (even in a suboptimal state) seems literally infinite times more rational.

That entirely depends on what you value. You may value living in your suboptimal state less than chance at making something happen that you wanted to see happen but due to bodily limitations are no loger able to progress on.

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

#374

Post by latexr »

gregjor wrote: post #327
latexr wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Denigrating someone expressing their personal opinion seems absurd. (…) The commenter just described their threshold, they didn't judge other people. My sentence does not judge the person, it criticises the belief . Learn to differentiate or you’ll be doomed to a life of ad hominem attacks and taking things personally. If person A says they love spiders and person B replies they find spiders repulsive, there’s no v…

> My sentence does not judge the person, it criticises the belief. An opinion or belief can't "be" insensitive. A person may intend to say something insensitive, another person may interpret an opinion as insensitive (as you did when dragging in amputees and people suffering from other conditions and injuries). "Insensitive" can only refer to a person's intention or another person's reaction. So calling someone insen…

Urk, clearly continuing this conversation is fruitless. Even after mentioning twice and with emphasis that I’d use a purposefully exaggerated example, you decide to latch on to it as if it were the central thesis, calling it “false and deliberately inflammatory”. Do you understand the meaning of “purposefully exaggerated”, of analogies and hyperbole as a means to explain a point? Stop assuming bad faith, and please go fresh up on what an ad hominem is, as you keep mischaracterising it. My original comment had nothing to do with you, unless you’re Al Ewing and pretending not to be. Stop taking it personally, this isn’t even about you. You’re also conflating what other people said with my points, which is unproductive.

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

#375

Post by nytesky »

kelnos wrote: post #237
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think Star Trek transporters would work?

Star Trek's lore includes some technobabble about transporters operating in "quantum" mode to assuage concerns that the person at the transporter destination is not the same as at the source.

But it cloned Riker once!

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Thomas_Riker

This is a similar vein about time machines

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CXhnPLMIET0

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

#376

Post by nytesky »

suzzer99 wrote: post #159
adventured wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can't copy a person anyway. We're going to find out that it requires an order of events - order of experiences - aspect that can't be recreated to get the actual person. Everything else will end up being a weak simulation (even if it gets a bit closer over time with improvements in simulating).

In theory if you had an atomic replicator you should be able to make a copy of a person. I'm not saying it will ever be practically possible. But I don't see any fundamental laws of nature that make it impossible .

But the active electricity and chemical processes that denote life are more than just the absolute distribution and position of atoms; can you replicate the velocity of every electron, etc?

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

#377

Post by exe34 »

nkrisc wrote: post #371
exe34 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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!

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

#379

Post by prometheus76 »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #176
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…

Every nanosecond the set of atoms constituting you changes, each of those are a different you.

Because you are more than atoms. You are a pattern. A pattern plays out over time. Like music. Music has a physical component, of course, but music is enjoyable because it's a pattern over time.

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

#380

Post by prometheus76 »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #272
geye1234 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hold a tree in your mind. Now describe it aloud. You have now produced a material effect in the physical world that resulted directly from your idea of a tree. Definitionally, that means it is not immaterial- you conjured it with material and measured it with material.

Music has a physical component: sound waves vibrating your eardrum and your brain recognizes the sound. What makes it music is that it is a pattern of interwoven sounds that sound "harmonious" to you. You can physically measure that, but what makes it music is that it's a pattern that plays out over time. The concept of "pattern" is not physical. It's a concept. It's "metaphysical". You are not a bundle of atoms. You are a pattern that plays out over time.
Post reply on HN