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If you copy your brain digitally and let that run while you yourself die, there's no benefit to yourself. You still die. You don't get to experience longevity.

If you copy your brain digitally and let that run while you yourself die, there's no benefit to yourself. You still die. You don't get to experience longevity. What would live on is a copy of yourself that believes itself to be the same person as you were. Your yourself would have no continuity of thought. What would be needed is some way of merging yourself with a digital replica of your brain while you're still alive. I can't even begin to imagine what that would be like.

derekp7 10y ago
But doesn't that happen anyway through normal repairs that happen at the subcellular level? I have a feeling that I'm not really the same person as from years ago, I'm just some bloke who thinks he is.
sparky_z 10y ago
It would be as simple anesthetizing you, copying/uploading your brain, then euthanizing the body and "awakening" yourself in the computer. From your point of view, it would be no more discontinuous than waking up after surgery.
- vkou 10y ago
  From the point of view of your body, it would be someone giving you anesthetic, and then killing you. The copy is in no way privileged. What about this experiment: 1. We copy your brain into a computer. 2. We turn the computer on. 3. We shoot you. Would you expect that when you get shot, you'll 'wake up' inside the computer? If so, by what mechanism? If not, how does this case differ from the first? Alternatively, what if we copy your consciousness into another sleeping organic brain, and wake up both of you. What makes the new copy, but not the old one 'you'?
  - kamaal 10y ago
    This is how I look at it. You go to sleep, some one take a snapshot of your brain 'as-is' and installs it into the electronic hardware. The hardware already runs a Matrix like software. You just wake up as you wake generally after sleep. You won't even notice you've lost your biological body. Or anything strange at all! Except for whatever you've asked for. If you've asked a private disney land for yourself, you might wake up there! At this time, your biological body is irrelevant.
    - vkou 10y ago
      It's irrelevant to the digital 'you'. It's incredibly relevant to current 'you'!
  - sparky_z 10y ago
    "From the point of view of your body, it would be someone giving you anesthetic, and then killing you." The point of view of your body ends when it is anesthetized. That's the definition of "anesthetize" that I'm using here - a reversible cessation of consciousness. (Of course, if you woke it up rather than kill it, it would continue from that point on, and then there would be two of you, one in the computer, one out, whose experiences would then diverge.) "The copy is in no way privileged." Never said it was. Just the opposite, in fact. Neither the copy nor the body is privileged. "What about this experiment: ... Would you expect that when you get shot, you'll 'wake up' inside the computer? If so, by what mechanism? If not, how does this case differ from the first?" No, the other copy of you would wake up in the computer at step 2, not step 3. At that point there would be two entities with identical histories that then begin to diverge (like a git branch). Anything experienced by the physical body after step 1 would be erased after step 3, so there would be a death of a sort involved in this scenario. The anesthetization/euthanasia steps don't do anything special or magical, they just prevent that divergence from occurring. "Alternatively, what if we copy your consciousness into another sleeping organic brain, and wake up both of you. What makes the new copy, but not the old one 'you'?" Nothing. You're both you (though one of you is probably more confused than the other.) We're running up against the limits of the English language, which is why correct statements can sound so absurd. We just don't have the right pronouns for this type of consciousness split. Let me put it to you this way: Suppose that there was some sort of sufficiently-indistinguishable-from-magic device that actually "transferred" you (whatever that means to you) from an organic brain to a digital afterlife. How would the experience of that be distinguishable to you from the anesthetization/euthanasia scenario I originally described? What would be the difference, as far as the digital consciousness is concerned?
  - grondilu 10y ago
    > What makes the new copy, but not the old one 'you'? There are now two versions of "you". That's the point of making a copy.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
logfromblammo 10y ago
After watching The Prestige, I decided that I would probably not enjoy dying while an exact copy of me completely replaced me in every aspect of my former life. Then I remembered that Star Trek: the Next Generation episode in which a transporter malfunction created an exact duplicate of Cmdr. Riker, and decided I would not enjoy living while an exact copy of me took over my life, either. Between those two, I totally understand how Dr. McCoy would prefer shuttlecraft to the transporter. After seeing Primer, I decided I probably wouldn't have to worry about an exact duplicate of myself ever kidnapping or murdering me, or vice versa. But then I played Bioshock Infinite and realized that it would no longer be an exact duplicate after the divergence point, so maybe I would have to worry, and think about what might cause me to turn against me. So I'm definitely having wires plugged into my head before I die, rather than resorting to having my brain exhaustively scanned so that some emulated copy can go around pretending to be me after I'm dead (or while I'm alive). And if I ever do the latter, I'm definitely adding a feature similar to "reinitialize MAC address" when cloning a VM. If I'm ever going to wake up in a featureless white room surrounded by me, I want every last one of me to know our own serial numbers, so we can all follow my personality differentiation plan. But no matter what, I'm definitely giving my original meat-body at least a 10% discount on whatever it is that I do, for as long as it can manage to last. I'm remembering that now, so I'd better uphold my end of the deal, if I happen to end up being a digital copy later.
grondilu 10y ago
One version dies, the other lives on. The problem is that many people think only the one that dies deserved to be called "you". To me a copy that "believes it is the same person as you were" is as good as it gets. How would you tell the difference? Every morning when I wake up I am who I am because I believe so. If someone had scanned me last night while I was asleep and created a digital copy of my mind in a virtual, identical world, I wouldn't know. And if I was told someone was there and was capable of doing it, I could not even be sure he did not (seems like the same assertion, but it's not quite). People who say "it's just a copy" are suggesting there is a difference between two things they have absolutely no way to tell apart, not even in a thought experiment. They're chasing ghosts.
- zyxley 10y ago
  > The problem is that many people think only the one that dies deserved to be called "you". I see this as "well, yes, obviously, because there's no continuity of identity between the two". If I die and a perfect copy lives on, the copy is well-suited to preserve my legacy, but it's still not me.
  - grondilu 10y ago
    If a copy of you is made, there are now two persons. Both of them think they are "you" and both of them are right since being you is, by definition, a subjective experience which as such depends on a point of view.
    - kamaal 10y ago
      My guess is there will some limitation which won't allow this. There will be be cut-paste and not copy-paste function here. In short 'you' can live only at one place at a time. At any given point in time only one 'you' can be active. Or its also possible that the 'you' we describe here is just everybody else, and just gets a different shape because of individual experiences. More : http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
    - 10y ago
bumbledraven 10y ago
If you copy your brain digitally and let that run while you yourself die, there's no benefit to yourself. You still die. No, you don't die. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_death explains why. > You don't get to experience longevity. What would live on is a copy of yourself that believes itself to be the same person as you were. Your yourself would have no continuity of thought. Do you have continuity of thought before and after you undergo general anesthesia?
- CountSessine 10y ago
  Do you have continuity of thought before and after you undergo general anesthesia? Perhaps, perhaps not - but it does remove any uncertainty, doesn't it? At least with general anesthesia we can say that there is continuity of process and form; with 'digital afterlife', we don't even have that - you've been extinguished and your electronic doppleganger lives happily ever after. 'Digital afterlife' resolves any epistemelogical ambiguity but not in a happy way - it isn't you - we know that. Seems like a pretty lousy afterlife. I'd rather just be remembered.
  - zyxley 10y ago
    If the options were "die" and "die, but with an immortal digital copy", I think I'd still take the second. It wouldn't help me much personally, but zyxley-2 would be able to carry my legacy forward and (hopefully) lessen the burden of grief on others.
    - civilian 10y ago
      Might it increase the burden of grief on others? I had a hard time seeing my friend's facebook page after he died. Months and years later, it still hurts that FB suggest that I invite him to events. But I don't want to unfriend him, and I'm not sure I want to mess with Facebooks "memorial page" policy.
- wocram 10y ago
  You could ask the same question with 'sleep' instead of 'general anesthesia'. Every day we are born again (or die, if you want to look at it that way).
kndyry 10y ago
For those who might like to see this concept explored more fully, I highly recommend Greg Egan's Permutation City [0]. To quote: “Paul struggled to imagine the outside world on his own terms, but it was almost impossible. Not only was he scattered across the globe, but widely separated machines were simultaneously computing different moments of his subjective time frame. Was the distance from Tokyo to New York now the length of his corpus callosum? Had the world shrunk to the size of his skull – and vanished from time altogether, except for the fifty computers which contributed at any one time to what he called ‘the present’?” [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
kamaal 10y ago
No you don't. That 'yourself' you talk about is currently being carried around in a very fragile biological container. It will just be transferred to a fail-safe electronic container. Whatever will run 'yourself' will also have a way of having that run in a electronic simulation of your body in whatever wonderland you wish to live in digitally.
- zyxley 10y ago
  A copy of 'yourself' would be transferred. The original 'yourself' is still there.
nickparker 10y ago
I like the idea of merging with a replica then slowly turning off the original. In reality there's simply no way around it, we're going to die someday because these chunks of meat degrade. If you accept that which I readily admit I haven't yet myself, your question should be "how would I like to die?" I would very much like to be connected to a computer and have little chunks of my brain slowly swapped out for processes on the computer so that I can experience almost all of the transition along with the new me. I'll still hit the edge and fade to black at some point in the process, but the process seems at-least-as-good as every other choice in death.
AgentME 10y ago
Plagiarizing an older comment of mine... >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. None of those are necessarily an issue if an accurate digital copy of me continues on. Worrying about continuity sounds to me like worrying about whether you're the same person after sleeping.
- dTal 10y ago
  The analogy with sleep is even more apt when you consider that we forget our dreams, mostly. Not only is there no "continuity of thought", there are actual forks in consciousness analogous to brain uploading. Not caring if a digital copy of yourself lives on because "you" are still dead is like not caring if you're still alive when you wake up because either way, your "dream self" dies.

derekp7 10y ago

But doesn't that happen anyway through normal repairs that happen at the subcellular level? I have a feeling that I'm not really the same person as from years ago, I'm just some bloke who thinks he is.

sparky_z 10y ago

It would be as simple anesthetizing you, copying/uploading your brain, then euthanizing the body and "awakening" yourself in the computer. From your point of view, it would be no more discontinuous than waking up after surgery.

vkou 10y ago
From the point of view of your body, it would be someone giving you anesthetic, and then killing you. The copy is in no way privileged. What about this experiment: 1. We copy your brain into a computer. 2. We turn the computer on. 3. We shoot you. Would you expect that when you get shot, you'll 'wake up' inside the computer? If so, by what mechanism? If not, how does this case differ from the first? Alternatively, what if we copy your consciousness into another sleeping organic brain, and wake up both of you. What makes the new copy, but not the old one 'you'?
- kamaal 10y ago
  This is how I look at it. You go to sleep, some one take a snapshot of your brain 'as-is' and installs it into the electronic hardware. The hardware already runs a Matrix like software. You just wake up as you wake generally after sleep. You won't even notice you've lost your biological body. Or anything strange at all! Except for whatever you've asked for. If you've asked a private disney land for yourself, you might wake up there! At this time, your biological body is irrelevant.
  - vkou 10y ago
    It's irrelevant to the digital 'you'. It's incredibly relevant to current 'you'!
- sparky_z 10y ago
  "From the point of view of your body, it would be someone giving you anesthetic, and then killing you." The point of view of your body ends when it is anesthetized. That's the definition of "anesthetize" that I'm using here - a reversible cessation of consciousness. (Of course, if you woke it up rather than kill it, it would continue from that point on, and then there would be two of you, one in the computer, one out, whose experiences would then diverge.) "The copy is in no way privileged." Never said it was. Just the opposite, in fact. Neither the copy nor the body is privileged. "What about this experiment: ... Would you expect that when you get shot, you'll 'wake up' inside the computer? If so, by what mechanism? If not, how does this case differ from the first?" No, the other copy of you would wake up in the computer at step 2, not step 3. At that point there would be two entities with identical histories that then begin to diverge (like a git branch). Anything experienced by the physical body after step 1 would be erased after step 3, so there would be a death of a sort involved in this scenario. The anesthetization/euthanasia steps don't do anything special or magical, they just prevent that divergence from occurring. "Alternatively, what if we copy your consciousness into another sleeping organic brain, and wake up both of you. What makes the new copy, but not the old one 'you'?" Nothing. You're both you (though one of you is probably more confused than the other.) We're running up against the limits of the English language, which is why correct statements can sound so absurd. We just don't have the right pronouns for this type of consciousness split. Let me put it to you this way: Suppose that there was some sort of sufficiently-indistinguishable-from-magic device that actually "transferred" you (whatever that means to you) from an organic brain to a digital afterlife. How would the experience of that be distinguishable to you from the anesthetization/euthanasia scenario I originally described? What would be the difference, as far as the digital consciousness is concerned?
- grondilu 10y ago
  > What makes the new copy, but not the old one 'you'? There are now two versions of "you". That's the point of making a copy.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

logfromblammo 10y ago

After watching The Prestige, I decided that I would probably not enjoy dying while an exact copy of me completely replaced me in every aspect of my former life. Then I remembered that Star Trek: the Next Generation episode in which a transporter malfunction created an exact duplicate of Cmdr. Riker, and decided I would not enjoy living while an exact copy of me took over my life, either. Between those two, I totally understand how Dr. McCoy would prefer shuttlecraft to the transporter. After seeing Primer, I decided I probably wouldn't have to worry about an exact duplicate of myself ever kidnapping or murdering me, or vice versa. But then I played Bioshock Infinite and realized that it would no longer be an exact duplicate after the divergence point, so maybe I would have to worry, and think about what might cause me to turn against me. So I'm definitely having wires plugged into my head before I die, rather than resorting to having my brain exhaustively scanned so that some emulated copy can go around pretending to be me after I'm dead (or while I'm alive). And if I ever do the latter, I'm definitely adding a feature similar to "reinitialize MAC address" when cloning a VM. If I'm ever going to wake up in a featureless white room surrounded by me, I want every last one of me to know our own serial numbers, so we can all follow my personality differentiation plan. But no matter what, I'm definitely giving my original meat-body at least a 10% discount on whatever it is that I do, for as long as it can manage to last. I'm remembering that now, so I'd better uphold my end of the deal, if I happen to end up being a digital copy later.

grondilu 10y ago

One version dies, the other lives on. The problem is that many people think only the one that dies deserved to be called "you". To me a copy that "believes it is the same person as you were" is as good as it gets. How would you tell the difference? Every morning when I wake up I am who I am because I believe so. If someone had scanned me last night while I was asleep and created a digital copy of my mind in a virtual, identical world, I wouldn't know. And if I was told someone was there and was capable of doing it, I could not even be sure he did not (seems like the same assertion, but it's not quite). People who say "it's just a copy" are suggesting there is a difference between two things they have absolutely no way to tell apart, not even in a thought experiment. They're chasing ghosts.

zyxley 10y ago
> The problem is that many people think only the one that dies deserved to be called "you". I see this as "well, yes, obviously, because there's no continuity of identity between the two". If I die and a perfect copy lives on, the copy is well-suited to preserve my legacy, but it's still not me.
- grondilu 10y ago
  If a copy of you is made, there are now two persons. Both of them think they are "you" and both of them are right since being you is, by definition, a subjective experience which as such depends on a point of view.
  - kamaal 10y ago
    My guess is there will some limitation which won't allow this. There will be be cut-paste and not copy-paste function here. In short 'you' can live only at one place at a time. At any given point in time only one 'you' can be active. Or its also possible that the 'you' we describe here is just everybody else, and just gets a different shape because of individual experiences. More : http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
  - 10y ago

bumbledraven 10y ago

If you copy your brain digitally and let that run while you yourself die, there's no benefit to yourself. You still die. No, you don't die. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_death explains why. > You don't get to experience longevity. What would live on is a copy of yourself that believes itself to be the same person as you were. Your yourself would have no continuity of thought. Do you have continuity of thought before and after you undergo general anesthesia?

CountSessine 10y ago
Do you have continuity of thought before and after you undergo general anesthesia? Perhaps, perhaps not - but it does remove any uncertainty, doesn't it? At least with general anesthesia we can say that there is continuity of process and form; with 'digital afterlife', we don't even have that - you've been extinguished and your electronic doppleganger lives happily ever after. 'Digital afterlife' resolves any epistemelogical ambiguity but not in a happy way - it isn't you - we know that. Seems like a pretty lousy afterlife. I'd rather just be remembered.
- zyxley 10y ago
  If the options were "die" and "die, but with an immortal digital copy", I think I'd still take the second. It wouldn't help me much personally, but zyxley-2 would be able to carry my legacy forward and (hopefully) lessen the burden of grief on others.
  - civilian 10y ago
    Might it increase the burden of grief on others? I had a hard time seeing my friend's facebook page after he died. Months and years later, it still hurts that FB suggest that I invite him to events. But I don't want to unfriend him, and I'm not sure I want to mess with Facebooks "memorial page" policy.
wocram 10y ago
You could ask the same question with 'sleep' instead of 'general anesthesia'. Every day we are born again (or die, if you want to look at it that way).

kndyry 10y ago

For those who might like to see this concept explored more fully, I highly recommend Greg Egan's Permutation City [0]. To quote: “Paul struggled to imagine the outside world on his own terms, but it was almost impossible. Not only was he scattered across the globe, but widely separated machines were simultaneously computing different moments of his subjective time frame. Was the distance from Tokyo to New York now the length of his corpus callosum? Had the world shrunk to the size of his skull – and vanished from time altogether, except for the fifty computers which contributed at any one time to what he called ‘the present’?” [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

kamaal 10y ago

No you don't. That 'yourself' you talk about is currently being carried around in a very fragile biological container. It will just be transferred to a fail-safe electronic container. Whatever will run 'yourself' will also have a way of having that run in a electronic simulation of your body in whatever wonderland you wish to live in digitally.

zyxley 10y ago
A copy of 'yourself' would be transferred. The original 'yourself' is still there.

nickparker 10y ago

I like the idea of merging with a replica then slowly turning off the original. In reality there's simply no way around it, we're going to die someday because these chunks of meat degrade. If you accept that which I readily admit I haven't yet myself, your question should be "how would I like to die?" I would very much like to be connected to a computer and have little chunks of my brain slowly swapped out for processes on the computer so that I can experience almost all of the transition along with the new me. I'll still hit the edge and fade to black at some point in the process, but the process seems at-least-as-good as every other choice in death.

AgentME 10y ago

Plagiarizing an older comment of mine... >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. None of those are necessarily an issue if an accurate digital copy of me continues on. Worrying about continuity sounds to me like worrying about whether you're the same person after sleeping.

dTal 10y ago
The analogy with sleep is even more apt when you consider that we forget our dreams, mostly. Not only is there no "continuity of thought", there are actual forks in consciousness analogous to brain uploading. Not caring if a digital copy of yourself lives on because "you" are still dead is like not caring if you're still alive when you wake up because either way, your "dream self" dies.