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Welcome To Life

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Re: Welcome To Life

#61

Post by lmm »

sovok wrote: post #58
sodiumphosphate wrote: post #36

While it does make for some entertaining fiction, and may provide some benefits to the living, I do not believe that 'uploading' is a desirable experience. In fact, I don't believe that one can experience it at all. Imagine the procedure (for a conscious person): your brain is connected to a computer interface and a copy of your mind is taken. Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to…

> I want to inject nanorobots into my body which will transform it gradually, cell by cell into an improved synthetic one. In this way, immortality and superhumanity can be achieved without loss of continuity. Just last night I thought about this and went to sleep in despair :> If someone scans my brain, builds an artificial copy, instantly cuts out my brain and inserts the new one, I clearly die (because I got my br…

>If someone scans my brain, builds an artificial copy, instantly cuts out my brain and inserts the new one, I clearly die (because I got my brain/me cut out) and my copy lives on. From the outside, I'm the same, but the first me died.

If you look at the physics the right way, your brain is cut out and a copy inserted billions of times a second already.

Re: Welcome To Life

#62

Post by tocomment »

sodiumphosphate wrote: post #36

While it does make for some entertaining fiction, and may provide some benefits to the living, I do not believe that 'uploading' is a desirable experience. In fact, I don't believe that one can experience it at all. Imagine the procedure (for a conscious person): your brain is connected to a computer interface and a copy of your mind is taken. Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to…

Probably a dumb question; have you tried reading glasses?

Re: Welcome To Life

#63

Post by udp »

dmbass wrote: post #45
ericb wrote: post #35

I'm not excited about this future. Whatever is uploaded isn't me, it is merely like me--a copy. Anything that is theoretically capable of running while I'm still alive is just a copy--it isn't me .

The "copy" becomes the "real" you because it has extended life. Both you and the "copy" consider yourselves to be the "real one" (or maybe you accept the coexistence), but you are going to die and the copies will live forever. You think: "That copy isn't me, ericb!" * dies * Copy thinks: "Great! I, ericb, just got a new lease on life!"

This doubles up as a great explanation of how fork(2) works.

Re: Welcome To Life

#64

Post by jlgreco »

indiecore wrote: post #47
tejaswiy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it regardless of how many mental copies are made. Why? Can you explain more? I would believe that you can be a fully functioning human living in a simulated reality if we ever managed to fully simulate the human brain.. However, since our brain modules are so messily coupled I don't know if we can easily "delete" memories and not impact a…

Unless you accept dualism (that there is some 'you' separate from the wetware in your head) you are always going to have this problem. A copy of 'you' would only sync with 'you' for an infinitesimal amount of time before you both diverged. The two 'yous' both have valid claim to everything before the Split but afterwards you are effectively two different people.

This is where the following thought experiment comes in:

Imagine science advances to the point where medical science can replace individual brain cells with perfect robot replicas. These robot cells interact with surrounding cells in exactly the same way as the real ones and can be initialized with the state of the real cell they are replacing. They're small though, so all the real computation work they may need to do is offloaded to a computer (over radio signals perhaps, or whatever.) Perhaps we can even optimize their operation such that communication with other robot cells that may happen to be next to it takes place inside the computers modelling both cells, instead of actually firing off the connection "for real".

Preform this operation once, and few would argue that the mind in question has died, been replicated, ceased to operate and been replaced with another... anything. It's just the same mind.

If you are willing to accept that (and if you're not, we'll just have to disagree), then preform the operation again. And again. And again.

This is what sodiumphosphate was referring to by "metamorphosis", and it does not require dualism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Human_body

Re: Welcome To Life

#65

Post by ajdecon »

sovok wrote: post #58
sodiumphosphate wrote: post #36

While it does make for some entertaining fiction, and may provide some benefits to the living, I do not believe that 'uploading' is a desirable experience. In fact, I don't believe that one can experience it at all. Imagine the procedure (for a conscious person): your brain is connected to a computer interface and a copy of your mind is taken. Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to…

> I want to inject nanorobots into my body which will transform it gradually, cell by cell into an improved synthetic one. In this way, immortality and superhumanity can be achieved without loss of continuity. Just last night I thought about this and went to sleep in despair :> If someone scans my brain, builds an artificial copy, instantly cuts out my brain and inserts the new one, I clearly die (because I got my br…

Let's assume one neuron is replaced every second. No problem, nice and gradual. What if it's one every millisecond, every picosecond? Should make no difference, because it's still one by one.

It should make a difference how long it takes, though.

Assume that consciousness is a physical process. If new neurons take part in this process after the old ones die (so that we have continuity as part of normal "healing"), there must be some time scale over which those neurons become an effective part of the consciousness process.

At minimum, if consciousness is a "network effect", this would be on the order of the latency of inter-neuronal communications. If the cells are doing some processing which forms part of consciousness, the time scale would increase.

To throw out some wild numbers: neuronal latency seems to vary, but I found a number for visual-cortical neurons of about 80 ms. (http://redwood.berkeley.edu/bruno/npb261b/whitney-reading/kr...) And you can't replace more than a few cells at a time (I wonder what fraction?) if you want to avoid impairing consciousness during the process.

(This also doesn't include whatever the time is to make an effective copy of a given neuron and it's state; we're assuming instant perfect copying.)

Re: Welcome To Life

#66

Post by scotty79 »

ericb wrote: post #55
JonnieCache wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you so sure of that? What is the important difference between the copy and you, assuming that they behave identically? How much "like" you would a copy have to be before it caused you ontological distress?

It isn't about degree of similarity. If I don't have access to their mental state, they are not me. I think I am like an instance of an object, and my identity is related to my path through space and time. To be me , they'd have to be standing where I stand, and have stood where I stood. A 100% copy of the mona lisa is still not the mona lisa--it lacks the history.

You don't always get what you want. When mona lisa gets destroyed 100% copy becomes just as good with it's own history of being perfect copy of something that had long history.

Re: Welcome To Life

#67

Post by scotty79 »

sodiumphosphate wrote: post #36

While it does make for some entertaining fiction, and may provide some benefits to the living, I do not believe that 'uploading' is a desirable experience. In fact, I don't believe that one can experience it at all. Imagine the procedure (for a conscious person): your brain is connected to a computer interface and a copy of your mind is taken. Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to…

Watch "The Prestige".

Re: Welcome To Life

#68

Post by GreenNight »

sovok wrote: post #58
sodiumphosphate wrote: post #36

While it does make for some entertaining fiction, and may provide some benefits to the living, I do not believe that 'uploading' is a desirable experience. In fact, I don't believe that one can experience it at all. Imagine the procedure (for a conscious person): your brain is connected to a computer interface and a copy of your mind is taken. Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to…

> I want to inject nanorobots into my body which will transform it gradually, cell by cell into an improved synthetic one. In this way, immortality and superhumanity can be achieved without loss of continuity. Just last night I thought about this and went to sleep in despair :> If someone scans my brain, builds an artificial copy, instantly cuts out my brain and inserts the new one, I clearly die (because I got my br…

You have an old car, and you want to renew it. If you buy it brand new and toss the old one, you are destroying the old one. If you keep changing pieces of it, testing them to see they work, and keep going until you have replaced the whole car, it's still the old car, just brand new.

There's not much difference at the end, except that you can consider that the second way of doing things will let you still use the old car, only it'll be new.

Re: Welcome To Life

#69

Post by scotty79 »

sodiumphosphate wrote: post #36

While it does make for some entertaining fiction, and may provide some benefits to the living, I do not believe that 'uploading' is a desirable experience. In fact, I don't believe that one can experience it at all. Imagine the procedure (for a conscious person): your brain is connected to a computer interface and a copy of your mind is taken. Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to…

It's hard to die but it must be easier when you know that you are not gone.

Re: Welcome To Life

#70

Post by Rhapso »

jlgreco wrote: post #64
indiecore wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you accept dualism (that there is some 'you' separate from the wetware in your head) you are always going to have this problem. A copy of 'you' would only sync with 'you' for an infinitesimal amount of time before you both diverged. The two 'yous' both have valid claim to everything before the Split but afterwards you are effectively two different people.

This is where the following thought experiment comes in: Imagine science advances to the point where medical science can replace individual brain cells with perfect robot replicas. These robot cells interact with surrounding cells in exactly the same way as the real ones and can be initialized with the state of the real cell they are replacing. They're small though, so all the real computation work they may need to d…

We all really want to accept this idea. It is inviting. Not accepting it has a lot of scary implications. If small changes in the matter that makes up my mind "kills" me, then what happens when my body naturally replaces parts. In neurons, the whole cell is rarely replaced, but all components of it all, none of the atoms are there forever, it is only a matter of scale to replace neurons with "working replicas". So, accept that somewhere along the way of "perfect replicas" I think you stop being the same person for any rational reason, then by scaling that reason down simply changing out atoms in the natural process of life kills "me" just as surely.
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