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No you don't: Have you seen the TV show "Caprica" ? Part of the plot is that a girl creates an artificial afterlife by duplicating people upon their death from

No you don't: Have you seen the TV show "Caprica" ? Part of the plot is that a girl creates an artificial afterlife by duplicating people upon their death from data collected during their life, ironically accidentally killing herself in the process. Technically that's a spoiler, but it's put sufficiently misleading I hope, plus it's revealed in the first 20 minutes of the first episode. And this can work. You could copy a human merely by observing them. If you get enough data on a person (say yourself, so it isn't creepy), and train an algorithm. Once the algorithm is good enough at imitating you that your own mother can't tell the difference between a robot containing that algorithm and you, is there still a difference. And now every mathematician should say "No". After all, 4 and IV is the same number. You don't need audio or visual override. You don't need to give any agency to any flesh and blood over a virtual body. Even the robot mentioned before is really more of an optional thing, you could eliminate it. You could simplify further. You don't need to duplicate a human, you just need to provide them with "a kid". An algorithm that's purely virtual but that is sufficiently smart that humans can raise it to become part of human society. But it's mind can start out mostly empty. So you don't even need to duplicate anything, you just need a sufficiently complex learning algorithm and a way to interact with it, and a human (perhaps preferably a couple?) to teach it, if you're willing to give it a generation or two.

gfodor 7y ago
I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. I'm not arguing if it's possible for consciousness to exist outside of my own. I'm arguing that insofar as we want to understand if it's possible to transfer the medium ones own consciousness "runs on" out of your own brain, it seems like experiments like the one I wrote may be able to provide some knowledge about the viability. It's still running on your brain of course, so it's not trying to actually do any real transferal, but it is showing the degree to which conscious experience can feel non-local, which is part of what would be needed to be a person externalized from their own brain. So it may not exactly provide evidence in favor or against transfer viability (though it might, since we may be able to see that it would result in ego death or some equally horrifying result) but it would provide evidence that the subjective experience of such a transfer has meaning, and what that feeling could be. Now, once we get a brain/computer interface, things get really interesting. Because you can start to link minds, and even at low bandwidth, it may rapidly increase our understanding of the boundaries of what a conscious mind "is" and how much we should care about the "death" or "merging" of such things. It would be quite impactful, to say the least, to see that if you connected a person's mind to that of a simple organism in a bidirectional interface, if over time they act as though they had a single consciousness (probably mostly represented by the person's prior self, but perhaps with characteristics of the organism leaking in the other direction as well.) The closest analog we have today is when one separates the left and right hemisphere of the brain, and that is a crude, fixed, and brutal methodology for such experiments, so it's only done as a way to treat people whose health it may improve, and is irreversible.
perl4ever 7y ago
"Once the algorithm is good enough at imitating you that your own mother can't tell the difference between a robot containing that algorithm and you, is there still a difference. And now every mathematician should say "No". After all, 4 and IV is the same number." I don't understand what you are talking about. Do you think identical twins share the same consciousness? Is a clone the same person as who it was cloned from? It seems to me that "4" and "IV" are abstract concepts that have a basically unlimited number of relationships with the real world, like tentacles. The mathematical concept of four is just one of those linkages.
- candiodari 7y ago
  The point of the exercise was to prove that something non-human can be conscious at all. So if it "shares the same consciousness" that's great. If not, still good enough.

gfodor 7y ago

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. I'm not arguing if it's possible for consciousness to exist outside of my own. I'm arguing that insofar as we want to understand if it's possible to transfer the medium ones own consciousness "runs on" out of your own brain, it seems like experiments like the one I wrote may be able to provide some knowledge about the viability. It's still running on your brain of course, so it's not trying to actually do any real transferal, but it is showing the degree to which conscious experience can feel non-local, which is part of what would be needed to be a person externalized from their own brain. So it may not exactly provide evidence in favor or against transfer viability (though it might, since we may be able to see that it would result in ego death or some equally horrifying result) but it would provide evidence that the subjective experience of such a transfer has meaning, and what that feeling could be. Now, once we get a brain/computer interface, things get really interesting. Because you can start to link minds, and even at low bandwidth, it may rapidly increase our understanding of the boundaries of what a conscious mind "is" and how much we should care about the "death" or "merging" of such things. It would be quite impactful, to say the least, to see that if you connected a person's mind to that of a simple organism in a bidirectional interface, if over time they act as though they had a single consciousness (probably mostly represented by the person's prior self, but perhaps with characteristics of the organism leaking in the other direction as well.) The closest analog we have today is when one separates the left and right hemisphere of the brain, and that is a crude, fixed, and brutal methodology for such experiments, so it's only done as a way to treat people whose health it may improve, and is irreversible.

perl4ever 7y ago

"Once the algorithm is good enough at imitating you that your own mother can't tell the difference between a robot containing that algorithm and you, is there still a difference. And now every mathematician should say "No". After all, 4 and IV is the same number." I don't understand what you are talking about. Do you think identical twins share the same consciousness? Is a clone the same person as who it was cloned from? It seems to me that "4" and "IV" are abstract concepts that have a basically unlimited number of relationships with the real world, like tentacles. The mathematical concept of four is just one of those linkages.

candiodari 7y ago
The point of the exercise was to prove that something non-human can be conscious at all. So if it "shares the same consciousness" that's great. If not, still good enough.