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While it does make for some entertaining fiction, and may provide some benefits to the living, I do not believe that 'uploading' is a desirable experience. In

While it does make for some entertaining fiction, and may provide some benefits to the living, I do not believe that 'uploading' is a desirable experience. In fact, I don't believe that one can experience it at all. Imagine the procedure (for a conscious person): your brain is connected to a computer interface and a copy of your mind is taken. Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to die. Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it regardless of how many mental copies are made. I much prefer the idea of human metamorphosis. I want to inject nanorobots into my body which will transform it gradually, cell by cell into an improved synthetic one. In this way, immortality and superhumanity can be achieved without loss of continuity. I imagine the experience would be one of waking up a little better (stronger, smarter, etc.) every morning until the cells are all upgraded. I don't read enough these days because of chronic eyestrain, but if you are aware of anything dealing with this concept of human metamorphosis, fiction or otherwise, I would appreciate a link. It's something I would like to read about (if it's even been dealt with), someday when I have time (and don't have a headache).

indiecore 14y ago
I disagree. Your individual consciousness will diverge of course (you are just a meat machine) but your computer copy will continue on and your ideas, ideals, and personality would continue. Writing this I just had a major existential crisis because I realized that at the exact point of divergence there is a point where 'you' are both alive and dead at the same time, Schrodinger's Tomb. I agree with you in that I think a gradual change is less crisis inducing even though it equals out to the same thing. I think that I'd get a brain backup anyway, just in case.
arethuza 14y ago
Greg Egan's short story Closer has people implanted with a device, a "jewel", that learns to mimic the behaviour of their brain - to the point where people actually choose to switch from their biological brain controlling their body to their jewel.... http://eidolon.net/?story=Closer&pagetitle=Closer&section=fiction http://eidolon.net/?story=Closer&pagetitle=Closer&se...
- gojomo 14y ago
  Egan's story 'Learning to Be Me', available in the same collection as 'Closer' (Axiomatic), is also an exploration of this idea with relevance to sodiumphosphate's fear.
tejaswiy 14y ago
> Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it regardless of how many mental copies are made. Why? Can you explain more? I would believe that you can be a fully functioning human living in a simulated reality if we ever managed to fully simulate the human brain.. However, since our brain modules are so messily coupled I don't know if we can easily "delete" memories and not impact anything else.
- indiecore 14y ago
  Unless you accept dualism (that there is some 'you' separate from the wetware in your head) you are always going to have this problem. A copy of 'you' would only sync with 'you' for an infinitesimal amount of time before you both diverged. The two 'yous' both have valid claim to everything before the Split but afterwards you are effectively two different people.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    This is where the following thought experiment comes in: Imagine science advances to the point where medical science can replace individual brain cells with perfect robot replicas. These robot cells interact with surrounding cells in exactly the same way as the real ones and can be initialized with the state of the real cell they are replacing. They're small though, so all the real computation work they may need to do is offloaded to a computer (over radio signals perhaps, or whatever.) Perhaps we can even optimize their operation such that communication with other robot cells that may happen to be next to it takes place inside the computers modelling both cells, instead of actually firing off the connection "for real". Preform this operation once, and few would argue that the mind in question has died, been replicated, ceased to operate and been replaced with another... anything. It's just the same mind. If you are willing to accept that (and if you're not, we'll just have to disagree), then preform the operation again. And again. And again. This is what sodiumphosphate was referring to by "metamorphosis", and it does not require dualism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Human_body http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Human_body
Rhapso 14y ago
this goes back to the ages old problem of, "In Star Trek, the transporter killed you every time" We have this almost social idea of Body Continuity. As long as there is the same body the entire time you are still you and still "alive". A scarier truth is that all it takes is a decent change to how you brain is structured (bullet, railroad spike, fork through the skull) and you can very suddenly for all intents and purposes be a different person, with the same or similar memories but essentially different patterns of behavior. Metamorphosis may not save you, it might kill the person you were just as if you made a copy and burned the original. Further down the rabbit hole, just how different is your brain now from and instant ago, and your brain versus your brain with the addition of a few ball bearings or other random matter. The person you were an instant ago is just as dead as the original who gets destroyed and you are the copy.
- stephengillie 14y ago
  One example from history (railroad spike through the head in 1848); https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Phineas_Gage https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Phineas_Gage
  - gaius 14y ago
    More recent example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17703018 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17703018
- bmahmood 14y ago
  Ray Kurzweil has a nice point on this, calling human consciousness an "evolving pattern of information that persists through time."
deleted 14y ago
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entropyneur 14y ago
This was my favorite subject for a while and I arrived to a similar idea of transformation, except without nanobots: the computer becomes a continuation of your brain and then your biological brain is gradually killed cell-by-cell. However, the idea that you still get to die after backup is based on an assumptions that I don't find neither obvious nor true: that the stream of consciousness is fully continuous and never stops. I've recently seen a documentary about a guy who was declared brain dead and yet recovered into being himself again. So it might still be possible to "upload" a dead brain in which case your experience is that of a resurrection which doesn't sound so bad.
oskarth 14y ago
I agree that human metamorphosis is extremely interesting, but this line I really don't get: > Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it regardless of how many mental copies are made. I don't understand how you can put out a statement like that, like it's taken for granted or something. It's far from granted, and I've never heard of something remotely approaching a proof for this type of assertion. To my mind it's the same kind of reasoning which proved we would never fly, nor go to space. It's an open problem. Please keep it that way until we know more. We don't have the proper tools to understand consciousness in a scientific way yet (consider the extremely limitations of EEG and MRI) For those interested in this philosophical question, there's an area called Philosophy of Mind [0] which deals with this and related questions. 0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mind
- sodiumphosphate 14y ago
  Granted that consciousness is not fully understood, can we not agree that it is entirely manifest in the brain? I mean, you don't believe that human consciousness somehow survives the body after brain death, do you? Even if the cloned memories could be streamed from your brain into a running simulation, allowing a memory of crossing the threshold from the physical world to the digital one to be created in the simulation, the 'patient' will not have this experience. The patient will still have to experience death. Going further, let's imagine that we want it really, really badly. Let's destroy each neuron immediately after taking it's state and pushing it into the stream, so that the whole process of uploading and death are completely synchronized and nothing of the patient's consciousness remains afterward. I'm sorry, but I still do not think that the patient will experience being uploaded into a computer. It will only experience having it's brain fried until death. For the clone, the memory might just be glorious, like some Hollywood special effect sequence, but personally I find this wholly unsatisfying. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, either. I'm only saying that I suspect some people may have the wrong perspective about it. If you sign up for this procedure, you are not signing up for immortality, but merely to donate a copy of your memories to whomever is running the simulation. You would be like an organ donor, but instead of saving a life, you'd be feeding your mind to the new Zombie Second Life. It would not benefit you, but it might benefit someone else. As for me, I'm a selfish, arrogant bastard with a desire for physical immortality and superhuman capabilities.
pbw 14y ago
> Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to die. You get to do both. The concept of "you" changes once there is a copy, see the Ship of Theseus [1]. Each post-you entity has a legitimate claim to being pre-you. The copy woke up that morning, ate your breakfeast, went to the uploading clinic, and went to sleep as a digital being. The copy has perfect continuity. The biological you on the other hand stayed biological and will die. A gradual replacement doesn't change the fundamentals, the biological you has to die. The gradual replacement just makes for an unusual twilight, its mind commingled with an arising digital being. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
- sodiumphosphate 14y ago
  I think that the experience of continuity is what makes these things entirely different. It is the experience of continuity that satisfies my hard-wired desire for self-preservation.
  - joeyo 14y ago
    You experience discontinuities in consciousness every day: when you sleep. Why is it that we feel like the same person after we wake up from sleep, from anesthesia, or even a prolonged coma? You could go to sleep, have arbitrary operations done to the neurons in your brain while asleep, and presumably will awake into the "same body". This thought experiment leads me to believe that the most important consideration for mind-uploading is to ensure that the original body dies/is killed before bringing the copy online.
    - rbanffy 14y ago
      Considering the metamorphosis idea, by the time your whole brain was replaced, piece by piece, by devices simulating its behavior, you became an upload - it's just that all of your data is running inside your head (or that this illusion is maintained by very low-latency links to your root-self running elsewhere). Still, the moment you move its dataset to a new device and deactivate the original, aren't you killing the original?
sovok 14y ago
> I want to inject nanorobots into my body which will transform it gradually, cell by cell into an improved synthetic one. In this way, immortality and superhumanity can be achieved without loss of continuity. Just last night I thought about this and went to sleep in despair :> If someone scans my brain, builds an artificial copy, instantly cuts out my brain and inserts the new one, I clearly die (because I got my brain/me cut out) and my copy lives on. From the outside, I'm the same, but the first me died. So instead, I get my neurons replaced with artificial ones, one at a time. If I drink a few beers, brain cells die but I'm still conscious. So gradually replacing my neurons one by one should be no problem; there clearly is no loss of continuity, I'm still me. But what's the difference? Let's assume one neuron is replaced every second. No problem, nice and gradual. What if it's one every millisecond, every picosecond? Should make no difference, because it's still one by one. But, the faster you do it, the more it approaches "instant". And instantly replacing all my brain cells is the same as replacing my whole brain. Thus, I'm dead and my copy lives on...
- lmm 14y ago
  >If someone scans my brain, builds an artificial copy, instantly cuts out my brain and inserts the new one, I clearly die (because I got my brain/me cut out) and my copy lives on. From the outside, I'm the same, but the first me died. If you look at the physics the right way, your brain is cut out and a copy inserted billions of times a second already.
- ajdecon 14y ago
  Let's assume one neuron is replaced every second. No problem, nice and gradual. What if it's one every millisecond, every picosecond? Should make no difference, because it's still one by one. It should make a difference how long it takes, though. Assume that consciousness is a physical process. If new neurons take part in this process after the old ones die (so that we have continuity as part of normal "healing"), there must be some time scale over which those neurons become an effective part of the consciousness process. At minimum, if consciousness is a "network effect", this would be on the order of the latency of inter-neuronal communications. If the cells are doing some processing which forms part of consciousness, the time scale would increase. To throw out some wild numbers: neuronal latency seems to vary, but I found a number for visual-cortical neurons of about 80 ms. (http://redwood.berkeley.edu/bruno/npb261b/whitney-reading/krekelberg.pdf http://redwood.berkeley.edu/bruno/npb261b/whitney-reading/kr...) And you can't replace more than a few cells at a time (I wonder what fraction?) if you want to avoid impairing consciousness during the process. (This also doesn't include whatever the time is to make an effective copy of a given neuron and it's state; we're assuming instant perfect copying.)
tocomment 14y ago
Probably a dumb question; have you tried reading glasses?
scotty79 14y ago
Watch "The Prestige".
scotty79 14y ago
It's hard to die but it must be easier when you know that you are not gone.
jakeonthemove 14y ago
"Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it" I take it you would find it very hard to meet your copy, then? If for some reason your copy goes live and you don't die, I bet you two would get into a fight :-). As it is now, if I'm alive and I meet my exact copy, he'd agree to die ("just do it quickly") until I really die. And then the copy would become me - it's that simple. Maybe later it'd be possible to download myself into a body again, in which case I would retain all the knowledge that I acquired inside the virtual world.
- boboblong 14y ago
  Um, that would be murder. Furthermore, it wouldn't even be necessary: just go your separate ways, and when you die and "become" your (second) copy--this time, you time it correctly--you will still live on, even though you have a clone out there.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
el_presidente 14y ago
Your body is transforming at this very moment through mitosis. Gradually, cell by cell and depending on what kind of activity you are performing you are becoming stronger, smarter, weaker or dumber. Regarding consciousness, my personal belief is that there is no continuity and it's more like the frame rate of a video or sample rate of a song. You could read about the Buddhist concept of impermanence and the five aggregates of being which sounds similar to the idea of a metamorphosis, only not just human but everything changing all the time.
sliverstorm 14y ago
An interesting thought, there is a difference between gradually replacing your cells with mechanical/electrical equivalents, and copying your consciousness to a machine. How? Well, think of replacing a hard drive under a running process. Compare that to migrating a VM to another machine. In one, the process is truly continuous, it just begins using new hardware; in the other, the process is cloned and the original process killed.
D_Alex 14y ago
Greg Egan has quite a few amazing stories dealing with the transition process. "Transition Dreams" is the one I remember, it is a bit dark. I cant find a free link, but here is a paid e-book, $0.59: http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/b876/Transition-Dreams/Greg-Egan/?si=0 http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/b876/Transition-Dreams/Gre...
nikatwork 14y ago
if you are aware of anything dealing with this concept of human metamorphosis, fiction or otherwise, I would appreciate a link. This free Cory Doctorow piece could float your boat: "0wnz0red - Programmers who hack their own bodies don't need exercise and never get sick" http://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/singleton/ http://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/singleton/
Dysiode 14y ago
I'm wholly relieved that someone else thinks this way too ( still aware of the fact that most thoughts aren't unique). I never came to the conclusion of metamorphosis, however. Just felt a need to express my experience of camaraderie on the subject.
nu23 14y ago
In your metamorphosis example, is the finished project essentially be a robot? Would you have the same problem when a software agent is transferred from one computer to another? Assume a negative answer. Then, the interesting implicit belief, is that there is something special about body composition. Whereas in physical law, there is nothing unique in principle about the body. So, the laws would have to be wrong or incomplete(fail to include consciousness) in an important way.

indiecore 14y ago

I disagree. Your individual consciousness will diverge of course (you are just a meat machine) but your computer copy will continue on and your ideas, ideals, and personality would continue. Writing this I just had a major existential crisis because I realized that at the exact point of divergence there is a point where 'you' are both alive and dead at the same time, Schrodinger's Tomb. I agree with you in that I think a gradual change is less crisis inducing even though it equals out to the same thing. I think that I'd get a brain backup anyway, just in case.

arethuza 14y ago

Greg Egan's short story Closer has people implanted with a device, a "jewel", that learns to mimic the behaviour of their brain - to the point where people actually choose to switch from their biological brain controlling their body to their jewel.... http://eidolon.net/?story=Closer&pagetitle=Closer&section=fiction http://eidolon.net/?story=Closer&pagetitle=Closer&se...

gojomo 14y ago
Egan's story 'Learning to Be Me', available in the same collection as 'Closer' (Axiomatic), is also an exploration of this idea with relevance to sodiumphosphate's fear.

tejaswiy 14y ago

> Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it regardless of how many mental copies are made. Why? Can you explain more? I would believe that you can be a fully functioning human living in a simulated reality if we ever managed to fully simulate the human brain.. However, since our brain modules are so messily coupled I don't know if we can easily "delete" memories and not impact anything else.

indiecore 14y ago
Unless you accept dualism (that there is some 'you' separate from the wetware in your head) you are always going to have this problem. A copy of 'you' would only sync with 'you' for an infinitesimal amount of time before you both diverged. The two 'yous' both have valid claim to everything before the Split but afterwards you are effectively two different people.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  This is where the following thought experiment comes in: Imagine science advances to the point where medical science can replace individual brain cells with perfect robot replicas. These robot cells interact with surrounding cells in exactly the same way as the real ones and can be initialized with the state of the real cell they are replacing. They're small though, so all the real computation work they may need to do is offloaded to a computer (over radio signals perhaps, or whatever.) Perhaps we can even optimize their operation such that communication with other robot cells that may happen to be next to it takes place inside the computers modelling both cells, instead of actually firing off the connection "for real". Preform this operation once, and few would argue that the mind in question has died, been replicated, ceased to operate and been replaced with another... anything. It's just the same mind. If you are willing to accept that (and if you're not, we'll just have to disagree), then preform the operation again. And again. And again. This is what sodiumphosphate was referring to by "metamorphosis", and it does not require dualism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Human_body http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Human_body

Rhapso 14y ago

this goes back to the ages old problem of, "In Star Trek, the transporter killed you every time" We have this almost social idea of Body Continuity. As long as there is the same body the entire time you are still you and still "alive". A scarier truth is that all it takes is a decent change to how you brain is structured (bullet, railroad spike, fork through the skull) and you can very suddenly for all intents and purposes be a different person, with the same or similar memories but essentially different patterns of behavior. Metamorphosis may not save you, it might kill the person you were just as if you made a copy and burned the original. Further down the rabbit hole, just how different is your brain now from and instant ago, and your brain versus your brain with the addition of a few ball bearings or other random matter. The person you were an instant ago is just as dead as the original who gets destroyed and you are the copy.

stephengillie 14y ago
One example from history (railroad spike through the head in 1848); https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Phineas_Gage https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Phineas_Gage
- gaius 14y ago
  More recent example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17703018 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17703018
bmahmood 14y ago
Ray Kurzweil has a nice point on this, calling human consciousness an "evolving pattern of information that persists through time."

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

entropyneur 14y ago

This was my favorite subject for a while and I arrived to a similar idea of transformation, except without nanobots: the computer becomes a continuation of your brain and then your biological brain is gradually killed cell-by-cell. However, the idea that you still get to die after backup is based on an assumptions that I don't find neither obvious nor true: that the stream of consciousness is fully continuous and never stops. I've recently seen a documentary about a guy who was declared brain dead and yet recovered into being himself again. So it might still be possible to "upload" a dead brain in which case your experience is that of a resurrection which doesn't sound so bad.

oskarth 14y ago

I agree that human metamorphosis is extremely interesting, but this line I really don't get: > Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it regardless of how many mental copies are made. I don't understand how you can put out a statement like that, like it's taken for granted or something. It's far from granted, and I've never heard of something remotely approaching a proof for this type of assertion. To my mind it's the same kind of reasoning which proved we would never fly, nor go to space. It's an open problem. Please keep it that way until we know more. We don't have the proper tools to understand consciousness in a scientific way yet (consider the extremely limitations of EEG and MRI) For those interested in this philosophical question, there's an area called Philosophy of Mind [0] which deals with this and related questions. 0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mind

sodiumphosphate 14y ago
Granted that consciousness is not fully understood, can we not agree that it is entirely manifest in the brain? I mean, you don't believe that human consciousness somehow survives the body after brain death, do you? Even if the cloned memories could be streamed from your brain into a running simulation, allowing a memory of crossing the threshold from the physical world to the digital one to be created in the simulation, the 'patient' will not have this experience. The patient will still have to experience death. Going further, let's imagine that we want it really, really badly. Let's destroy each neuron immediately after taking it's state and pushing it into the stream, so that the whole process of uploading and death are completely synchronized and nothing of the patient's consciousness remains afterward. I'm sorry, but I still do not think that the patient will experience being uploaded into a computer. It will only experience having it's brain fried until death. For the clone, the memory might just be glorious, like some Hollywood special effect sequence, but personally I find this wholly unsatisfying. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, either. I'm only saying that I suspect some people may have the wrong perspective about it. If you sign up for this procedure, you are not signing up for immortality, but merely to donate a copy of your memories to whomever is running the simulation. You would be like an organ donor, but instead of saving a life, you'd be feeding your mind to the new Zombie Second Life. It would not benefit you, but it might benefit someone else. As for me, I'm a selfish, arrogant bastard with a desire for physical immortality and superhuman capabilities.

pbw 14y ago

> Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to die. You get to do both. The concept of "you" changes once there is a copy, see the Ship of Theseus [1]. Each post-you entity has a legitimate claim to being pre-you. The copy woke up that morning, ate your breakfeast, went to the uploading clinic, and went to sleep as a digital being. The copy has perfect continuity. The biological you on the other hand stayed biological and will die. A gradual replacement doesn't change the fundamentals, the biological you has to die. The gradual replacement just makes for an unusual twilight, its mind commingled with an arising digital being. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

sodiumphosphate 14y ago
I think that the experience of continuity is what makes these things entirely different. It is the experience of continuity that satisfies my hard-wired desire for self-preservation.
- joeyo 14y ago
  You experience discontinuities in consciousness every day: when you sleep. Why is it that we feel like the same person after we wake up from sleep, from anesthesia, or even a prolonged coma? You could go to sleep, have arbitrary operations done to the neurons in your brain while asleep, and presumably will awake into the "same body". This thought experiment leads me to believe that the most important consideration for mind-uploading is to ensure that the original body dies/is killed before bringing the copy online.
  - rbanffy 14y ago
    Considering the metamorphosis idea, by the time your whole brain was replaced, piece by piece, by devices simulating its behavior, you became an upload - it's just that all of your data is running inside your head (or that this illusion is maintained by very low-latency links to your root-self running elsewhere). Still, the moment you move its dataset to a new device and deactivate the original, aren't you killing the original?

sovok 14y ago

> I want to inject nanorobots into my body which will transform it gradually, cell by cell into an improved synthetic one. In this way, immortality and superhumanity can be achieved without loss of continuity. Just last night I thought about this and went to sleep in despair :> If someone scans my brain, builds an artificial copy, instantly cuts out my brain and inserts the new one, I clearly die (because I got my brain/me cut out) and my copy lives on. From the outside, I'm the same, but the first me died. So instead, I get my neurons replaced with artificial ones, one at a time. If I drink a few beers, brain cells die but I'm still conscious. So gradually replacing my neurons one by one should be no problem; there clearly is no loss of continuity, I'm still me. But what's the difference? Let's assume one neuron is replaced every second. No problem, nice and gradual. What if it's one every millisecond, every picosecond? Should make no difference, because it's still one by one. But, the faster you do it, the more it approaches "instant". And instantly replacing all my brain cells is the same as replacing my whole brain. Thus, I'm dead and my copy lives on...

lmm 14y ago
>If someone scans my brain, builds an artificial copy, instantly cuts out my brain and inserts the new one, I clearly die (because I got my brain/me cut out) and my copy lives on. From the outside, I'm the same, but the first me died. If you look at the physics the right way, your brain is cut out and a copy inserted billions of times a second already.
ajdecon 14y ago
Let's assume one neuron is replaced every second. No problem, nice and gradual. What if it's one every millisecond, every picosecond? Should make no difference, because it's still one by one. It should make a difference how long it takes, though. Assume that consciousness is a physical process. If new neurons take part in this process after the old ones die (so that we have continuity as part of normal "healing"), there must be some time scale over which those neurons become an effective part of the consciousness process. At minimum, if consciousness is a "network effect", this would be on the order of the latency of inter-neuronal communications. If the cells are doing some processing which forms part of consciousness, the time scale would increase. To throw out some wild numbers: neuronal latency seems to vary, but I found a number for visual-cortical neurons of about 80 ms. (http://redwood.berkeley.edu/bruno/npb261b/whitney-reading/krekelberg.pdf http://redwood.berkeley.edu/bruno/npb261b/whitney-reading/kr...) And you can't replace more than a few cells at a time (I wonder what fraction?) if you want to avoid impairing consciousness during the process. (This also doesn't include whatever the time is to make an effective copy of a given neuron and it's state; we're assuming instant perfect copying.)

tocomment 14y ago

Probably a dumb question; have you tried reading glasses?

scotty79 14y ago

Watch "The Prestige".

scotty79 14y ago

It's hard to die but it must be easier when you know that you are not gone.

jakeonthemove 14y ago

"Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it" I take it you would find it very hard to meet your copy, then? If for some reason your copy goes live and you don't die, I bet you two would get into a fight :-). As it is now, if I'm alive and I meet my exact copy, he'd agree to die ("just do it quickly") until I really die. And then the copy would become me - it's that simple. Maybe later it'd be possible to download myself into a body again, in which case I would retain all the knowledge that I acquired inside the virtual world.

boboblong 14y ago
Um, that would be murder. Furthermore, it wouldn't even be necessary: just go your separate ways, and when you die and "become" your (second) copy--this time, you time it correctly--you will still live on, even though you have a clone out there.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

el_presidente 14y ago

Your body is transforming at this very moment through mitosis. Gradually, cell by cell and depending on what kind of activity you are performing you are becoming stronger, smarter, weaker or dumber. Regarding consciousness, my personal belief is that there is no continuity and it's more like the frame rate of a video or sample rate of a song. You could read about the Buddhist concept of impermanence and the five aggregates of being which sounds similar to the idea of a metamorphosis, only not just human but everything changing all the time.

sliverstorm 14y ago

An interesting thought, there is a difference between gradually replacing your cells with mechanical/electrical equivalents, and copying your consciousness to a machine. How? Well, think of replacing a hard drive under a running process. Compare that to migrating a VM to another machine. In one, the process is truly continuous, it just begins using new hardware; in the other, the process is cloned and the original process killed.

D_Alex 14y ago

Greg Egan has quite a few amazing stories dealing with the transition process. "Transition Dreams" is the one I remember, it is a bit dark. I cant find a free link, but here is a paid e-book, $0.59: http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/b876/Transition-Dreams/Greg-Egan/?si=0 http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/b876/Transition-Dreams/Gre...

nikatwork 14y ago

if you are aware of anything dealing with this concept of human metamorphosis, fiction or otherwise, I would appreciate a link. This free Cory Doctorow piece could float your boat: "0wnz0red - Programmers who hack their own bodies don't need exercise and never get sick" http://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/singleton/ http://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/singleton/

Dysiode 14y ago

I'm wholly relieved that someone else thinks this way too ( still aware of the fact that most thoughts aren't unique). I never came to the conclusion of metamorphosis, however. Just felt a need to express my experience of camaraderie on the subject.

nu23 14y ago

In your metamorphosis example, is the finished project essentially be a robot? Would you have the same problem when a software agent is transferred from one computer to another? Assume a negative answer. Then, the interesting implicit belief, is that there is something special about body composition. Whereas in physical law, there is nothing unique in principle about the body. So, the laws would have to be wrong or incomplete(fail to include consciousness) in an important way.