15 ms·

What will it matter? You'll still be dead. Will your machine likeness be anything like you, except in simulation? Or will it simply be an empty Chinese room, gi

by kebman 7y ago

What will it matter? You'll still be dead. Will your machine likeness be anything like you, except in simulation? Or will it simply be an empty Chinese room, giving your loved ones a doll-shell to hold onto, like in a cruel Harry Harlow experiment?

jvagner 7y ago
I think if you could upload your mind and interact, a la Speaker for the Dead, it would be more than just your doll she’ll getting interacted with. I’m Buddhist, I work on my acceptance of death. Sometimes it feels deceptively easy, and sometimes I look at my son and pre ache for what won’t be. Uploading my thoughts for him to review isn’t tempting to me, just like cloning my dog won’t give me my dog. But I get the temptation to wish we were close to a time where it felt plausible. But I don’t expect it to be.
meowface 7y ago
It would matter if true consciousness transfer turns out to actually be theoretically possible. First we have to figure out creating a near-perfect replica (give that a few centuries, at least, probably) and what substrates it could be implanted into, and then if it's possible to really retain subjective self-continuity. Non-transfered replicas will also each feel like they have continuity, so this is a difficult problem, but there's still a lot that needs to be understood before we can definitively rule the possibility in or out. If the former is possible but not the latter, then I agree it isn't really very interesting. It's just a new way to spawn intelligent lifeforms, but we'll surely have many ways to do that by then. But I feel like if we can actually crack that, then we can eventually crack the second problem, too. The most popular hypothesis seems to be a Ship of Theseus-style gradual replacement / transition for some level of granularity (perhaps individual atoms, molecules, or neurons). We're fundamentally in the dark in so many ways at the moment that it seems unclear if these are plausible, obvious, or absurd. Possible in the lifetimes of anyone reading this today? No (even if longevity breakthroughs accelerate like crazy). But if human or human-derived intelligence is still around in 1000, 100,000, 100,000,000 years from now, it's impossible to speculate what we may be capable of. If colonizing millions of galaxies becomes a boring walk in the park (via self-propagating autonomous constructs, for instance), then moving your consciousness to different tenancies while fully preserving your original self doesn't seem that insane. Maybe future "humans" will even skip the "middleman" (literally) and just be "born" directly into a non-biological housing from the start so that the transfer step won't be necessary, and maybe the "A" in AGI will become a non-sequitur.
- sooheon 7y ago
  Kaibeezy linked to Greg Egan, who's one of my favorites in this area. To my mind the latter is logically impossible. Subjective self-continuity is not intrinsic to the experience of consciousness, it is a conclusion we draw upon introspection, based on circumstantial evidence. Subjectively, all we ever have is a sequence of fleeting moments. We only have the "word" of our memory to trust that the Now Me is a descendant of Past Me. As soon as perfect replication is possible, the replicant and the original have exactly equivalent claims to identity in every sense that matters, just one will have a better claim to physical continuity. But physical continuity is not the most important aspect of identity, it's just our intuitions favor it so heavily because it has historically perfectly coincided with conscious identity.
  - blueadept111 7y ago
    Right, and we don't even have subjective continuity ourselves. Every night we fall asleep, and our consciousness dies. Every morning it is reborn. We don't worry about it.
    - TomMarius 7y ago
      Maybe you are different than me, but I really don't feel as "reborn" when I wake up - I mean I immediately feel all the time that has passed (and how much, usually to 1 hour precision), and even during the night, when I'm sleeping, I'm still there, just in a different state and not making many memories, but I am definitely not gone.
      - defertoreptar 7y ago
        A better example is going under anesthesia. I had a procedure done, and after I drifted to sleep, 30 minutes passed instantly and they were rolling me to the other room. The point is that we can lose our continuity of consciousness, yet we don't consider this "dying" in normal life. If we duplicate our exact physical brain and processes and immediately destroy the original while this happens, there is no loss of continuity, but this feels like dying still.
Kaibeezy 7y ago
Ideally, uploaded to Konishi polis. http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html
tim333 7y ago
Each day the you that gets up is slightly different to the one that went to sleep. You could make the same argument - what does it matter - the yesterday you is gone, why bother with the new one. I think the reason to bother is that life is kind of cool whether traditional or perhaps AI enhanced.
- pushpop 7y ago
  You’re argument is a metaphoric one; yes we do change and evolve as people. Whereas the GPs point was a literal one; if you upload your consciousness the “physical you” will still quite literally die. The uploaded version is really more of an interactive Egyptian statue designed to immortalise yourself from the perspective of others rather than you literally living past death. This is why I don’t see the point of arguments such as that. I would still die. So I might as well survive my memory in more meaningful ways like building a family. If I’m forgotten about 100 years after my death then that’s just the natural order of things and it’s not like I’ll be around to care anyway.
  - c22 7y ago
    The "physical you" changes too. Your cells are constantly being replaced resulting in a "whole new physical you" roughly every year. [0] "You" must be a state. If carried to a complex enough substrate my state may continue while the old substrate dies. What concern to me is the nature of this substrate so long as it adequately exists to run my state machine? It is true that the substrate holding my state may have its operations sabotaged to update my state in strange non-standard ways, but this appears also to be the situation now, in the physical realm. There are untold conditions I can apply to my body and brain that would have marked affect on the unfolding state of my mind. The concept of multiple mes is confusing, as would be the potential to merge mes and access memories of my own "death(s)". Techniques for confirming consciousness in others are largely non-existent. These are deep and still open questions that cannot be so easily dismissed with a claim that all that's artificial must be artifice. [0] https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-for-most-of-the-atoms-in-your-body-to-be-replaced-by-others https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-for-most-of-the-...
WalterBright 7y ago
That's why I'll never get in the Star Trek transporter. It takes you apart into information, then reconstructs you somewhere else. But it reconstructs a clone of you - you are dead. The clone believes the transporter works perfectly, and the clone was transported. But the original you is no more.
- avani 7y ago
  You need to read Clifford Simak's "The Way Station"
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    I keep meaning to read that one :-)
- IggleSniggle 7y ago
  Meh. That’s what we do everyday as our body sheds old cells and grows new ones. It’s the ship of Theseus already anyway. The me of yesterday is dead. The me of today only believes I am the same.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    I didn't think brain cells were replaced.
    - ptrott2017 7y ago
      That used to be the dominant theory - there is now evidence that new cells continue to grow - just the replacement rate slows down as we age. However we still do not really understand the mechanisms of neurogenesis (growth of new brain cells), the interplay with neural stem cells, cellular development dependencies or the pathological mechanisms associated with various diseases such as Alzheimer's. There continue to be new theories, emergent lab work etc but we still have a long long way to go before we have a clear insightful model of the mechanisms involved, never mind a predictive understanding for systemic outcomes.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
This is a very narrow and naive view of self. If I removed part of your brain would you still be you? It happens to people all the time, personalities are sometimes altered, yet we don't consider these people to be a different person. You yourself have undergone tremendous change since you were a child, yet we do not consider the child-you to be dead and the present-you to be a different being. Why then, should a being even more like you than a previous version of yourself not be considered the same person? Self is illusion. We are a collection of energy swirling in the great sea of energy we call the world, forming for a brief time a pattern that believes itself to be separate from that which comprises it, and of which it in turn is a part.
- godelski 7y ago
  I don't think the parent's idea of self is naive at all. Let's imagine you can upload your consciousness into the cloud or whatever. There's two of "you" now. Clearly the one on the cloud is a copy. And as time progresses, that being is no longer "you". It has new experiences that "you" do not have. They are not shared experiences, and so you are different entities. This point might seem moot if you kill the body immediately, but it brings up a good question of what is "you". I think one thing is clear though, the being that you currently associate with "you" is not the same being that is in the computer.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    > It has new experiences that "you" do not have. Then this is equally true of you now and the you who first read that comment, isn't it? > the being that you currently associate with "you" is not the same being that is in the computer. This is not clear, at least not from the perspective of the being in the computer. As far as it is concerned, it stepped into the uploader device (or whatever) and woke up in a computer. Hypothetical: lets say curious aliens abducted you one night and made an identically functioning copy of the right hemisphere of your brain with circuitry, then replaced your meaty original. You would wake up none the wiser and believe you are the same person right? And so would everyone else, since you behave identically. Ok, so they come back the next night and do the same thing to the left hemisphere. Still you? Now they take your original organic halves and put them back together in a robot body.

by kebman 7y ago

jvagner 7y ago

I think if you could upload your mind and interact, a la Speaker for the Dead, it would be more than just your doll she’ll getting interacted with. I’m Buddhist, I work on my acceptance of death. Sometimes it feels deceptively easy, and sometimes I look at my son and pre ache for what won’t be. Uploading my thoughts for him to review isn’t tempting to me, just like cloning my dog won’t give me my dog. But I get the temptation to wish we were close to a time where it felt plausible. But I don’t expect it to be.

meowface 7y ago

It would matter if true consciousness transfer turns out to actually be theoretically possible. First we have to figure out creating a near-perfect replica (give that a few centuries, at least, probably) and what substrates it could be implanted into, and then if it's possible to really retain subjective self-continuity. Non-transfered replicas will also each feel like they have continuity, so this is a difficult problem, but there's still a lot that needs to be understood before we can definitively rule the possibility in or out. If the former is possible but not the latter, then I agree it isn't really very interesting. It's just a new way to spawn intelligent lifeforms, but we'll surely have many ways to do that by then. But I feel like if we can actually crack that, then we can eventually crack the second problem, too. The most popular hypothesis seems to be a Ship of Theseus-style gradual replacement / transition for some level of granularity (perhaps individual atoms, molecules, or neurons). We're fundamentally in the dark in so many ways at the moment that it seems unclear if these are plausible, obvious, or absurd. Possible in the lifetimes of anyone reading this today? No (even if longevity breakthroughs accelerate like crazy). But if human or human-derived intelligence is still around in 1000, 100,000, 100,000,000 years from now, it's impossible to speculate what we may be capable of. If colonizing millions of galaxies becomes a boring walk in the park (via self-propagating autonomous constructs, for instance), then moving your consciousness to different tenancies while fully preserving your original self doesn't seem that insane. Maybe future "humans" will even skip the "middleman" (literally) and just be "born" directly into a non-biological housing from the start so that the transfer step won't be necessary, and maybe the "A" in AGI will become a non-sequitur.

sooheon 7y ago
Kaibeezy linked to Greg Egan, who's one of my favorites in this area. To my mind the latter is logically impossible. Subjective self-continuity is not intrinsic to the experience of consciousness, it is a conclusion we draw upon introspection, based on circumstantial evidence. Subjectively, all we ever have is a sequence of fleeting moments. We only have the "word" of our memory to trust that the Now Me is a descendant of Past Me. As soon as perfect replication is possible, the replicant and the original have exactly equivalent claims to identity in every sense that matters, just one will have a better claim to physical continuity. But physical continuity is not the most important aspect of identity, it's just our intuitions favor it so heavily because it has historically perfectly coincided with conscious identity.
- blueadept111 7y ago
  Right, and we don't even have subjective continuity ourselves. Every night we fall asleep, and our consciousness dies. Every morning it is reborn. We don't worry about it.
  - TomMarius 7y ago
    Maybe you are different than me, but I really don't feel as "reborn" when I wake up - I mean I immediately feel all the time that has passed (and how much, usually to 1 hour precision), and even during the night, when I'm sleeping, I'm still there, just in a different state and not making many memories, but I am definitely not gone.
    - defertoreptar 7y ago
      A better example is going under anesthesia. I had a procedure done, and after I drifted to sleep, 30 minutes passed instantly and they were rolling me to the other room. The point is that we can lose our continuity of consciousness, yet we don't consider this "dying" in normal life. If we duplicate our exact physical brain and processes and immediately destroy the original while this happens, there is no loss of continuity, but this feels like dying still.

Kaibeezy 7y ago

Ideally, uploaded to Konishi polis. http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html

tim333 7y ago

Each day the you that gets up is slightly different to the one that went to sleep. You could make the same argument - what does it matter - the yesterday you is gone, why bother with the new one. I think the reason to bother is that life is kind of cool whether traditional or perhaps AI enhanced.

pushpop 7y ago
You’re argument is a metaphoric one; yes we do change and evolve as people. Whereas the GPs point was a literal one; if you upload your consciousness the “physical you” will still quite literally die. The uploaded version is really more of an interactive Egyptian statue designed to immortalise yourself from the perspective of others rather than you literally living past death. This is why I don’t see the point of arguments such as that. I would still die. So I might as well survive my memory in more meaningful ways like building a family. If I’m forgotten about 100 years after my death then that’s just the natural order of things and it’s not like I’ll be around to care anyway.
- c22 7y ago
  The "physical you" changes too. Your cells are constantly being replaced resulting in a "whole new physical you" roughly every year. [0] "You" must be a state. If carried to a complex enough substrate my state may continue while the old substrate dies. What concern to me is the nature of this substrate so long as it adequately exists to run my state machine? It is true that the substrate holding my state may have its operations sabotaged to update my state in strange non-standard ways, but this appears also to be the situation now, in the physical realm. There are untold conditions I can apply to my body and brain that would have marked affect on the unfolding state of my mind. The concept of multiple mes is confusing, as would be the potential to merge mes and access memories of my own "death(s)". Techniques for confirming consciousness in others are largely non-existent. These are deep and still open questions that cannot be so easily dismissed with a claim that all that's artificial must be artifice. [0] https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-for-most-of-the-atoms-in-your-body-to-be-replaced-by-others https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-for-most-of-the-...

WalterBright 7y ago

That's why I'll never get in the Star Trek transporter. It takes you apart into information, then reconstructs you somewhere else. But it reconstructs a clone of you - you are dead. The clone believes the transporter works perfectly, and the clone was transported. But the original you is no more.

avani 7y ago
You need to read Clifford Simak's "The Way Station"
- WalterBright 7y ago
  I keep meaning to read that one :-)
IggleSniggle 7y ago
Meh. That’s what we do everyday as our body sheds old cells and grows new ones. It’s the ship of Theseus already anyway. The me of yesterday is dead. The me of today only believes I am the same.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  I didn't think brain cells were replaced.
  - ptrott2017 7y ago
    That used to be the dominant theory - there is now evidence that new cells continue to grow - just the replacement rate slows down as we age. However we still do not really understand the mechanisms of neurogenesis (growth of new brain cells), the interplay with neural stem cells, cellular development dependencies or the pathological mechanisms associated with various diseases such as Alzheimer's. There continue to be new theories, emergent lab work etc but we still have a long long way to go before we have a clear insightful model of the mechanisms involved, never mind a predictive understanding for systemic outcomes.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

This is a very narrow and naive view of self. If I removed part of your brain would you still be you? It happens to people all the time, personalities are sometimes altered, yet we don't consider these people to be a different person. You yourself have undergone tremendous change since you were a child, yet we do not consider the child-you to be dead and the present-you to be a different being. Why then, should a being even more like you than a previous version of yourself not be considered the same person? Self is illusion. We are a collection of energy swirling in the great sea of energy we call the world, forming for a brief time a pattern that believes itself to be separate from that which comprises it, and of which it in turn is a part.

godelski 7y ago
I don't think the parent's idea of self is naive at all. Let's imagine you can upload your consciousness into the cloud or whatever. There's two of "you" now. Clearly the one on the cloud is a copy. And as time progresses, that being is no longer "you". It has new experiences that "you" do not have. They are not shared experiences, and so you are different entities. This point might seem moot if you kill the body immediately, but it brings up a good question of what is "you". I think one thing is clear though, the being that you currently associate with "you" is not the same being that is in the computer.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  > It has new experiences that "you" do not have. Then this is equally true of you now and the you who first read that comment, isn't it? > the being that you currently associate with "you" is not the same being that is in the computer. This is not clear, at least not from the perspective of the being in the computer. As far as it is concerned, it stepped into the uploader device (or whatever) and woke up in a computer. Hypothetical: lets say curious aliens abducted you one night and made an identically functioning copy of the right hemisphere of your brain with circuitry, then replaced your meaty original. You would wake up none the wiser and believe you are the same person right? And so would everyone else, since you behave identically. Ok, so they come back the next night and do the same thing to the left hemisphere. Still you? Now they take your original organic halves and put them back together in a robot body.