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Is copying your brain into another body == bringing you back to life? The game SOMA explores a lot of the topics being brought up in this discussion: https://

Is copying your brain into another body == bringing you back to life? The game SOMA explores a lot of the topics being brought up in this discussion: https://www.gog.com/game/soma https://www.gog.com/game/soma

ericb 7y ago
100% no in my book. I mean, if you made the copy, and I could go on existing, or not, how could that copy be "me." I'm an instance of an object, not a class.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  You are not immutable. Your body is already a ship of Theseus.
  - ericb 7y ago
    That's true, but that doesn't mean if you build an identical ship next to mine that your ship is "the same ship." Further, I'll be pissed if the one I'm on sinks. The identical one sailing off into the distance is cold comfort to me.
  - J5892 7y ago
    But the system of continuous electrical processes that make up your consciousness is immutable, from your perspective. If it is perfectly transferred to another vessel, as a series of direct connections (maybe some kind of neuron-based "wire"), then maybe it could be considered the same continuous consciousness. The body around it, from the perspective of the system, doesn't matter. It can be replaced forever as long as the system remains continuous.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Yes, but it's a massive and complex feedback system. So every replaced piece is tuned back to be a good to perfect replacement - including thought. When that does not happen you get hallucinations or cancers, for example. You could build an empirically accurate copy of the ship in this way - not perfect but very close.
- Jach 7y ago
  I take John K Clark's perspeective: "But I am not an object. I am not a noun, I am an adjective. I am the way matter behaves when it is organized in a John K Clark-ish way. At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; someday that could change." Since this thread is full of references I thought I'd throw in http://ageofem.com/ http://ageofem.com/ -- a baseline scenario book of the future that reads like history should we get brain emulation tech.
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; How do you know this is true? How do you know there isn't a John K Clark-ish person in Australia or South Africa or Alpha Centauri? What does it mean to say there is a John K Clark-ish lump of matter in Alpha Centauri, why is it useful to say that matter is "you"? You can't meet it, you can't share stories with it, you can't experience what it experiences through spooky action at a distance effects, you can't feel full when it eats, you presumably wouldn't want your spouse abandoning Earth and going to live with it instead, you presumably wouldn't want it spending out of your bank account; in what useful way is it "you" just because it's a similarly patterned organisation of matter? If you relax the accuracy in the organization a little, is this any different from saying "your twin sibling is you" or "all humans are the same person"? And if you don't relax the accuracy in the pattern, where do you draw the line? Isn't that a bit of a joke to argue that all "similar enough" people are you, while carefully and deliberately excluding every candidate until nobody counts in that group?
  - imtringued 7y ago
    >At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; someday that could change. This is not correct because it is possible to experience the same John K Clark from multiple different frames of reference.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Which one is you? How can you answer that question in any reliable way?
coldcode 7y ago
From your perspective you died. From the copies perspective you are continuous.
- Loughla 7y ago
  This will devolve into a 'what is consciousness' debate, but honestly does it matter? To your consciousness, there is no gap, just the novel experience of watching someone who looks an awful lot like you die. If the consciousness is copied perfectly from a to b, is there a difference in it at that point?
  - sidewndr46 7y ago
    If you watch the show "Altered Carbon", I kind of felt like there was an unspoken idea that all of the characters are in fact deceased many times over. The capability of replicating the exact consciousness of any of them exists of course.
    - Razengan 7y ago
      This is also a core theme of the awesome game SOMA: https://www.gog.com/game/soma https://www.gog.com/game/soma
  - mellosouls 7y ago
    It matters particularly depending on whether you are a or b after the transition point. To your consciousness, there is no gap, just the novel experience of watching someone who looks an awful lot like you die. This could be rephrased as: To your consciousness, there is no gap, just the novel experience of dying as someone who looks an awful lot like you watches.
    - Loughla 7y ago
      That's the thing, there is NO transition point. There's just two of you. SO, if there are two of your consciousness with the same thoughts, experiences, and the whole shabang up until the second one is made and the first dies, does it even matter that it's not the original? I would argue no. Because for you, your consciousness, it's as if you are still the same person. The first doesn't matter, because it's just turned off. But you still exist. Unless you're arguing for a 'soul', there is no difference between the two consciousnesses. Therefore, you are still alive.
ping_pong 7y ago
This the entire premise behind "West World".
- mellosouls 7y ago
  Raised also in The Prestige.
asaph 7y ago
This is the human version of the philosophical Ship of Theseus[0] question. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
- SteveNuts 7y ago
  My thinking is, my brain is almost entirely what makes me "me". The rest of my body is just a container. I do understand the analogy though.
  - NoodleIncident 7y ago
    That just means that the brain is the entire ship. All the same questions still come up
  - UnFleshedOne 7y ago
    Sense of self is quite possibly an illusion a bunch of separate processes in the brain use to organize things. If this is true, changing some of those gradually enough will preserve your sense of self. This is what any experience does to you in various degrees. (Changing them rapidly might conflict with previous memory though.) Even remembering something rewrites that memory and you end up with a slightly different one. So it is possible that not only your body gets completely replaced many times over, but your identity and memories and thinking processes get replaced by imperfect copies.
- asjw 7y ago
  We already phisically change completely every few years. We still don't know if we stay we or become something different. Experience says we are not the same person we were and we often feel disconnected from who we were or who people that know us think we should be. From our perspective we just accept who we became and simply remember who we were, without being able to be that person ever again.
  - pfundstein 7y ago
    > We already phisically change completely every few years. That is not true at all. Please don't perpetuate these old wives' tales on HN. A lot of your cells do die and are replaced, sperm cells for example have a life span of 3 days, white blood cells about a year, but brain cells (especially relevant to the context of this thread) are with you for life.
rafaelvasco 7y ago
I believe it would take an infinitely large storage medium to store a person's full consciousness. Right now we can only take a sample. Discrete data. Human consciousness is infinite continuous data; Even if you somehow copy all neurons and their connections it won't be enough; For me the consciousness communicates with the brain, the brain is merely a proxy; Consciousness is pure sentient energy;
- xaedes 7y ago
  Oh and imagine we would need to capture / know the position AND velocity of even some of the "things" defining the consciousness. Its like really _uncertain_ what we can do then.
wonderwonder 7y ago
Same idea with Star Trek style teleportation. If you are broken down and reassembled at another destination, you essentially died and a perfect copy of you was reassembled with your original parts. China Mievielle explores something like this as a sub plot in the book Kraken.
Felz 7y ago
Incidentally, I think SOMA is free on the Epic store today.
agumonkey 7y ago
how do you call the moment when the first brain ceases to function and the second is about to start ? and if there is no gap, which you is you ?
- sdegutis 7y ago
  I wish more programmers understood metaphysics better. We’re built to be philosophers. The first command God gave Adam was to name every animal, which is the act of categorizing abstract concepts and building language to concretize these relationships. It’s in our human nature, but especially programmers. But any philosophy approaching the cross is to be damned lest we be convinced we must carry it and die. So we killed Socrates instead. And when the Greeks came back to ask Jesus to be their new Socrates, he explained that a seed must first die alone to become a fruit-bearing tree. The only people alive today that I know who might understand these things are programmers. But no, even if a copy is made of you, it’s not you. Your brain is a channel for your mind, it is not it’s source. There is a more “real” level of existence where all our actions really exist. This life is basically a metaphor for that more real life. The physical world is an analogy of what’s really happening. When we eat a plant or animal for example, we are actually consuming some of its life force to replenish part of our finite and diminishing life source. That’s why we can only eat things that were recently alive. We can’t eat rocks or very old meat. You exist both inside and outside this physical world. A clone with an exact memory of yours is not you. It’s someone else.
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    I'm sure you can get something out of very old meat
    - sdegutis 7y ago
      But think about it, everyone only has a few days left to live! We just keep extending that, day by day, by eating something else that recently died. And then it’s atoms become part of our bodies. It’s life force gets absorbed into us. But because it has a finite and limited life, it can’t fully stop us from dying. So we need to repeat it again a few hours later!
buboard 7y ago
your brain might be copied in your sleep and you wouldn't know. The Matrix analogy is right - conscious experience is just a small subset of brain's functioning
Razengan 7y ago
For everyone interested in fiction which explores these things, I'd also like to plug the excellent anime Kaiba. [0] It's set in the far future where editing your memories, copying them to other bodies, editing those bodies, is as common as smartphones today. People get bad memories removed, download fake good memories (like Total Recall), transfer their consciousness into "designer bodies", and of course there's even a fetish for having sex with yourself (your clone, who knows best how to please you.) [0] https://myanimelist.net/anime/3701/Kaiba https://myanimelist.net/anime/3701/Kaiba (possible spoilers; avoid reading any more if you want the max enjoyment.)

ericb 7y ago

100% no in my book. I mean, if you made the copy, and I could go on existing, or not, how could that copy be "me." I'm an instance of an object, not a class.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
You are not immutable. Your body is already a ship of Theseus.
- ericb 7y ago
  That's true, but that doesn't mean if you build an identical ship next to mine that your ship is "the same ship." Further, I'll be pissed if the one I'm on sinks. The identical one sailing off into the distance is cold comfort to me.
- J5892 7y ago
  But the system of continuous electrical processes that make up your consciousness is immutable, from your perspective. If it is perfectly transferred to another vessel, as a series of direct connections (maybe some kind of neuron-based "wire"), then maybe it could be considered the same continuous consciousness. The body around it, from the perspective of the system, doesn't matter. It can be replaced forever as long as the system remains continuous.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Yes, but it's a massive and complex feedback system. So every replaced piece is tuned back to be a good to perfect replacement - including thought. When that does not happen you get hallucinations or cancers, for example. You could build an empirically accurate copy of the ship in this way - not perfect but very close.
Jach 7y ago
I take John K Clark's perspeective: "But I am not an object. I am not a noun, I am an adjective. I am the way matter behaves when it is organized in a John K Clark-ish way. At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; someday that could change." Since this thread is full of references I thought I'd throw in http://ageofem.com/ http://ageofem.com/ -- a baseline scenario book of the future that reads like history should we get brain emulation tech.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; How do you know this is true? How do you know there isn't a John K Clark-ish person in Australia or South Africa or Alpha Centauri? What does it mean to say there is a John K Clark-ish lump of matter in Alpha Centauri, why is it useful to say that matter is "you"? You can't meet it, you can't share stories with it, you can't experience what it experiences through spooky action at a distance effects, you can't feel full when it eats, you presumably wouldn't want your spouse abandoning Earth and going to live with it instead, you presumably wouldn't want it spending out of your bank account; in what useful way is it "you" just because it's a similarly patterned organisation of matter? If you relax the accuracy in the organization a little, is this any different from saying "your twin sibling is you" or "all humans are the same person"? And if you don't relax the accuracy in the pattern, where do you draw the line? Isn't that a bit of a joke to argue that all "similar enough" people are you, while carefully and deliberately excluding every candidate until nobody counts in that group?
- imtringued 7y ago
  >At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; someday that could change. This is not correct because it is possible to experience the same John K Clark from multiple different frames of reference.
lonelappde 7y ago
Which one is you? How can you answer that question in any reliable way?

coldcode 7y ago

From your perspective you died. From the copies perspective you are continuous.

Loughla 7y ago
This will devolve into a 'what is consciousness' debate, but honestly does it matter? To your consciousness, there is no gap, just the novel experience of watching someone who looks an awful lot like you die. If the consciousness is copied perfectly from a to b, is there a difference in it at that point?
- sidewndr46 7y ago
  If you watch the show "Altered Carbon", I kind of felt like there was an unspoken idea that all of the characters are in fact deceased many times over. The capability of replicating the exact consciousness of any of them exists of course.
  - Razengan 7y ago
    This is also a core theme of the awesome game SOMA: https://www.gog.com/game/soma https://www.gog.com/game/soma
- mellosouls 7y ago
  It matters particularly depending on whether you are a or b after the transition point. To your consciousness, there is no gap, just the novel experience of watching someone who looks an awful lot like you die. This could be rephrased as: To your consciousness, there is no gap, just the novel experience of dying as someone who looks an awful lot like you watches.
  - Loughla 7y ago
    That's the thing, there is NO transition point. There's just two of you. SO, if there are two of your consciousness with the same thoughts, experiences, and the whole shabang up until the second one is made and the first dies, does it even matter that it's not the original? I would argue no. Because for you, your consciousness, it's as if you are still the same person. The first doesn't matter, because it's just turned off. But you still exist. Unless you're arguing for a 'soul', there is no difference between the two consciousnesses. Therefore, you are still alive.

ping_pong 7y ago

This the entire premise behind "West World".

mellosouls 7y ago
Raised also in The Prestige.

asaph 7y ago

This is the human version of the philosophical Ship of Theseus[0] question. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

SteveNuts 7y ago
My thinking is, my brain is almost entirely what makes me "me". The rest of my body is just a container. I do understand the analogy though.
- NoodleIncident 7y ago
  That just means that the brain is the entire ship. All the same questions still come up
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  Sense of self is quite possibly an illusion a bunch of separate processes in the brain use to organize things. If this is true, changing some of those gradually enough will preserve your sense of self. This is what any experience does to you in various degrees. (Changing them rapidly might conflict with previous memory though.) Even remembering something rewrites that memory and you end up with a slightly different one. So it is possible that not only your body gets completely replaced many times over, but your identity and memories and thinking processes get replaced by imperfect copies.
asjw 7y ago
We already phisically change completely every few years. We still don't know if we stay we or become something different. Experience says we are not the same person we were and we often feel disconnected from who we were or who people that know us think we should be. From our perspective we just accept who we became and simply remember who we were, without being able to be that person ever again.
- pfundstein 7y ago
  > We already phisically change completely every few years. That is not true at all. Please don't perpetuate these old wives' tales on HN. A lot of your cells do die and are replaced, sperm cells for example have a life span of 3 days, white blood cells about a year, but brain cells (especially relevant to the context of this thread) are with you for life.

rafaelvasco 7y ago

I believe it would take an infinitely large storage medium to store a person's full consciousness. Right now we can only take a sample. Discrete data. Human consciousness is infinite continuous data; Even if you somehow copy all neurons and their connections it won't be enough; For me the consciousness communicates with the brain, the brain is merely a proxy; Consciousness is pure sentient energy;

xaedes 7y ago
Oh and imagine we would need to capture / know the position AND velocity of even some of the "things" defining the consciousness. Its like really _uncertain_ what we can do then.

wonderwonder 7y ago

Same idea with Star Trek style teleportation. If you are broken down and reassembled at another destination, you essentially died and a perfect copy of you was reassembled with your original parts. China Mievielle explores something like this as a sub plot in the book Kraken.

Felz 7y ago

Incidentally, I think SOMA is free on the Epic store today.

agumonkey 7y ago

how do you call the moment when the first brain ceases to function and the second is about to start ? and if there is no gap, which you is you ?

sdegutis 7y ago
I wish more programmers understood metaphysics better. We’re built to be philosophers. The first command God gave Adam was to name every animal, which is the act of categorizing abstract concepts and building language to concretize these relationships. It’s in our human nature, but especially programmers. But any philosophy approaching the cross is to be damned lest we be convinced we must carry it and die. So we killed Socrates instead. And when the Greeks came back to ask Jesus to be their new Socrates, he explained that a seed must first die alone to become a fruit-bearing tree. The only people alive today that I know who might understand these things are programmers. But no, even if a copy is made of you, it’s not you. Your brain is a channel for your mind, it is not it’s source. There is a more “real” level of existence where all our actions really exist. This life is basically a metaphor for that more real life. The physical world is an analogy of what’s really happening. When we eat a plant or animal for example, we are actually consuming some of its life force to replenish part of our finite and diminishing life source. That’s why we can only eat things that were recently alive. We can’t eat rocks or very old meat. You exist both inside and outside this physical world. A clone with an exact memory of yours is not you. It’s someone else.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  I'm sure you can get something out of very old meat
  - sdegutis 7y ago
    But think about it, everyone only has a few days left to live! We just keep extending that, day by day, by eating something else that recently died. And then it’s atoms become part of our bodies. It’s life force gets absorbed into us. But because it has a finite and limited life, it can’t fully stop us from dying. So we need to repeat it again a few hours later!

buboard 7y ago

your brain might be copied in your sleep and you wouldn't know. The Matrix analogy is right - conscious experience is just a small subset of brain's functioning

Razengan 7y ago

For everyone interested in fiction which explores these things, I'd also like to plug the excellent anime Kaiba. [0] It's set in the far future where editing your memories, copying them to other bodies, editing those bodies, is as common as smartphones today. People get bad memories removed, download fake good memories (like Total Recall), transfer their consciousness into "designer bodies", and of course there's even a fetish for having sex with yourself (your clone, who knows best how to please you.) [0] https://myanimelist.net/anime/3701/Kaiba https://myanimelist.net/anime/3701/Kaiba (possible spoilers; avoid reading any more if you want the max enjoyment.)