8 ms·

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 d

by 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.
- Dn_Ab 14y ago
  Lets go over this carefully as the concepts are slippery. Lack of continuous experience of an event does not mean you died, it is merely memory loss. Assuming the very reasonable theory that consciousness is classical and emergent from the network structure and interactions of neurons and glia then it should be possible to encode this consciousness on a turing machine. If we go a step further and replace certain collections of simulated cells with black boxes that behave the same way given an isomorphic set of inputs then we can have consciousness even more cheaply. Your idea is not necessarily more grounded. Assumptions you make are: the substrate does not matter as long as it is not digital, you assume the replacement material will not itself have effects that result in vastly divergent actions in the long run. Yet the perturbations a neuron suffers will differ from those of nanodiamodons, will this be significant? You also take for granted the new replacement brain will not allow a very large viewpoint shift due to the new complexities and speeds of thought possible. That some invariance of self remains from morphism to morphism. That there is more resemblance between you and the the final being than you and a lemur like ancestor. It is likely that the beings of the future will have far more sophisticated definitions of self and identity. I personally think that physical bodies will give way to digital minds and its only a matter of time. Whether linear time or log time I can't say. But physical bodies are resource hogs. Progress is energy intensive and so is ever more complex thinking. Imagine a being whose memory is so dense that its thoughts have a gravitational pull of their own and its mind risks collapsing into a blackhole... Eventually theres going to be a lot of pressure to compress thinking beings and squeeze as much thinking capacity from matter as efficiently as possible.
  - sodiumphosphate 14y ago
    You not only misstate my assumptions, but seem to miss my point entirely. Here is my point: the original human will not experience continuity, therefore it's instinct for self-preservation will not be satisfied. The best it can hope for is to take comfort in knowing that a copy will survive. Personally, this does not comfort me. I don't doubt the possibility of a very high fidelity copy and supporting simulation, for all intents and purposes. I also think there may be sound reasons to pursue it. But I don't think it will benefit those who are copied, beyond any positive thoughts and feelings it may give them before they die. Being selfish and programmed for self-preservation, I desire physical immortality instead. I have no interest in donating a copy of my memories to a simulation project. I hope this clears it up; my interest is quickly waning, and I have work to do.
nsxwolf 14y ago
I do know that if you made a bunch of copies of me right now, I wouldn't expect to walk around seeing a superimposed image of my original self in Chicago, a copy walking around in New York, etc. I'd be totally disconnected from my copies, and that is reasonable proof to me that I should not expect to ever have a continuity of experience through a backup copy after my own death.
- sofal 14y ago
  Are you making the unlikely assumption that you would actually be the original? More likely you'd black out during the brain scan and wake up as one of the copies. You have no good reason to simply assume that you are going to be the original process right after making that fork() call. How might your thoughts about this process change if you woke up as a copy?
  - spupy 14y ago
    If a scientist asks you, "Was the upload successful?", you (the original) will answer "No". The copy you will answer "Yes". That's my view, at least. Same answers for teleportation Star Trek style.
joe_the_user 14y ago
What is fascinating is how strongly and without proof many people believe the argument that "Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body". If anything, this fixation seems like both an interesting study of the blind-spots of human mental process and as evidence that the situation is, in fact, rather unlikely. This particular, uh, delusion, seems similar to the recurrent theme that an "intelligent" enough computer would/could "develop self-conscious" (whatever that is) and start "thinking for itself". Here, we have strong ideas about the properties of "self-consciousness", without, as you say, having a ghost of an idea of what it is.

by oskarth 14y ago

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.

Dn_Ab 14y ago
Lets go over this carefully as the concepts are slippery. Lack of continuous experience of an event does not mean you died, it is merely memory loss. Assuming the very reasonable theory that consciousness is classical and emergent from the network structure and interactions of neurons and glia then it should be possible to encode this consciousness on a turing machine. If we go a step further and replace certain collections of simulated cells with black boxes that behave the same way given an isomorphic set of inputs then we can have consciousness even more cheaply. Your idea is not necessarily more grounded. Assumptions you make are: the substrate does not matter as long as it is not digital, you assume the replacement material will not itself have effects that result in vastly divergent actions in the long run. Yet the perturbations a neuron suffers will differ from those of nanodiamodons, will this be significant? You also take for granted the new replacement brain will not allow a very large viewpoint shift due to the new complexities and speeds of thought possible. That some invariance of self remains from morphism to morphism. That there is more resemblance between you and the the final being than you and a lemur like ancestor. It is likely that the beings of the future will have far more sophisticated definitions of self and identity. I personally think that physical bodies will give way to digital minds and its only a matter of time. Whether linear time or log time I can't say. But physical bodies are resource hogs. Progress is energy intensive and so is ever more complex thinking. Imagine a being whose memory is so dense that its thoughts have a gravitational pull of their own and its mind risks collapsing into a blackhole... Eventually theres going to be a lot of pressure to compress thinking beings and squeeze as much thinking capacity from matter as efficiently as possible.
- sodiumphosphate 14y ago
  You not only misstate my assumptions, but seem to miss my point entirely. Here is my point: the original human will not experience continuity, therefore it's instinct for self-preservation will not be satisfied. The best it can hope for is to take comfort in knowing that a copy will survive. Personally, this does not comfort me. I don't doubt the possibility of a very high fidelity copy and supporting simulation, for all intents and purposes. I also think there may be sound reasons to pursue it. But I don't think it will benefit those who are copied, beyond any positive thoughts and feelings it may give them before they die. Being selfish and programmed for self-preservation, I desire physical immortality instead. I have no interest in donating a copy of my memories to a simulation project. I hope this clears it up; my interest is quickly waning, and I have work to do.

nsxwolf 14y ago

I do know that if you made a bunch of copies of me right now, I wouldn't expect to walk around seeing a superimposed image of my original self in Chicago, a copy walking around in New York, etc. I'd be totally disconnected from my copies, and that is reasonable proof to me that I should not expect to ever have a continuity of experience through a backup copy after my own death.

sofal 14y ago
Are you making the unlikely assumption that you would actually be the original? More likely you'd black out during the brain scan and wake up as one of the copies. You have no good reason to simply assume that you are going to be the original process right after making that fork() call. How might your thoughts about this process change if you woke up as a copy?
- spupy 14y ago
  If a scientist asks you, "Was the upload successful?", you (the original) will answer "No". The copy you will answer "Yes". That's my view, at least. Same answers for teleportation Star Trek style.

joe_the_user 14y ago

What is fascinating is how strongly and without proof many people believe the argument that "Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body". If anything, this fixation seems like both an interesting study of the blind-spots of human mental process and as evidence that the situation is, in fact, rather unlikely. This particular, uh, delusion, seems similar to the recurrent theme that an "intelligent" enough computer would/could "develop self-conscious" (whatever that is) and start "thinking for itself". Here, we have strong ideas about the properties of "self-consciousness", without, as you say, having a ghost of an idea of what it is.