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It's an interesting problem, but I don't feel like this page accomplished much besides calling a position he disagreed with a fallacy and using unexplained appe

by AgentME 10y ago

It's an interesting problem, but I don't feel like this page accomplished much besides calling a position he disagreed with a fallacy and using unexplained appeals to emotion. >To refute this, let’s conduct a thought experiment. Pretend that you can copy a human brain. There are ten copies of me. They are all individually conscious — perfect replicas that only diverge after the point when replication happened. Is it okay to kill five of these copies? No, of course not! Each one is a self-aware, intelligent mind, human in everything but body. The identicalness doesn’t change that. The things that scare me about death are the ideas that my specific goals would be left unpursued, that my responsibilities would be abandoned, my friends would lose my friendship, and that my memories and experiences would lose their significance upon the world. If an alien came to Earth with a perfect matter-duplicater (that I have reason to fully trust), duplicated me such that I'm not even sure which is the original, then remembers that he's not allowed to use it on humans, and explains he needs to painlessly euthanize and disassemble one of me, I wouldn't be particularly shaken up by it. Sure, I'd feel I was teased with a cool toy and possibility, but the only injury that has happened is in a way equivalent to a few seconds of memory loss. I've done worse to myself by drinking. There were no big life experiences lost or goals left unpursued. --- Going a little further... if I were an AI or could somehow copy myself, I imagine I would frequently make short-lived copies to work together with to accomplish my goals. I as my copies would be told that I'm going to be removed in a few days; I think I could handle the idea of knowing the surviving-me is going to be amnesic to my several days of (probably barely)unique experiences in a world much closer to our goals. In a world where everyone or all AIs could do the above, I imagine the minds who did the above would become much more successful in nearly all endeavors. Choosing not to do so would be choosing to fail, unless the strategy was made illegal. I struggle to fault the strategy morally given that it would be something done by a single consenting individual to themselves, though it does still sound a little weird to my instincts about how survival is supposed to work. If we encountered otherwise similar aliens which already worked that way, would we judge them, or only consider it an abomination when humans did it to themselves? I'm a bit disappointed that I haven't seen much sci-fi explore concepts like this.

deleted 10y ago
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fixermark 10y ago
The long-running space opera comic "Schlock Mercenary" actually has treatments of this topic that are frequently clever (and humorous). As example, here [http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2004-08-23 http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2004-08-23] is an instance of an AI making copies of itself to act as the smart guidance in warship-killing high-energy munitions. If the munition survives impact, it can be refurbished and used again; if not, the AI shard dumps a 'gestalt' of new experiences back to the core before the munition breaks up. Since the AI copies are crafted by the master AI, they don't generally exhibit divergence from its will or an independent survival instinct.
gervase 10y ago
This is something I've thought about frequently, and I completely agree. The "purpose" of my existence would be maintained, so why would I care which one you choose? We all do this without thought on a daily basis with files on our filesystem. A particular document encodes a set of information; if we duplicate that document, we now have two identical copies of the same information. By the original author's argument, they are unique and distinct, because they occupy different blocks on our storage medium! But common sense makes it clear that which one we delete doesn't matter, because they serve the same purpose - provided that we preserve at least one copy. (To those that argue that the file system metaphor is flawed, because consciousness is "different" or "special" in some way, I reference the inverse of Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from technology.) Now, if those documents continue to evolve and change over time, such that they no longer match, now you are left with a version control problem, and one that seems to be nigh-impossible to solve with a consciousness. In my opinion, this is a situation worth avoiding if we can, as it becomes very sticky very quickly, since the uniqueness of the experiences produces an infinite gradient that makes deciding on an appropriate cutoff of termination very difficult. As for the continuity of thought, we certainly don't see falling asleep at the end of the day as the "death" of our current consciousness, or waking up in the morning as the "birth" of our new consciousness, despite the (perceived) discontinuity. So why would your source or target self perceive it that way? Fortunately, regardless of how you feel about the whole "continuity of thought" argument, the solution is very simple - users would simply not be required to make use of these new products/services. Don't want to get faxed to Mars? No problem! Users are not currently required to make copies of files, or transmit files, or make backups of files, after all. Anyway, that was longer than I had intended. Hopefully someone finds that somewhat interesting, although I suppose it's really all moot anyway until we're even remotely close to the technology required to implement this.

by AgentME 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

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fixermark 10y ago

The long-running space opera comic "Schlock Mercenary" actually has treatments of this topic that are frequently clever (and humorous). As example, here [http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2004-08-23 http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2004-08-23] is an instance of an AI making copies of itself to act as the smart guidance in warship-killing high-energy munitions. If the munition survives impact, it can be refurbished and used again; if not, the AI shard dumps a 'gestalt' of new experiences back to the core before the munition breaks up. Since the AI copies are crafted by the master AI, they don't generally exhibit divergence from its will or an independent survival instinct.

gervase 10y ago

This is something I've thought about frequently, and I completely agree. The "purpose" of my existence would be maintained, so why would I care which one you choose? We all do this without thought on a daily basis with files on our filesystem. A particular document encodes a set of information; if we duplicate that document, we now have two identical copies of the same information. By the original author's argument, they are unique and distinct, because they occupy different blocks on our storage medium! But common sense makes it clear that which one we delete doesn't matter, because they serve the same purpose - provided that we preserve at least one copy. (To those that argue that the file system metaphor is flawed, because consciousness is "different" or "special" in some way, I reference the inverse of Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from technology.) Now, if those documents continue to evolve and change over time, such that they no longer match, now you are left with a version control problem, and one that seems to be nigh-impossible to solve with a consciousness. In my opinion, this is a situation worth avoiding if we can, as it becomes very sticky very quickly, since the uniqueness of the experiences produces an infinite gradient that makes deciding on an appropriate cutoff of termination very difficult. As for the continuity of thought, we certainly don't see falling asleep at the end of the day as the "death" of our current consciousness, or waking up in the morning as the "birth" of our new consciousness, despite the (perceived) discontinuity. So why would your source or target self perceive it that way? Fortunately, regardless of how you feel about the whole "continuity of thought" argument, the solution is very simple - users would simply not be required to make use of these new products/services. Don't want to get faxed to Mars? No problem! Users are not currently required to make copies of files, or transmit files, or make backups of files, after all. Anyway, that was longer than I had intended. Hopefully someone finds that somewhat interesting, although I suppose it's really all moot anyway until we're even remotely close to the technology required to implement this.