8 ms·

I used to buy into this kind of stuff, but I've become more and more skeptical of the idea that you would still be yourself if your brain could be preserved/emu

by NickM 2y ago

I used to buy into this kind of stuff, but I've become more and more skeptical of the idea that you would still be yourself if your brain could be preserved/emulated/transplanted/whatever. Our nervous system extends into our bodies. We feel emotions in our bodies. People with certain kinds of brain damage that prevents them from feeling emotions normally also experience trouble making rational decisions. More recent research has been hinting that we may even hold certain types of memories outside our brains. Humans have always been drawn to neat, tidy ideas, especially ones that draw clean boundaries: it's an appealing idea that our consciousness lives solely in our brains, and that our brains could function independently of our bodies, but it seems unlikely that it's really that simple.

namrog84 2y ago
There is a bit of research and effort into a head transplants. I wonder if and when that is successful to see how it impacts the individual. Possibly having memories of the body or changing personality.
- mannanj 2y ago
  where?
  - bookofjoe 2y ago
    >HEAVEN: The head anastomosis venture Project outline for the first human head transplantation with spinal linkage (GEMINI) [2013] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3821155/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3821155/ ................... >World's first human head transplant successfully performed on a corpse, scientists say (2017) https://nationalpost.com/health/worlds-first-human-head-transplant-successfully-performed-on-a-corpse-scientists-say https://nationalpost.com/health/worlds-first-human-head-tran... ............. First Human Head Transplantation: Surgically Challenging, Ethically Controversial and Historically Tempting – an Experimental Endeavor or a Scientific Landmark? (2019) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6511668/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6511668/ .......... >No Doctor Has Ever Performed a Human Head Transplant. This Neurosurgeon Says He’s Ready to Do It. (2024) https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a62831709/human-head-transplants/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a62831709/human-hea...
- HideousKojima 2y ago
  Can't wait for C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength to become a reality
latexr 2y ago
For example, it’s widely reported that organ transplantation, especially heart transplants, may cause personality changes associated with the donor. https://www.mdpi.com/2673-3943/5/1/2 https://www.mdpi.com/2673-3943/5/1/2 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/
- everdrive 2y ago
  Do we think the personality changes are due to the heart itself, or just due the minor brain damage accompanying an incredibly invasive surgery?
  - SubiculumCode 2y ago
    General anesthesia is not good for the brain.
    - SubiculumCode 2y ago
      replying to myself to provide more context. In my PhD work, I helped conduct the human portion of a study on this topic, contributing to some discussions at the FDA [1]. The idea was a bit controversial then, and I've had a few anesthesiologists get mad at me for it, but the general pattern has now been replicated quite a few times now, such that the field has largely moved on from 'Is something bad happening?' to 'Why does it happen, and how do we prevent that bad thing from happening?'[2]. So it has been a gratifying excursion from my typical research before and since then. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4168665/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4168665/ [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9750936/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9750936/
      - spondylosaurus 2y ago
        Is there any reason to suspect that adults suffer the same effects as infants? (Not asking to be combative, just curious whether children are uniquely affected because their brains are still cooking.)
ashleyn 2y ago
I'm also skeptical of the idea that one can "upload" consciousness and it would still be "you". I suppose this is true in a philosophical sense, but in a practical sense, subjective experience of consciousness rules the roost. It's inevitably going to be a mere copy of you. You don't get to experience any of it. Similar to a software project which is forked, I think it makes more sense to classify it as an entirely different entity at that point. I suppose there are valid use cases for this, but I'm not that narcissistic to think the world needs eternal copies of me. The continued subjective experience of the original consciousness is where I believe the real value lies. Digitisation of consciousness, assuming it has any sound scientific basis in the first place, would practically need to look more like the gradual replacement of brain (and bodily) matter with something more durable, enduring, and controllable. A slow process in which carbon is exchanged for silicon, or cellular damage is continuously reversed and aging kept at bay.
- svara 2y ago
  As long as you believe that any theory of subjective experience will ultimately be physicalist, this argument doesn't really work. There is no continuity of subjective experience even within the same brain, you can be deeply unconscious for extended periods of time and come back.
  - sdwr 2y ago
    Yeah, you can argue the same thing about going to sleep, there's no guarantee that the same "you" wakes up. From the outside, an "identical clone" is indistinguishable. On the inside, the clone feels exactly how you would feel. The only problem is the "I don't want my 'me' to die" feeling. I bet most people would be fine with death/rebirth teleportation.
- dinfinity 2y ago
  > It's inevitably going to be a mere copy of you. You don't get to experience any of it. You can make the same argument for 'you before you went to sleep' and 'you after you woke up'. The only real link you have to that previous consciousness are memories of experiences, which are all produced by your current body/brain. Think about this: For every consciousness (including you right now) it is _impossible_ to experience anything other than what the thing producing that consciousness produces (memories, sensations, etc.). It doesn't matter whether the different conscious entities or whatever produces them are separated by time or space. They _will_ be produced, and they _will_ experience exactly what the thing that produces them produces. With an analogy: If you drop pebbles in either the same pond at different times or in different ponds at the same time, waves will be produced in all cases. From the perspectives of the waves themselves, what they interact with is always _exactly_ the stuff that interacts with the water they're made up of. To them, the question of identity or continuity is fully irrelevant. They're just them. Similarly, it makes no difference whether you only have the memories of the previous conscious experiences, or if 'you' really experienced them. Those situations are indistinguishable to you. The link to future consciousnesses inhabiting your body is effectively the same.
etrautmann 2y ago
As a neuroscientist working on brain computer interfaces, it's painfully clear to me that we are absolutely nowhere close to understanding the full complexity of the human brain in a manner required to simulate or reboot someone's consciousness. It's not even clear yet what level of abstraction is required. Do we need to map all of the synapses to get a connection graph, or do we need to map all synapses plus the synaptic proteins to assign connection weights too? This is ignoring other types of connections like gap junctions between cells, ephaptic coupling (the influence of local electric fields on neurons firing), mapping neuormodulator release, etc. On one hand, it feels like irreduceable complexity. On the other hand, however, you can lose about half of your neurons to neurodegenerative diseases before you start noticing a behavioral effect, so clearly not every single details is required to simulate your consciousness. It would be a MAJOR leap forward in neuroscience to even understand what level of abstraction is necessary and which biological details are essential vs. which can be summarized succinctly. Anyone claiming to take your brain and slice it up and have a working model right now is currently selling snake oil. It's not impossible, but neuroscience has to progress a ways before this is a reasonable proposition. The alternative is to take the brain and preserve it, but even a frozen or perfused brain may have degraded in ways that would make it hard to recover important aspects that we don't yet understand. It is, however, fascinating to do the research required to answer these questions, and that should be funded and continue, even if just to understand the underlying biology.
- belfalas 2y ago
  Keying off your comment - in the field of neuroscience, is consciousness viewed as a kind of simulation? (I'm just a programmer so it's fascinating to me to consider how actual brain scientists model consciousness in their work.)
- alchemist1e9 2y ago
  Losing half neurons caught my attention. I believe we had a post about how LLM weights being trimmed by 1/2 still had them functional. Interesting.
- radarsat1 2y ago
  In addition to all that we don't know about synapses etc, I've often wondered if even mapping all the "hardware connections" so to speak would even be enough. You'd have everything in the right place, but what about the "signals" running on it? Does a certain amount of constant activity on these circuits constitute signs of a "living" brain vs a dead one? How much of our consciousness is really in the topology of the circuits, and how much of it is simply defined by the constant activity running around in them? I assume neural circuits form loops that consist of synapses that reinforce or surpress activity. If these signals going around and around ever "stop", can they ever be started again with the same "patterns"? What if these patterns, the living "software", are at least partially what define you? Well anyway that's my airchair crackpot neuroscience theory for the world to consume ;). I'm sure there must already be a name for the idea though.
seba_dos1 2y ago
The way various hormones influence the brain alone makes it pretty clear to me already that you'd be a completely different person when taken out of your body, and I'm pretty sure that's just the tip of the iceberg.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  Coming back as a brain in a vat certainly sounds awful. But I would assume that bringing someone back would be tied to a physical or simulated body that provided a compatible context. Not a bad assumption to solidify in your brain preservation/restoration contract.
- Freebytes 2y ago
  The 'people' that undergo this first will experience the most incredible pain imaginable if we do not figure out a way to block such pain first.
kh_hk 2y ago
In terms of computing (one that we do not understand), it would be like cloning a live machine by taking the CPU dye only, or maybe the hard drive. How many parts you need to take away from a computer for it to be the same machine? It's easy though with a VM, or a kernel that supports many hardware. Kind of a digress, but I liked this idea.
- kelnos 2y ago
  I don't think this is a great analogy because computers don't have consciousness (yet). But I usually move the hard drive (or at least its contents) between machines when I get a new computer, and that's enough for me to think of it as the "same", even if I reinstall the OS on the new machine and just copy my home directory onto the new one.
hinkley 2y ago
Why would you want to go on in a world that has either left you behind or keeps making the same mistakes over and over in a cycle and won't listen to you because you're too old to understand? And conversely, I think Kim Stanley Robinson puts it best in the Mars trilogy. Scientific progress often has to wait for the old guard to die so new ideas can be tried. Sometimes there are actually new things and they need to be allowed to cook.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  I dunno. I’m a pretty open minded guy so if anyone is going to be immortal, might as well be me. I promise not even to shout at too many clouds. Plus there are a lot of assholes in the world. Come on, there isn’t anybody you’d enjoy watching get Ozymandias‘d? I’d enjoy it.
- idontwantthis 2y ago
  There’s a short story about uploaded consciousnesses being used as AI slaves. They go bad once enough years have gone by that they can’t speak the modern language anymore. Then they usually lapse into insanity or depression.
  - anon84873628 2y ago
    Reminds me of: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
    - idontwantthis 2y ago
      That’s the one.
- kiba 2y ago
  A questionable assumption. A scientist like Einstein experienced scientific revolutions within his lifetime. That's hardly going to be the norm in the history of science, and also a horrible assumption to think revolutions would endlessly be occurring and reoccurring. Also, we know when we're on the edge of knowledge, especially in cosmology and physics. We're waiting for revolution there. There's dark energy and dark matter. It doesn't matter if you're old or young, you knew that your theories isn't good enough to explain whatever these are. Scientific knowledge don't get swept away especially if they're rock solid. Newtonian physics still has a lot of relevance after all. It's just that relativity is even more accurate.
Freebytes 2y ago
I consider that I have likely died more than twice in my lifetime already. And before this body gives up, I will have already died more times. Must simply enjoy the present and give gifts to my future self.
bee_rider 2y ago
I’m not sure I actually believe in quantum immortality but I think it is slightly suspicious—out of all the people you could have been be born as, you just happen to be born in a timeframe where brain preservation might be possible before you die?
- prettyStandard 2y ago
  I see what you're saying...but... Most people are alive right now. The population historically has been much lower, so odds are you would be born around the time high technology would support a high population.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    I think that “most people are alive now” is not true (although it is often repeated). https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16870579 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16870579 > So what are the figures? There are currently seven billion people alive today and the Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 107 billion people have ever lived. > This means that we are nowhere near close to having more alive than dead. In fact, there are 15 dead people for every person living. So it is not wildly impossible that you’d be alive now, but it is fairly unlikely. Also, hard to say what’s in the future of course, but even if population growth levels off, you’d expect to be born in the future, right? Which brings up another question, why not? If we are going to go along on the fully ridiculous implications here and reinterpret all probabilities as conditioned on your immortality, why weren’t you born in the far future? I’d expect people born in the future to have easier access to immortality. Maybe birth rates will go way down if we discover immortality (lowering your odds of being born later). Or maybe pre-immortality minds will be seen as more interesting and worth preserving (increasing your odds of being kept around).
    - seba_dos1 2y ago
      Even if being born right now had an astronomically low probability, someone would still be lucky enough.
augusto-moura 2y ago
I don't think I agree with you. There are multiple examples in society of damaged nervous system connections with the brain, spine cord damage for example, where the personality of the pacient changes little. In the same sense, losing limbs or entire sections of your body (aside from psychological trauma and other psychological consequences) don't affect personality that much Of course the nervous system is much more complex, but damage to the brain almost always result in some sort of cognitive dysfunction or personality change, see the Phineas Gage case for example.
- whythre 2y ago
  I see what you mean- but consider that the gut does seem to play a significant role in mood and mental health. The enteric nervous system may not hold memories, but it seems to have something to do with personality and digestion issues can have negative cognitive effects.
  - augusto-moura 2y ago
    Agree that discomfort can cause temporary problems, and sometimes chronic problems in parts of the body can cause life long cognitive impairment. But that is not to say that these represent "you" or your personality. You brain could still function perfectly without those body conditions. And for the gut example the brain actually does work normally, stomach and instetines removal (and other related surgeries) are fairly common procedures and I don't hear of people complaining about personality changes. Of course, those types of procedures are extremely invasive in a sistemic way, and not only your mental state, but multiple other parts of the body need to re-adapt. But I truly believe "you" will be still be "you" inside your brain PS.: I quoted "you" because discussions about the identity of one-self are much more complex, just regard it as the most high level definition of the concept
- snakeyjake 2y ago
  >In the same sense, losing limbs or entire sections of your body (aside from psychological trauma and other psychological consequences) don't affect personality that much "There aren't any changes except for all of the changes, but those changes don't count because reasons." I don't know how many amputees you know; you may know many. I was in the army for 10 years during the height of the global war on terror and know more than most. Not a single one is the same as they were pre-amputation. Could be the trauma that caused the amputation, could be the amputation. I'm not an amputationologist. I do assert that a holo-techno-brain will need a shit-ton of e-drugs to deal with being amputated from its fucking body. The bacteria in your butthole are a part of you just like your brain, maybe less, but they ARE a part of you.
johnea 2y ago
I agree completely. This is unsubstantiated hype. Transferring our consciousness into "the net", or some other fuzzy concepts are so far removed from reality as to be complete fiction. This includes freezing our brains and reanimating them later to resuscitate our lives. They not only massively overestimate the functionality of today's tech to receive something like our consciousnesses, but even more so, by orders of magnitude, underestimate just how complex our living bodies are. We only have the vaguest of ideas about how our physiology works (while we might be able to replicate flesh cells for "fake meat", we have 0 understanding or control over how those cells organize to form macroscopic organs). Applying this to the brain, our understanding is even more primitive. An example would be recent news that perhaps the brain is not sterile, but hosts a microbiome. Whether or not the brain hosts a microbiome is still "controversial". We're still hundreds of years away from a comprehensive understanding of physiology. But of course, we're never going to live that long, because we still believe (statistically as a species) in invisible guys in outer space that tell us we need to dismember people who believe in the WRONG invisible guy in outer space. Our primitive violent ape species will extinct itself long before we ever have a comprehensive grasp of how life works, especially to the level of understanding consciousnesses...
glenstein 2y ago
>Our nervous system extends into our bodies. We feel emotions in our bodies. People with certain kinds of brain damage that prevents them from feeling emotions normally also experience trouble making rational decisions. I think that may be true enough, but it doesn't have the upshot you seem to think it does. It just means that what we need to sustain not just a brain itself but the totality of the environmental conditions on which it depends. No easy task for sure, but not something that presents an in-principle impossibility of preserving brains. I think there's a major philosophical error here in thinking that the added logistics present this kind of in-principle impossibility. Also, talking like this starts to play with anti-science speculation a bit. Octopi actually have neurons extending through their limbs. We don't. So when we talk about consciousness being "embodied", I'm sorry, it's an attempt to romanticize the question in a way that loses sight of our scientific understanding. Consciousness happens in the brain. Sure, the brain needs stimulus from its embodied nervous system, and may even depend on those data and interactions in significant ways, but everything we know about consciousness suggests its in the brain. And so the data from "embodied" nervous systems may be important but there's no in-principle reason why it can't be accounted for in the context of preservation.
- ninala 2y ago
  > Octopi actually have neurons extending through their limbs. We don't. You don't have neurons extending through your limbs?
jaco6 2y ago
Very well, you think that preserving the brain, or even preserving the nervous system, is futile. But what of total biostasis, preserving the entire organism, just like the archaebacteria that live for thousands of years in ice or other extreme environments by slowing their metabolisms to a crawl? To me, excessive negativity about the possibility of immortality smacks of weakness and defeatism. You either love life and want as much of it as possible, which makes you a friend of humanity, or prefer death, which makes you an enemy of humanity. I take a stronger line than the neuroscientist in the article. “Death positivity” like that of Viktor Frankl, anti-natalism, even faith in magical spiritual resurrections—all are anti-human viewpoints, only excusable in the past because they were copes with the inevitability of death. Now that we have reason to believe it can be averted, we owe our potential future selves every possible effort to save them from oblivion.
rekabis 2y ago
> More recent research has been hinting that we may even hold certain types of memories outside our brains. Not just hinting - the evidence is strong and accumulating rapidly. The gut, in particular, has so many neurons that it is considered the body’s “second brain”, to say nothing about the impact that gut bacteria have on your mind. If you really wanted to create a copy of your “mind”, you’d have to image every neuron in your body for a thoroughly accurate copy. And then accept the fact that your entire behavioural profile is then missing the input of your gut bacteria, which appears to have a significant and non-trivial impact.
dyauspitr 2y ago
If it was preserving my original brain it would definitely still be me at the core. Would everything be exactly the same? Probably not but that paradigm is more than good enough.

by NickM 2y ago

namrog84 2y ago

There is a bit of research and effort into a head transplants. I wonder if and when that is successful to see how it impacts the individual. Possibly having memories of the body or changing personality.

mannanj 2y ago
where?
- bookofjoe 2y ago
  >HEAVEN: The head anastomosis venture Project outline for the first human head transplantation with spinal linkage (GEMINI) [2013] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3821155/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3821155/ ................... >World's first human head transplant successfully performed on a corpse, scientists say (2017) https://nationalpost.com/health/worlds-first-human-head-transplant-successfully-performed-on-a-corpse-scientists-say https://nationalpost.com/health/worlds-first-human-head-tran... ............. First Human Head Transplantation: Surgically Challenging, Ethically Controversial and Historically Tempting – an Experimental Endeavor or a Scientific Landmark? (2019) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6511668/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6511668/ .......... >No Doctor Has Ever Performed a Human Head Transplant. This Neurosurgeon Says He’s Ready to Do It. (2024) https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a62831709/human-head-transplants/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a62831709/human-hea...
HideousKojima 2y ago
Can't wait for C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength to become a reality

latexr 2y ago

For example, it’s widely reported that organ transplantation, especially heart transplants, may cause personality changes associated with the donor. https://www.mdpi.com/2673-3943/5/1/2 https://www.mdpi.com/2673-3943/5/1/2 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/

everdrive 2y ago
Do we think the personality changes are due to the heart itself, or just due the minor brain damage accompanying an incredibly invasive surgery?
- SubiculumCode 2y ago
  General anesthesia is not good for the brain.
  - SubiculumCode 2y ago
    replying to myself to provide more context. In my PhD work, I helped conduct the human portion of a study on this topic, contributing to some discussions at the FDA [1]. The idea was a bit controversial then, and I've had a few anesthesiologists get mad at me for it, but the general pattern has now been replicated quite a few times now, such that the field has largely moved on from 'Is something bad happening?' to 'Why does it happen, and how do we prevent that bad thing from happening?'[2]. So it has been a gratifying excursion from my typical research before and since then. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4168665/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4168665/ [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9750936/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9750936/
    - spondylosaurus 2y ago
      Is there any reason to suspect that adults suffer the same effects as infants? (Not asking to be combative, just curious whether children are uniquely affected because their brains are still cooking.)

ashleyn 2y ago

I'm also skeptical of the idea that one can "upload" consciousness and it would still be "you". I suppose this is true in a philosophical sense, but in a practical sense, subjective experience of consciousness rules the roost. It's inevitably going to be a mere copy of you. You don't get to experience any of it. Similar to a software project which is forked, I think it makes more sense to classify it as an entirely different entity at that point. I suppose there are valid use cases for this, but I'm not that narcissistic to think the world needs eternal copies of me. The continued subjective experience of the original consciousness is where I believe the real value lies. Digitisation of consciousness, assuming it has any sound scientific basis in the first place, would practically need to look more like the gradual replacement of brain (and bodily) matter with something more durable, enduring, and controllable. A slow process in which carbon is exchanged for silicon, or cellular damage is continuously reversed and aging kept at bay.

svara 2y ago
As long as you believe that any theory of subjective experience will ultimately be physicalist, this argument doesn't really work. There is no continuity of subjective experience even within the same brain, you can be deeply unconscious for extended periods of time and come back.
- sdwr 2y ago
  Yeah, you can argue the same thing about going to sleep, there's no guarantee that the same "you" wakes up. From the outside, an "identical clone" is indistinguishable. On the inside, the clone feels exactly how you would feel. The only problem is the "I don't want my 'me' to die" feeling. I bet most people would be fine with death/rebirth teleportation.
dinfinity 2y ago
> It's inevitably going to be a mere copy of you. You don't get to experience any of it. You can make the same argument for 'you before you went to sleep' and 'you after you woke up'. The only real link you have to that previous consciousness are memories of experiences, which are all produced by your current body/brain. Think about this: For every consciousness (including you right now) it is _impossible_ to experience anything other than what the thing producing that consciousness produces (memories, sensations, etc.). It doesn't matter whether the different conscious entities or whatever produces them are separated by time or space. They _will_ be produced, and they _will_ experience exactly what the thing that produces them produces. With an analogy: If you drop pebbles in either the same pond at different times or in different ponds at the same time, waves will be produced in all cases. From the perspectives of the waves themselves, what they interact with is always _exactly_ the stuff that interacts with the water they're made up of. To them, the question of identity or continuity is fully irrelevant. They're just them. Similarly, it makes no difference whether you only have the memories of the previous conscious experiences, or if 'you' really experienced them. Those situations are indistinguishable to you. The link to future consciousnesses inhabiting your body is effectively the same.

etrautmann 2y ago

As a neuroscientist working on brain computer interfaces, it's painfully clear to me that we are absolutely nowhere close to understanding the full complexity of the human brain in a manner required to simulate or reboot someone's consciousness. It's not even clear yet what level of abstraction is required. Do we need to map all of the synapses to get a connection graph, or do we need to map all synapses plus the synaptic proteins to assign connection weights too? This is ignoring other types of connections like gap junctions between cells, ephaptic coupling (the influence of local electric fields on neurons firing), mapping neuormodulator release, etc. On one hand, it feels like irreduceable complexity. On the other hand, however, you can lose about half of your neurons to neurodegenerative diseases before you start noticing a behavioral effect, so clearly not every single details is required to simulate your consciousness. It would be a MAJOR leap forward in neuroscience to even understand what level of abstraction is necessary and which biological details are essential vs. which can be summarized succinctly. Anyone claiming to take your brain and slice it up and have a working model right now is currently selling snake oil. It's not impossible, but neuroscience has to progress a ways before this is a reasonable proposition. The alternative is to take the brain and preserve it, but even a frozen or perfused brain may have degraded in ways that would make it hard to recover important aspects that we don't yet understand. It is, however, fascinating to do the research required to answer these questions, and that should be funded and continue, even if just to understand the underlying biology.

belfalas 2y ago
Keying off your comment - in the field of neuroscience, is consciousness viewed as a kind of simulation? (I'm just a programmer so it's fascinating to me to consider how actual brain scientists model consciousness in their work.)
alchemist1e9 2y ago
Losing half neurons caught my attention. I believe we had a post about how LLM weights being trimmed by 1/2 still had them functional. Interesting.
radarsat1 2y ago
In addition to all that we don't know about synapses etc, I've often wondered if even mapping all the "hardware connections" so to speak would even be enough. You'd have everything in the right place, but what about the "signals" running on it? Does a certain amount of constant activity on these circuits constitute signs of a "living" brain vs a dead one? How much of our consciousness is really in the topology of the circuits, and how much of it is simply defined by the constant activity running around in them? I assume neural circuits form loops that consist of synapses that reinforce or surpress activity. If these signals going around and around ever "stop", can they ever be started again with the same "patterns"? What if these patterns, the living "software", are at least partially what define you? Well anyway that's my airchair crackpot neuroscience theory for the world to consume ;). I'm sure there must already be a name for the idea though.

seba_dos1 2y ago

The way various hormones influence the brain alone makes it pretty clear to me already that you'd be a completely different person when taken out of your body, and I'm pretty sure that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Nevermark 2y ago
Coming back as a brain in a vat certainly sounds awful. But I would assume that bringing someone back would be tied to a physical or simulated body that provided a compatible context. Not a bad assumption to solidify in your brain preservation/restoration contract.
Freebytes 2y ago
The 'people' that undergo this first will experience the most incredible pain imaginable if we do not figure out a way to block such pain first.

kh_hk 2y ago

In terms of computing (one that we do not understand), it would be like cloning a live machine by taking the CPU dye only, or maybe the hard drive. How many parts you need to take away from a computer for it to be the same machine? It's easy though with a VM, or a kernel that supports many hardware. Kind of a digress, but I liked this idea.

kelnos 2y ago
I don't think this is a great analogy because computers don't have consciousness (yet). But I usually move the hard drive (or at least its contents) between machines when I get a new computer, and that's enough for me to think of it as the "same", even if I reinstall the OS on the new machine and just copy my home directory onto the new one.

hinkley 2y ago

Why would you want to go on in a world that has either left you behind or keeps making the same mistakes over and over in a cycle and won't listen to you because you're too old to understand? And conversely, I think Kim Stanley Robinson puts it best in the Mars trilogy. Scientific progress often has to wait for the old guard to die so new ideas can be tried. Sometimes there are actually new things and they need to be allowed to cook.

bee_rider 2y ago
I dunno. I’m a pretty open minded guy so if anyone is going to be immortal, might as well be me. I promise not even to shout at too many clouds. Plus there are a lot of assholes in the world. Come on, there isn’t anybody you’d enjoy watching get Ozymandias‘d? I’d enjoy it.
idontwantthis 2y ago
There’s a short story about uploaded consciousnesses being used as AI slaves. They go bad once enough years have gone by that they can’t speak the modern language anymore. Then they usually lapse into insanity or depression.
- anon84873628 2y ago
  Reminds me of: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
  - idontwantthis 2y ago
    That’s the one.
kiba 2y ago
A questionable assumption. A scientist like Einstein experienced scientific revolutions within his lifetime. That's hardly going to be the norm in the history of science, and also a horrible assumption to think revolutions would endlessly be occurring and reoccurring. Also, we know when we're on the edge of knowledge, especially in cosmology and physics. We're waiting for revolution there. There's dark energy and dark matter. It doesn't matter if you're old or young, you knew that your theories isn't good enough to explain whatever these are. Scientific knowledge don't get swept away especially if they're rock solid. Newtonian physics still has a lot of relevance after all. It's just that relativity is even more accurate.

Freebytes 2y ago

I consider that I have likely died more than twice in my lifetime already. And before this body gives up, I will have already died more times. Must simply enjoy the present and give gifts to my future self.

bee_rider 2y ago

I’m not sure I actually believe in quantum immortality but I think it is slightly suspicious—out of all the people you could have been be born as, you just happen to be born in a timeframe where brain preservation might be possible before you die?

prettyStandard 2y ago
I see what you're saying...but... Most people are alive right now. The population historically has been much lower, so odds are you would be born around the time high technology would support a high population.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  I think that “most people are alive now” is not true (although it is often repeated). https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16870579 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16870579 > So what are the figures? There are currently seven billion people alive today and the Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 107 billion people have ever lived. > This means that we are nowhere near close to having more alive than dead. In fact, there are 15 dead people for every person living. So it is not wildly impossible that you’d be alive now, but it is fairly unlikely. Also, hard to say what’s in the future of course, but even if population growth levels off, you’d expect to be born in the future, right? Which brings up another question, why not? If we are going to go along on the fully ridiculous implications here and reinterpret all probabilities as conditioned on your immortality, why weren’t you born in the far future? I’d expect people born in the future to have easier access to immortality. Maybe birth rates will go way down if we discover immortality (lowering your odds of being born later). Or maybe pre-immortality minds will be seen as more interesting and worth preserving (increasing your odds of being kept around).
  - seba_dos1 2y ago
    Even if being born right now had an astronomically low probability, someone would still be lucky enough.

augusto-moura 2y ago

I don't think I agree with you. There are multiple examples in society of damaged nervous system connections with the brain, spine cord damage for example, where the personality of the pacient changes little. In the same sense, losing limbs or entire sections of your body (aside from psychological trauma and other psychological consequences) don't affect personality that much Of course the nervous system is much more complex, but damage to the brain almost always result in some sort of cognitive dysfunction or personality change, see the Phineas Gage case for example.

whythre 2y ago
I see what you mean- but consider that the gut does seem to play a significant role in mood and mental health. The enteric nervous system may not hold memories, but it seems to have something to do with personality and digestion issues can have negative cognitive effects.
- augusto-moura 2y ago
  Agree that discomfort can cause temporary problems, and sometimes chronic problems in parts of the body can cause life long cognitive impairment. But that is not to say that these represent "you" or your personality. You brain could still function perfectly without those body conditions. And for the gut example the brain actually does work normally, stomach and instetines removal (and other related surgeries) are fairly common procedures and I don't hear of people complaining about personality changes. Of course, those types of procedures are extremely invasive in a sistemic way, and not only your mental state, but multiple other parts of the body need to re-adapt. But I truly believe "you" will be still be "you" inside your brain PS.: I quoted "you" because discussions about the identity of one-self are much more complex, just regard it as the most high level definition of the concept
snakeyjake 2y ago
>In the same sense, losing limbs or entire sections of your body (aside from psychological trauma and other psychological consequences) don't affect personality that much "There aren't any changes except for all of the changes, but those changes don't count because reasons." I don't know how many amputees you know; you may know many. I was in the army for 10 years during the height of the global war on terror and know more than most. Not a single one is the same as they were pre-amputation. Could be the trauma that caused the amputation, could be the amputation. I'm not an amputationologist. I do assert that a holo-techno-brain will need a shit-ton of e-drugs to deal with being amputated from its fucking body. The bacteria in your butthole are a part of you just like your brain, maybe less, but they ARE a part of you.

johnea 2y ago

I agree completely. This is unsubstantiated hype. Transferring our consciousness into "the net", or some other fuzzy concepts are so far removed from reality as to be complete fiction. This includes freezing our brains and reanimating them later to resuscitate our lives. They not only massively overestimate the functionality of today's tech to receive something like our consciousnesses, but even more so, by orders of magnitude, underestimate just how complex our living bodies are. We only have the vaguest of ideas about how our physiology works (while we might be able to replicate flesh cells for "fake meat", we have 0 understanding or control over how those cells organize to form macroscopic organs). Applying this to the brain, our understanding is even more primitive. An example would be recent news that perhaps the brain is not sterile, but hosts a microbiome. Whether or not the brain hosts a microbiome is still "controversial". We're still hundreds of years away from a comprehensive understanding of physiology. But of course, we're never going to live that long, because we still believe (statistically as a species) in invisible guys in outer space that tell us we need to dismember people who believe in the WRONG invisible guy in outer space. Our primitive violent ape species will extinct itself long before we ever have a comprehensive grasp of how life works, especially to the level of understanding consciousnesses...

glenstein 2y ago

>Our nervous system extends into our bodies. We feel emotions in our bodies. People with certain kinds of brain damage that prevents them from feeling emotions normally also experience trouble making rational decisions. I think that may be true enough, but it doesn't have the upshot you seem to think it does. It just means that what we need to sustain not just a brain itself but the totality of the environmental conditions on which it depends. No easy task for sure, but not something that presents an in-principle impossibility of preserving brains. I think there's a major philosophical error here in thinking that the added logistics present this kind of in-principle impossibility. Also, talking like this starts to play with anti-science speculation a bit. Octopi actually have neurons extending through their limbs. We don't. So when we talk about consciousness being "embodied", I'm sorry, it's an attempt to romanticize the question in a way that loses sight of our scientific understanding. Consciousness happens in the brain. Sure, the brain needs stimulus from its embodied nervous system, and may even depend on those data and interactions in significant ways, but everything we know about consciousness suggests its in the brain. And so the data from "embodied" nervous systems may be important but there's no in-principle reason why it can't be accounted for in the context of preservation.

ninala 2y ago
> Octopi actually have neurons extending through their limbs. We don't. You don't have neurons extending through your limbs?

jaco6 2y ago

Very well, you think that preserving the brain, or even preserving the nervous system, is futile. But what of total biostasis, preserving the entire organism, just like the archaebacteria that live for thousands of years in ice or other extreme environments by slowing their metabolisms to a crawl? To me, excessive negativity about the possibility of immortality smacks of weakness and defeatism. You either love life and want as much of it as possible, which makes you a friend of humanity, or prefer death, which makes you an enemy of humanity. I take a stronger line than the neuroscientist in the article. “Death positivity” like that of Viktor Frankl, anti-natalism, even faith in magical spiritual resurrections—all are anti-human viewpoints, only excusable in the past because they were copes with the inevitability of death. Now that we have reason to believe it can be averted, we owe our potential future selves every possible effort to save them from oblivion.

rekabis 2y ago

> More recent research has been hinting that we may even hold certain types of memories outside our brains. Not just hinting - the evidence is strong and accumulating rapidly. The gut, in particular, has so many neurons that it is considered the body’s “second brain”, to say nothing about the impact that gut bacteria have on your mind. If you really wanted to create a copy of your “mind”, you’d have to image every neuron in your body for a thoroughly accurate copy. And then accept the fact that your entire behavioural profile is then missing the input of your gut bacteria, which appears to have a significant and non-trivial impact.

dyauspitr 2y ago

If it was preserving my original brain it would definitely still be me at the core. Would everything be exactly the same? Probably not but that paradigm is more than good enough.