When I see things like this, it reminds that the saying life imitates art is surprisingly true. This is basically the premise of the movie Transcendence to a certain extent. Very interesting and very cool but begs the question just because we can, does it mean we should?
That being said, ever since I found out about Colossal Bioscience and their de-extinction projects, I have been tuned into their progress with great interest because it is the real life Jurassic Park.
More of a digital copy scenario. The article says the process involves toxic chemicals that lock everything in place so the connectome can be examined. There's no known way to reverse the chemical process in the biological brain.
Not that I think this is anywhere close in actuality, but It's reminding me of MMAcevedo. (https://qntm.org/mmacevedo)
What server will I wake up on? Who is running the infrastructure? What will be asked of me to be allowed to continue to exist on that server? Given our current societal trends, I can't imagine I would enjoy any existence where a copy of me is spun back up.
And of course, my original thread of consciousness will still be ended, so this is some alternate copy of me. (Based on my view of the teletransportation paradox.)
The worse part is you can't know that your current life isn't one of those. Everything that you think of as perks of being alive could be part of the protocol to keep you cooperative.
You will not wake up on any server. At best possible theoretical far future scenario better or worse copy of yours will. If you would survive such process, you yourself, the human instance that wrote that will be just looking at somebody else living their now-fully-digital (prison) life.
I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact. We are all gonna die, make inner peace with that (it isn't that hard, depends mostly on your ego) and enjoy rest of that short time here. If you seek immortality, do it either via exceptional deeds or via well-raised children, that's the best we have.
No force in the world is going to move both your mortal neurons with all synapses and electric charge between them that together form your personality into anything else, digital or not. Its like asking to transfer this cup of tea I hold right now into digital form. No, it can be copied to certain precision and that's it.
>I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact.
Some people think identity and the continuity of consciousness are based on information or computation, and not on specific physical matter or soul-like constructs, so for them a transfer of all relevant information would constitute a transfer of consciousness and identity. From this perspective (leaving aside questions of practicality) "you yourself looking from the biological body at somebody else in the computer" is exactly as valid as "you yourself looking from inside the computer at somebody else in the biological body" (and in fact the whole idea that you have to choose one or the other as "the real you" becomes moot on this view).
Of course it's a difficult metaphysical conundrum but to say that your view of things is "a simple fact" when the basic scientific materialist worldview of today points at least as much in the opposite direction is a bit overconfident.
If you were to slowly replace your brain with a cybernetic appliance, you could also have perfect continuity.
Not that it matters; we sleep and wake up, no one freaks out daily that they were unconscious for hours.
No reason to suspect waking up in 3030 after being unfrozen or in 6045 after being cybernetically reanimated would be any more disconcerting physiologically than an extended coma patients experience.
Your continuity is just as illusionous as your free will.
I don't really think you're correct on that one. To begin with, what makes us whole is mostly memories and our subconcious.
What makes it obvious are illnesses like dementia and general decay of neural activity as we get older.
If we implant the same memories into something or someone that person/entity would become you, like waking up from a long nap. You might not feel the same, think the same, or act the same, but it would still feel like you. Going one step further and growing an exact clone can probably go even further than that.
Ahh, but you can't know if it's the actual you that wakes up or a perfect copy of you.
If a copy is indistinguishable enough from the original, you have to treat that copy as you would treat you.
Imagine the following experiment, you are on a room seeing 5 (or 20, or 100) live streams of as many perfect copies. You are informed that a livestream of yourself is being presented to the rest.
You are given the same questions and you all answer in the same way. Now they tell that out of all of you, only one is the original and that you can vote to proceed with some pretty terrible physical punishment to the simulations. Which way are you voting?
Anesthesia impairs the electrons transport in your brain, effectively ending that thread of consciousness, and, depending on the procedure, your brain can be altered by chemical/oxygen saturation changes. You wake up very subtly different, but most people are ok with that.
People have strokes or accidents and wake up missing memories and with changed bodies, but their families still call them by name.
You still being you is a matter of degree, not a binary, and different people are comfortable with different degrees of change.
I wouldn't call that degrees of change but degrees of damage. The thing is, past a certain degree of damage people stop having opinions, so how would you know the individual is comfortable with it?
In this case, the damage is total. The degrees end here, it reaches a binary state: from alive to dead. And then something else entirely says they are the dead person and they are alive.
The question is, does society accept a complete switcheroo? The individual died in the process, they cannot give an opinion on this. The copy is another entity. There are no degrees, it's all absolutes with this process.
> I wouldn't call that degrees of change but degrees of damage.
If you define any change from a previous state that loses some state as damage, then that's a tautology, not an argument.
> The thing is, past a certain degree of damage people stop having opinions, so how would you know the individual is comfortable with it?
We don't. I didn't say everyone was ok with every change. Some people aren't ok with being mildly inebriated, hence my "different strokes for different folks" take. Some people are comfortable losing a decade of memories, and some people would mourn a day lost.
> In this case, the damage is total. The degrees end here, it reaches a binary state: from alive to dead. And then something else entirely says they are the dead person and they are alive.
You're equivocating death with the end of the self. The core conversation here is whether or not that is true, and my opinion is that it is a manner of degree. This goes back to the earlier mention of the teletransportation paradox. Different people how different opinions on what constitutes the self.
> The question is, does society accept a complete switchero?
Society has generally been pragmatic and taken the approach of "if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's a duck".
> The individual died in the process, they cannot give an opinion on this. The copy is another entity. There are no degrees, it's all absolutes with this process.
Again, you're assuming your opinion on what constitutes an individual is the one and only interpretation, which isn't the case.
No. That's the definition of damage. "Change" doesn't imply loss. Damage does. With change you can add and/or subtract characteristics. Damage subtracts, it is a more precise term for the examples you gave. Using such a broad term as "change" makes it a euphemism for damage. A bit dishonest really.
>I didn't say everyone was ok with every change.
Neither did I.
>"different strokes for different folks" take.
Dead folks included? That's absurd. Also, who is comfortable losing a decade of memories? Is "comfort" a euphemism for "acceptance due to not having a choice on the matter"?
>Different people how (have) different opinions on what constitutes the self.
Because no one asks the dead guy! (tongue in cheek)
>You're equivocating
How can you be so sure? I have has much right to have an opinion on what constitutes the self as much as you do. Equivocating would imply that my opinion on what constitutes the self is based on an error, a misunderstanding. But you don't even know my opinion on that, we haven't got to it yet.
>Society has generally been
If that were the case then there would be no argument. All opinions opposed to accepting whatever comes out of this process as the same person are hereby dismissed due to tradition. Society has generally been such and such. It's settled then.
>Again, you're assuming
No, it is you who's assuming you know my opinion on this.
Glad you asked, here's my opinion:
Continuity. The ship of Theseus (with all planks and everything replaced) will always be the same ship. The copy of the ship of Theseus built right next to the original won't become the original ship of Theseus just because the original is destroyed.
The process destroys the original. This does not promote the copy to original status. It breaks continuity. If the original wasn't destroyed, the copied person and the original are easily distinguished by the people who witnessed the process since both cannot occupy the same space at the same time, one of them is definitely more to the left than the other, at least.
Now for the original and the copy, both will think they are the original if there's no information that satisfies them both about who's who. I would consider that lying to either one of them about their status is a serious crime.
But in this process, there's definitely a corpse left behind. Probably not complete since the copying is destructive to the brain. But the existence of a corpse will definitely convince the copy is the copy. The copy might stubbornly refuse to accept it as such, but that's on them and they are responsible for the consequences that stance might bring.
This proposed technology is messy. They don't even advertise a copy. Just a scan that could one day maybe used to make a "copy"(within questionable standards of what constitutes a copy in the future). That makes things easy for me, really. If it was a teletransportation paradox (without the killing part) then I'd have to accept that the original and the copy are the same, atom for atom, and now there's simply two of them, like a string of bytes on a computer, neither is the original or the copy and they are just the same individual that start diverge due to the impossibility of both occupying the same space at the same time, yada yada yada. But this isn't that, it's the cheap, oh so cheap knock off that only a sad few will settle for. If ever.
So no, I'm not equivocating death with the end of the self. This is just not a teletransportation paradox situation. The technology the article presents is not even close to make an atom for atom copy of a person. Furthermore, I figure if we ever reach that level of technology, we won't need to let the original die to make a copy, we could just cure whatever they are suffering from.
And finally, I would settle for a not so perfect copy of a brain scenario. Magic "Nanobots" replacing the neurons of a subject in vivo, gradually over the span of a few days/weeks/months. The new neurons can be non-biological, but must work identically to the original ones and obviously the connectome should be identical. The subject would be asked if they feel ok with this process regularly and the general part of the brain that is responsible for answering that question would be the last part to be replaced, otherwise it would be cheating wouldn't it? On completion, I would assume it's the same person and if it was me I would assume I'm the same person. This preserves continuity (of the self) to my personal satisfaction. Anything less than that is cryonics-level of bull**.
> No. That's the definition of damage. "Change" doesn't imply loss. Damage does. With change you can add and/or subtract characteristics. Damage subtracts, it is a more precise term for the examples you gave. Using such a broad term as "change" makes it a euphemism for damage. A bit dishonest really.
Again, you're missing the point. We can use the word damage and it doesn't change the argument here. A concussion is damage, but it doesn't mean you're someone else after you have one.
> Neither did I.
Not sure why you brought up people who don't have opinions then.
> Dead folks included?
If we are talking about reanimated consciousnesses of the dead, the yeah.
> Also, who is comfortable losing a decade of memories?
So you think people should be more accepting of losing ALL memories (dying) than losing 10 years of memories? I'm kinda losing the point you're trying to make here. Should we hold on as hard as possible, or accept obliteration. You seem to be saying both.
> How can you be so sure? I have has much right to have an opinion on what constitutes the self as much as you do.
By definition? You are stating your opinion as fact. Having an opinion is fine, but if your argument relies on your opinion being true then that's just circular reasoning.
> No, it is you who's assuming you know my opinion on this.
I'm not assuming it, I'm reading it. Maybe I misunderstood something, but I only have what you give me here.
> Continuity. The ship of Theseus (with all planks and everything replaced) will always be the...
If we use Theseus as the proxy for our convo:
I'm not saying the new ship "is the original ship" in some philosophical way. I'm saying, if it behaves the same and carries the same passengers, I don't see any reason to change the ship's name. If the original ship said "hey, I'm cool to be taken apart as long as you save my design and build me again later to the best of your ability," then I have no problem building the ship later and calling it "The ship of Theseus".
> So no, I'm not equivocating death with the end of the self.
So, what did you mean by "it" when you said "it reaches a binary state, from alive to dead"?
I highly recommend playing Frictonal Games' Soma from 2015. It is an extremely critical examination of this entire concept. Without spoiling the plot, a digitized consciousness doesn't imply just one, but an infinite number of copies, some just subjected to torture as they are essentially disposable.
That doesn't mean you have to like the fact that you're dying. But make peace with the fact that you too, will die - it's one of the very few universal truths of life. I see so many people living like they are going to live forever - world would be a better place if more people realized that this isn't true, and your time on earth is limited.
This feels like an odd cope, sure I might not be able to do anything about my mortality, but I still view the fact that I and other people are mortal as a damn tragedy (and often the gradual decline and non-dignified end of people's lives). If someone held a gun at my head and I knew that within a minute they're going to pull the trigger, I'd be rightfully quite disturbed. Now knowing that a metaphorical trigger will be pulled at a random time decades later doesn't make it any less disturbing. The only solace there is ignorance.
> do it either via exceptional deeds or via well-raised children
Both of those are worthy pursuits, but are also categorically different from you being here. So sure, you can and probably should say that living a good life is what people should do instead of losing sleep over their mortality - but that also moves the goal posts in a sense. You could have cut it short at the equivalent of "you'll never be immortal".
Most likely if you put a gun to his head and he'll beg for his life and stoop to do the most pathetic tasks to stay alive. It's not cope, more delusional arrogance.
> You will not wake up on any server ... I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact.
Did you even read my comment? In the last paragraph I discuss this and the teletransportation paradox, and how it will not actually be me but a copy, my thread of consciousness dies with me.
Please give me the courtesy of at least a full read before replying.
I don't get the complete certainty with which people post this opinion.
You have no special access to data or insight that anyone else does, nor new evidence and the argument itself is always pretty specious (those patterns over there are different because like, they're not here).
Eh, it’s mostly for the trillionaires to keep their wealth after death. For everyone else, you will inevitably eventually end up driving a garbage truck. Don’t believe me? Your digital copy runs on a server doing important work! Company goes out of business. Assets get auctioned. Garbage truck.
Or another? The trust you set up ran out of money because all of the fees continued to increase and outpaced certain economic downturns. More and more people drew money off of your remaining static assets. You run out of money. Estate sale. Garbage truck.
Just remember, you’ll have all of time to end up there.
One of the many details of Altered Carbon (Netflix) that they got right. Digitized minds would become so numerous as to be considered little more than fancy trash.
> I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact.
It's an element of faith, not fact. If you simulate a human body from quarks up, the physics won't know if it's running on base reality or in a computer.
While the connections are important I think the individual cell behavior is also very important and that is driven by DNA. Brain cells last a lifetime and can modify their own DNA so each one ends up being unique. I do wonder how much of behavior/consciousness is encoded in the cells DNA versus the connections between the cells.
Do you have a citation for the notion they can modify their own DNA? I would fairly easily believe they can modify its expression, but I’m skeptical of the idea they can modify the sequence.
If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need. In terms of a modern ANN, it's the connections (axons) and the weights (transmitters/receptors in tandem).
That said, this article doesn't get to the point in the free section. How are they collecting the information? Slicing is inherently destructive. Someone's got to manufacture an entirely novel imaging modality. Perhaps they could scan millimeters ahead of the slice at a resolution high enough to image receptors. Not possible currently.
Take a gander at the OpenWorm project. It's a great example of how simple neuronal activity is (given details like the connections, number of receptors, and transmitter infrastructure). SOTA models of neuronal activity are simple enough for problem sets in undergraduate biomedical engineering programs.
Sure, to your point, we don't know. But the worm above (nematode) swims and seeks food when dropped into a physics engine.
My main point is that the scale of the human brain is well beyond the capabilities of modern imaging modalities, and it will likely remain so indefinitely. Fascicles we can image, individual axons we cannot. I guess, theoretically, we'll eventually be able to (but it's not relevant to us or any of our remote descendants).
> But the worm above (nematode) swims and seeks food when dropped into a physics engine.
Nematode worms have an oxytocin analogue called nematocin that is known to influence learning and social behaviors like mating. As far as I can find, the project doesn't account for this, or only minimally, but aims to in the future.
It's not surprising that immediate short-term behaviors like movement depend mostly on the faster signaling of the connectome. But since we know of other mechanisms that most definitely influence the connectome's behavior, and we know we don't account for those at the moment, it is not accurate to say that the connectome is "all the information you need".
I agree that mapping the connectome of the human brain is impractical to the point of impossibility. But even if we could, the resulting "circuit diagram" would not capture all the details needed to fully replicate human cognition. Aspects of it, sure. Maybe even enough to make it do useful tasks for EvilCorp LLC while being prodded with virtual sticks and carrots. But it would be incomplete.
I saw a putative 3D animation of a fly whose brain had been digitized and then run in a simulation. It buzzed around, sipped food it had found on the ground, even rubbed its forelegs together as flies do. A true Dixie Flyline. We live in strange times...
> If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need. In terms of a modern ANN, it's the connections (axons) and the weights (transmitters/receptors in tandem).
This is exactly what I’m doubting, how can you be so sure?
Yeah but it wasn’t though. I found your answer unconvincing. I suppose “we don’t know” is an answer but that is nothing like “we have all the information we need”
It is my understanding that for the animals where we have a simulation of the full connectome the behavior you see approximates the real behavior reasonably well, so maybe the jury is still out as to whether it is sufficient or not.
Recently rewatched Demolition Man (1993) where criminals are frozen in cryostasis and then reanimated – a very prescient film. All I could think of was Demolition Pig
Here's a thought experiment. I offer you the chance to be put in a medically induced coma and shipped around the world to strangers you know nothing about. You don't know what economic, political, or moral system you'll awaken to. The only thing you know for sure is they, for some reason we're interested in receiving an unconscious person, no questions asked.
Do you take the deal? Do you sign your family up for it?
Brains 'R Us recently filed for chapter 11 and has been cut up and sold for scrap to private equity. The new PE firm has your brain. In 2208 there's a large grey market for brains to be used for hybrid AI and meat bag workflows. It's technically illegal in many jurisdictions due to "ethical implications", but is still the cheapest way to run many workloads. The method used to harness the brain involves reanimating it in a jar of jelly, and then forcing it to do the 2208 equivalent of a captcha. Each time the brain fails a captcha, the brain receives an electric impulse which simulates the most excruciating pain that the brain can respresent, but the brain cannot scream or run away.
> grey market for brains to be used for hybrid AI and meat bag workflows ... is still the cheapest way to run many workloads.
It's an absolute nightmare scenario, but luckily it has become completely implausible since 2023. We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job. Not saying this would make me comfortable with brain cloning, but at least the simple economic incentive seems to be gone.
>> We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job.
Unless RTX9000 with 16PB of ram needed to run basic Gemini2077 model costs more than a house, but a brain jar with electrodes is cheaper than that. Then the economic incentives will shift the other way.
No I don't think so. We can already create LLMs that are highly efficient and infinitely more knowledgeable than any single human being, completely tuned to the task, without ego or distractions, and they are cheap enough that you can run tens of them in parallel for a few hundred dollars per month. They are also way faster than any human being. And we're three/ four years in this. Imagine 50 years from now.
That's the whole point though - I can't, and I don't think anyone can. Right now the LLMs are just getting bigger and bigger, we're bruteforcing the way out of their stupidity by giving them bigger and bigger datasets - unless something fundamental changes soon that tech has an actual dead end. Hence my (joke-ish) prediction that you'll eventually need a 16PB GPU to run a basic gemini model, and such a thing will always be very expensive no matter how much our tech advances(especially since we are already hitting some technical limits). Human brains won't get any more expensive with time - they already contain all the hardware they are ever going to get - but what might get cheaper is the plumbing to make them "run" and interact with other systems.
We can already grow brain organoids cheaply and easily enough to be a YouTuber's long-running series, so even if biological somehow gets cheaper than silicon, it still isn't going to be a revived complete human brain from someone who died 50 years earlier and probably retired 20 years before that.
I mean, imagine someone who got themselves cryonically preserved in 1976 getting either revived or uploaded today: what job would they be able to get? Almost no office job is the same now as then; manufacturing involves very different tools and a lot of CNC and robotic arms; agriculture is only getting more automated and we've had cow-milking robots for 20-30 years; cars may have changed the least in usage if not safety, performance, and power source; I suppose that leaves gardening… well, except for robot lawnmowers, anyone who can hire a gardener can probably afford a robo-mower?
Tldr is that for some very limited tasks it might still be preferable to use a human mind, especially if you can run it at 1000x cognitive speed. Or.....it might not. It's sci-fi at this point.
It shouldn't remind you of that, my point is there's little economic use for uploads like this: if thinking meat is cheaper than thinking silicon, train some fresh thinking meat with an electrode array or whatever; if thinking silicon is cheaper, train some fresh thinking silicon.
Non-economic use, that's different of course. Digital afterlife and so on, but as a consumer, not a supplier of anything.
> Each time the brain fails a captcha, the brain receives an electric impulse which simulates the most excruciating pain that the brain can respresent, but the brain cannot scream or run away.
What percentage of your life being enjoyable vs horrible suffering makes it worth living?
Maybe you're 80 years old at the time of storing your brain.
Suppose after being revived that regime with capitalist incentives holds for another 200 years during which you live as a brain in a jar, but some cultural revolutions later you are liberated and then proceed to live 10'000 years across any number of bodies and circumstances, which means that in your lifespan of ~10'280 years (not accounting for being in storage) you experienced horrible suffering for about 2% of your life.
This is as much of a contrived example as yours, aside from maybe good commentary on your part on human ethics being shit when profit enters the scene.
Or maybe after 200 years you expire, having at least tried your best at a non-zero chance of extending your lifespan, instead leading to your total lifespan of 280 years being about 71% suffering. Is it better to not have tried at all, then? Just forsake ANY chance of being revived and living for as long as you want and conquering biology and seeing so much more than your 80 year lifespan let you? Should absolute oblivion be chosen instead, willingly, a 100% chance of never having a conscious though after your death again (within our current medical understanding)?
What about the people dealing with all sorts of horrible illnesses and knowing that each next year might be spent in a lot of pain and suffering, even things like going through chemo? Should they also not try? Or even something as simple as all of the people who look for love/success in their lives, and never find any of it anyways and possibly die alone and in squalor? They knew the odds weren't good and tried anyways. A more grounded take would be that those preserved brains are just left to thaw and you probably die anyways without being turned into some human captcha machine, at least having tried. Is it also not worth it in that case, knowing those both potential alternatives?
I guess I'm not making a judgement of what other people should or shouldn't do. Just making up a goofy example to illustrate that the choice is not so obvious to a lot of people, which I think you also illustrate pretty well with your examples. It really depends on the individual. I do think it's worth looking at the incentives of the people funding these companies, because that does give a picture of the probable outcomes.
People will continue working on this sort of thing, that's fine, it really doesn't bother me. If I was forced to make a judgement, I think it's maybe a little silly, but I'm also not out there saving the planet from climate armageddon so I shouldn't cast stones. As a species we are extremely bad at prioritizing for our collective survival and there are a million worse things to be working on.
What percentage of your life being enjoyable vs horrible suffering makes it worth living? I don't know but 99% of my life being used to solve captchas makes it not worth living
>Suppose after being revived that regime with capitalist incentives
Having to provide for other people is literally the same as being trapped in a "I have no mouth and I must scream"-esque torture chamber. Given the historical track record of communism, you're more likely to end in the torture chamber than not in that situation. The curve of history bends towards factory farms.
Not a chance. In fact all these developments make me convinced that my early choice for cremation over burial was and is the right one. Arrive blank and leave with grace, try to improve the world while you're here.
Even in the best case scenario I would wake up in a world that barely makes any sense to me, where the things I cared about are long gone and nearly forgotten.
Imagine everyday waking up in a world that forgot the grammar you dream on. That's a curse.
I can recommend the comic “Transmetropolitan” by Warren Ellis, which deals with this and many other questions.
You have to imagine what it would be like for someone who lived in 1826 too wake up today, in a world where nothing they know is relevant, they have no connections, no idea what to do with any of it. Historians might want to interview you, or the first couple of people like you, but then what?
You will be an audience member to a show you don’t understand, until you die.
Fall, Or Dodge in Hell (Neil Stephenson) and The Waves (Ken Liu) are two other good stories about brain scanning and transhumanism. The first one is a ridiculously long novel about a future where the cloud is increasingly used for uploading souls of scanned brains, and the second one is a short story where people on a spaceship eventually evolve into noncorporal beings.
> who wouldn't want to witness and be a part of a new world?
Me?
This view is grounded in the assumption that the future will be better than today. There is no guarantee of that. This is, in my opinion, the same flaw in the thought process of wanting to live forever. The assumption being that, this "new world" is a better place than where you are now. That it is compatible with you as you are. That you will never grow tired of existing.
I know for a fact that I will grow tired of existence. Why would I want to continue it? The bar is very high for me to want to continue to exist in a "new world". I would need guarantees that the world will be a better place where I can thrive in ways I can not in this one. That I will be accepted in this "new world".
You are free to choose non existence but others are equally free to be brave enough to wake up in a worse world.
They may even feel responsible enough to try and fix it rather than requiring a "guarantee".
> The assumption being that, this "new world" is a better place than where you are now.
No one is assuming that. At least, I am not assuming that. Even if the world gets worse, I think it is rational to want to live longer and try and fix that.
Even if it is provably 100% unfixable and worse, any existence is better than non existence (certain forms of Hindu/Buddhist meditation teach you how to get into a state where that is obvious).
> This view is grounded in the assumption that the future will be better than today. There is no guarantee of that.
It could be better, it could be flawed in the same ways, it could be flawed but in different ways, or it could be worse altogether. Compare our current lives with someone a century ago. Two centuries. A millenia. Plus hey if you wake up and the oceans have boiled off, there's solutions to your continued existence then.
> I know for a fact that I will grow tired of existence.
I think that's the main part - ceasing to exist should be a choice. It wasn't one to be brought into this world, but inhabiting it and going out of it should be done on one's own terms and when having lived as good of a long life as one might want to. For some people that will be close to a century. For others that might be a thousand years. Who knows, for some it might be a million years.
If this is all thought experiments, why not? At that point, why even care about waking up in a capitalist dystopian hellhole? Might take a few centuries to overthrow them but it's not like that sort of life is the end point of humanity. And if it is, at least you'd know that for sure. Or maybe it's nuclear winter. Or something closer to a utopia, or at least something where everyone's basic needs are more or less met. Asking for guarantees doesn't work either way.
Or imagine waking up in a world where “ownership” of your mind has exchanged hands as the company who started this has gone through “structural changes” etc and you’ll basically be commandeered to be the brain of someones coffee machine or something for an eternity.
Or, as in the Bobiverse books, the brain of a space probe, but I have a bleaker view of the future than that…
Even worse, imagine waking up in a world where 200 years have gone by and nothing has changed, everyone is still here that you knew in your 'first' life. All the self-serving bosses, all the mendacious politicians, all the mediocre entertainers. Like a groundhog day from hell, forever.
The beauty of groundhog day is what we can accomplish when we have unlimited time and no real responsibilities
People overemphasize the "time loop trap" piece but seem to overlook the fact that he eventually uses the time to better himself in almost every way. He's a much better, much more enriched and happy person by the end.
Groundhog day was perhaps the wrong phrase to use. In any case I don't believe people would spontaneously attempt meaningful self-improvement with any seriousness if there was no expected finality to our existence. Don't forget, Bill Murray's character has to kill himself numerous times before he makes any kind of worthwhile progress.
Another way of looking at it is that Bill Murray's character learns over and over that there are no consequences to failure.
The biggest thing holding people back imo is fear of failure, fear of consequences.
If your dream is starting a business but if it fails you'll be broke, it's understandable if you're hesitant
Fear of failure cripples people because setbacks are so costly. Many people never attempt anything because they are afraid they will fail. Or more accurately because they cannot afford to fail
It's nice that a fictional character in a fictional scenario could come to such an understanding, but in real life there absolutely are consequences to failure, in a multitude of ways.
If you mean it in the sense that 'ultimately, nothing really matters', then the subtext to that is that nothing ultimately matters because we all die in the end. Which would be completely negated by immortality.
I don't necessarily want to live forever. But I am very curious about Humanity's ultimate fate. I want to see how things play out
I want to know if there is life out in the universe, if humanity ever meets other intelligent life, or even if we ever meaningfully leave Earth
I don't know. I love the good in humanity, I hope we eventually wind up more good than bad, and I just want to see.
Edit: Also, if we ever actually build a society that is a lot more meaningfully ethical and good than our current society, maybe I would want to live forever in it, or at least a very long time. Maybe it would just be nice to have the choice of when I go
Yeah, count me out. I don't even like how the world's played out in the 40 years I've been here. Imagine waking up in 200 years and finding out 90% of the world is still poor, we can't feed everybody, the rich still get to do whatever they want, we're still warring for no good reason, etc.
So... same as the whole of human history? You're upset that your generation isn't going to fix all of the problems of civilization that have existed forever?
This assumes you wake up and are given liberties. There are much worse fates. Waking up and owing your life to the company forever is pretty awful.
Worse even is never truly waking up but instead being replicated and turned into the brain for a servitor. If you believe the Roko Worshippers, you might be woken up just to be tortured.
One by one your neurons are replaced by their digital counterpart as a nano-scale computer in-place, with equivalent functionality. After which neuron number are you no longer you? You remain conscious throughout the process, the process may last however long with pauses for sleep.
After the replacement is complete, one by one these neurons are switched off with their functionality offloaded to their clone instantiated in a computer. After which neuron number are you no longer you?
This mind upload thought experiment convinced me that as long as there are no sharp discontinuities in experience, it makes no sense to ask what happened to the you. It also carries the implication that you are not your brain, but rather the abstract dynamical system instantiated in it.
One by one your neurons are replaced by water. At which neuron are you no longer you?
The fact that there is no clear time to pinpoint for a change doesn't imply that there is no such change... so your thought experiment doesn't really prove that the 'you' is kept.
In the end, Theseus ship is, and is not, the original ship, and both things can be true at the same time.
Plenty of people (not tons, but many) experience loss of neurons through injury, disease, or aging. We generally consider the person to be the same person, even if their personality changes.
Likewise, as you grow in childhood, you create many many neurons. Again, you are still you throughout the experience of growing up.
I suspect in your thought experiment you'd remain you throughout. Honestly, a community I bet does a lot of thinking about the self and what makes you "you" is the trans community, given their experience grappling with bodies and identity already.
My grandma got dementia, and she has been deteriorating quite a lot just now at the hospital to the point where she is unrecognizable. Yes, technically she is still my grandma, but at the same time she is not. I hope you understand what I am trying to get at.
(Of course I still consider her my grandma and she is being cared for just as much as she would have been years ago. It just saddens me that I cannot have the same or similar interactions as I could have some time back.)
When a person dies, not all of the cells in the body 'blink out' at once.
I've never died, but I imagine that a near-death person with 80, 60, 40, or 20 percent brain cell function is still in possession of qualia - lived experience of some sort.
I also imagine that this experience is diminished and likely otherworldly compared when compared to my normal goings on.
Finally, I imagine that this qualia 'fade to approximate black' as the living cell count trends to zero.
These neural-replacement thought experiments have never been convincing to me. What's proposed is that my brain dies - piecewise - and a new mecha-brain is born, piecewise. The period of interop between meat-me and mecha-me leaves me no less dead at the end, and only slightly less "partially dead" than in the normal death process ("more alive", or at least, "less bizarre" because my remaining living cells are receiving coherent inputs rather than random noise / silence).
Note that I'm not engaged in meat chauvinism here - I don't deny the potential consciousness of the mecha-me, but it's a different consciousness than mine.
Just wrote about this further down. I would be satisfied with identity retention with ALL neurons replaced, if certain conditions were met.
I'll just copy/paste the relevant part so no one needs to follow the other comment* if they don't want to:
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And finally, I would settle for a not so perfect copy of a brain scenario. Magic "Nanobots" replacing the neurons of a subject in vivo, gradually over the span of a few days/weeks/months. The new neurons can be non-biological, but must work identically to the original ones and obviously the connectome should be identical. The subject would be asked if they feel ok with this process regularly and the general part of the brain that is responsible for answering that question would be the last part to be replaced, otherwise it would be cheating wouldn't it? On completion, I would assume it's the same person and if it was me I would assume I'm the same person. This preserves continuity (of the self) to my personal satisfaction. Anything less than that is cryonics-level of bull*.
---
Edit:
> clone instantiated in a computer.
Oh and as far as clones go, I would assume it is the same identity. There would be no original or copy after this, all copies and original are the same as a string of bytes in memory. But... Only at inception. Then as more life experiences each one accumulates, the more they diverge and cannot be treated as the same person. And as such, I wouldn't let a clone like this, nowhere near my imaginary partner for life.
> one by one these neurons are switched off with their functionality offloaded to their clone instantiated in a computer.
We are not just brains in a jar. Our bodies provide rich sensory information, and feedback loops without which we would definietly not be “us”.
To use the “Ship of Theseus” analogy you are proposing to replace all the parts of the cockpit with new parts, but you are also at the same time discarding the hull, the sails and the oars. It would not be the same “ship” without those other things. You also need to very precisely replicate/simulate those parts too otherwise you won’t have the same person.
Glad to know I'm not the only one that thinks along these lines, and presumably by extension that teleportation by delete and rebuild mechanics would be mass murder.
You might no longer be you in the sense of you behave quite differently, but I remember being 16 and I don't behave like that either. The discontinuity is the point, as you eloquently put it.
This part here forces the answer. What is necessary for equivalent functionality? If you ask this question of someone who believes in immaterial souls, they can simply deny that equivalent functionality is possible in the first place.
Are you the same "you" that went to sleep last night? (Thought experiment: what if we die every night we go to bed? Seriously consider this for a moment.)
Are "you" a "you" at all?
What if "you" is just a prediction machine linked to prediction capability + history + planning + objectives + online learning? Your memories are just seasoning for the weights?
Personality, nostalgia and frisson are just hallucinations of experience. Biochemical complexity feels alive and conscious in large numbers and at scale, but it's all simple physics.
Microtubule dynamic instability etc. etc. is just how evolution stumbled upon a runtime learning algorithm. It's not the only solution.
No amount of replacement removes your sense of self. "You" become a machine.
I think the main thing that makes this inrealistic is the scale. In theory it also could take place on a larger level of discretization: chunks of many neurons.
I think it also matters what the nature of the replacement is. Is it possible for you to retain memories and skills throughout this intrusive process? Presumably, if the computer has "equivalent functionality".
Absolutely not sounds like a be careful what you wish for Black Mirror episode where you wake up trapped in some simulation you can’t break free from but it’s ok because you signed on the dotted line to donate your mind and body to science.
It is absolutely one of my favourite series and made Dennis E Taylor an absolute goto author for me. I also love his Outland series.
I quite enjoy listening to the Bobiverse audio books especially. Anything Ray Porter narrates is usually magnificent.
As far as we know, damage to no part of the body results in personality changes, changes to subjective sense of self, or the loss of memory or cognitive ability, except the brain.
There are some, not fully verified/researched, personality shifts after heart transplantations. Controversial, and I don't know if anyone tried to run some proper research with psychometrics.
Same goes with fecal transplantations for curing major depressions. Not fully researched either, and not sure if we can say that a depression qualifies as a personality trait.
Probably a good first step in life extension, I know a lot of first peeks at this came from hypothermic people. Those lessons are now used in heart surgeries to slow metabolism and limit cell deaths.
When I see things like this, it reminds that the saying life imitates art is surprisingly true. This is basically the premise of the movie Transcendence to a certain extent. Very interesting and very cool but begs the question just because we can, does it mean we should?
That being said, ever since I found out about Colossal Bioscience and their de-extinction projects, I have been tuned into their progress with great interest because it is the real life Jurassic Park.
More of a digital copy scenario. The article says the process involves toxic chemicals that lock everything in place so the connectome can be examined. There's no known way to reverse the chemical process in the biological brain.
https://archive.is/SMcX5
Not that I think this is anywhere close in actuality, but It's reminding me of MMAcevedo. (https://qntm.org/mmacevedo)
What server will I wake up on? Who is running the infrastructure? What will be asked of me to be allowed to continue to exist on that server? Given our current societal trends, I can't imagine I would enjoy any existence where a copy of me is spun back up.
And of course, my original thread of consciousness will still be ended, so this is some alternate copy of me. (Based on my view of the teletransportation paradox.)
The worse part is you can't know that your current life isn't one of those. Everything that you think of as perks of being alive could be part of the protocol to keep you cooperative.
Feels like the world religions that doubled down on reincarnation/rebirth/cyclic narratives were, literally, ahead of their time.
Cherish it if the Great RNG In The Sky gave your simulation cycle a good seed.
You will not wake up on any server. At best possible theoretical far future scenario better or worse copy of yours will. If you would survive such process, you yourself, the human instance that wrote that will be just looking at somebody else living their now-fully-digital (prison) life.
I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact. We are all gonna die, make inner peace with that (it isn't that hard, depends mostly on your ego) and enjoy rest of that short time here. If you seek immortality, do it either via exceptional deeds or via well-raised children, that's the best we have.
No force in the world is going to move both your mortal neurons with all synapses and electric charge between them that together form your personality into anything else, digital or not. Its like asking to transfer this cup of tea I hold right now into digital form. No, it can be copied to certain precision and that's it.
>I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact.
Some people think identity and the continuity of consciousness are based on information or computation, and not on specific physical matter or soul-like constructs, so for them a transfer of all relevant information would constitute a transfer of consciousness and identity. From this perspective (leaving aside questions of practicality) "you yourself looking from the biological body at somebody else in the computer" is exactly as valid as "you yourself looking from inside the computer at somebody else in the biological body" (and in fact the whole idea that you have to choose one or the other as "the real you" becomes moot on this view).
Of course it's a difficult metaphysical conundrum but to say that your view of things is "a simple fact" when the basic scientific materialist worldview of today points at least as much in the opposite direction is a bit overconfident.
If you were to slowly replace your brain with a cybernetic appliance, you could also have perfect continuity.
Not that it matters; we sleep and wake up, no one freaks out daily that they were unconscious for hours.
No reason to suspect waking up in 3030 after being unfrozen or in 6045 after being cybernetically reanimated would be any more disconcerting physiologically than an extended coma patients experience.
Your continuity is just as illusionous as your free will.
> no one freaks out daily that they were unconscious for hours.
Speak for yourself! Every time I come to there's something to freak out about. Okay, not every time, but waking up is a lot.
I don't really think you're correct on that one. To begin with, what makes us whole is mostly memories and our subconcious.
What makes it obvious are illnesses like dementia and general decay of neural activity as we get older.
If we implant the same memories into something or someone that person/entity would become you, like waking up from a long nap. You might not feel the same, think the same, or act the same, but it would still feel like you. Going one step further and growing an exact clone can probably go even further than that.
Ahh, but you can't know if it's the actual you that wakes up or a perfect copy of you.
If a copy is indistinguishable enough from the original, you have to treat that copy as you would treat you.
Imagine the following experiment, you are on a room seeing 5 (or 20, or 100) live streams of as many perfect copies. You are informed that a livestream of yourself is being presented to the rest.
You are given the same questions and you all answer in the same way. Now they tell that out of all of you, only one is the original and that you can vote to proceed with some pretty terrible physical punishment to the simulations. Which way are you voting?
Anesthesia impairs the electrons transport in your brain, effectively ending that thread of consciousness, and, depending on the procedure, your brain can be altered by chemical/oxygen saturation changes. You wake up very subtly different, but most people are ok with that.
People have strokes or accidents and wake up missing memories and with changed bodies, but their families still call them by name.
You still being you is a matter of degree, not a binary, and different people are comfortable with different degrees of change.
I wouldn't call that degrees of change but degrees of damage. The thing is, past a certain degree of damage people stop having opinions, so how would you know the individual is comfortable with it?
In this case, the damage is total. The degrees end here, it reaches a binary state: from alive to dead. And then something else entirely says they are the dead person and they are alive.
The question is, does society accept a complete switcheroo? The individual died in the process, they cannot give an opinion on this. The copy is another entity. There are no degrees, it's all absolutes with this process.
> I wouldn't call that degrees of change but degrees of damage.
If you define any change from a previous state that loses some state as damage, then that's a tautology, not an argument.
> The thing is, past a certain degree of damage people stop having opinions, so how would you know the individual is comfortable with it?
We don't. I didn't say everyone was ok with every change. Some people aren't ok with being mildly inebriated, hence my "different strokes for different folks" take. Some people are comfortable losing a decade of memories, and some people would mourn a day lost.
> In this case, the damage is total. The degrees end here, it reaches a binary state: from alive to dead. And then something else entirely says they are the dead person and they are alive.
You're equivocating death with the end of the self. The core conversation here is whether or not that is true, and my opinion is that it is a manner of degree. This goes back to the earlier mention of the teletransportation paradox. Different people how different opinions on what constitutes the self.
> The question is, does society accept a complete switchero?
Society has generally been pragmatic and taken the approach of "if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's a duck".
> The individual died in the process, they cannot give an opinion on this. The copy is another entity. There are no degrees, it's all absolutes with this process.
Again, you're assuming your opinion on what constitutes an individual is the one and only interpretation, which isn't the case.
>then that's a tautology, not an argument.
No. That's the definition of damage. "Change" doesn't imply loss. Damage does. With change you can add and/or subtract characteristics. Damage subtracts, it is a more precise term for the examples you gave. Using such a broad term as "change" makes it a euphemism for damage. A bit dishonest really.
>I didn't say everyone was ok with every change.
Neither did I.
>"different strokes for different folks" take.
Dead folks included? That's absurd. Also, who is comfortable losing a decade of memories? Is "comfort" a euphemism for "acceptance due to not having a choice on the matter"?
>Different people how (have) different opinions on what constitutes the self.
Because no one asks the dead guy! (tongue in cheek)
>You're equivocating
How can you be so sure? I have has much right to have an opinion on what constitutes the self as much as you do. Equivocating would imply that my opinion on what constitutes the self is based on an error, a misunderstanding. But you don't even know my opinion on that, we haven't got to it yet.
>Society has generally been
If that were the case then there would be no argument. All opinions opposed to accepting whatever comes out of this process as the same person are hereby dismissed due to tradition. Society has generally been such and such. It's settled then.
>Again, you're assuming
No, it is you who's assuming you know my opinion on this.
Glad you asked, here's my opinion:
Continuity. The ship of Theseus (with all planks and everything replaced) will always be the same ship. The copy of the ship of Theseus built right next to the original won't become the original ship of Theseus just because the original is destroyed.
The process destroys the original. This does not promote the copy to original status. It breaks continuity. If the original wasn't destroyed, the copied person and the original are easily distinguished by the people who witnessed the process since both cannot occupy the same space at the same time, one of them is definitely more to the left than the other, at least.
Now for the original and the copy, both will think they are the original if there's no information that satisfies them both about who's who. I would consider that lying to either one of them about their status is a serious crime.
But in this process, there's definitely a corpse left behind. Probably not complete since the copying is destructive to the brain. But the existence of a corpse will definitely convince the copy is the copy. The copy might stubbornly refuse to accept it as such, but that's on them and they are responsible for the consequences that stance might bring.
This proposed technology is messy. They don't even advertise a copy. Just a scan that could one day maybe used to make a "copy"(within questionable standards of what constitutes a copy in the future). That makes things easy for me, really. If it was a teletransportation paradox (without the killing part) then I'd have to accept that the original and the copy are the same, atom for atom, and now there's simply two of them, like a string of bytes on a computer, neither is the original or the copy and they are just the same individual that start diverge due to the impossibility of both occupying the same space at the same time, yada yada yada. But this isn't that, it's the cheap, oh so cheap knock off that only a sad few will settle for. If ever.
So no, I'm not equivocating death with the end of the self. This is just not a teletransportation paradox situation. The technology the article presents is not even close to make an atom for atom copy of a person. Furthermore, I figure if we ever reach that level of technology, we won't need to let the original die to make a copy, we could just cure whatever they are suffering from.
And finally, I would settle for a not so perfect copy of a brain scenario. Magic "Nanobots" replacing the neurons of a subject in vivo, gradually over the span of a few days/weeks/months. The new neurons can be non-biological, but must work identically to the original ones and obviously the connectome should be identical. The subject would be asked if they feel ok with this process regularly and the general part of the brain that is responsible for answering that question would be the last part to be replaced, otherwise it would be cheating wouldn't it? On completion, I would assume it's the same person and if it was me I would assume I'm the same person. This preserves continuity (of the self) to my personal satisfaction. Anything less than that is cryonics-level of bull**.
> No. That's the definition of damage. "Change" doesn't imply loss. Damage does. With change you can add and/or subtract characteristics. Damage subtracts, it is a more precise term for the examples you gave. Using such a broad term as "change" makes it a euphemism for damage. A bit dishonest really.
Again, you're missing the point. We can use the word damage and it doesn't change the argument here. A concussion is damage, but it doesn't mean you're someone else after you have one.
> Neither did I.
Not sure why you brought up people who don't have opinions then.
> Dead folks included?
If we are talking about reanimated consciousnesses of the dead, the yeah.
> Also, who is comfortable losing a decade of memories?
So you think people should be more accepting of losing ALL memories (dying) than losing 10 years of memories? I'm kinda losing the point you're trying to make here. Should we hold on as hard as possible, or accept obliteration. You seem to be saying both.
> How can you be so sure? I have has much right to have an opinion on what constitutes the self as much as you do.
By definition? You are stating your opinion as fact. Having an opinion is fine, but if your argument relies on your opinion being true then that's just circular reasoning.
> No, it is you who's assuming you know my opinion on this.
I'm not assuming it, I'm reading it. Maybe I misunderstood something, but I only have what you give me here.
> Continuity. The ship of Theseus (with all planks and everything replaced) will always be the...
If we use Theseus as the proxy for our convo:
I'm not saying the new ship "is the original ship" in some philosophical way. I'm saying, if it behaves the same and carries the same passengers, I don't see any reason to change the ship's name. If the original ship said "hey, I'm cool to be taken apart as long as you save my design and build me again later to the best of your ability," then I have no problem building the ship later and calling it "The ship of Theseus".
> So no, I'm not equivocating death with the end of the self.
So, what did you mean by "it" when you said "it reaches a binary state, from alive to dead"?
I highly recommend playing Frictonal Games' Soma from 2015. It is an extremely critical examination of this entire concept. Without spoiling the plot, a digitized consciousness doesn't imply just one, but an infinite number of copies, some just subjected to torture as they are essentially disposable.
>We are all gonna die, make inner peace with that (it isn't that hard, depends mostly on your ego)
You should go to a cancer ward and tell that to all the cancer patients there. That will make them "get it" like you do.
That doesn't mean you have to like the fact that you're dying. But make peace with the fact that you too, will die - it's one of the very few universal truths of life. I see so many people living like they are going to live forever - world would be a better place if more people realized that this isn't true, and your time on earth is limited.
> it isn't that hard, depends mostly on your ego
This feels like an odd cope, sure I might not be able to do anything about my mortality, but I still view the fact that I and other people are mortal as a damn tragedy (and often the gradual decline and non-dignified end of people's lives). If someone held a gun at my head and I knew that within a minute they're going to pull the trigger, I'd be rightfully quite disturbed. Now knowing that a metaphorical trigger will be pulled at a random time decades later doesn't make it any less disturbing. The only solace there is ignorance.
> do it either via exceptional deeds or via well-raised children
Both of those are worthy pursuits, but are also categorically different from you being here. So sure, you can and probably should say that living a good life is what people should do instead of losing sleep over their mortality - but that also moves the goal posts in a sense. You could have cut it short at the equivalent of "you'll never be immortal".
Most likely if you put a gun to his head and he'll beg for his life and stoop to do the most pathetic tasks to stay alive. It's not cope, more delusional arrogance.
> You will not wake up on any server ... I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact.
Did you even read my comment? In the last paragraph I discuss this and the teletransportation paradox, and how it will not actually be me but a copy, my thread of consciousness dies with me.
Please give me the courtesy of at least a full read before replying.
I don't get the complete certainty with which people post this opinion.
You have no special access to data or insight that anyone else does, nor new evidence and the argument itself is always pretty specious (those patterns over there are different because like, they're not here).
Eh, it’s mostly for the trillionaires to keep their wealth after death. For everyone else, you will inevitably eventually end up driving a garbage truck. Don’t believe me? Your digital copy runs on a server doing important work! Company goes out of business. Assets get auctioned. Garbage truck.
Or another? The trust you set up ran out of money because all of the fees continued to increase and outpaced certain economic downturns. More and more people drew money off of your remaining static assets. You run out of money. Estate sale. Garbage truck.
Just remember, you’ll have all of time to end up there.
No thanks.
One of the many details of Altered Carbon (Netflix) that they got right. Digitized minds would become so numerous as to be considered little more than fancy trash.
> I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact.
It's an element of faith, not fact. If you simulate a human body from quarks up, the physics won't know if it's running on base reality or in a computer.
While the connections are important I think the individual cell behavior is also very important and that is driven by DNA. Brain cells last a lifetime and can modify their own DNA so each one ends up being unique. I do wonder how much of behavior/consciousness is encoded in the cells DNA versus the connections between the cells.
Do you have a citation for the notion they can modify their own DNA? I would fairly easily believe they can modify its expression, but I’m skeptical of the idea they can modify the sequence.
It is half true in that they can modify their epigenetics.
Right, that’s why it makes sense. And epigenetics are not changes to DNA sequences.
The depth of complexity and innumerable interacting variables of biology make attempts to map brain function always seem like an absurdity
I worked on the Human Connectome Project.
If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need. In terms of a modern ANN, it's the connections (axons) and the weights (transmitters/receptors in tandem).
That said, this article doesn't get to the point in the free section. How are they collecting the information? Slicing is inherently destructive. Someone's got to manufacture an entirely novel imaging modality. Perhaps they could scan millimeters ahead of the slice at a resolution high enough to image receptors. Not possible currently.
> If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need.
How can we possibly know that the non-connectome details of the brain don't influence computation or conscious experience?
It seems we ignore these only because they don't fit neatly into our piles of linear algebra that we call ANNs.
Take a gander at the OpenWorm project. It's a great example of how simple neuronal activity is (given details like the connections, number of receptors, and transmitter infrastructure). SOTA models of neuronal activity are simple enough for problem sets in undergraduate biomedical engineering programs.
Sure, to your point, we don't know. But the worm above (nematode) swims and seeks food when dropped into a physics engine.
My main point is that the scale of the human brain is well beyond the capabilities of modern imaging modalities, and it will likely remain so indefinitely. Fascicles we can image, individual axons we cannot. I guess, theoretically, we'll eventually be able to (but it's not relevant to us or any of our remote descendants).
> But the worm above (nematode) swims and seeks food when dropped into a physics engine.
Nematode worms have an oxytocin analogue called nematocin that is known to influence learning and social behaviors like mating. As far as I can find, the project doesn't account for this, or only minimally, but aims to in the future.
It's not surprising that immediate short-term behaviors like movement depend mostly on the faster signaling of the connectome. But since we know of other mechanisms that most definitely influence the connectome's behavior, and we know we don't account for those at the moment, it is not accurate to say that the connectome is "all the information you need".
I agree that mapping the connectome of the human brain is impractical to the point of impossibility. But even if we could, the resulting "circuit diagram" would not capture all the details needed to fully replicate human cognition. Aspects of it, sure. Maybe even enough to make it do useful tasks for EvilCorp LLC while being prodded with virtual sticks and carrots. But it would be incomplete.
I saw a putative 3D animation of a fly whose brain had been digitized and then run in a simulation. It buzzed around, sipped food it had found on the ground, even rubbed its forelegs together as flies do. A true Dixie Flyline. We live in strange times...
> If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need. In terms of a modern ANN, it's the connections (axons) and the weights (transmitters/receptors in tandem).
This is exactly what I’m doubting, how can you be so sure?
Same question answered under other comment.
Yeah but it wasn’t though. I found your answer unconvincing. I suppose “we don’t know” is an answer but that is nothing like “we have all the information we need”
It is my understanding that for the animals where we have a simulation of the full connectome the behavior you see approximates the real behavior reasonably well, so maybe the jury is still out as to whether it is sufficient or not.
> "to allow them to continue, in effect, with their life.”
"in effect" doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Not to mention the tricky question of what happens to your consciousness during and after this process?
Most likely they're just preserving the tissue, but not the consciousness
"William and Mary" -- Roald Dahl
https://user.ceng.metu.edu.tr/~ucoluk/yazin/William_and_Mary...
Recently rewatched Demolition Man (1993) where criminals are frozen in cryostasis and then reanimated – a very prescient film. All I could think of was Demolition Pig
Here's a thought experiment. I offer you the chance to be put in a medically induced coma and shipped around the world to strangers you know nothing about. You don't know what economic, political, or moral system you'll awaken to. The only thing you know for sure is they, for some reason we're interested in receiving an unconscious person, no questions asked.
Do you take the deal? Do you sign your family up for it?
In this scenario, the alternative is “you die”. Let’s make sure we’re including that in the question.
Brains 'R Us recently filed for chapter 11 and has been cut up and sold for scrap to private equity. The new PE firm has your brain. In 2208 there's a large grey market for brains to be used for hybrid AI and meat bag workflows. It's technically illegal in many jurisdictions due to "ethical implications", but is still the cheapest way to run many workloads. The method used to harness the brain involves reanimating it in a jar of jelly, and then forcing it to do the 2208 equivalent of a captcha. Each time the brain fails a captcha, the brain receives an electric impulse which simulates the most excruciating pain that the brain can respresent, but the brain cannot scream or run away.
> grey market for brains to be used for hybrid AI and meat bag workflows ... is still the cheapest way to run many workloads.
It's an absolute nightmare scenario, but luckily it has become completely implausible since 2023. We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job. Not saying this would make me comfortable with brain cloning, but at least the simple economic incentive seems to be gone.
>> We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job.
Unless RTX9000 with 16PB of ram needed to run basic Gemini2077 model costs more than a house, but a brain jar with electrodes is cheaper than that. Then the economic incentives will shift the other way.
No I don't think so. We can already create LLMs that are highly efficient and infinitely more knowledgeable than any single human being, completely tuned to the task, without ego or distractions, and they are cheap enough that you can run tens of them in parallel for a few hundred dollars per month. They are also way faster than any human being. And we're three/ four years in this. Imagine 50 years from now.
>>Imagine 50 years from now.
That's the whole point though - I can't, and I don't think anyone can. Right now the LLMs are just getting bigger and bigger, we're bruteforcing the way out of their stupidity by giving them bigger and bigger datasets - unless something fundamental changes soon that tech has an actual dead end. Hence my (joke-ish) prediction that you'll eventually need a 16PB GPU to run a basic gemini model, and such a thing will always be very expensive no matter how much our tech advances(especially since we are already hitting some technical limits). Human brains won't get any more expensive with time - they already contain all the hardware they are ever going to get - but what might get cheaper is the plumbing to make them "run" and interact with other systems.
We can already grow brain organoids cheaply and easily enough to be a YouTuber's long-running series, so even if biological somehow gets cheaper than silicon, it still isn't going to be a revived complete human brain from someone who died 50 years earlier and probably retired 20 years before that.
I mean, imagine someone who got themselves cryonically preserved in 1976 getting either revived or uploaded today: what job would they be able to get? Almost no office job is the same now as then; manufacturing involves very different tools and a lot of CNC and robotic arms; agriculture is only getting more automated and we've had cow-milking robots for 20-30 years; cars may have changed the least in usage if not safety, performance, and power source; I suppose that leaves gardening… well, except for robot lawnmowers, anyone who can hire a gardener can probably afford a robo-mower?
It reminds me of this, which talks about this exact scenario:
https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
Tldr is that for some very limited tasks it might still be preferable to use a human mind, especially if you can run it at 1000x cognitive speed. Or.....it might not. It's sci-fi at this point.
It shouldn't remind you of that, my point is there's little economic use for uploads like this: if thinking meat is cheaper than thinking silicon, train some fresh thinking meat with an electrode array or whatever; if thinking silicon is cheaper, train some fresh thinking silicon.
Non-economic use, that's different of course. Digital afterlife and so on, but as a consumer, not a supplier of anything.
> Each time the brain fails a captcha, the brain receives an electric impulse which simulates the most excruciating pain that the brain can respresent, but the brain cannot scream or run away.
What percentage of your life being enjoyable vs horrible suffering makes it worth living?
Maybe you're 80 years old at the time of storing your brain.
Suppose after being revived that regime with capitalist incentives holds for another 200 years during which you live as a brain in a jar, but some cultural revolutions later you are liberated and then proceed to live 10'000 years across any number of bodies and circumstances, which means that in your lifespan of ~10'280 years (not accounting for being in storage) you experienced horrible suffering for about 2% of your life.
This is as much of a contrived example as yours, aside from maybe good commentary on your part on human ethics being shit when profit enters the scene.
Or maybe after 200 years you expire, having at least tried your best at a non-zero chance of extending your lifespan, instead leading to your total lifespan of 280 years being about 71% suffering. Is it better to not have tried at all, then? Just forsake ANY chance of being revived and living for as long as you want and conquering biology and seeing so much more than your 80 year lifespan let you? Should absolute oblivion be chosen instead, willingly, a 100% chance of never having a conscious though after your death again (within our current medical understanding)?
What about the people dealing with all sorts of horrible illnesses and knowing that each next year might be spent in a lot of pain and suffering, even things like going through chemo? Should they also not try? Or even something as simple as all of the people who look for love/success in their lives, and never find any of it anyways and possibly die alone and in squalor? They knew the odds weren't good and tried anyways. A more grounded take would be that those preserved brains are just left to thaw and you probably die anyways without being turned into some human captcha machine, at least having tried. Is it also not worth it in that case, knowing those both potential alternatives?
I guess I'm not making a judgement of what other people should or shouldn't do. Just making up a goofy example to illustrate that the choice is not so obvious to a lot of people, which I think you also illustrate pretty well with your examples. It really depends on the individual. I do think it's worth looking at the incentives of the people funding these companies, because that does give a picture of the probable outcomes.
People will continue working on this sort of thing, that's fine, it really doesn't bother me. If I was forced to make a judgement, I think it's maybe a little silly, but I'm also not out there saving the planet from climate armageddon so I shouldn't cast stones. As a species we are extremely bad at prioritizing for our collective survival and there are a million worse things to be working on.
What percentage of your life being enjoyable vs horrible suffering makes it worth living? I don't know but 99% of my life being used to solve captchas makes it not worth living
>Suppose after being revived that regime with capitalist incentives
Having to provide for other people is literally the same as being trapped in a "I have no mouth and I must scream"-esque torture chamber. Given the historical track record of communism, you're more likely to end in the torture chamber than not in that situation. The curve of history bends towards factory farms.
That doesn't change things as much as you might think. Sufficiently advanced technology can create many fates worse than death.
By that logic I wouldn’t sign up for blood transfusions, organ transplants, or take any medicine I didn’t compound myself.
What’s the downside of skipping all that potential torture?… oh
Not a chance. In fact all these developments make me convinced that my early choice for cremation over burial was and is the right one. Arrive blank and leave with grace, try to improve the world while you're here.
The Bobiverse novels start this way. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_E._Taylor)
Would the dynamical strange attractor system that is brain start in the same basin as it died in? Something to think about.
What for?
Even in the best case scenario I would wake up in a world that barely makes any sense to me, where the things I cared about are long gone and nearly forgotten.
Imagine everyday waking up in a world that forgot the grammar you dream on. That's a curse.
Would people want this? Imagine waking up to a world where 200 years has passed, everyone you knew is dead, everything you knew is history.
Why do you assume that everyone you know will be dead? Won't some of them also be preserved.
As for "everything you knew is history", who wouldn't want to witness and be a part of a new world?
I can recommend the comic “Transmetropolitan” by Warren Ellis, which deals with this and many other questions.
You have to imagine what it would be like for someone who lived in 1826 too wake up today, in a world where nothing they know is relevant, they have no connections, no idea what to do with any of it. Historians might want to interview you, or the first couple of people like you, but then what?
You will be an audience member to a show you don’t understand, until you die.
If a large number of people get reanimated, I don't think this will be their fate.
I can imagine "educators" who can get them up speed. In a future where people get reanimated, I would think this shouldn't be a problem long term.
Any existence may be better than non existence.
Fall, Or Dodge in Hell (Neil Stephenson) and The Waves (Ken Liu) are two other good stories about brain scanning and transhumanism. The first one is a ridiculously long novel about a future where the cloud is increasingly used for uploading souls of scanned brains, and the second one is a short story where people on a spaceship eventually evolve into noncorporal beings.
> who wouldn't want to witness and be a part of a new world?
Me?
This view is grounded in the assumption that the future will be better than today. There is no guarantee of that. This is, in my opinion, the same flaw in the thought process of wanting to live forever. The assumption being that, this "new world" is a better place than where you are now. That it is compatible with you as you are. That you will never grow tired of existing.
I know for a fact that I will grow tired of existence. Why would I want to continue it? The bar is very high for me to want to continue to exist in a "new world". I would need guarantees that the world will be a better place where I can thrive in ways I can not in this one. That I will be accepted in this "new world".
Can anyone guarantee those things?
> Can anyone guarantee those things?
No one can guarantee those things.
No one can guarantee anything in this world.
You are free to choose non existence but others are equally free to be brave enough to wake up in a worse world.
They may even feel responsible enough to try and fix it rather than requiring a "guarantee".
> The assumption being that, this "new world" is a better place than where you are now.
No one is assuming that. At least, I am not assuming that. Even if the world gets worse, I think it is rational to want to live longer and try and fix that.
Even if it is provably 100% unfixable and worse, any existence is better than non existence (certain forms of Hindu/Buddhist meditation teach you how to get into a state where that is obvious).
> This view is grounded in the assumption that the future will be better than today. There is no guarantee of that.
It could be better, it could be flawed in the same ways, it could be flawed but in different ways, or it could be worse altogether. Compare our current lives with someone a century ago. Two centuries. A millenia. Plus hey if you wake up and the oceans have boiled off, there's solutions to your continued existence then.
> I know for a fact that I will grow tired of existence.
I think that's the main part - ceasing to exist should be a choice. It wasn't one to be brought into this world, but inhabiting it and going out of it should be done on one's own terms and when having lived as good of a long life as one might want to. For some people that will be close to a century. For others that might be a thousand years. Who knows, for some it might be a million years.
If this is all thought experiments, why not? At that point, why even care about waking up in a capitalist dystopian hellhole? Might take a few centuries to overthrow them but it's not like that sort of life is the end point of humanity. And if it is, at least you'd know that for sure. Or maybe it's nuclear winter. Or something closer to a utopia, or at least something where everyone's basic needs are more or less met. Asking for guarantees doesn't work either way.
I just got an app idea
Or imagine waking up in a world where “ownership” of your mind has exchanged hands as the company who started this has gone through “structural changes” etc and you’ll basically be commandeered to be the brain of someones coffee machine or something for an eternity.
Or, as in the Bobiverse books, the brain of a space probe, but I have a bleaker view of the future than that…
Even worse, imagine waking up in a world where 200 years have gone by and nothing has changed, everyone is still here that you knew in your 'first' life. All the self-serving bosses, all the mendacious politicians, all the mediocre entertainers. Like a groundhog day from hell, forever.
The beauty of groundhog day is what we can accomplish when we have unlimited time and no real responsibilities
People overemphasize the "time loop trap" piece but seem to overlook the fact that he eventually uses the time to better himself in almost every way. He's a much better, much more enriched and happy person by the end.
Groundhog day was perhaps the wrong phrase to use. In any case I don't believe people would spontaneously attempt meaningful self-improvement with any seriousness if there was no expected finality to our existence. Don't forget, Bill Murray's character has to kill himself numerous times before he makes any kind of worthwhile progress.
Another way of looking at it is that Bill Murray's character learns over and over that there are no consequences to failure.
The biggest thing holding people back imo is fear of failure, fear of consequences.
If your dream is starting a business but if it fails you'll be broke, it's understandable if you're hesitant
Fear of failure cripples people because setbacks are so costly. Many people never attempt anything because they are afraid they will fail. Or more accurately because they cannot afford to fail
It's nice that a fictional character in a fictional scenario could come to such an understanding, but in real life there absolutely are consequences to failure, in a multitude of ways.
If you mean it in the sense that 'ultimately, nothing really matters', then the subtext to that is that nothing ultimately matters because we all die in the end. Which would be completely negated by immortality.
More time to pursue hobbies and see the literal future? Uh yeah. Especially if friends/family also opt in.
Make sure to read those terms and conditions!
Fry found a way to make it work
Just beware of the suicide booths
It's dolomite, baby
I've thought about this a bunch
I don't necessarily want to live forever. But I am very curious about Humanity's ultimate fate. I want to see how things play out
I want to know if there is life out in the universe, if humanity ever meets other intelligent life, or even if we ever meaningfully leave Earth
I don't know. I love the good in humanity, I hope we eventually wind up more good than bad, and I just want to see.
Edit: Also, if we ever actually build a society that is a lot more meaningfully ethical and good than our current society, maybe I would want to live forever in it, or at least a very long time. Maybe it would just be nice to have the choice of when I go
Just buy the family pack and get your wife and kids on it too.
As for traveling to the future: that sounds like fun!
I imagine there's plenty of appeal among the zero introspection set.
Futurama and the Bobiverse series investigate this pretty well.
Same question as if you'd like to drop everything and create a new life on the other side of the world, not for everyone.
I quite enjoyed the original run of the docuseries "Futurama" on this concept.
Remember to have a little something parked on your savings account. Compounding interest works in your favour over a few centuries.
see Altered Carbon (netflix), amazing story.
I'm infinitely curious, so it's almost a perk that everything I knew would be history, implying there's a ton of stuff to learn/catch up on.
I've dealt with loss. It sucks, but it's part of being alive (I say with just a hint of irony).
I do recognize that not everyone feels this way about this topic though. That's ok.
Yeah, count me out. I don't even like how the world's played out in the 40 years I've been here. Imagine waking up in 200 years and finding out 90% of the world is still poor, we can't feed everybody, the rich still get to do whatever they want, we're still warring for no good reason, etc.
So... same as the whole of human history? You're upset that your generation isn't going to fix all of the problems of civilization that have existed forever?
This assumes you wake up and are given liberties. There are much worse fates. Waking up and owing your life to the company forever is pretty awful.
Worse even is never truly waking up but instead being replicated and turned into the brain for a servitor. If you believe the Roko Worshippers, you might be woken up just to be tortured.
A thought experiment:
One by one your neurons are replaced by their digital counterpart as a nano-scale computer in-place, with equivalent functionality. After which neuron number are you no longer you? You remain conscious throughout the process, the process may last however long with pauses for sleep.
After the replacement is complete, one by one these neurons are switched off with their functionality offloaded to their clone instantiated in a computer. After which neuron number are you no longer you?
This mind upload thought experiment convinced me that as long as there are no sharp discontinuities in experience, it makes no sense to ask what happened to the you. It also carries the implication that you are not your brain, but rather the abstract dynamical system instantiated in it.
Another thought experiment:
One by one your neurons are replaced by water. At which neuron are you no longer you?
The fact that there is no clear time to pinpoint for a change doesn't imply that there is no such change... so your thought experiment doesn't really prove that the 'you' is kept.
In the end, Theseus ship is, and is not, the original ship, and both things can be true at the same time.
Plenty of people (not tons, but many) experience loss of neurons through injury, disease, or aging. We generally consider the person to be the same person, even if their personality changes.
Likewise, as you grow in childhood, you create many many neurons. Again, you are still you throughout the experience of growing up.
I suspect in your thought experiment you'd remain you throughout. Honestly, a community I bet does a lot of thinking about the self and what makes you "you" is the trans community, given their experience grappling with bodies and identity already.
My grandma got dementia, and she has been deteriorating quite a lot just now at the hospital to the point where she is unrecognizable. Yes, technically she is still my grandma, but at the same time she is not. I hope you understand what I am trying to get at.
(Of course I still consider her my grandma and she is being cared for just as much as she would have been years ago. It just saddens me that I cannot have the same or similar interactions as I could have some time back.)
When a person dies, not all of the cells in the body 'blink out' at once.
I've never died, but I imagine that a near-death person with 80, 60, 40, or 20 percent brain cell function is still in possession of qualia - lived experience of some sort.
I also imagine that this experience is diminished and likely otherworldly compared when compared to my normal goings on.
Finally, I imagine that this qualia 'fade to approximate black' as the living cell count trends to zero.
These neural-replacement thought experiments have never been convincing to me. What's proposed is that my brain dies - piecewise - and a new mecha-brain is born, piecewise. The period of interop between meat-me and mecha-me leaves me no less dead at the end, and only slightly less "partially dead" than in the normal death process ("more alive", or at least, "less bizarre" because my remaining living cells are receiving coherent inputs rather than random noise / silence).
Note that I'm not engaged in meat chauvinism here - I don't deny the potential consciousness of the mecha-me, but it's a different consciousness than mine.
Is your consciousness now the same as the version of you that wakes up tomorrow?
Just wrote about this further down. I would be satisfied with identity retention with ALL neurons replaced, if certain conditions were met.
I'll just copy/paste the relevant part so no one needs to follow the other comment* if they don't want to:
---
And finally, I would settle for a not so perfect copy of a brain scenario. Magic "Nanobots" replacing the neurons of a subject in vivo, gradually over the span of a few days/weeks/months. The new neurons can be non-biological, but must work identically to the original ones and obviously the connectome should be identical. The subject would be asked if they feel ok with this process regularly and the general part of the brain that is responsible for answering that question would be the last part to be replaced, otherwise it would be cheating wouldn't it? On completion, I would assume it's the same person and if it was me I would assume I'm the same person. This preserves continuity (of the self) to my personal satisfaction. Anything less than that is cryonics-level of bull*.
---
Edit:
> clone instantiated in a computer.
Oh and as far as clones go, I would assume it is the same identity. There would be no original or copy after this, all copies and original are the same as a string of bytes in memory. But... Only at inception. Then as more life experiences each one accumulates, the more they diverge and cannot be treated as the same person. And as such, I wouldn't let a clone like this, nowhere near my imaginary partner for life.
* - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47467300#47471320
> one by one these neurons are switched off with their functionality offloaded to their clone instantiated in a computer.
We are not just brains in a jar. Our bodies provide rich sensory information, and feedback loops without which we would definietly not be “us”.
To use the “Ship of Theseus” analogy you are proposing to replace all the parts of the cockpit with new parts, but you are also at the same time discarding the hull, the sails and the oars. It would not be the same “ship” without those other things. You also need to very precisely replicate/simulate those parts too otherwise you won’t have the same person.
>> This mind upload thought experiment convinced me…
Start at the color green and gradually add in some blue. As long as there are no sharp discontinuities there is no such thing as the color green.
Glad to know I'm not the only one that thinks along these lines, and presumably by extension that teleportation by delete and rebuild mechanics would be mass murder.
You might no longer be you in the sense of you behave quite differently, but I remember being 16 and I don't behave like that either. The discontinuity is the point, as you eloquently put it.
During your sleep, we clone you fully down to brain connectome and burn your original body.
On waking up, we show you the video of what happened. You feel the same person as yesterday when you went to bed. Are you?
> with equivalent functionality
This part here forces the answer. What is necessary for equivalent functionality? If you ask this question of someone who believes in immaterial souls, they can simply deny that equivalent functionality is possible in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Brain_replacement...
It’s somewhat impossible to me to determine if a sense of self is an emergent phenomenon or an illusion without Descartes.
Chip of Theseus
Ship?
Permutation city, by Greg Egan. You don't even need the computer once instantiated!
That book was like a matryoshka doll but instead stacked dolls there were stacked mindfucks
Are you the same "you" that went to sleep last night? (Thought experiment: what if we die every night we go to bed? Seriously consider this for a moment.)
Are "you" a "you" at all?
What if "you" is just a prediction machine linked to prediction capability + history + planning + objectives + online learning? Your memories are just seasoning for the weights?
Personality, nostalgia and frisson are just hallucinations of experience. Biochemical complexity feels alive and conscious in large numbers and at scale, but it's all simple physics.
Microtubule dynamic instability etc. etc. is just how evolution stumbled upon a runtime learning algorithm. It's not the only solution.
RE the first question I'm sure someone hasn't seen this yet:
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/1
Subjectively though, sleep 'feels' like it maintains continuity in a way. But of course that could just be a rationalization.
That was fantastic! Thank you for sharing.
No amount of replacement removes your sense of self. "You" become a machine.
I think the main thing that makes this inrealistic is the scale. In theory it also could take place on a larger level of discretization: chunks of many neurons.
I think it also matters what the nature of the replacement is. Is it possible for you to retain memories and skills throughout this intrusive process? Presumably, if the computer has "equivalent functionality".
Absolutely not sounds like a be careful what you wish for Black Mirror episode where you wake up trapped in some simulation you can’t break free from but it’s ok because you signed on the dotted line to donate your mind and body to science.
One step closer to the Bobiverse.
I'm just finishing the last one published.
It would be interesting to wake up as a Von Neumann probe.
Still, did these people completely solve the ice crystalization problem?
https://www.amazon.com/Are-Legion-Bob-Bobiverse-Book-ebook/d...
It is absolutely one of my favourite series and made Dennis E Taylor an absolute goto author for me. I also love his Outland series. I quite enjoy listening to the Bobiverse audio books especially. Anything Ray Porter narrates is usually magnificent.
this is probably one of the least efficient implementations of state persistence ever attempted, but I like it.
Nothing like a ghost pain for a ghost digital person
Are we even sure, that personality is stored solely in a brain? What if whole or other parts of body involved as well
You'd have to at least present a candidate to make such a suggestion, otherwise the simple counter is 'where else would it be?'
As far as we know, damage to no part of the body results in personality changes, changes to subjective sense of self, or the loss of memory or cognitive ability, except the brain.
There are some, not fully verified/researched, personality shifts after heart transplantations. Controversial, and I don't know if anyone tried to run some proper research with psychometrics.
Same goes with fecal transplantations for curing major depressions. Not fully researched either, and not sure if we can say that a depression qualifies as a personality trait.
'Hold that thought'
Herbert West requires extremely fresh specimens
I have no mouth and I must scream
Oh great! A new way to keep the tax base growing!
Those 50y mortgages won't pay for themselves!
Probably a good first step in life extension, I know a lot of first peeks at this came from hypothermic people. Those lessons are now used in heart surgeries to slow metabolism and limit cell deaths.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8297075/
Very cool
No thanks