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In the case when you die, but your brain still exists, and it starts processing it again in a new host (computer or organic), isn't that not you anymore? Why wo

In the case when you die, but your brain still exists, and it starts processing it again in a new host (computer or organic), isn't that not you anymore? Why would my former self want that? Is this a solved philosophical problem for which literature exists?

monitron 9y ago
I feel the same way. There's a scene in the book Old Man's War by John Scalzi which drives this point home in a way that has really stuck with me.
aurellem 9y ago
If you want to get into some of the literature around mind uploading, I'd start with some of Daniel Dennett's work such as "Consciousness Explained". If you think that it's possible for a computer program to have its own sense of self, then it's interesting to think about what it would feel like for that program to be stopped, copied to a new computer, and then started again. There's definitely a lot of literature and debate around these issues!
- rosser 9y ago
  I'm not sure that a book written by a dude whose position is basically, "the direct experience you have of your own consciousness is an illusion" is necessarily the best choice for exploring what a "sense of self" or "mind" are all about. "Consciousness Explained" should really have been titled "Consciousness Explained Away".
macintux 9y ago
This question descends from an ancient philosophical question; see the Ship of Theseus[0]. CGP Grey has a good look at the question wrt Star Trek teleportation[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus [1] https://youtu.be/nQHBAdShgYI https://youtu.be/nQHBAdShgYI
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
BrandonY 9y ago
Well, maybe. This is Ship of Theseus situation. The good news is that, from the perspective of the new you, everything went great, and the old you doesn't have a perspective, so that's a 100% endorsement rate.
pnloyd 9y ago
There's a game called Soma which has a plot that largely revolves around this question. You play as a man who wakes up mysteriously in an underwater facility as a circumstantial consequence of a "brain scan" you took 100 or so years ago. The "is it still me?" question pops up over and over throughout the game. It's incredibly thought provoking.
sushid 9y ago
What if you think of it like "I wish I could give my kids advice even when I'm long gone" or "would I wish to care for the well being of a son/daughter I never knew I had?" If so, what if that kid was 100% your genes instead of 50%?
Tehnix 9y ago
For a more casual experience, yet still filled with interesting questions, you could check out Ghost in the Shell, the anime (unfortunately, the movie largely skips going into this in any serious way).
kerkeslager 9y ago
> In the case when you die, but your brain still exists, and it starts processing it again in a new host (computer or organic), isn't that not you anymore? I've yet to come across any evidence of a "self" that exists outside a brain. > Is this a solved philosophical problem for which literature exists? It's a problem that was hypothesized (and not solved) by philosophy, but as far as I know there's no evidence the problem exists. You can hypothesize any number of problems but if there isn't any evidence they exist, there's not much urgency in solving these problems. What if invisible monsters are breeding all around us and building up numbers before they wipe out the human race? There's equal evidence that this could be happening, and the consequences are more immediately dire, so perhaps we should discuss that first?
- grkvlt 9y ago
  > invisible monsters are breeding all around us [...] before they wipe out the human race See also, the germ theory of disease.[0] I think we have this covered already... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
    Haha fair enough.
- projektir 9y ago
  This is really NOT the topic that most people are OK handwaving away simply because the evidence isn't there, because this topic is older than the concept of science itself and it's the #1 thing that gives anything around here any meaning whatsoever. Inventing the scientific method doesn't mean you get a carte blanche to call invalid everything you haven't gotten around to understanding with it. This is not a solved problem and if someone gets this tech it's going to become an issue. A political issue, not a scientific one, because this one is in the region of politics, science doesn't know what's going on here.
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
leggomylibro 9y ago
If you're interested in that question, you might want to take a look at a game called SOMA.
ajuc 9y ago
Is it still you when you wake up every day? What about after general anesthesia? You only know you are you because of your memories. The future brain will have the memories, so it will think it's you, just like you think today that you are the same you that were awake 3 days ago and 10 years ago. Are you afraid of nonexistence when you fall asleep, and envy the tommorow's you that he will live in your body and get to see what the future brings? I don't think there's much difference between these scenarios - the conciousness is interrupted in both cases.
- ericb 9y ago
  I think there is. If you cloned me while I'm sleeping and I never knew about it, you could torture and kill the other "me" and I'd be none the wiser, so that definitely seems like it isn't "me" because for whatever definition of me that I have, it involves this particular instance of conscious experience. Other conscious experiences, even if they are similar, are not me if they don't share my conscious experiences. Programming wise, I'm an instance of an object, not a class.
  - gagege 9y ago
    This is the part I'm always surprised people don't seem to get. If someone makes an exact copy of me, the original me is still going to think "I'm me. That other thing is a copy of me." So, if the original me has to die for the clone to be created... unless my consciousness somehow jumps to the clone, I experience a death which I do not come back from.
    - ajuc 9y ago
      > unless my consciousness somehow jumps to the clone You don't have conciousness when you sleep (at least during some parts of it). Your conciousness disappears every night for several hours and is recreated every morning. Why is it not a problem, but when there is 2 of you - it suddenly becomes a problem? If you were sleeping while someone made a clone - would that make it OK? If no - why? There's no evidence of anything external that has to "jump".
tvanantwerp 9y ago
Depends whether you define yourself as your molecules, or the particular patterns those molecules have taken.
acrefoot 9y ago
There are a couple of scenarios that might be helpful to consider, as they are examples of mental discontinuity in use today. I cannot convince you of the semantics of "not you" vs "still you", because I think this question is too ambiguous to address satisfactorily. - general anesthesia is definitely, to some extent a discontinuity of consciousness. You lose time. - more extremely, Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest actually (temporarily) causes brain death by cooling the body to between 10˚C and 20˚C. All brain activity ceases for the duration of this deep hypothermia. Are there risks to these practices? Definitely. Some may argue that someone who undergoes general anesthesia isn't the same person. But I would argue that it is, despite the discontinuity, and despite some risk of personality changes.
sulam 9y ago
This feels straightforward to me. The you that is now, pre-preservation, will be dead. The you that is then, post-restoration, will be alive and believe and behave as if they are you. It's convenient that this process (as described) kills you, because that simplifies things quite a lot. Scanning is more complicated, and I suspect if technology ever arrives that allows for it we will treat such scans as "heirs of the body" -- meaning they will only have such assets as you give them, although of course the IRS will still find a way to get them to pay your taxes.
- sulam 9y ago
  Oh, and one more case that's interesting -- we know the "embalming" process fixes things such that you are now dead. However we don't know what the reading process looks like yet. If _that_ is non-destructive (and I can't think of any way that it _wouldn't_ be effectively non-destructive, since any transformation should be amenable to duplication), then you could be resurrected an infinite number of times. I haven't thought about that very hard, but it raises fascinating possibilities.
  - sulam 9y ago
    The more I think about this the more I think it has some really wild implications. The earliest restores are likely to be less high fidelity than later restores, just because that's the nature of technology (getting better over time). Does this mean that later restores will somehow be "more authoritative" than previous? Who knows?!

monitron 9y ago

I feel the same way. There's a scene in the book Old Man's War by John Scalzi which drives this point home in a way that has really stuck with me.

aurellem 9y ago

If you want to get into some of the literature around mind uploading, I'd start with some of Daniel Dennett's work such as "Consciousness Explained". If you think that it's possible for a computer program to have its own sense of self, then it's interesting to think about what it would feel like for that program to be stopped, copied to a new computer, and then started again. There's definitely a lot of literature and debate around these issues!

rosser 9y ago
I'm not sure that a book written by a dude whose position is basically, "the direct experience you have of your own consciousness is an illusion" is necessarily the best choice for exploring what a "sense of self" or "mind" are all about. "Consciousness Explained" should really have been titled "Consciousness Explained Away".

macintux 9y ago

This question descends from an ancient philosophical question; see the Ship of Theseus[0]. CGP Grey has a good look at the question wrt Star Trek teleportation[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus [1] https://youtu.be/nQHBAdShgYI https://youtu.be/nQHBAdShgYI

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

BrandonY 9y ago

Well, maybe. This is Ship of Theseus situation. The good news is that, from the perspective of the new you, everything went great, and the old you doesn't have a perspective, so that's a 100% endorsement rate.

pnloyd 9y ago

There's a game called Soma which has a plot that largely revolves around this question. You play as a man who wakes up mysteriously in an underwater facility as a circumstantial consequence of a "brain scan" you took 100 or so years ago. The "is it still me?" question pops up over and over throughout the game. It's incredibly thought provoking.

sushid 9y ago

What if you think of it like "I wish I could give my kids advice even when I'm long gone" or "would I wish to care for the well being of a son/daughter I never knew I had?" If so, what if that kid was 100% your genes instead of 50%?

Tehnix 9y ago

For a more casual experience, yet still filled with interesting questions, you could check out Ghost in the Shell, the anime (unfortunately, the movie largely skips going into this in any serious way).

kerkeslager 9y ago

> In the case when you die, but your brain still exists, and it starts processing it again in a new host (computer or organic), isn't that not you anymore? I've yet to come across any evidence of a "self" that exists outside a brain. > Is this a solved philosophical problem for which literature exists? It's a problem that was hypothesized (and not solved) by philosophy, but as far as I know there's no evidence the problem exists. You can hypothesize any number of problems but if there isn't any evidence they exist, there's not much urgency in solving these problems. What if invisible monsters are breeding all around us and building up numbers before they wipe out the human race? There's equal evidence that this could be happening, and the consequences are more immediately dire, so perhaps we should discuss that first?

grkvlt 9y ago
> invisible monsters are breeding all around us [...] before they wipe out the human race See also, the germ theory of disease.[0] I think we have this covered already... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  Haha fair enough.
projektir 9y ago
This is really NOT the topic that most people are OK handwaving away simply because the evidence isn't there, because this topic is older than the concept of science itself and it's the #1 thing that gives anything around here any meaning whatsoever. Inventing the scientific method doesn't mean you get a carte blanche to call invalid everything you haven't gotten around to understanding with it. This is not a solved problem and if someone gets this tech it's going to become an issue. A political issue, not a scientific one, because this one is in the region of politics, science doesn't know what's going on here.
- kerkeslager 9y ago

leggomylibro 9y ago

If you're interested in that question, you might want to take a look at a game called SOMA.

ajuc 9y ago

Is it still you when you wake up every day? What about after general anesthesia? You only know you are you because of your memories. The future brain will have the memories, so it will think it's you, just like you think today that you are the same you that were awake 3 days ago and 10 years ago. Are you afraid of nonexistence when you fall asleep, and envy the tommorow's you that he will live in your body and get to see what the future brings? I don't think there's much difference between these scenarios - the conciousness is interrupted in both cases.

ericb 9y ago
I think there is. If you cloned me while I'm sleeping and I never knew about it, you could torture and kill the other "me" and I'd be none the wiser, so that definitely seems like it isn't "me" because for whatever definition of me that I have, it involves this particular instance of conscious experience. Other conscious experiences, even if they are similar, are not me if they don't share my conscious experiences. Programming wise, I'm an instance of an object, not a class.
- gagege 9y ago
  This is the part I'm always surprised people don't seem to get. If someone makes an exact copy of me, the original me is still going to think "I'm me. That other thing is a copy of me." So, if the original me has to die for the clone to be created... unless my consciousness somehow jumps to the clone, I experience a death which I do not come back from.
  - ajuc 9y ago
    > unless my consciousness somehow jumps to the clone You don't have conciousness when you sleep (at least during some parts of it). Your conciousness disappears every night for several hours and is recreated every morning. Why is it not a problem, but when there is 2 of you - it suddenly becomes a problem? If you were sleeping while someone made a clone - would that make it OK? If no - why? There's no evidence of anything external that has to "jump".

tvanantwerp 9y ago

Depends whether you define yourself as your molecules, or the particular patterns those molecules have taken.

acrefoot 9y ago

There are a couple of scenarios that might be helpful to consider, as they are examples of mental discontinuity in use today. I cannot convince you of the semantics of "not you" vs "still you", because I think this question is too ambiguous to address satisfactorily. - general anesthesia is definitely, to some extent a discontinuity of consciousness. You lose time. - more extremely, Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest actually (temporarily) causes brain death by cooling the body to between 10˚C and 20˚C. All brain activity ceases for the duration of this deep hypothermia. Are there risks to these practices? Definitely. Some may argue that someone who undergoes general anesthesia isn't the same person. But I would argue that it is, despite the discontinuity, and despite some risk of personality changes.

sulam 9y ago

This feels straightforward to me. The you that is now, pre-preservation, will be dead. The you that is then, post-restoration, will be alive and believe and behave as if they are you. It's convenient that this process (as described) kills you, because that simplifies things quite a lot. Scanning is more complicated, and I suspect if technology ever arrives that allows for it we will treat such scans as "heirs of the body" -- meaning they will only have such assets as you give them, although of course the IRS will still find a way to get them to pay your taxes.

sulam 9y ago
Oh, and one more case that's interesting -- we know the "embalming" process fixes things such that you are now dead. However we don't know what the reading process looks like yet. If _that_ is non-destructive (and I can't think of any way that it _wouldn't_ be effectively non-destructive, since any transformation should be amenable to duplication), then you could be resurrected an infinite number of times. I haven't thought about that very hard, but it raises fascinating possibilities.
- sulam 9y ago
  The more I think about this the more I think it has some really wild implications. The earliest restores are likely to be less high fidelity than later restores, just because that's the nature of technology (getting better over time). Does this mean that later restores will somehow be "more authoritative" than previous? Who knows?!