5 ms·

We Don’t Have to Die

19 points by finite_jest 5y ago

iggyblueeyes 5y ago
I resist the idea that consciousness can be preserved like this, but moreover in any way. I think the litmus test for understanding consciousness is making something that is consciousness. I don't think anyone has done this.
- garmaine 5y ago
  How would you know if they did?
mayoff 5y ago
Neal Stephenson wrote a novel about this: Fall; or, Dodge in Hell.
peakaboo 5y ago
I guess the author of this piece doesnt believe in reincarnation or the eternal soul.
KronisLV 5y ago
> Alas, this scenario can’t work if your brain is burned or eaten by worms soon. But the info that specifies you is now only a tiny fraction of all the info in your brain and is redundantly encoded. So if we freeze all the chemical processes in your brain, either via plastination or liquid nitrogen, quite likely enough info can be found there to make a brain emulation of you. So “all” that stands between you and this future immortality is freezing your brain and then storing it until future tech improves. This feels wrong to me. No, not on an ethical level or anything like that, but rather the fact that it wouldn't be you that continues living, but rather a copy of you, much like cloning an HDD and putting the new one in the computer, while the old one probably gets tossed away (though some forms of getting to this emulation with brains might also be destructive during the process). Your present consciousness is not just the pattern itself, but rather the pattern within a specific brain - yours. If you are currently reading this and are experiencing this (not just remembering this as a memory that you had a thousand years ago), then it's a given that you're on the losing side of this equation, unless we develop viable cryopreservation or something to reverse aging. Otherwise, there's probably nothing but a final cessation of consciousness for you in store, at some point in time. One moment you'll be thinking and experiencing the world around you, the next you'll stop and will never have a thought or an experience again, at least with our present understanding of the universe (Boltzmann brains and Quantum immortality both seem unlikely). Sure, you can argue semantics and the Ship of Theseus, but i don't care much about preserving an instance of my brain/memories that's not me, much like how i find the claims that a person can "live on" in others' memories to be nonsensical.
- hotpotamus 5y ago
  You've hit upon an ongoing debate about continuity of consciousness. The best answer I've heard is to replace your brain with artificial neurons one at a time in order to create a gradual transfer but even that seems unsatisfying.
  - reducesuffering 5y ago
    Why does it seem unsatisfying? Hanson makes the point that what makes us today, our X billion cells, all are not a part of us 20 years later. We are constantly replacing our individual components and yet still have the same stream of conscious. I suspect that over the next few decades, our understanding of biology and neuroscience will get much much better in explaining this phenomena and giving us the proper single-consciousness way of replacing our individual components likewise.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      We actually have no way to know that our stream of consciousness is continuous, because all we have of the past is memory, and memory is not consciousness. There's quite a few unnerving ideas in this space, like that we can't really know whether we wake up the same "us" after we sleep. The only thing we really experience is the present moment.
      - reducesuffering 5y ago
        Yes that's a good point but that doesn't distinguish natural cells/neurons from artificial.
        beaconstudios 5y ago
        True - I suspect that if you were to gradually replace human neurons with artificial ones that you could potentially achieve continuity of experience, but it would be impossible to prove one way or the other so doing it on somebody who wasn't dying might be unethical.
tablespoon 5y ago
> You are mostly the mind (software) that runs on the brain (hardware) in your head; your brain and body are tools supporting your mind. If our civilization doesn’t collapse but instead advances, we will eventually be able to move your mind into artificial hardware, making a “brain emulation”. With an artificial brain and body, you could live an immortal life, a life as vivid and meaningful as your life today, where you never need feel pain, disease, grime, and your body always looks and feels young and beautiful. Let's start by assuming science-fiction is true...
- dragontamer 5y ago
  To be fair, assuming that science-fiction is true is the cornerstone of that entire genre. Lets start by assuming time-travel exists, but it only goes back to the point where you turned on the machine. Or lets assume hyperdrives were invented and we're entering a period of space exploration (Star Trek), etc. etc. It turns out to be pretty fun. ----------- So lets say it were possible that "saving your brain to software" was possible. How would it work? We know that worms and jellyfish have memories but no brains for example. Their simple nervous systems store memories in the nerves themselves. Surely, our nerves in our muscles and fingertips are storing some of our memories: the "software" we download out of our bodies would probably have to include that! (A common joke is that my fingers know my passwords but my brain does not. Maybe its true: muscle memory is a real thing after all). Ultimately, it is clear that to "transfer our memories", we need to rebuild a nervous system, and maybe a good chunk of our bodies (if memories are truly stored in the nerves in our muscles, then to perform an adequate transfer, we need to recreate those nerves with the same "settings" as our hypothetically downloaded software) Its fun to think about, because we don't actually have to solve the problem. Its just fantasy. We can think and discuss the problem as much or as little as we'd like, without in fact doing any hard work. IE: The fun part.
nzmsv 5y ago
I have to ask: but why? The author correctly concludes that the human mind is software, but then their survival instinct gets the better of them and they don't carry this thought to its logical conclusion. And that is: death is a feature, not a bug. The planet-wide human computer happens to run its computation by transferring some state from the current generation of humans to the next via a mixture of lip flapping, squiggles on paper, and backlit screens panels. In doing so it performs pruning of the state: every detail is not transferred. In essence, a person pushing for immortality is a single selfish genome with a singular purpose: replicate to the detriment of maximizing the global utility of the system. The system by design will try its best to thwart this effort.
- nyokodo 5y ago
  > the human mind is software It’s an understatement to say this has yet to be established. The human body is very much hardware and includes our incredible cognitive system that we haven’t and may never be able to simulate accurately. Everything from quantum interactions of particles composing neurons to physically interacting with the world etc may prove irreducibly complex to intelligence so as to make simulation essentially just cloning. The “mind as software” meme really needs to have better evidence for its arrogant presentation.
  - Maursault 5y ago
    > The “mind as software” meme really needs to have better evidence It never will because it is fundamentally a bad metaphor in reverse. The proper metaphor doesn't apply in reverse to mind and brain. Mind is not an algorithm or a series of instructions that gets executed on brain, the notion is absurd. Mind is also not something else, it is not some thing, as it has no substance, has no weight, color, smell, etc. Though we are certain the brain is the seat of the mind, you can slice up brain as many ways as possible and never find the mind. Near as experts can figure, mind is a phenomenon of personal experience that arises from healthy brain. Conversely, Strong AI, a living but artificial mind in a digital machine, is unattainable and will remain the domain of science fiction, though it is easy enough to have a convincing enough AI fool us into believing an AI has personal experience, it is simply physically and logically impossible, at least until two things occur: 1) we actually fully understand mind (unlikely to occur) and 2) we attain the ability to create neurons at the scale of what makes neurons (may be impossible). But if it ever occurs, what a horrendous and cruel thing to create. Imagine being consciousness under those conditions.

19 points by finite_jest 5y ago

I resist the idea that consciousness can be preserved like this, but moreover in any way. I think the litmus test for understanding consciousness is making something that is consciousness. I don't think anyone has done this.

garmaine 5y ago
How would you know if they did?

mayoff 5y ago

Neal Stephenson wrote a novel about this: Fall; or, Dodge in Hell.

peakaboo 5y ago

I guess the author of this piece doesnt believe in reincarnation or the eternal soul.

KronisLV 5y ago

> Alas, this scenario can’t work if your brain is burned or eaten by worms soon. But the info that specifies you is now only a tiny fraction of all the info in your brain and is redundantly encoded. So if we freeze all the chemical processes in your brain, either via plastination or liquid nitrogen, quite likely enough info can be found there to make a brain emulation of you. So “all” that stands between you and this future immortality is freezing your brain and then storing it until future tech improves. This feels wrong to me. No, not on an ethical level or anything like that, but rather the fact that it wouldn't be you that continues living, but rather a copy of you, much like cloning an HDD and putting the new one in the computer, while the old one probably gets tossed away (though some forms of getting to this emulation with brains might also be destructive during the process). Your present consciousness is not just the pattern itself, but rather the pattern within a specific brain - yours. If you are currently reading this and are experiencing this (not just remembering this as a memory that you had a thousand years ago), then it's a given that you're on the losing side of this equation, unless we develop viable cryopreservation or something to reverse aging. Otherwise, there's probably nothing but a final cessation of consciousness for you in store, at some point in time. One moment you'll be thinking and experiencing the world around you, the next you'll stop and will never have a thought or an experience again, at least with our present understanding of the universe (Boltzmann brains and Quantum immortality both seem unlikely). Sure, you can argue semantics and the Ship of Theseus, but i don't care much about preserving an instance of my brain/memories that's not me, much like how i find the claims that a person can "live on" in others' memories to be nonsensical.

hotpotamus 5y ago
You've hit upon an ongoing debate about continuity of consciousness. The best answer I've heard is to replace your brain with artificial neurons one at a time in order to create a gradual transfer but even that seems unsatisfying.
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  Why does it seem unsatisfying? Hanson makes the point that what makes us today, our X billion cells, all are not a part of us 20 years later. We are constantly replacing our individual components and yet still have the same stream of conscious. I suspect that over the next few decades, our understanding of biology and neuroscience will get much much better in explaining this phenomena and giving us the proper single-consciousness way of replacing our individual components likewise.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    We actually have no way to know that our stream of consciousness is continuous, because all we have of the past is memory, and memory is not consciousness. There's quite a few unnerving ideas in this space, like that we can't really know whether we wake up the same "us" after we sleep. The only thing we really experience is the present moment.
    - reducesuffering 5y ago
      Yes that's a good point but that doesn't distinguish natural cells/neurons from artificial.
      - beaconstudios 5y ago
        True - I suspect that if you were to gradually replace human neurons with artificial ones that you could potentially achieve continuity of experience, but it would be impossible to prove one way or the other so doing it on somebody who wasn't dying might be unethical.

tablespoon 5y ago

> You are mostly the mind (software) that runs on the brain (hardware) in your head; your brain and body are tools supporting your mind. If our civilization doesn’t collapse but instead advances, we will eventually be able to move your mind into artificial hardware, making a “brain emulation”. With an artificial brain and body, you could live an immortal life, a life as vivid and meaningful as your life today, where you never need feel pain, disease, grime, and your body always looks and feels young and beautiful. Let's start by assuming science-fiction is true...

dragontamer 5y ago
To be fair, assuming that science-fiction is true is the cornerstone of that entire genre. Lets start by assuming time-travel exists, but it only goes back to the point where you turned on the machine. Or lets assume hyperdrives were invented and we're entering a period of space exploration (Star Trek), etc. etc. It turns out to be pretty fun. ----------- So lets say it were possible that "saving your brain to software" was possible. How would it work? We know that worms and jellyfish have memories but no brains for example. Their simple nervous systems store memories in the nerves themselves. Surely, our nerves in our muscles and fingertips are storing some of our memories: the "software" we download out of our bodies would probably have to include that! (A common joke is that my fingers know my passwords but my brain does not. Maybe its true: muscle memory is a real thing after all). Ultimately, it is clear that to "transfer our memories", we need to rebuild a nervous system, and maybe a good chunk of our bodies (if memories are truly stored in the nerves in our muscles, then to perform an adequate transfer, we need to recreate those nerves with the same "settings" as our hypothetically downloaded software) Its fun to think about, because we don't actually have to solve the problem. Its just fantasy. We can think and discuss the problem as much or as little as we'd like, without in fact doing any hard work. IE: The fun part.

nzmsv 5y ago

I have to ask: but why? The author correctly concludes that the human mind is software, but then their survival instinct gets the better of them and they don't carry this thought to its logical conclusion. And that is: death is a feature, not a bug. The planet-wide human computer happens to run its computation by transferring some state from the current generation of humans to the next via a mixture of lip flapping, squiggles on paper, and backlit screens panels. In doing so it performs pruning of the state: every detail is not transferred. In essence, a person pushing for immortality is a single selfish genome with a singular purpose: replicate to the detriment of maximizing the global utility of the system. The system by design will try its best to thwart this effort.

nyokodo 5y ago
> the human mind is software It’s an understatement to say this has yet to be established. The human body is very much hardware and includes our incredible cognitive system that we haven’t and may never be able to simulate accurately. Everything from quantum interactions of particles composing neurons to physically interacting with the world etc may prove irreducibly complex to intelligence so as to make simulation essentially just cloning. The “mind as software” meme really needs to have better evidence for its arrogant presentation.
- Maursault 5y ago
  > The “mind as software” meme really needs to have better evidence It never will because it is fundamentally a bad metaphor in reverse. The proper metaphor doesn't apply in reverse to mind and brain. Mind is not an algorithm or a series of instructions that gets executed on brain, the notion is absurd. Mind is also not something else, it is not some thing, as it has no substance, has no weight, color, smell, etc. Though we are certain the brain is the seat of the mind, you can slice up brain as many ways as possible and never find the mind. Near as experts can figure, mind is a phenomenon of personal experience that arises from healthy brain. Conversely, Strong AI, a living but artificial mind in a digital machine, is unattainable and will remain the domain of science fiction, though it is easy enough to have a convincing enough AI fool us into believing an AI has personal experience, it is simply physically and logically impossible, at least until two things occur: 1) we actually fully understand mind (unlikely to occur) and 2) we attain the ability to create neurons at the scale of what makes neurons (may be impossible). But if it ever occurs, what a horrendous and cruel thing to create. Imagine being consciousness under those conditions.