8 ms·

The Hayworth-Miller 2019 Debate About Brain Preservation

24 points by ogennadi 6y ago

gwern 6y ago
What an extraordinary pain to read. This really demonstrates why Twitter is awful for debates. This can be made readable, but you'd have to rewrite the entire thing, more or less, to pull out the individual points, consolidate broken up thoughts, and create consistent formatting per author so you can follow it instead of being a sea of text with occasional implicit author switching. (It also demonstrates why you shouldn't have light-gray text on gray background, pale green links, and dashed underline links.)
- porejide 6y ago
  I apologize and wish I could have presented it better. I first compiled this in 2019 and had been planning to summarize it more. Alas, I recently realized that I wouldn't have the energy for that and that I should simply publish as is. I'm surprised that people care at all, but perhaps I underestimate how many are as interested in the content as I am. Regarding the formatting, I will try to update the background to something more readable using wordpress, although I obviously lack your skills in this area. In the meantime, you're free to copy it onto your website or elsewhere.
  - aperrien 6y ago
    I've learned several new things from this conversation. Thank you for saving it.
steve_g 6y ago
Coincidently, I've just been re-reading Neal Stephenson's Fall, which is a fun story about simulating uploaded minds (or brains, or whatever). https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Dodge-Hell-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0062458728/ https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Dodge-Hell-Neal-Stephenson/dp/00...
russfink 6y ago
What if consciousness requires an active synapse loop to be maintained, kind of like a magnetic field, with little hysteresis eddies etc, but one that if it loses all power, it disappears forever?
- ogennadi 6y ago
  Hi @russfink. That can't be the case since, as mentioned in the debate, there are medical procedures [1] where a person's neural activity ceases and the patients recover their (long-term) memories [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0013469489900333 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001346...
  - mlyle 6y ago
    This doesn't fix the philosophical issue, though. Is it the same person? Or did that thread of individual conscious perception disappear forever and was replaced by someone "new" who acts the same? In the end, this is a philosophical discussion because consciousness is not something we can observe in a way to test and falsify hypotheses.
  - ralfd 6y ago
    Hm. The cessation of electrical activity is just that which is measured on scalp EEG; ie, we can only really be certain that the most superficial layers of cortex aren't firing and what we are measuring.
    - porejide 6y ago
      Very fair point. There are other examples that go beyond DHCA, though, and point clearly in the same direction. One example is that sometimes people suffer cardiac arrests and lose consciousness for minutes to hours 10.1016/j.resuscitation.2014.06.015. Coordinated electrical activity stops after a few minutes following cardiac arrest, but people can (rarely) be revived with their apparent memories and personality intact.
- Baeocystin 6y ago
geofft 6y ago
> A terminal patient choosing brain preservation with the hope of future revival via mind uploading is making the same type of rational judgement –faced with the alternative of oblivion I choose to undergo an uncertain surgical procedure that has some chance of restoring most of the unique memories that I consider to define ‘me’ as an individual. Hopefully this makes clear that I am rejecting a ‘magical’ view of the self. An individual’s mind is computational and, just like with a laptop, an imperfect backup copy is better than complete erasure. Doesn't this argue against the entire brain preservation enterprise? That is, without a "magical" view of selfhood, why attempt to preserve a partially faithful replica of one's self instead of finding other ways to do the things that you'd want to do in the future once revived? I don't really back up my laptop in a conventional sense. I do git pushes of my git clones, I copy some files to rsync.net, I do a lot of work on cloud services like Google Docs and Trello, etc. A lot of what's on my laptop is transient. This is nice, because I'm not backing up a Mac; if I decide to run Debian or switch to a Chromebook or whatever, I can still achieve my high-level goal of not losing work without the low-level implementation of restoring a Mac. And certainly I don't back up servers at work in the conventional sense, either; most of those "servers" are now just Kubernetes pods anyway, represented declaratively, and that's a lot better than a backup. I think in the same sense, I do have a plan for immortality, and that plan is to change the world for the better while I am alive, now, as conventionally defined, in lasting ways. I don't really know what I would do if I were resurrected many centuries in the future. (I would expect at least as much change in the world as between now and many centuries in the past, and I can't really imagine even the greatest thinkers or doers or heroes of ages past productively helping the world today. Should Arthur return from Avalon to save Britain today, he'd have a lot of trouble recovering the throne in a largely pro-democratic society, and he'd have no idea what to make of "Brexit.") Meanwhile, there's quite a bit I can do today to improve the world, to improve the lives of others, to try to improve by a fraction of a percent the chances of human society even existing a few centuries hence, etc. My self - my life and physical conscious existence - is just a tool for accomplishing whatever goals I have; it's not the goal itself. My laptop is also a tool; if I can keep doing the work that was on my laptop, I don't need a clone of the laptop itself. It seems to me, then, that the only argument for brain preservation - for attempting to preserve one's "self" into the future and for investing in the ability to make it happen - is seeing one's self in this "magical" way, in believing that there's more value in the very fact of one's existence, and in fact even a partial and inaccurate continuation of that existence - than in what you do with that existence. (And it does not save you from having to influence the world and engineer its future. At the least, as we can see, you have to spend a fair amount of your life today convincing society that it should develop in a way so that, in the future, they build the means to restore you.)
gruez 6y ago
If a "backup" is made of your brain before you died, and it's restored afterwards to a new body, wouldn't that new copy be totally disconnected from the original. The brain in the new body might behave identically to the original, but the entity (or "soul", for lack of a better word) experiencing it won't be the original. This is trivially demonstrated by using the same backup process to make a clone (ie. restoring the backup but not killing the original). Clearly you won't be having the experiences of both bodies, would you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox
- simondw 6y ago
  > "soul", for lack of a better word A better word isn't all we're lacking. We don't have a clear idea of what that thing is, or whether it even exists. > Clearly you won't be having the experiences of both bodies, would you? Whether there is a "you" distinct from both bodies is the actual question to be answered here. If the experiment were done, my guess is that both bodies would swear that they were the original -- in much the same way, perhaps, that you would swear that you are the same "you" you were yesterday.
- danbmil99 6y ago
  This is a fair point. I think the best way to think of it is to assume that when you clone a brain, consciousness splits between the two copies. However, in this case, one of the two conscious paths doesn't really exist since the procedure is destructive. Therefore it seems probable to you subjectively, that you will wake up in a lab in a future century if that ever comes to pass. Otherwise, you just die like a regular schmuck. It seems like it's worth a try, since the alternative is certain death and non-existence.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >It seems like it's worth a try, since the alternative is certain death and non-existence. but only if it's free, right? Otherwise it turns into a variant of pascal's wager.
    - 6y ago

24 points by ogennadi 6y ago

What an extraordinary pain to read. This really demonstrates why Twitter is awful for debates. This can be made readable, but you'd have to rewrite the entire thing, more or less, to pull out the individual points, consolidate broken up thoughts, and create consistent formatting per author so you can follow it instead of being a sea of text with occasional implicit author switching. (It also demonstrates why you shouldn't have light-gray text on gray background, pale green links, and dashed underline links.)

porejide 6y ago
I apologize and wish I could have presented it better. I first compiled this in 2019 and had been planning to summarize it more. Alas, I recently realized that I wouldn't have the energy for that and that I should simply publish as is. I'm surprised that people care at all, but perhaps I underestimate how many are as interested in the content as I am. Regarding the formatting, I will try to update the background to something more readable using wordpress, although I obviously lack your skills in this area. In the meantime, you're free to copy it onto your website or elsewhere.
- aperrien 6y ago
  I've learned several new things from this conversation. Thank you for saving it.

steve_g 6y ago

Coincidently, I've just been re-reading Neal Stephenson's Fall, which is a fun story about simulating uploaded minds (or brains, or whatever). https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Dodge-Hell-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0062458728/ https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Dodge-Hell-Neal-Stephenson/dp/00...

russfink 6y ago

What if consciousness requires an active synapse loop to be maintained, kind of like a magnetic field, with little hysteresis eddies etc, but one that if it loses all power, it disappears forever?

ogennadi 6y ago
Hi @russfink. That can't be the case since, as mentioned in the debate, there are medical procedures [1] where a person's neural activity ceases and the patients recover their (long-term) memories [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0013469489900333 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001346...
- mlyle 6y ago
  This doesn't fix the philosophical issue, though. Is it the same person? Or did that thread of individual conscious perception disappear forever and was replaced by someone "new" who acts the same? In the end, this is a philosophical discussion because consciousness is not something we can observe in a way to test and falsify hypotheses.
- ralfd 6y ago
  Hm. The cessation of electrical activity is just that which is measured on scalp EEG; ie, we can only really be certain that the most superficial layers of cortex aren't firing and what we are measuring.
  - porejide 6y ago
    Very fair point. There are other examples that go beyond DHCA, though, and point clearly in the same direction. One example is that sometimes people suffer cardiac arrests and lose consciousness for minutes to hours 10.1016/j.resuscitation.2014.06.015. Coordinated electrical activity stops after a few minutes following cardiac arrest, but people can (rarely) be revived with their apparent memories and personality intact.
Baeocystin 6y ago

geofft 6y ago

> A terminal patient choosing brain preservation with the hope of future revival via mind uploading is making the same type of rational judgement –faced with the alternative of oblivion I choose to undergo an uncertain surgical procedure that has some chance of restoring most of the unique memories that I consider to define ‘me’ as an individual. Hopefully this makes clear that I am rejecting a ‘magical’ view of the self. An individual’s mind is computational and, just like with a laptop, an imperfect backup copy is better than complete erasure. Doesn't this argue against the entire brain preservation enterprise? That is, without a "magical" view of selfhood, why attempt to preserve a partially faithful replica of one's self instead of finding other ways to do the things that you'd want to do in the future once revived? I don't really back up my laptop in a conventional sense. I do git pushes of my git clones, I copy some files to rsync.net, I do a lot of work on cloud services like Google Docs and Trello, etc. A lot of what's on my laptop is transient. This is nice, because I'm not backing up a Mac; if I decide to run Debian or switch to a Chromebook or whatever, I can still achieve my high-level goal of not losing work without the low-level implementation of restoring a Mac. And certainly I don't back up servers at work in the conventional sense, either; most of those "servers" are now just Kubernetes pods anyway, represented declaratively, and that's a lot better than a backup. I think in the same sense, I do have a plan for immortality, and that plan is to change the world for the better while I am alive, now, as conventionally defined, in lasting ways. I don't really know what I would do if I were resurrected many centuries in the future. (I would expect at least as much change in the world as between now and many centuries in the past, and I can't really imagine even the greatest thinkers or doers or heroes of ages past productively helping the world today. Should Arthur return from Avalon to save Britain today, he'd have a lot of trouble recovering the throne in a largely pro-democratic society, and he'd have no idea what to make of "Brexit.") Meanwhile, there's quite a bit I can do today to improve the world, to improve the lives of others, to try to improve by a fraction of a percent the chances of human society even existing a few centuries hence, etc. My self - my life and physical conscious existence - is just a tool for accomplishing whatever goals I have; it's not the goal itself. My laptop is also a tool; if I can keep doing the work that was on my laptop, I don't need a clone of the laptop itself. It seems to me, then, that the only argument for brain preservation - for attempting to preserve one's "self" into the future and for investing in the ability to make it happen - is seeing one's self in this "magical" way, in believing that there's more value in the very fact of one's existence, and in fact even a partial and inaccurate continuation of that existence - than in what you do with that existence. (And it does not save you from having to influence the world and engineer its future. At the least, as we can see, you have to spend a fair amount of your life today convincing society that it should develop in a way so that, in the future, they build the means to restore you.)

gruez 6y ago

If a "backup" is made of your brain before you died, and it's restored afterwards to a new body, wouldn't that new copy be totally disconnected from the original. The brain in the new body might behave identically to the original, but the entity (or "soul", for lack of a better word) experiencing it won't be the original. This is trivially demonstrated by using the same backup process to make a clone (ie. restoring the backup but not killing the original). Clearly you won't be having the experiences of both bodies, would you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox

simondw 6y ago
> "soul", for lack of a better word A better word isn't all we're lacking. We don't have a clear idea of what that thing is, or whether it even exists. > Clearly you won't be having the experiences of both bodies, would you? Whether there is a "you" distinct from both bodies is the actual question to be answered here. If the experiment were done, my guess is that both bodies would swear that they were the original -- in much the same way, perhaps, that you would swear that you are the same "you" you were yesterday.
danbmil99 6y ago
This is a fair point. I think the best way to think of it is to assume that when you clone a brain, consciousness splits between the two copies. However, in this case, one of the two conscious paths doesn't really exist since the procedure is destructive. Therefore it seems probable to you subjectively, that you will wake up in a lab in a future century if that ever comes to pass. Otherwise, you just die like a regular schmuck. It seems like it's worth a try, since the alternative is certain death and non-existence.
- gruez 6y ago
  >It seems like it's worth a try, since the alternative is certain death and non-existence. but only if it's free, right? Otherwise it turns into a variant of pascal's wager.
  - 6y ago