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“Take very high resolution scans of brain structure to characterise how someone’s neurons work, recreate it in a digital format then put it in another robotic,

“Take very high resolution scans of brain structure to characterise how someone’s neurons work, recreate it in a digital format then put it in another robotic, virtual or biological body.” This isn't preserving, it's copying. A copy of your brain/personality/you... isn't you... it's a copy. It's a cassette tape playing back the radio you recorded onto it. It's really kind of odd that people talk about brain transplants, or living forever, and then talk about uploading your mind to the cloud or swapping someone else's healthy brain into your healthy body, or scanning your brain and recreating it, and make it sound like it is going to help you to live forever. If my brain is scanned and uploaded to the cloud, a copy of me would live on forever, but me, literally, me, will still deteriorate and die, then rot away into nothingness. My mind, my personality, my essence, me, will not live forever under any of these solutions. I'll die. A copy of me, a point in time snapshot of who I was when it was taken, will continue on, with my memories, mimicking who I was. That gives me no comfort at all. I don't care if a copy of me lives on forever if I still die. That's not immortality, not for me personally, not if I die.

nickisnoble 2y ago
Some people never learned about pointers / pass by value vs reference and it shows
vagab0nd 2y ago
Let's not pretend that we understand consciousness. It's like talking about the movement of stars without understanding gravity.
cg5280 2y ago
Not that it makes things any better for the original you, but the copied you would presumably feel and believe themself to be the real you. From their perspective, "you" really are living forever. To proceed with the copying would be a sort of act of kindness for yourself.
suzzer99 2y ago
Suppose you died every night in your sleep and were replaced in the morning with a perfect copy of yourself with all your memories intact. Would you know the difference?
- wutwutwat 2y ago
  No, but if I died tonight and a copy of me took over tomorrow, what good did that do for me personally? I'm still dead. Selfishly, I don't care if a copy of me continues on, I only care that I don't.
  - suzzer99 2y ago
    Let's say you just found out that this is actually happening. Every night you die and are replaced with a perfect copy of yourself. Would you do anything differently?
    - wutwutwat 2y ago
      I would probably get a concentrated dose of existential dread knowing that by EOD I would cease to exist. Usually I'm able to delay that dread with the silly reasoning that I still have many years left before I die, but I wouldn't have that mind hack if I knew I had no time left.
      - suzzer99 2y ago
        Why not go out with a bang and spend your life savings on hookers and blow (or whatever decadent thing floats your boat)? My point is that I suspect most of us wouldn't do anything differently, even if we know it's not our consciousness continuing on, because both scenarios are identical for all practical purposes.
        wutwutwat 2y ago
        You're right, nothing would change, and both scenarios do play out the same. The difference would be the knowing about it part. That's what changes things for me. If it currently happens that way I wouldn't be aware of it, but if I knew that it was going to happen, the act of knowing, makes it an issue, for me anyway, even if it still plays out the same as every other time.
ikiris 2y ago
Is the person from before you last slept the same you? How do you know?
- smeej 2y ago
  If not, I should have had to do something with her body when I woke up where she went to sleep.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    I don't think that's the thought experiment. We're not talking about physical bodies, we're talking about consciousness. When you go to sleep, does your consciousness cease to exist, to be replaced with a new one, with all your memories and behaviors and attitudes, when you wake up? I have memories of being me and doing me things yesterday, but was that really me doing those things, or was that a different consciousness that doesn't exist anymore, and my memories are just the high-fidelity recorded experiences of someone else? And on top of it all: if that's the case, does it matter?
    - smeej 2y ago
      I don't think consciousness exists separate from the body, so this sounds to me like a contradiction in terms more than an actual thought experiment. It's the kind of thing a technologist can propose because the syntax of the sentences makes sense, but from a philosophical one, it's no more a "thought experiment" than a 4-sided triangle. There's a 1:1 relationship of consciousnesses and bodies they can possibly inhabit, and we do not now and never have had evidence to the contrary.
deleted 2y ago
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adventured 2y ago
We can't copy a person anyway. We're going to find out that it requires an order of events - order of experiences - aspect that can't be recreated to get the actual person. Everything else will end up being a weak simulation (even if it gets a bit closer over time with improvements in simulating).
- suzzer99 2y ago
  In theory if you had an atomic replicator you should be able to make a copy of a person. I'm not saying it will ever be practically possible. But I don't see any fundamental laws of nature that make it impossible.
  - nytesky 2y ago
    But the active electricity and chemical processes that denote life are more than just the absolute distribution and position of atoms; can you replicate the velocity of every electron, etc?
  - neom 2y ago
    Unless some quantum effect doesn't actually allow that to be true, a "great filter" of sorts. Could make a copy and it just doesn't turn on, due to unknown unknowns, can't know why.
    - ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
      You're essentially suggesting 'maybe the laws of physics would stop applying here for unknown reasons', but it's not plausible that would happen absent evidence.
      - neom 2y ago
        I was trying to elegantly hint there is probably lot we don't understand. :) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936 / https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10671017/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10671017/
robbomacrae 2y ago
That all makes sense. But let's run with this way beyond the foreseeable tech. What if you can replace each neuron in situ one by one up to X%. Then what if it was reversible (the neurons were initially just bypassed, commented out). Someone could then dial it up to 5%.. 50% and if they still felt the same throughout and then went up to 100%. In that scenario would they have copied themselves? I find it fascinatingly coincidental that neurons are the only cells in the body that don't rejuvenate unless there is some sort of injury [0]. [0]: https://www.dzne.de/en/im-fokus/meldungen/2021/neurons-able-to-talk-cannot-regenerate https://www.dzne.de/en/im-fokus/meldungen/2021/neurons-able-...
- stetrain 2y ago
  That's still a copy, just one where both copies remember their life before being copied and equally think they are the original. The original will still experience aging and death.
- wutwutwat 2y ago
  You're asking a question that we've asked ourselves for a millennia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus Technically, we are not the same people that we were when we were born. The cells in our body have one by one been replaced with new ones and the old ones have died off. The things that make up my body are 100% different than when I was born, so I literally am not the same person, physically. Maybe this is an indicator that there is more to what makes us, us, than just the physical assembly of atoms in our bodies. There are things I don't know that we'll ever get a full understanding of.
  - prometheus76 2y ago
    Categories, numbers, logic, grammar, etc. all map onto physical systems, but aren't necessarily directly linked. This is "metaphysics" in philosophy, and is essential in order to even reason about physical systems. Just the concept of a "physical system" is actually metaphysical, but without metaphysics, you can say nothing to anyone about anything. Metaphysics is just generally taken as a "given", but is worth evaluating itself. Then you'll run into the "realism" vs. "nominalism" debate and you'll understand the philosophical underpinnings of the current culture wars in America.
TrainedMonkey 2y ago
Every time you go to sleep your consciousness shuts down. What wakes up is something slightly different due to biological processes. You are not tired, your mood is different, part of cells in your brain got replaced, memories become more stable and maybe linked to other similar memories, etc... This is way more pronounced for people waking up from a coma. Philosophers thought of this for a while, see https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/66018/the-brain-of-theseus https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/66018/the-bra... So, each morning is a copy of you wakes up? Or do you draw a line in the sand and say that is different.
- musicale 2y ago
  Thanks for feeding my existential dread. For that matter, the you of this moment is constantly being annihilated and replaced by a slightly different clone, in an illusory life that resembles stop-frame animation. And don't ask me about the me from yesterday - the one who didn't bother to do any of the things I am stuck with doing today - or the me from tomorrow who will likely squander everything I've worked so hard for. Neither of them is to be trusted. On the other hand, I do seem to have a vast store of dream memories; wnen I think about them it seems like living some kind of second life, usually while fast asleep. Sleeping and waking selves are in agreement that being asleep is generally more pleasant than being awake, though being awake seems to have better continuity.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Every nanosecond the set of atoms constituting you changes, each of those are a different you.
  - smeej 2y ago
    There's a difference between "I have changed" and "I have been copied." This seems obvious enough to me that I don't question it, but is it not obvious to everyone?
    - mensetmanusman 2y ago
      Copies are impossible because every moment is change with bounded but non-zero uncertainty.
exe34 2y ago
the trick is to do it slowly, a few grams at a time. a one way ticket on the ship of Theseus.
yfw 2y ago
Reminds me of the scene from the show pantheon where the scanning process kills you because you need to scan and peel the brain layer by layer
ToValueFunfetti 2y ago
This makes sense if you believe in a non-materialist self, like a soul. That model wouldn't be falsifiable- we can't measure it, so it can have whatever properties are convenient. You could then rule out the possibility that your soul would inhabit the copied 'you' by fiat. Scientifically, though: of course an exact copy of you is you. If you don't believe in souls but still feel like this is not the case, that indicates your model of 'you' is incorrect.
- musicale 2y ago
  > of course an exact copy of you is you Yeah, that's what my clones keep telling me. I ask them: have you ever woken up inside a cloning machine? That probably means you're not the original. Then they somehow sedated me and locked me inside the cloning machine.
- danparsonson 2y ago
  So if we copy you into a robot and the copying process leaves you unharmed and awake, are they both you?
  - ToValueFunfetti 2y ago
    Yes, they are both me. It is admittedly a weird conclusion, but that doesn't make it false- we did a weird thing and got a weird result. Objectively, there is no case for saying either is not you.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      So twins are both the same person? Not sure what you mean, they aren't both you, you create a new person who thinks the same way you do.
    - kelnos 2y ago
      I agree that they'd both be you, but I don't think that's what's at stake. "You" would only get to experience one of the two lives at that point: either the original's or the robot's. Presumably whatever consciousness was present before the duplication still resides with the original. So there's certainly an argument to be made that if someone created a copy of "you" and put it in a robot, and then destroyed your organic body, that consciousness wouldn't "move" to the robot; it would stay in the organic body and be killed. The robot would be a completely new consciousness, but with all of your memories and behaviors and attitudes. I'm honestly not sure what I believe around this. Perhaps we will discover "consciousness" as a physical thing and learn how to transfer that as well. Or not. Who knows.
yuppiemephisto 2y ago
Of all things, The Venture Bros convinced me otherwise that the copies “are” me, enough to matter anyway.
- wutwutwat 2y ago
  quiet, Dean
ben_w 2y ago
I view (hypothetical, sufficiently good) brain upload and emulation the way I view git forks: both children are just as equally "the real one" even if only one of them is on the same physical hard drive. Looking forward from now, both bio-me and digital-fork-me (or indeed bio-fork-me if the upload gets revented) are equally "my future self", even though they would also each be distinct beings in their own rights and not a shared consciousness over many bodies.
- someuser2345 2y ago
  I think that from everyone else's perspective, an ideal copy of me would be me; by the definition of "ideal copy". I, however, would not consider the copy to be me; to me, there is only one me.
kelnos 2y ago
> This isn't preserving, it's copying. A copy of your brain/personality/you... isn't you... it's a copy. It's a cassette tape playing back the radio you recorded onto it. That's just one opinion, though. We still don't know what consciousness really is. We don't know what makes us who we are. We don't know if some concept (scientific or supernatural) of a "soul" exists apart from the behavior that arises from the physical structures of the brain. We just don't know. So maybe you're right, but that's far from clear.
- wutwutwat 2y ago
  I'd agree with you, except if my brain was scanned and uploaded to the cloud, I'd still exist in my original brain. There can't be two originals of something so the cloud version would be a copy of me, since the original me would still be alive, able to talk to the copy of me living in the cloud.
blensor 2y ago
From what my experience tells me, many people prioritize their children's life over their own. Kind of like the insurance policy that lives on carrying their values further after they have died. So this is not really that much different. Your own body is nearing it's end but a new vessel is carrying your values your influence on the world further. Even if it is a physically separate part from the own body it's the close enough for me to be considered living beyond my death.
boogieknite 2y ago
its Villeneuve's Enemy thinking about this even a little makes me want to throw up because this can never be tested. yeah, id be dead, but technically, im alive. im alive according to everyone including myself (new me). So im not dead. But like you said, i died and am dead and dont experience any more life. if all evidence is that i didnt die and still exist, then thats the fact we can theorize that our consciousness continues, but there is NO WAY to ever actually test it because all experience are that consciousness continues whether or not that is the case. sprinkle in some quantum suicide and my stomach is doing backflips from the existentialism od
foobiekr 2y ago
Hans Moravec had a suggestion on how to do this in Mind Children: instead of examining the whole brain, you measure a layer, then replace it, layer by layer, until the last. There is never a copy and an original, it's just a ship of theseus self where the neurons are individually replaced with new ones, albeit electronic ones.
tempestn 2y ago
As the article says, a book is not the ink, but the words. I am not my physical atoms, but the connections that form my thought patterns and memories. If it were possible to make a perfect copy of those things, the copy would be "me". If the original still existed, that would also be (a different) me.
Clubber 2y ago
I'm not a huge Trekkie but I recall the reason Bones McCoy wouldn't go in a transporter was he believed it killed the person and created a copy.
- jareklupinski 2y ago
  there was an episode where it didn't go as planned
wry_discontent 2y ago
Something I think about a lot is that people tend to compare whatever the most recent innovation was to humans. It used to be that what made you alive was electricity; you could Frankenstein shock yourself back to life. It used to be that you were a clock. Your gears wound up at birth, and then eventually you wore out. You needed repairs. People love to use metaphors, but none of these things are the full picture. Just because computers are so complex doesn't make you more correct. Your brain isn't the whole of your mind, we already know that's true. Why is this silly nonsense entertained?
concordDance 2y ago
> A copy of your brain/personality/you... isn't you... it's a copy This reads a bit like "a copy of Super Mario Bros isn't Super Mario Bros, it's a copy". It has all of the bits that let you distinguish Super Mario Bros from Donkey Kong or Super Mario World. Why isn't it also Super Mario Bros?
scotty79 2y ago
Is your savegame you loaded today still the same game you started yesterday? Or is it a copy of yesterday's game running forward? Does it matter? Are electrical processes rebooted from chemical memory every morning when you wake up or after you have a seizure still the same you? Or is it just a fresh copy of your mind that dispersed when electrical signals in your brain lost continuity?
evoke4908 2y ago
This is a pretty big philosophical question. There's no universal answer, just opinions. Your conclusion is not the obvious one for everybody. What happens if you have an identical copy down to the atom. Totally impossible to distinguish. You're put to sleep and your mind is copied over. When you both wake, which one is "you"? Both copies think they're "you" and both are correct. Each has the same sense of self and continuity of identity. Maybe at the moment of synchronization "you" ceased to exist as you branched into two new identities. Say you upload into a computer. From the copy's perspective, it is "you", it's the same self. It might view your biological body like you'd view an old computer after you finish migrating your files to a new one. Say you destroy the biological body, or wipe its brain once you copy. Does that change the equation? If you destroyed one of the identical clones, is it even relevant to ask which is "you"? Personally, I think Altered Carbon comes close to how our society will solve this problem. The original copy has its brain wiped and the new copy is "you" by cultural consensus. Truly duplicating a single identity is strongly taboo and illegal. I think this is a question that either matters to you or it doesn't. In my opinion, it's irrelevant. I, the original "me" am totally free to agree with the copy that it is "me". I can choose to give it my social and legal identity and agree that "me" is no longer "I". My personal choice is to destroy the original, but one could also choose to let the original body continue and assume a new identity, live a new life or whatever. I view this the same way I do my past self. The person I was ten years ago is not "me", it was a totally different person. That past self lived a different life and had a sense of identity that isn't at all like what I have today. That past me, the ego that called itself "me" died a long time ago and the "me" now is a different self identity built out of new pieces. In my worldview, "me" is a transient thing. The self is not one fixed thing, it changes over time and sometimes it's replaced. I don't see the idea of transferring my sense of self to a new body as anything more extreme than any other kind of ego death. I choose to resolve this problem with practicality. I agree with myself that the new copy is "me". My social and legal identity, as well as my own sense of self transfer to the copy. My choice would be to destroy the original copy. Barring that, it would assume a new identity and live a different life far away. It'd get a memory wipe if available. I can make the choice to sacrifice my ego and allow "me" to be assumed by someone else. To me, even to the original copy, the new copy is me. In my opinion, "me" is immortal in the digital copy, even if "I" remain in a mortal body.
EasyMark 2y ago
Your memories and biology are you. If someone makes a perfect copy of you, disintegrates your old “you” and then wakes the “new you” up how is it any different?
ANewFormation 2y ago
The line I like to use here when people talk about this sort of 'transferring' your consciousness - imagine there was a 'perfect' chatbot trained on your every experience, thought, and sensation, and mind. OK, now your consciousness is 'transferred'. I promise to run you.exe plenty. It's just an exercise in self delusion, even if this was possible. That's not you anymore than a 'you' created by a taxidermist and shoved in a closet is.
Etherlord87 2y ago
Coming from an atheist, what if there is a metaphysical dimension, and the computing structure of a processor, brain, whatever, necessarily positions it in a unique space within that dimension, and this dimension is what holds consciousness? The idea doesn't really matter, what matters is that perhaps copying a brain actually does move its consciousness. Easy to prove/disprove once you can actually copy a human being, as he should then report to be simultaneously aware of both bodies. Other than that it's possible that by the same logic of you not being the same as your copy, you're not being the same after you sleep: the continuity of your consciousness is interrupted, and the new you in the morning thinks he is the old guy, having all the memories, but he actually isn't. Think about this: what if you were replaced with a clone while you sleep? No one would ever know and scientifically speaking both scenarios are equivalent because they lead to the same result. Maybe enjoy today a little bit longer, now knowing you're actually going to die in that bed, and as your "clone" will wake up in the morning completely oblivious of not actually continuing your consciousness, you don't even get a witness to your tragic death, as was the case with thousands of your predecessors. Or maybe it's even worse, because the consciousness is interrupted tens or hundreds of times during the day. Or maybe those are thousands of separate, overlapping consciousness bubbles and really you should worry only about your identity, as the consciousness is just short-lived fireworks on top of the actual you. I guess it would be nice to know what consciousness even is.
- prometheus76 2y ago
  Numbers are metaphysical, as is music. They both can manifest physically (three cars and three cats, or a Bach concerto making sound waves that vibrate my eardrum). But what makes music musical is that it's a pattern of sounds over time. Patterns are not physical. Patterns map to the physical, but they are above the physical. You, too, are a pattern that plays out over time. You are mapped to your physical body, but you are the pattern that is embedded in the body. You are a pattern.
robertlagrant 2y ago
> That's not immortality, not for me personally, not if I die. What if: at the point of copying there are two of you, both of whom don't want to die?
dyauspitr 2y ago
A copy is a copy. On the other hand, actually transplanting my brain into another body is definitely living forever because the brain is me.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
JeremyNT 2y ago
Perhaps we could just "Ship of Theseus" our consciousness? Slowly augment with cybernetics, then replace the meat over time. It's all just hypothetical without knowing what consciousness/qualia really "is," and as far as I can discern we've basically moved no closer to understanding that since the very beginnings of neurological research.
sagolikasoppor 2y ago
That's easy to solve. Just make the copy while you are still alive, make it so that you can control both brains ans bodies. That way you should be able to shut down the old body and keep on living?
incognito124 2y ago
You might like this: https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/stayingalive/ https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/stayingalive/
pontifier 2y ago
I've thought a lot about this, and realized that there is no continuation in our normal life anyway. What we experience is a huge and omnipresent blind spot because we cannot see the future. Even 5 minutes from now, you don't know where you'll be, and you will be a completely different person based on the events of that 5 minutes. Every moment that passes, the you of the moment dies. What you can have, is a you in the future that remembers and understands the past you. That only happens if you preserve your memories either by not dying, or by preserving your internal memories in some other way. That's all you get. A copy in the future that remembers, or nothing at all.

nickisnoble 2y ago

Some people never learned about pointers / pass by value vs reference and it shows

vagab0nd 2y ago

Let's not pretend that we understand consciousness. It's like talking about the movement of stars without understanding gravity.

cg5280 2y ago

Not that it makes things any better for the original you, but the copied you would presumably feel and believe themself to be the real you. From their perspective, "you" really are living forever. To proceed with the copying would be a sort of act of kindness for yourself.

suzzer99 2y ago

Suppose you died every night in your sleep and were replaced in the morning with a perfect copy of yourself with all your memories intact. Would you know the difference?

wutwutwat 2y ago
No, but if I died tonight and a copy of me took over tomorrow, what good did that do for me personally? I'm still dead. Selfishly, I don't care if a copy of me continues on, I only care that I don't.
- suzzer99 2y ago
  Let's say you just found out that this is actually happening. Every night you die and are replaced with a perfect copy of yourself. Would you do anything differently?
  - wutwutwat 2y ago
    I would probably get a concentrated dose of existential dread knowing that by EOD I would cease to exist. Usually I'm able to delay that dread with the silly reasoning that I still have many years left before I die, but I wouldn't have that mind hack if I knew I had no time left.
    - suzzer99 2y ago
      Why not go out with a bang and spend your life savings on hookers and blow (or whatever decadent thing floats your boat)? My point is that I suspect most of us wouldn't do anything differently, even if we know it's not our consciousness continuing on, because both scenarios are identical for all practical purposes.
      - wutwutwat 2y ago
        You're right, nothing would change, and both scenarios do play out the same. The difference would be the knowing about it part. That's what changes things for me. If it currently happens that way I wouldn't be aware of it, but if I knew that it was going to happen, the act of knowing, makes it an issue, for me anyway, even if it still plays out the same as every other time.

ikiris 2y ago

Is the person from before you last slept the same you? How do you know?

smeej 2y ago
If not, I should have had to do something with her body when I woke up where she went to sleep.
- kelnos 2y ago
  I don't think that's the thought experiment. We're not talking about physical bodies, we're talking about consciousness. When you go to sleep, does your consciousness cease to exist, to be replaced with a new one, with all your memories and behaviors and attitudes, when you wake up? I have memories of being me and doing me things yesterday, but was that really me doing those things, or was that a different consciousness that doesn't exist anymore, and my memories are just the high-fidelity recorded experiences of someone else? And on top of it all: if that's the case, does it matter?
  - smeej 2y ago
    I don't think consciousness exists separate from the body, so this sounds to me like a contradiction in terms more than an actual thought experiment. It's the kind of thing a technologist can propose because the syntax of the sentences makes sense, but from a philosophical one, it's no more a "thought experiment" than a 4-sided triangle. There's a 1:1 relationship of consciousnesses and bodies they can possibly inhabit, and we do not now and never have had evidence to the contrary.

deleted 2y ago

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adventured 2y ago

We can't copy a person anyway. We're going to find out that it requires an order of events - order of experiences - aspect that can't be recreated to get the actual person. Everything else will end up being a weak simulation (even if it gets a bit closer over time with improvements in simulating).

suzzer99 2y ago
In theory if you had an atomic replicator you should be able to make a copy of a person. I'm not saying it will ever be practically possible. But I don't see any fundamental laws of nature that make it impossible.
- nytesky 2y ago
  But the active electricity and chemical processes that denote life are more than just the absolute distribution and position of atoms; can you replicate the velocity of every electron, etc?
- neom 2y ago
  Unless some quantum effect doesn't actually allow that to be true, a "great filter" of sorts. Could make a copy and it just doesn't turn on, due to unknown unknowns, can't know why.
  - ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
    You're essentially suggesting 'maybe the laws of physics would stop applying here for unknown reasons', but it's not plausible that would happen absent evidence.
    - neom 2y ago
      I was trying to elegantly hint there is probably lot we don't understand. :) https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936 / https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10671017/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10671017/

robbomacrae 2y ago

That all makes sense. But let's run with this way beyond the foreseeable tech. What if you can replace each neuron in situ one by one up to X%. Then what if it was reversible (the neurons were initially just bypassed, commented out). Someone could then dial it up to 5%.. 50% and if they still felt the same throughout and then went up to 100%. In that scenario would they have copied themselves? I find it fascinatingly coincidental that neurons are the only cells in the body that don't rejuvenate unless there is some sort of injury [0]. [0]: https://www.dzne.de/en/im-fokus/meldungen/2021/neurons-able-to-talk-cannot-regenerate https://www.dzne.de/en/im-fokus/meldungen/2021/neurons-able-...

stetrain 2y ago
That's still a copy, just one where both copies remember their life before being copied and equally think they are the original. The original will still experience aging and death.
wutwutwat 2y ago
You're asking a question that we've asked ourselves for a millennia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus Technically, we are not the same people that we were when we were born. The cells in our body have one by one been replaced with new ones and the old ones have died off. The things that make up my body are 100% different than when I was born, so I literally am not the same person, physically. Maybe this is an indicator that there is more to what makes us, us, than just the physical assembly of atoms in our bodies. There are things I don't know that we'll ever get a full understanding of.
- prometheus76 2y ago
  Categories, numbers, logic, grammar, etc. all map onto physical systems, but aren't necessarily directly linked. This is "metaphysics" in philosophy, and is essential in order to even reason about physical systems. Just the concept of a "physical system" is actually metaphysical, but without metaphysics, you can say nothing to anyone about anything. Metaphysics is just generally taken as a "given", but is worth evaluating itself. Then you'll run into the "realism" vs. "nominalism" debate and you'll understand the philosophical underpinnings of the current culture wars in America.

TrainedMonkey 2y ago

Every time you go to sleep your consciousness shuts down. What wakes up is something slightly different due to biological processes. You are not tired, your mood is different, part of cells in your brain got replaced, memories become more stable and maybe linked to other similar memories, etc... This is way more pronounced for people waking up from a coma. Philosophers thought of this for a while, see https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/66018/the-brain-of-theseus https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/66018/the-bra... So, each morning is a copy of you wakes up? Or do you draw a line in the sand and say that is different.

musicale 2y ago
Thanks for feeding my existential dread. For that matter, the you of this moment is constantly being annihilated and replaced by a slightly different clone, in an illusory life that resembles stop-frame animation. And don't ask me about the me from yesterday - the one who didn't bother to do any of the things I am stuck with doing today - or the me from tomorrow who will likely squander everything I've worked so hard for. Neither of them is to be trusted. On the other hand, I do seem to have a vast store of dream memories; wnen I think about them it seems like living some kind of second life, usually while fast asleep. Sleeping and waking selves are in agreement that being asleep is generally more pleasant than being awake, though being awake seems to have better continuity.
mensetmanusman 2y ago
Every nanosecond the set of atoms constituting you changes, each of those are a different you.
- smeej 2y ago
  There's a difference between "I have changed" and "I have been copied." This seems obvious enough to me that I don't question it, but is it not obvious to everyone?
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Copies are impossible because every moment is change with bounded but non-zero uncertainty.

exe34 2y ago

the trick is to do it slowly, a few grams at a time. a one way ticket on the ship of Theseus.

yfw 2y ago

Reminds me of the scene from the show pantheon where the scanning process kills you because you need to scan and peel the brain layer by layer

ToValueFunfetti 2y ago

This makes sense if you believe in a non-materialist self, like a soul. That model wouldn't be falsifiable- we can't measure it, so it can have whatever properties are convenient. You could then rule out the possibility that your soul would inhabit the copied 'you' by fiat. Scientifically, though: of course an exact copy of you is you. If you don't believe in souls but still feel like this is not the case, that indicates your model of 'you' is incorrect.

musicale 2y ago
> of course an exact copy of you is you Yeah, that's what my clones keep telling me. I ask them: have you ever woken up inside a cloning machine? That probably means you're not the original. Then they somehow sedated me and locked me inside the cloning machine.
danparsonson 2y ago
So if we copy you into a robot and the copying process leaves you unharmed and awake, are they both you?
- ToValueFunfetti 2y ago
  Yes, they are both me. It is admittedly a weird conclusion, but that doesn't make it false- we did a weird thing and got a weird result. Objectively, there is no case for saying either is not you.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    So twins are both the same person? Not sure what you mean, they aren't both you, you create a new person who thinks the same way you do.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    I agree that they'd both be you, but I don't think that's what's at stake. "You" would only get to experience one of the two lives at that point: either the original's or the robot's. Presumably whatever consciousness was present before the duplication still resides with the original. So there's certainly an argument to be made that if someone created a copy of "you" and put it in a robot, and then destroyed your organic body, that consciousness wouldn't "move" to the robot; it would stay in the organic body and be killed. The robot would be a completely new consciousness, but with all of your memories and behaviors and attitudes. I'm honestly not sure what I believe around this. Perhaps we will discover "consciousness" as a physical thing and learn how to transfer that as well. Or not. Who knows.

yuppiemephisto 2y ago

Of all things, The Venture Bros convinced me otherwise that the copies “are” me, enough to matter anyway.

wutwutwat 2y ago
quiet, Dean

ben_w 2y ago

I view (hypothetical, sufficiently good) brain upload and emulation the way I view git forks: both children are just as equally "the real one" even if only one of them is on the same physical hard drive. Looking forward from now, both bio-me and digital-fork-me (or indeed bio-fork-me if the upload gets revented) are equally "my future self", even though they would also each be distinct beings in their own rights and not a shared consciousness over many bodies.

someuser2345 2y ago
I think that from everyone else's perspective, an ideal copy of me would be me; by the definition of "ideal copy". I, however, would not consider the copy to be me; to me, there is only one me.

kelnos 2y ago

> This isn't preserving, it's copying. A copy of your brain/personality/you... isn't you... it's a copy. It's a cassette tape playing back the radio you recorded onto it. That's just one opinion, though. We still don't know what consciousness really is. We don't know what makes us who we are. We don't know if some concept (scientific or supernatural) of a "soul" exists apart from the behavior that arises from the physical structures of the brain. We just don't know. So maybe you're right, but that's far from clear.

wutwutwat 2y ago
I'd agree with you, except if my brain was scanned and uploaded to the cloud, I'd still exist in my original brain. There can't be two originals of something so the cloud version would be a copy of me, since the original me would still be alive, able to talk to the copy of me living in the cloud.

blensor 2y ago

From what my experience tells me, many people prioritize their children's life over their own. Kind of like the insurance policy that lives on carrying their values further after they have died. So this is not really that much different. Your own body is nearing it's end but a new vessel is carrying your values your influence on the world further. Even if it is a physically separate part from the own body it's the close enough for me to be considered living beyond my death.

boogieknite 2y ago

its Villeneuve's Enemy thinking about this even a little makes me want to throw up because this can never be tested. yeah, id be dead, but technically, im alive. im alive according to everyone including myself (new me). So im not dead. But like you said, i died and am dead and dont experience any more life. if all evidence is that i didnt die and still exist, then thats the fact we can theorize that our consciousness continues, but there is NO WAY to ever actually test it because all experience are that consciousness continues whether or not that is the case. sprinkle in some quantum suicide and my stomach is doing backflips from the existentialism od

foobiekr 2y ago

Hans Moravec had a suggestion on how to do this in Mind Children: instead of examining the whole brain, you measure a layer, then replace it, layer by layer, until the last. There is never a copy and an original, it's just a ship of theseus self where the neurons are individually replaced with new ones, albeit electronic ones.

tempestn 2y ago

As the article says, a book is not the ink, but the words. I am not my physical atoms, but the connections that form my thought patterns and memories. If it were possible to make a perfect copy of those things, the copy would be "me". If the original still existed, that would also be (a different) me.

Clubber 2y ago

I'm not a huge Trekkie but I recall the reason Bones McCoy wouldn't go in a transporter was he believed it killed the person and created a copy.

jareklupinski 2y ago
there was an episode where it didn't go as planned

wry_discontent 2y ago

Something I think about a lot is that people tend to compare whatever the most recent innovation was to humans. It used to be that what made you alive was electricity; you could Frankenstein shock yourself back to life. It used to be that you were a clock. Your gears wound up at birth, and then eventually you wore out. You needed repairs. People love to use metaphors, but none of these things are the full picture. Just because computers are so complex doesn't make you more correct. Your brain isn't the whole of your mind, we already know that's true. Why is this silly nonsense entertained?

concordDance 2y ago

> A copy of your brain/personality/you... isn't you... it's a copy This reads a bit like "a copy of Super Mario Bros isn't Super Mario Bros, it's a copy". It has all of the bits that let you distinguish Super Mario Bros from Donkey Kong or Super Mario World. Why isn't it also Super Mario Bros?

scotty79 2y ago

Is your savegame you loaded today still the same game you started yesterday? Or is it a copy of yesterday's game running forward? Does it matter? Are electrical processes rebooted from chemical memory every morning when you wake up or after you have a seizure still the same you? Or is it just a fresh copy of your mind that dispersed when electrical signals in your brain lost continuity?

evoke4908 2y ago

This is a pretty big philosophical question. There's no universal answer, just opinions. Your conclusion is not the obvious one for everybody. What happens if you have an identical copy down to the atom. Totally impossible to distinguish. You're put to sleep and your mind is copied over. When you both wake, which one is "you"? Both copies think they're "you" and both are correct. Each has the same sense of self and continuity of identity. Maybe at the moment of synchronization "you" ceased to exist as you branched into two new identities. Say you upload into a computer. From the copy's perspective, it is "you", it's the same self. It might view your biological body like you'd view an old computer after you finish migrating your files to a new one. Say you destroy the biological body, or wipe its brain once you copy. Does that change the equation? If you destroyed one of the identical clones, is it even relevant to ask which is "you"? Personally, I think Altered Carbon comes close to how our society will solve this problem. The original copy has its brain wiped and the new copy is "you" by cultural consensus. Truly duplicating a single identity is strongly taboo and illegal. I think this is a question that either matters to you or it doesn't. In my opinion, it's irrelevant. I, the original "me" am totally free to agree with the copy that it is "me". I can choose to give it my social and legal identity and agree that "me" is no longer "I". My personal choice is to destroy the original, but one could also choose to let the original body continue and assume a new identity, live a new life or whatever. I view this the same way I do my past self. The person I was ten years ago is not "me", it was a totally different person. That past self lived a different life and had a sense of identity that isn't at all like what I have today. That past me, the ego that called itself "me" died a long time ago and the "me" now is a different self identity built out of new pieces. In my worldview, "me" is a transient thing. The self is not one fixed thing, it changes over time and sometimes it's replaced. I don't see the idea of transferring my sense of self to a new body as anything more extreme than any other kind of ego death. I choose to resolve this problem with practicality. I agree with myself that the new copy is "me". My social and legal identity, as well as my own sense of self transfer to the copy. My choice would be to destroy the original copy. Barring that, it would assume a new identity and live a different life far away. It'd get a memory wipe if available. I can make the choice to sacrifice my ego and allow "me" to be assumed by someone else. To me, even to the original copy, the new copy is me. In my opinion, "me" is immortal in the digital copy, even if "I" remain in a mortal body.

EasyMark 2y ago

Your memories and biology are you. If someone makes a perfect copy of you, disintegrates your old “you” and then wakes the “new you” up how is it any different?

ANewFormation 2y ago

The line I like to use here when people talk about this sort of 'transferring' your consciousness - imagine there was a 'perfect' chatbot trained on your every experience, thought, and sensation, and mind. OK, now your consciousness is 'transferred'. I promise to run you.exe plenty. It's just an exercise in self delusion, even if this was possible. That's not you anymore than a 'you' created by a taxidermist and shoved in a closet is.

Etherlord87 2y ago

Coming from an atheist, what if there is a metaphysical dimension, and the computing structure of a processor, brain, whatever, necessarily positions it in a unique space within that dimension, and this dimension is what holds consciousness? The idea doesn't really matter, what matters is that perhaps copying a brain actually does move its consciousness. Easy to prove/disprove once you can actually copy a human being, as he should then report to be simultaneously aware of both bodies. Other than that it's possible that by the same logic of you not being the same as your copy, you're not being the same after you sleep: the continuity of your consciousness is interrupted, and the new you in the morning thinks he is the old guy, having all the memories, but he actually isn't. Think about this: what if you were replaced with a clone while you sleep? No one would ever know and scientifically speaking both scenarios are equivalent because they lead to the same result. Maybe enjoy today a little bit longer, now knowing you're actually going to die in that bed, and as your "clone" will wake up in the morning completely oblivious of not actually continuing your consciousness, you don't even get a witness to your tragic death, as was the case with thousands of your predecessors. Or maybe it's even worse, because the consciousness is interrupted tens or hundreds of times during the day. Or maybe those are thousands of separate, overlapping consciousness bubbles and really you should worry only about your identity, as the consciousness is just short-lived fireworks on top of the actual you. I guess it would be nice to know what consciousness even is.

prometheus76 2y ago
Numbers are metaphysical, as is music. They both can manifest physically (three cars and three cats, or a Bach concerto making sound waves that vibrate my eardrum). But what makes music musical is that it's a pattern of sounds over time. Patterns are not physical. Patterns map to the physical, but they are above the physical. You, too, are a pattern that plays out over time. You are mapped to your physical body, but you are the pattern that is embedded in the body. You are a pattern.

robertlagrant 2y ago

> That's not immortality, not for me personally, not if I die. What if: at the point of copying there are two of you, both of whom don't want to die?

dyauspitr 2y ago

A copy is a copy. On the other hand, actually transplanting my brain into another body is definitely living forever because the brain is me.

deleted 2y ago

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JeremyNT 2y ago

Perhaps we could just "Ship of Theseus" our consciousness? Slowly augment with cybernetics, then replace the meat over time. It's all just hypothetical without knowing what consciousness/qualia really "is," and as far as I can discern we've basically moved no closer to understanding that since the very beginnings of neurological research.

sagolikasoppor 2y ago

That's easy to solve. Just make the copy while you are still alive, make it so that you can control both brains ans bodies. That way you should be able to shut down the old body and keep on living?

incognito124 2y ago

You might like this: https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/stayingalive/ https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/stayingalive/

pontifier 2y ago

I've thought a lot about this, and realized that there is no continuation in our normal life anyway. What we experience is a huge and omnipresent blind spot because we cannot see the future. Even 5 minutes from now, you don't know where you'll be, and you will be a completely different person based on the events of that 5 minutes. Every moment that passes, the you of the moment dies. What you can have, is a you in the future that remembers and understands the past you. That only happens if you preserve your memories either by not dying, or by preserving your internal memories in some other way. That's all you get. A copy in the future that remembers, or nothing at all.