4 ms·

I have wondered, in a consciousness transfer scenario, if we can really ever ascertain whether the consciousness is actually transferred or, as I fear is the ca

by rue 16y ago

I have wondered, in a consciousness transfer scenario, if we can really ever ascertain whether the consciousness is actually transferred or, as I fear is the case, a new consciousness is created and the old one lost. I assume someone has written a long treatise on the subject, but I have not considered the subject pressing enough to actually research it.

philwelch 16y ago
It's one of those weird philosophical questions. The sad part is, there's no possible empirical answer--transferring my memories to a robot, the robot would believe it was me and any test you could possibly devise would confirm that the robot was me, but regarding my subjective experience inside this soggy bag of meat, who knows whether that continues inside the robot or just ends? EDIT: Useful thought experiment from philosophy, devised during the time Ronald Reagan was still alive. Suppose someone told you that they would take you, erase your memories from your brain, upload Ronald Reagan's memories, and then torture the inhabitant of your body. How willing are you to say, "go ahead! You'll just be torturing Ronald Reagan, not me!"? Personally, I'm not so willing.
- ThomPete 16y ago
  Exactly. Peter F. Hamilton explores this in "The Reality Dysfunction". Although it's Sci-Fi and a space-opera it's it illustrates the problem pretty well.
- antipaganda 16y ago
  Actually, I'd say "Torture? What? Don't torture anyone! Even Reagan! Damn!" Then I'd quite rightly get thrown out of the thought experiment for involving the Golden Rule without a licence.
- _delirium 16y ago
  For minor surgeries these days, like when I had my wisdom teeth removed, a common combination is a local anesthetic plus a drug, midazolam, that temporarily prevents forming new memories. Patients are conscious and responsive during the operation, but don't remember being conscious; in retrospect they remember it as if they had been knocked out with general anesthetic. An odd thought experiment: if the local anesthesia hadn't worked well and I was actually feeling pain, do I care in retrospect? I sort of don't, I think, oddly enough. I don't remember it, so it doesn't really matter to me either way. I mean, I wouldn't want to see a video of myself experiencing pain, but so long as I neither remember it nor ever have to see it, somehow it doesn't matter to me a whole lot.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    Well, yeah--after the fact, it doesn't really matter if you experienced terrible pain that you didn't remember. But by that argument it's fine to torture babies, since they won't remember it. The question is whether, before the fact, you would go into minor surgery without anesthetic at all knowing perfectly well that you would forget all of the pain afterwards. Maybe you would if it was the best option, but I would wince in anticipation.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      Yeah, I think I would wince at it, but I don't think I'd be that opposed. Somehow to me the idea of pain that I know up front I'll never remember isn't all that frightening a prospect, though I suppose I'd still avoid it given the option. It feels almost as if it's really just my body that'll experience pain, not "me", in the sense that I won't remember anything about it, it'll have no lingering traumatic effects, won't be an experience that'll do anything to shape my personality, etc. I'd definitely be much less apprehensive about it than if I knew I would remember it.
      - philwelch 16y ago
        Hence the eternal philosophical problem with thought experiments (or "intuition pumps" as some people call them)--different people have different intuitions so maybe your thought experiment won't even make sense to them :)
rms 16y ago
Yudkowsky's quantum physics sequence addresses this question. http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/ It's long and hard to understand, but easier to understand than other explanations of quantum physics. You can skip right to the answer, though you may not accept it without having understood the background. http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/ >If you can see the moments of now braided into time, the causal dependencies of future states on past states, the high-level pattern of synapses and the internal narrative as a computation within it - if you can viscerally dispel the classical hallucination of a little billiard ball that is you, and see your nows strung out in the river that never flows - then you can see that signing up for cryonics, being vitrified in liquid nitrogen when you die, and having your brain nanotechnologically reconstructed fifty years later, is actually less of a change than going to sleep, dreaming, and forgetting your dreams when you wake up.
mojuba 16y ago
I assume by "consciousness" you mean self-awareness. A similar paradox is viewed within the context of quantum replication, i.e. an aboslute precise material copy of your body is created, maybe even more than one, so the question is, what happens to your "I", your self-awareness in that case. One approach is to say "it doesn't matter" because self-awareness is illusory. It doesn't exist in the same sense as matter or fields. What does exist in your mind is memory of all state transitions ever happened in your brain. It's like a linked list going back, where each element is a state of the brain. That chain is mistaken for something that exists, whereas it's just a logically linked list of some data. You are nothing but information.
savemylife 16y ago
An excellent video short on the subject, by John Weldon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc
Rhapso 16y ago
Allow me to expand upon your fear. Our brains are constantly changing in location and constituent atoms, only the pattern of their order and perhaps a hyper-dimensional line of its travel remain constant. So if you are worried about consciousness transferring from meat body to artificial body, it is more pressing to worry about your consciousness transferring from the body you had a moment ago to this one.
randallsquared 16y ago
Hans Moravec wrote a book, _Mind Children_, in which he provided a thought experiment where consciousness could be transfered even by the standards of a process-partisan (as opposed to pattern partisans, for whom every sufficiently like mind is really them). The idea is to do the transfer in real time, building a copy of a tiny portion of the brain, then running the copy-portion in parallel with the original-portion until it's producing the same output given the same input. At that point, you can reroute control through the copy (running at the same speed as the rest of your brain), and remove the brain matter that was copied. If you do this to pieces small enough that the loss of each piece would still leave you essentially you, the whole procedure can smoothly transfer your consciousness into a brain simulation while you're awake and feeling like yourself.

by rue 16y ago

philwelch 16y ago

It's one of those weird philosophical questions. The sad part is, there's no possible empirical answer--transferring my memories to a robot, the robot would believe it was me and any test you could possibly devise would confirm that the robot was me, but regarding my subjective experience inside this soggy bag of meat, who knows whether that continues inside the robot or just ends? EDIT: Useful thought experiment from philosophy, devised during the time Ronald Reagan was still alive. Suppose someone told you that they would take you, erase your memories from your brain, upload Ronald Reagan's memories, and then torture the inhabitant of your body. How willing are you to say, "go ahead! You'll just be torturing Ronald Reagan, not me!"? Personally, I'm not so willing.

ThomPete 16y ago
Exactly. Peter F. Hamilton explores this in "The Reality Dysfunction". Although it's Sci-Fi and a space-opera it's it illustrates the problem pretty well.
antipaganda 16y ago
Actually, I'd say "Torture? What? Don't torture anyone! Even Reagan! Damn!" Then I'd quite rightly get thrown out of the thought experiment for involving the Golden Rule without a licence.
_delirium 16y ago
For minor surgeries these days, like when I had my wisdom teeth removed, a common combination is a local anesthetic plus a drug, midazolam, that temporarily prevents forming new memories. Patients are conscious and responsive during the operation, but don't remember being conscious; in retrospect they remember it as if they had been knocked out with general anesthetic. An odd thought experiment: if the local anesthesia hadn't worked well and I was actually feeling pain, do I care in retrospect? I sort of don't, I think, oddly enough. I don't remember it, so it doesn't really matter to me either way. I mean, I wouldn't want to see a video of myself experiencing pain, but so long as I neither remember it nor ever have to see it, somehow it doesn't matter to me a whole lot.
- philwelch 16y ago
  Well, yeah--after the fact, it doesn't really matter if you experienced terrible pain that you didn't remember. But by that argument it's fine to torture babies, since they won't remember it. The question is whether, before the fact, you would go into minor surgery without anesthetic at all knowing perfectly well that you would forget all of the pain afterwards. Maybe you would if it was the best option, but I would wince in anticipation.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    Yeah, I think I would wince at it, but I don't think I'd be that opposed. Somehow to me the idea of pain that I know up front I'll never remember isn't all that frightening a prospect, though I suppose I'd still avoid it given the option. It feels almost as if it's really just my body that'll experience pain, not "me", in the sense that I won't remember anything about it, it'll have no lingering traumatic effects, won't be an experience that'll do anything to shape my personality, etc. I'd definitely be much less apprehensive about it than if I knew I would remember it.
    - philwelch 16y ago
      Hence the eternal philosophical problem with thought experiments (or "intuition pumps" as some people call them)--different people have different intuitions so maybe your thought experiment won't even make sense to them :)

rms 16y ago

Yudkowsky's quantum physics sequence addresses this question. http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/ It's long and hard to understand, but easier to understand than other explanations of quantum physics. You can skip right to the answer, though you may not accept it without having understood the background. http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/ >If you can see the moments of now braided into time, the causal dependencies of future states on past states, the high-level pattern of synapses and the internal narrative as a computation within it - if you can viscerally dispel the classical hallucination of a little billiard ball that is you, and see your nows strung out in the river that never flows - then you can see that signing up for cryonics, being vitrified in liquid nitrogen when you die, and having your brain nanotechnologically reconstructed fifty years later, is actually less of a change than going to sleep, dreaming, and forgetting your dreams when you wake up.

mojuba 16y ago

I assume by "consciousness" you mean self-awareness. A similar paradox is viewed within the context of quantum replication, i.e. an aboslute precise material copy of your body is created, maybe even more than one, so the question is, what happens to your "I", your self-awareness in that case. One approach is to say "it doesn't matter" because self-awareness is illusory. It doesn't exist in the same sense as matter or fields. What does exist in your mind is memory of all state transitions ever happened in your brain. It's like a linked list going back, where each element is a state of the brain. That chain is mistaken for something that exists, whereas it's just a logically linked list of some data. You are nothing but information.

savemylife 16y ago

An excellent video short on the subject, by John Weldon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc

Rhapso 16y ago

Allow me to expand upon your fear. Our brains are constantly changing in location and constituent atoms, only the pattern of their order and perhaps a hyper-dimensional line of its travel remain constant. So if you are worried about consciousness transferring from meat body to artificial body, it is more pressing to worry about your consciousness transferring from the body you had a moment ago to this one.

randallsquared 16y ago

Hans Moravec wrote a book, _Mind Children_, in which he provided a thought experiment where consciousness could be transfered even by the standards of a process-partisan (as opposed to pattern partisans, for whom every sufficiently like mind is really them). The idea is to do the transfer in real time, building a copy of a tiny portion of the brain, then running the copy-portion in parallel with the original-portion until it's producing the same output given the same input. At that point, you can reroute control through the copy (running at the same speed as the rest of your brain), and remove the brain matter that was copied. If you do this to pieces small enough that the loss of each piece would still leave you essentially you, the whole procedure can smoothly transfer your consciousness into a brain simulation while you're awake and feeling like yourself.