5 ms·

> 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

> 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.
beaconstudios 5y ago
this is a pervasive issue with LessWrong-oriented life extension ideas. They seem to take the position that a simulation of you, IS you, and that your attitude towards it should be the same as your attitude towards your experienced self. This makes no sense to me whatsoever - a simulation of me would not, in fact, be me, because I would not experience its perspective. I've never gotten around to reading about why they take this position - presumably there's a lengthy sequence or post about it.
- garmaine 5y ago
  There isn’t, so don’t waste your time looking. I spent far too long trying to find the disconnect and came up empty. Don’t waste your time like I did.
achillesheels 5y ago
Don't think of it as a copy but a continuation of you. And why do you think I can't continue to live in a new body, brain included, cloned from my proprietary genome, with a digitally transmitted cache of my proprietary self which is electromechanically diagrammed from how my self has extended into my personal body over time? And by the way, your judgment of permanent death is ignorant of the ancient Hellenic state of mind which actually germinated the European Scientific Revolution which your scientific thoughts are predicated upon. They didn't believe in death; indeed the Christian religious concept of the resurrection is paragonal to enlightenment scientific pursuits; in that the titans of Europe believed Heaven is justified. The "random-walk" experience of human cellular life which you are inferring is actually a century's old aberration in this great ascension of man towards everlasting life.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  there's a very easy thought experiment to make against a copy of you implying experiential continuity, in the sense of experiencing qualia: make two copies. Do you experience two perspectives simultaneously? This defies both reality and intuition, because you could separate the copies by a light year and experiencing the two perspectives simultaneously would violate physics.
  - achillesheels 5y ago
    No one wouldn’t, because can one be electro conductive in both?

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.

beaconstudios 5y ago

this is a pervasive issue with LessWrong-oriented life extension ideas. They seem to take the position that a simulation of you, IS you, and that your attitude towards it should be the same as your attitude towards your experienced self. This makes no sense to me whatsoever - a simulation of me would not, in fact, be me, because I would not experience its perspective. I've never gotten around to reading about why they take this position - presumably there's a lengthy sequence or post about it.

garmaine 5y ago
There isn’t, so don’t waste your time looking. I spent far too long trying to find the disconnect and came up empty. Don’t waste your time like I did.

achillesheels 5y ago

Don't think of it as a copy but a continuation of you. And why do you think I can't continue to live in a new body, brain included, cloned from my proprietary genome, with a digitally transmitted cache of my proprietary self which is electromechanically diagrammed from how my self has extended into my personal body over time? And by the way, your judgment of permanent death is ignorant of the ancient Hellenic state of mind which actually germinated the European Scientific Revolution which your scientific thoughts are predicated upon. They didn't believe in death; indeed the Christian religious concept of the resurrection is paragonal to enlightenment scientific pursuits; in that the titans of Europe believed Heaven is justified. The "random-walk" experience of human cellular life which you are inferring is actually a century's old aberration in this great ascension of man towards everlasting life.

beaconstudios 5y ago
there's a very easy thought experiment to make against a copy of you implying experiential continuity, in the sense of experiencing qualia: make two copies. Do you experience two perspectives simultaneously? This defies both reality and intuition, because you could separate the copies by a light year and experiencing the two perspectives simultaneously would violate physics.
- achillesheels 5y ago
  No one wouldn’t, because can one be electro conductive in both?