6 ms·
Never thought the day that brain in a vat is no longer a philosophical question but a practical one would come so soon.
by trulyhnh 3y ago
Never thought the day that brain in a vat is no longer a philosophical question but a practical one would come so soon.
- sparrowInHand 3y agoTo be honest, i thought it would first go the other way around. To many billionaires afraid of death, trying to encode there mindstate-personality into a machine and become semi-imortal.
- Version467 3y agoI've never understood this. Even if we would have perfect mind-uploading capabilities, this doesn't help the billionaire who is afraid of death, right? It'd just be a copy of them. An immortal one, sure, but the original person would die just the same, no?
- falcor84 3y agoThere's the philosophical argument that we have no continuity of consciousness in our meatbag bodies either - e.g. when you wake up, it's rebooting your consciousness from suspended memories.
- freilanzer 3y agoLucid dreaming would like a word.
- ben_w 3y agoEven then it's not continuous over all your sleep.
- mofunnyman 3y agoNot to mention that nearly all of the atoms in your body are replaced every decade, meaning most of you went into sewage treatment long ago.
- kyleyeats 3y agoWe actually breathe out most of our previously-us mass.
- ChatGTP 3y agoIf you weren’t conscious when asleep, how do you explain dreams and memories? I’ve read about high level meditators who were “aware” they were asleep too. Not sure why they’d make this up.
- OttoVonBizark 3y agoyeah normal sleep is a bad example of rebooting. heavy general anaesthetic is a better example
- ChatGTP 3y agoYou conscious thoughts might be asleep but some part of you is still "there" and operating or else you wouldn't be able to wake up and remember anything?
- v4dok 3y agoThere would be no way to find out if that would be true however. The person in the vat might say they are the same person but you don't know if they really are. Also what happens if you create a copy? Is that two people or is there some kind of shared consciousness? If it is, how do they communicate?
- gat1 3y agoSame with teleportation, you cannot know for sure if the person after the teleportation is the same as the one before, they can just be a copy.
- caskstrength 3y agoBut once they pay $$$ and turn on the uploaded consciousness won't they be like "Hey, why I'm still here in my meat body and not in Amazon Brain Cloud(c)"?
- bratbag 3y agoDaily backup with a final scan after death, if possible. Then your mind is booted into a simulation from your memories, instead of being booted into your pillow from your memories. Functionally not much different to waking up after loosing some time from being blackout drunk.
- caskstrength 3y agoI thought the the fact that your mind is not magically booted into simulation while you are still alive (during sleep, backout while drunk or just pressing the power button on the server running it) should be a clue that you won't suddenly wake up in simulation after you have died.
- Aerbil313 3y agoYou are still dead tho. That thing is a clone of you. Nothing can help this fact.
- ben_w 3y agoOur language can't fully represent the possibility, as it doesn't currently exist and language is learned by mutually shared experiences upon which we then agree terminology. If you make a backup of my mind every midnight, and at noon one day biological-me faces death, that's still death for noon-me, while also being a way to cheat death from the point of view of the me from 12 hours before. Restoring your computer from a backup doesn't mean the hard drive never failed, but it is does get you data back.
- Aerbil313 3y agoNo, our language is perfectly capable of expressing this simple fact: When you die you die, no matter how many clones or backups of you are up and running.
- vbezhenar 3y agoThere's physical continuity. You can be sure that most of your neurones will be the same tomorrow. So to solve immortality, you gotta replace meat cells with silicone ones, slowly, one percent after another. It'll maintain relative continuity and hopefully will transfer memories and other person traits to the silicone, so one day the brain will be immortal and repairable.
- Kerbonut 3y agoThe movie Dark City (1998) explores this concept somewhat.
- paulluuk 3y agoIt's probably not a fear of death, but a fear to cease to exist. And uploading your mind does mean that you continue to exist.
- viraptor 3y agoIt probably depends on your idea of what the soul/consciousness is and how it interacts/integrates with the physical world. There's a few people interested in the idea of (simplifying a lot) "brain as an antenna receiving the consciousness signals".
- Borrible 3y agoThe belief of being no one can be a truth, the belief of being someone an advantage.
- xialvjun 3y agoShip of Theseus
- sparrowInHand 3y agoIf you do battle with the scramblers and you blow up your anti-matter stockpile, do you even have any ship left?
- Version467 3y agoAfaik Ship of Theseus is replacing parts incrementally until eventually no part is from the original ship. This is more like taking the ship, building an exact copy of it and then throwing away the original ship. Not sure that thought experiment is applicable.
- GoblinSlayer 3y agoIntegrate your brain into a machine then gradually replace it.
- rokkitmensch 3y agoThe Altered Carbon books explore this line of thinking decently.
- raverbashing 3y agoJust plug them into a corresponding MMORPG and let them continue from there?
- TeMPOraL 3y agoAh, the billionaires. Boogeymen of our times. The scourge of all us crabs living here in this fine bucket.
- analognoise 3y agoBillionaires shouldn't exist; to continue the crab metaphor, they're already outside the pot and it's disingenuous to suggest that we're trying to pull others down by removing the flaws that allow such extreme accumulations of wealth - that's the kind of divisive talk they're all for. Don't carry water for them.
- Kon5ole 3y ago>Billionaires shouldn't exist; People want to own things even if they are not billionaires, and they want to value things freely even if they are not billionaires. Those two things combined make billionaires unavoidable if you think about it. I think what you really desire is that billionaires should not be able to corrupt society or exploit the environment to the detriment of others. Which I am fully behind and consider an attainable and worthy goal even though we're currently far from it.
- bergen 3y ago>Those two things combined make billionaires unavoidable if you think about it. What service, commodity, or neccessity one owns, one pays a billion for? Considering production is worker owned, there would be no necessity for billionaires. This is basically a statement on the concentration of wealth, and that theoretically no one should have 20 Billion more "moneys" then any other person, with the linked fact that this person has 20 billion more influence in politics and getting their voice heard than a person with only one dollar on them. Because the fact that money buys influence is also "unavoidable" if you think about it. If I can feed 10.000 people daily and make them rely on me, they are much more likely to do my bidding and listen to me.
- Kon5ole 3y ago
- BoxOfRain 3y agoI think there's a good reason that trying to cheat death and meeting a grim end as a result is such a common trope in mythology. Even in ancient times I think people generally recognised the profound harm refusing to accept the inevitability of death does to a person.
- lyu07282 3y agoWe have religious mythologies promising eternal afterlife since ancient times too, I think it's more an irrational coping mechanism to deal with it's inevitability. Everybody grows old and dies, that doesn't make death less horrific, it's the worst aspect of the human condition. We just often pretend it's not in various ways to better deal with it. But that shouldn't prevent us from trying to cure it the same way we are trying to cure cancer.
- sparrowInHand 3y agoYour appendix burst 20 years ago, your comment is invalid. The gods willed it.
- barrysteve 3y agoAnd some billionaires aren't afraid enough, of death. Steve Jobs could have outlived his pancreatic cancer if he got it treated on time and didn't indulge in fake cures. Honsetly if you're an 80yr old billionaire who has done 'everything', why not go for some mind encoding shenanigans?
- tempmac 3y ago> didn't indulge in fake cures. maybe he WAS afraid of death, but didn't trust the modern stat-based medical methods?
- barrysteve 3y agomaybe so. 2010 was a different time and science still had a positive reputation. the quality of evidence required, to culturally settle an argument or otherwise allow for positive action, has dropped off a cliff. evidence my older brother would scoff at, is coming out of trained professionals' mouths. the justification for big risks on little evidence flows waaay too easily lately.
- aa1234556 3y ago[dead]
- dr_j_ 3y agoOne day we'll have biological networks of the size that can compete with today's biggest artificial neural networks, capable of running things like, well, ChatGPT. Then the philosophical questions will run even deeper....
- komali2 3y agoSince they're both neural networks, what questions have changed? I don't see what that clarifies or confounds about the nature of consciousness.
- bergen 3y agoNobody would argue that turning off ChatGPT is killing a sentient being. With a biological network, "turning it off" and killing it are very close if not the same (depending on who you ask). Biological network are present in our physical reality, you have some matter to deal with, which also makes the experience completely different. People fall in love and have compassion with ChatGPT, what would you think happens if you care for a brain a vat for months? If it is an actual neural structure resembling natural ones, than it might be possible it forms memories and becomes sentient. This is a completetly different array of ethical questions, you can't think of (living) biological matter like a machine, especially not regarding ethics.
- ben_w 3y ago> Nobody would argue that turning off ChatGPT is killing a sentient being. Some do, judging by surveys. And there was a famous case last year with a different LLM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims
- superb_dev 3y ago“neural nets” may mimic organic neurons but they are not comparable in that way
- soco 3y ago
- pjc50 3y agoSee "MMAcevdeo": https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
- andrepd 3y ago"Neural networks" as in chatgpt and friends have almost nothing to do with "neural networks" as understood in biology, more than a passing analogy to how synapses fire. I'm very skeptical of projects which seek to conflate the two in some vague way.