10 ms·

Anyone else feel the solution isn’t figuring out how to create or find a new earth but move our consciousness to silicon so that it does not have such a fragile

by mentos 6y ago

Anyone else feel the solution isn’t figuring out how to create or find a new earth but move our consciousness to silicon so that it does not have such a fragile requirement to exist?

Kewcipt 6y ago
Exactly, we will lose nothing but our chains
- detritus 6y ago
  Well, until someone trips over the power cable.
peteradio 6y ago
Lol you first. I for one highly doubt that our brain functions can be accurately reproduced with nand gates.
- LoSboccacc 6y ago
  and even if it were, it'd be a consciousness copy, not a consciousness transfer. you'd get a software simulation of yourself but you, the real you, would still be dead
  - est31 6y ago
    cgp grey has made a nice video about it. "trouble with transporters". The question is: if you go to sleep and wake up, is it really you? or is it a new consciousness?
    - foobarian 6y ago
      That's what bugs me about uploads. If you clone your brain by some means, and the second copy comes online, presumably your original "you" will stay in the original body, and you won't perceive sensation/thoughts of the clone. It may as well not be a copy but a completely different individual. This is getting off the rails into of science fiction I guess, but it raises the question of how do you transfer the "you" into the new brain? That way you could destroy the body or let it die and still have continuity. It's not clear that merely making a "bit-for-bit" copy is enough.
      - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
        The problem is, if the 'from' entity is destroyed, it has no agency any longer, and the 'to' entity, if a perfect copy, won't notice anything different, it'll be like waking from sleep. There's no loss for the rest of the world. What if actual sleep is analogous to that? The you that wakes in the morning is a fresh copy with memories up until you 'died' last night. Definitely digressing into sci-fi thought experiments.
        foobarian 6y ago
        Wow, you are right, I wouldn't be able to tell. That is wild.
        LoSboccacc 6y ago
        > I wouldn't be able to tell the robot wouldn't, you'd be dead
      - est31 6y ago
        > how do you transfer the "you" into the new brain? Yeah this is the big question: what constitutes as "you"? Your body? You can lose a limb or parts of your brain and still remain "you". Your memories? they are constantly re-forming with people forgetting things and new memories being made. Your way of thinking? Neurons are extremely long lived cells. Unless you believe in souls (which many religions do), the experience of "you" is entirely defined by the matter of your body and maybe your surroundings. Let's assume we can build machines that can fully emulate human minds. Let's assume this emulation is good enough to also emulate the self-ness experience we are interested in. Your question was (and the question of LoSboccacc), that if you have this technology, can you somehow transfer the self-ness so that the real, legitimate, "you" gets there, and not a copy? How do you know it's really you? I'd argue that consciousness and self-ness is weirder than humans usually experience it: it can do more things than you'd think. Let's take Bob, someone born in the simulation, that is, he has spent his entire life being simulated in silicon. For all purposes, his self-ness is the only true legitimate one. There is no difference in legitimacy between his simulation and a human in flesh and blood. That's just a simple conclusion of the basic assumption that there are machines that can do this. Now if we have such a machine, then it runs some kind of program that can at least store Bob's state as a finite set of bytes. Whether it's a petabyte (less likely) or a yottabyte (maybe) is less relevant, what's more important is that it's a set of bytes. Now you can do interesting things with this data. What happens if you pause the emulation, save the data to disk, and then decide to either a) stop the emulation and load it from the saved state or b) delete the saved copy and resume the emulation. In both scenarios a and b you'd resume with the same state for Bob as in a) you load the same data you just stored and in b) you just create a disk backup and delete it. Nothing would really change. It would be the same Bob afterwards in both scenarios. In the next experiment, you save it to disk, turn off the emulating computer for a day, then turn it on, loading the disk again? It would be the same Bob, right? Let's combine the two experiments. Let's pause the emulation, save the data to disk, and then decide whether to either a) turn off the computer for a day or b) resume the emulation and run it for a day. After the day concluded we power cycle the computer and load the data we stored to disk yesterday. Now my argument is that it's still the same Bob in both scenarios. Scenario a) is our second experiment. As for scenario b), at the point of the pausing, we haven't decided yet about whether to choose a) or b). So clearly, the Bob stored on disk must be the legitimate one, otherwise a) would end up "killing" Bob. So it follows that in scenario b) it's the same Bob as well. Next I'd argue that whether there is a decision or not isn't really relevant for which data is being stored. It'd be the same Bob if you always chose b). In the fourth experiment, you'd just always go with b). If we apply this thought experiment to the boundary between emulated and incarnated minds, the conclusion to be drawn is that the cloud copy is always [1] legitimate, whether the original host dies during the copy, after the copy, or not at all. This conclusion is a bit humbling and it's understandable that people are critical, in fact I'm myself. But I believe this is just because the way we experience life on earth as separate individuals and consciousnesses, simply because our bodies are made like that. Our perception of what a consciousness is is blinded by the fact that each human starts with a blank set of memories and has their own way of deciding things, own skills etc. But once we get the ability to copy entire brains, those new experiences with consciousnesses in our society will fold the perceptions of individuals. Of course there will always be people who still believe in souls, and maybe there are in fact souls we just don't have the detection technology for. But 100 years ago people were superstitious of being photographed as they'd think you are stealing their soul. Maybe in 100 years we'll think that the old kind of thinking about consciousness is the same kind of superstition. I'd say it's an artifact of our self-preservation drive. Of course it's very important to quality control whether the simulation is really doing what's promised. To conclude, I think it's much easier to believe in life after death if you've seen your friends and family do it before your own eyes. Even Thomas ended up believing! Uhh the comment has gotten a bit longer than I anticipated. [1]: Note that this opens the question: can you just make any kind of copy and call it legitimate? Of course not. Consciousnesses are even weirder. The transition between legitimate and illegitimate is fluid. I'd consider someone who had a stroke and can't talk or walk any more as a weakly legitimate copy of the person pre-stroke. My argument assumes legitimate copies, but of course people can have different opinions/standards on what constitutes a legitimate copy. The question will become especially interesting if billionaires will get access to different copying methods than poor people.
  - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
    The sci-fi novel The Resurrected Man asks that question about teleportation technology. The teleporter itself is referred to as "a murdering twinmaker". http://seanwilliams.com/words/books/sci-fi/the-resurrected-man/ http://seanwilliams.com/words/books/sci-fi/the-resurrected-m...
EdwardDiego 6y ago
Assuming that's even possible (how are those simulated brains going? As far as I can tell, we're up to 0.15% of a rat's brain), is a human consciousness separated from its biological construct still a human consciousness? We're well out of the realm of science into science fiction, but I feel it's a valid question to ask - all of our consciousnesses have developed in ape bodies adapted for the savanna, with a bunch of survival related traits and sub-processes. If we remove our "selves" from our bodies, are we still us?
- chispamed 6y ago
  It's really difficult to draw a line between being our "selves" and the alternatives though. We are not the individual cells of our body because most of them will be replaced in the next weeks/months/years. We also don't think of any body with a knee replacement as any less human. Even altering the genetic code of a huge part of your body, like after stem cell transplantation, is not commonly seen as making us less us. Also suppose it was possible to build a synthentic neuron that behaved just like the ones inside your brain. If you started replacing your neurons with the synthetic ones, no individual neuron would "change" you. So were would you draw the line? At 10% synthetic neurons? At 20%? At 100%? If we see ourselves as biological beings another interesting point is how you would view a 1:1 copy of yourself. If we constructed a synthetic human that had the exact same number of molecules in the exact same place as you, would that human be you? (Leaving aside that that's basically impossible, just as a thought experiment) If you answered the last question with "no", that would also mean that not even the way we process information and think makes us us, since the 1:1 molecular clone would behave exactly the same as you in the same environment (in a purely deterministic universe at least, leaving aside probability and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle). So are we instead an uninterrupted instance of a thinking process? That would allow us to differentiate us from the exact clone. However in that case, would you be another person after being unconsciousness? What about general anesthesia? This really keeps me up at night. It's next to impossible to define what we are and that we think of us as independent, unique beings might just be an illusion.
  - mLuby 6y ago
    Good points. Nevertheless, until we have a convincing answer to this, I have to treat mind uploaders and destructive teleporters as murderboxes.
Ididntdothis 6y ago
Personally I think this is what’s going to happen. Why put up with the limitations of our physical body? With games, TV and internet we have already disconnected from the physical world to some degree and I think this trend will just continue
pharke 6y ago
I think we'd be much further along if we kept our wet ware and learned how to program our existing DNA and proteins. We already have a functioning system that does what we want and a whole planet full of example code. The molecular machines even do all the work for you if you give them the right instructions. How happy would you be if I offered you functional nano technology capable of producing self sustaining macro structures from elements and energy scavenged from the environment? It's literally under our noses and almost nobody has noticed.
est31 6y ago
Full agree. In the great scheme of things, making environments safe for human levels of tolerance is extremely wasteful. You need the right atmosphere, temperature, radiation freedom, freedom of toxic materials (and guess what, many chemical processes create tons of them), noise freedom, etc. This causes huge costs already now because industrial processes need to be engineered in ways to reduce emissions, it makes nuclear energy unavailable, people not wanting to live near airports, etc. Even gravity is an extremely wasteful thing. In order to have it, you need a giant planet full of precious construction material for dyson spheres, anything->iron fusion/fission reactors and hawking radiation matter->energy converters, all unavailable because some individuals chose to colonize the surface of it... The optimal approach for intelligent life is to architect computers that can run in the vacuum of space with minimal shielding and then deploy them across the galaxy to convert the available energy into intelligent thoughts and experiences. What the computers will run is up to us.
- api 6y ago
  > What the computers will run is up to us Adtech and cryptocurrency mining?
jp555 6y ago
If you could put your mind into an octopus, could you learn to use your 8 tentacles? Probably not without no longer being a human mind and becoming an octopus mind. Our bodies (and culture & environment) are part of our minds. They cannot be separated without destroying that mind. Also, most of what we think is our own “intelligence” actually exists outside our brains, in our culture & civilization. “Uploading our minds” only seems plausible if you have a cargo cult understanding of what is actually happening.
- mLuby 6y ago
  Humans learn to drive cars, fly aircraft, operate robotic arms, and play video games quite well, to the point where they consider those things "extensions of themselves." I wouldn't say a pro StarCraft player who's soldier management clicking has become muscle memory isn't really a human mind anymore. And likewise humans whose bodies have crippled or dismembered are still fully human despite sometimes barely being able to move or sense.
  - jp555 6y ago
    Because their minds are all still inseparable from their bodies. You make my point, we are not just our mind, but a mind dynamically interconnected with a civilization in amazingly complex ways. Whether its the medieval catholic church, the interstate highway system, WoW, or the Internet. Cognition scientists are pretty sure that we think with our bodies, not just our brain. If you totally separated the human body from the human mind, it is by definition not a human anymore. At best it would be closer to the ghost we leave behind online after we die. Just a shadow or footprints. I dont expect us to ever do better than making really convincing animatronic ghosts.
Chathamization 6y ago
Yeah, there's a good chance that what we think of as humanity will be different 500 years from now. As such, trying to find ways to get today's humanity to live on other worlds (a questionable proposition even if things remain relatively static) might be about as useful as the tower of babel would have been to space exploration.

by mentos 6y ago

Anyone else feel the solution isn’t figuring out how to create or find a new earth but move our consciousness to silicon so that it does not have such a fragile requirement to exist?

Kewcipt 6y ago

Exactly, we will lose nothing but our chains

detritus 6y ago
Well, until someone trips over the power cable.

peteradio 6y ago

Lol you first. I for one highly doubt that our brain functions can be accurately reproduced with nand gates.

LoSboccacc 6y ago
and even if it were, it'd be a consciousness copy, not a consciousness transfer. you'd get a software simulation of yourself but you, the real you, would still be dead
- est31 6y ago
  cgp grey has made a nice video about it. "trouble with transporters". The question is: if you go to sleep and wake up, is it really you? or is it a new consciousness?
  - foobarian 6y ago
    That's what bugs me about uploads. If you clone your brain by some means, and the second copy comes online, presumably your original "you" will stay in the original body, and you won't perceive sensation/thoughts of the clone. It may as well not be a copy but a completely different individual. This is getting off the rails into of science fiction I guess, but it raises the question of how do you transfer the "you" into the new brain? That way you could destroy the body or let it die and still have continuity. It's not clear that merely making a "bit-for-bit" copy is enough.
    - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
      The problem is, if the 'from' entity is destroyed, it has no agency any longer, and the 'to' entity, if a perfect copy, won't notice anything different, it'll be like waking from sleep. There's no loss for the rest of the world. What if actual sleep is analogous to that? The you that wakes in the morning is a fresh copy with memories up until you 'died' last night. Definitely digressing into sci-fi thought experiments.
      - foobarian 6y ago
        Wow, you are right, I wouldn't be able to tell. That is wild.
        LoSboccacc 6y ago
        > I wouldn't be able to tell the robot wouldn't, you'd be dead
    - est31 6y ago
      > how do you transfer the "you" into the new brain? Yeah this is the big question: what constitutes as "you"? Your body? You can lose a limb or parts of your brain and still remain "you". Your memories? they are constantly re-forming with people forgetting things and new memories being made. Your way of thinking? Neurons are extremely long lived cells. Unless you believe in souls (which many religions do), the experience of "you" is entirely defined by the matter of your body and maybe your surroundings. Let's assume we can build machines that can fully emulate human minds. Let's assume this emulation is good enough to also emulate the self-ness experience we are interested in. Your question was (and the question of LoSboccacc), that if you have this technology, can you somehow transfer the self-ness so that the real, legitimate, "you" gets there, and not a copy? How do you know it's really you? I'd argue that consciousness and self-ness is weirder than humans usually experience it: it can do more things than you'd think. Let's take Bob, someone born in the simulation, that is, he has spent his entire life being simulated in silicon. For all purposes, his self-ness is the only true legitimate one. There is no difference in legitimacy between his simulation and a human in flesh and blood. That's just a simple conclusion of the basic assumption that there are machines that can do this. Now if we have such a machine, then it runs some kind of program that can at least store Bob's state as a finite set of bytes. Whether it's a petabyte (less likely) or a yottabyte (maybe) is less relevant, what's more important is that it's a set of bytes. Now you can do interesting things with this data. What happens if you pause the emulation, save the data to disk, and then decide to either a) stop the emulation and load it from the saved state or b) delete the saved copy and resume the emulation. In both scenarios a and b you'd resume with the same state for Bob as in a) you load the same data you just stored and in b) you just create a disk backup and delete it. Nothing would really change. It would be the same Bob afterwards in both scenarios. In the next experiment, you save it to disk, turn off the emulating computer for a day, then turn it on, loading the disk again? It would be the same Bob, right? Let's combine the two experiments. Let's pause the emulation, save the data to disk, and then decide whether to either a) turn off the computer for a day or b) resume the emulation and run it for a day. After the day concluded we power cycle the computer and load the data we stored to disk yesterday. Now my argument is that it's still the same Bob in both scenarios. Scenario a) is our second experiment. As for scenario b), at the point of the pausing, we haven't decided yet about whether to choose a) or b). So clearly, the Bob stored on disk must be the legitimate one, otherwise a) would end up "killing" Bob. So it follows that in scenario b) it's the same Bob as well. Next I'd argue that whether there is a decision or not isn't really relevant for which data is being stored. It'd be the same Bob if you always chose b). In the fourth experiment, you'd just always go with b). If we apply this thought experiment to the boundary between emulated and incarnated minds, the conclusion to be drawn is that the cloud copy is always [1] legitimate, whether the original host dies during the copy, after the copy, or not at all. This conclusion is a bit humbling and it's understandable that people are critical, in fact I'm myself. But I believe this is just because the way we experience life on earth as separate individuals and consciousnesses, simply because our bodies are made like that. Our perception of what a consciousness is is blinded by the fact that each human starts with a blank set of memories and has their own way of deciding things, own skills etc. But once we get the ability to copy entire brains, those new experiences with consciousnesses in our society will fold the perceptions of individuals. Of course there will always be people who still believe in souls, and maybe there are in fact souls we just don't have the detection technology for. But 100 years ago people were superstitious of being photographed as they'd think you are stealing their soul. Maybe in 100 years we'll think that the old kind of thinking about consciousness is the same kind of superstition. I'd say it's an artifact of our self-preservation drive. Of course it's very important to quality control whether the simulation is really doing what's promised. To conclude, I think it's much easier to believe in life after death if you've seen your friends and family do it before your own eyes. Even Thomas ended up believing! Uhh the comment has gotten a bit longer than I anticipated. [1]: Note that this opens the question: can you just make any kind of copy and call it legitimate? Of course not. Consciousnesses are even weirder. The transition between legitimate and illegitimate is fluid. I'd consider someone who had a stroke and can't talk or walk any more as a weakly legitimate copy of the person pre-stroke. My argument assumes legitimate copies, but of course people can have different opinions/standards on what constitutes a legitimate copy. The question will become especially interesting if billionaires will get access to different copying methods than poor people.
- BLKNSLVR 6y ago
  The sci-fi novel The Resurrected Man asks that question about teleportation technology. The teleporter itself is referred to as "a murdering twinmaker". http://seanwilliams.com/words/books/sci-fi/the-resurrected-man/ http://seanwilliams.com/words/books/sci-fi/the-resurrected-m...

EdwardDiego 6y ago

Assuming that's even possible (how are those simulated brains going? As far as I can tell, we're up to 0.15% of a rat's brain), is a human consciousness separated from its biological construct still a human consciousness? We're well out of the realm of science into science fiction, but I feel it's a valid question to ask - all of our consciousnesses have developed in ape bodies adapted for the savanna, with a bunch of survival related traits and sub-processes. If we remove our "selves" from our bodies, are we still us?

chispamed 6y ago
It's really difficult to draw a line between being our "selves" and the alternatives though. We are not the individual cells of our body because most of them will be replaced in the next weeks/months/years. We also don't think of any body with a knee replacement as any less human. Even altering the genetic code of a huge part of your body, like after stem cell transplantation, is not commonly seen as making us less us. Also suppose it was possible to build a synthentic neuron that behaved just like the ones inside your brain. If you started replacing your neurons with the synthetic ones, no individual neuron would "change" you. So were would you draw the line? At 10% synthetic neurons? At 20%? At 100%? If we see ourselves as biological beings another interesting point is how you would view a 1:1 copy of yourself. If we constructed a synthetic human that had the exact same number of molecules in the exact same place as you, would that human be you? (Leaving aside that that's basically impossible, just as a thought experiment) If you answered the last question with "no", that would also mean that not even the way we process information and think makes us us, since the 1:1 molecular clone would behave exactly the same as you in the same environment (in a purely deterministic universe at least, leaving aside probability and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle). So are we instead an uninterrupted instance of a thinking process? That would allow us to differentiate us from the exact clone. However in that case, would you be another person after being unconsciousness? What about general anesthesia? This really keeps me up at night. It's next to impossible to define what we are and that we think of us as independent, unique beings might just be an illusion.
- mLuby 6y ago
  Good points. Nevertheless, until we have a convincing answer to this, I have to treat mind uploaders and destructive teleporters as murderboxes.

Ididntdothis 6y ago

Personally I think this is what’s going to happen. Why put up with the limitations of our physical body? With games, TV and internet we have already disconnected from the physical world to some degree and I think this trend will just continue

pharke 6y ago

I think we'd be much further along if we kept our wet ware and learned how to program our existing DNA and proteins. We already have a functioning system that does what we want and a whole planet full of example code. The molecular machines even do all the work for you if you give them the right instructions. How happy would you be if I offered you functional nano technology capable of producing self sustaining macro structures from elements and energy scavenged from the environment? It's literally under our noses and almost nobody has noticed.

est31 6y ago

Full agree. In the great scheme of things, making environments safe for human levels of tolerance is extremely wasteful. You need the right atmosphere, temperature, radiation freedom, freedom of toxic materials (and guess what, many chemical processes create tons of them), noise freedom, etc. This causes huge costs already now because industrial processes need to be engineered in ways to reduce emissions, it makes nuclear energy unavailable, people not wanting to live near airports, etc. Even gravity is an extremely wasteful thing. In order to have it, you need a giant planet full of precious construction material for dyson spheres, anything->iron fusion/fission reactors and hawking radiation matter->energy converters, all unavailable because some individuals chose to colonize the surface of it... The optimal approach for intelligent life is to architect computers that can run in the vacuum of space with minimal shielding and then deploy them across the galaxy to convert the available energy into intelligent thoughts and experiences. What the computers will run is up to us.

api 6y ago
> What the computers will run is up to us Adtech and cryptocurrency mining?

jp555 6y ago

If you could put your mind into an octopus, could you learn to use your 8 tentacles? Probably not without no longer being a human mind and becoming an octopus mind. Our bodies (and culture & environment) are part of our minds. They cannot be separated without destroying that mind. Also, most of what we think is our own “intelligence” actually exists outside our brains, in our culture & civilization. “Uploading our minds” only seems plausible if you have a cargo cult understanding of what is actually happening.

mLuby 6y ago
Humans learn to drive cars, fly aircraft, operate robotic arms, and play video games quite well, to the point where they consider those things "extensions of themselves." I wouldn't say a pro StarCraft player who's soldier management clicking has become muscle memory isn't really a human mind anymore. And likewise humans whose bodies have crippled or dismembered are still fully human despite sometimes barely being able to move or sense.
- jp555 6y ago
  Because their minds are all still inseparable from their bodies. You make my point, we are not just our mind, but a mind dynamically interconnected with a civilization in amazingly complex ways. Whether its the medieval catholic church, the interstate highway system, WoW, or the Internet. Cognition scientists are pretty sure that we think with our bodies, not just our brain. If you totally separated the human body from the human mind, it is by definition not a human anymore. At best it would be closer to the ghost we leave behind online after we die. Just a shadow or footprints. I dont expect us to ever do better than making really convincing animatronic ghosts.

Chathamization 6y ago

Yeah, there's a good chance that what we think of as humanity will be different 500 years from now. As such, trying to find ways to get today's humanity to live on other worlds (a questionable proposition even if things remain relatively static) might be about as useful as the tower of babel would have been to space exploration.