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> 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 th

by 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.)

Baeocystin 6y ago
I'm pretty sure historians from every category would positively salivate over the prospect of being able to interview an actual person from a few hundred years ago. And it isn't like they'd stop being interested at just one. And in terms of work one can do to improve the world- the tools available today amplify the work someone can do by orders of magnitude compared to centuries past, particularly mental work. I see no reason to think this trend won't continue. Who is to say that, given enough time and development, a society of the future might have an entire pathway for the freshly-revived to go back to school, so to speak, and become able to do things those of us now can only dream of?
- geofft 6y ago
  The first one is a good point, although it doesn't quite sound to me like the folks advocating for preservation are doing so with the intention of being valuable to future generations for the interests of those generations. If they were, then they'd get themselves comfortable with being revived multiple times (either re-preserved or terminated and re-cloned, whatever's easiest to future society) and would prefer to be revived as far in the future as possible, and they'd accomplish what they intend during this life. But most of the motivation I see around this seems to be focused around trampling down death by cryopreservation and continuing to live your life in the future. You could also imagine that, in a future where we are close to being able to revive human brains, we can just query human brains via simulation without bringing them back to life. The ethics of that are different, but - at least with consent from the person while they were be alive - it doesn't seem obviously wrong. Re work improving the world - why do we imagine that someone from the present would be more effective at using those tools than someone from the future? Again, take the example of Arthur: if he returned, what would he do? What would you have him do? Or if even Isaac Newton were to return, would he be able to keep up with the brightest minds of the present generation of students who all took calculus in high school? I'm not doubting that he'd still be a sharp thinker, but would he be doing anything groundbreaking and world-changing like he did in his natural life, or would he "just" interview well at FAANG? I'm not disputing that both of them would do things beyond their own wildest dreams during their lifetimes. Honestly, I think Arthur would have a lot of fun being in the House of Lords (which is probably where they'd put him) and Newton would get a blast out of being an entry-level engineer at FAANG. I'm disputing that they would do anything beyond what the natural-born of today would do, and that unless you have a sentimental correlation between your revived self and your old self, there's not really a point in one more average or even above-average person existing in the future.

by geofft 6y ago

Baeocystin 6y ago

I'm pretty sure historians from every category would positively salivate over the prospect of being able to interview an actual person from a few hundred years ago. And it isn't like they'd stop being interested at just one. And in terms of work one can do to improve the world- the tools available today amplify the work someone can do by orders of magnitude compared to centuries past, particularly mental work. I see no reason to think this trend won't continue. Who is to say that, given enough time and development, a society of the future might have an entire pathway for the freshly-revived to go back to school, so to speak, and become able to do things those of us now can only dream of?

geofft 6y ago
The first one is a good point, although it doesn't quite sound to me like the folks advocating for preservation are doing so with the intention of being valuable to future generations for the interests of those generations. If they were, then they'd get themselves comfortable with being revived multiple times (either re-preserved or terminated and re-cloned, whatever's easiest to future society) and would prefer to be revived as far in the future as possible, and they'd accomplish what they intend during this life. But most of the motivation I see around this seems to be focused around trampling down death by cryopreservation and continuing to live your life in the future. You could also imagine that, in a future where we are close to being able to revive human brains, we can just query human brains via simulation without bringing them back to life. The ethics of that are different, but - at least with consent from the person while they were be alive - it doesn't seem obviously wrong. Re work improving the world - why do we imagine that someone from the present would be more effective at using those tools than someone from the future? Again, take the example of Arthur: if he returned, what would he do? What would you have him do? Or if even Isaac Newton were to return, would he be able to keep up with the brightest minds of the present generation of students who all took calculus in high school? I'm not doubting that he'd still be a sharp thinker, but would he be doing anything groundbreaking and world-changing like he did in his natural life, or would he "just" interview well at FAANG? I'm not disputing that both of them would do things beyond their own wildest dreams during their lifetimes. Honestly, I think Arthur would have a lot of fun being in the House of Lords (which is probably where they'd put him) and Newton would get a blast out of being an entry-level engineer at FAANG. I'm disputing that they would do anything beyond what the natural-born of today would do, and that unless you have a sentimental correlation between your revived self and your old self, there's not really a point in one more average or even above-average person existing in the future.