3 ms·

Well, when you put it like that, it doesn't not sound like a cult at all.

ben_w 2y ago
Phrasing does a lot of things. If I rephrased the quoted passage as: > transhumanists have deepened their hope for future in which the human species will augment evolution by fusing with machines (as we already do with brain-computer interfaces, but better), and the potential that current AI — which is already helping us decode proteins, perform and write up scientific research — will continue to improve, helping us to expand our medical knowledge even faster and help us develop cures for things currently beyond us. As the AI we already have has allowed us read the complete connectome — neural structure — in small animals, there's even a possibility we may expand this to human brains (though we don't know how long this will take us to do!), and if we manage that, then it would allow us to back up and restore our minds as we already do with digital documents. Doesn't seem nuts, unless you believe humans have souls that can't be digitised. That said, I'm skeptical about any specific future: when the only flying machine you've heard of is an airship, it's easy to imagine a future filled with them — what's our airship? What's the thing everyone expects but which won't happen?
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  It doesn't seem nuts, it just seems to miss the point, even ignoring souls. No matter how perfect the copy it'll still be a new instance, and the original meat brain instance of myself will one day fail and that consciousness will cease. A copy may fire up and it may be perfect could be a brand new "me", but the consciousness that is the running instance of me will be no more. There's no escape from that. I don't care about copies of myself running around, I'm not that egotistical to think the world needs more of me, but the eternal dark of death scares me, and duplication does nothing to assuage those fears.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Some care about that, others don't. The eternal dark that I can't experience doesn't scare me, but I'd still like to have a backup — or at least, I did, then I started seriously considering what else can be done with those backups besides restoring from them… I probably still would, but I'm much less optimistic about people than I used to be.
    - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
      A backup of what? And why do you want a copy of yourself? To what purpose? And yeah, wait for someone to create 1,000 instances of you to do whatever they want with.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        Backup of my brain. Lost two relatives to Alzheimer's, seems plausible that I might benefit from a freshly printed brain in 30 years, even if the scan, reprinting, and transplant are all done on the same day under general anaesthetic. (Today such a thing is totally implausible; perhaps it still will be in 30 years, but I'll only find out by living until then). I'm sure from your previous comment that you don't see that as a continuation of self, but I do see it as such. Similar works for any potentially dangerous activity.
  - dinfinity 2y ago
    This already happens to you every time you go to sleep and wake up. You have absolutely no way of discerning whether the consciousness you are now experiencing is a new consciousness created by your body when you woke up, or whether it is the same consciousness as before you went to sleep. A body produces consciousness, consciousness does not 'inhabit' a body.
    - dcow 2y ago
      This is not factually true, it’s a philosophical statement.
- eadmund 2y ago
  > Doesn't seem nuts, unless you believe humans have souls that can't be digitised. Let’s ignore souls: humans have bodies which cannot be digitised. Our bodies are real matter, not some dross to be jettisoned. I wonder if Black Mirror ever did an episode about someone unwillingly personality-cloned into a computer, then killed, with everyone around him acting as though this were normal and he — still conscious — was a non-person?
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Right now, nobody knows from whence personhood rises. There's not even any way to prove that all natural humans have the same thing whenever we speak of consciousness — indeed, we know that our conscious experiences vary wildly, not only between individuals but for any individual over time, and there's 40 or so competing definitions of the word. Some of the stuff that happens to the body clearly impacts our states of consciousness. Blood-alcohol levels, for example. So if I take your statement at face value: OK, so you simulate at least some of the rest of the body, perhaps all of it. So what? Still a simulation. You can also think of it this from the opposite direction, where someone might try to argue against a purely material origins of consciousness by saying "the brain doesn't work if you take it out of the body" — that this is in fact true, doesn't mean the brain isn't the bit doing the thinking. You can take Searle's position (why yes, I do have a philosophy qualification, albeit a mediocre one): "No one supposes that computer simulations of a five-alarm fire will burn the neighborhood down or that a computer simulation of a rainstorm will leave us all drenched."[0], but that only works if a mind is a substance of its own kind rather than the emergent result of the processes that gave rise to it. The components of a simulated rainstorm will still interact with each other as those of a real one, if given sufficient fidelity. Perhaps minds are emergent from some quantum shenanigans, as Penrose says[1]. Then it would take a quantum computer rather than a classical one[2]. > I wonder if Black Mirror ever did an episode about someone unwillingly personality-cloned into a computer, then killed, with everyone around him acting as though this were normal and he — still conscious — was a non-person? What you describe is a P-zombie, and as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie will show, there's no consensus over this even amongst philosophers. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_intelligence#:~:text=John%20Searle%2C%20on%20the%20other,essential%20difference%20between%20a%20simulated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_intelligence#:~:text... [1] but it would be horrifying if he's right specifically about microtubules, because those are in basically every living cell, and hence if they do mediate consciousness then potatoes would be conscious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti... [2] While it's technically possible to simulate quantum processes classically with an exponential slowdown, those kinds of technicality also make the entire universe and everything in it into a Markov chain, I prefer to only point out such things to show the limitations of making such arguments.

Phrasing does a lot of things. If I rephrased the quoted passage as: > transhumanists have deepened their hope for future in which the human species will augment evolution by fusing with machines (as we already do with brain-computer interfaces, but better), and the potential that current AI — which is already helping us decode proteins, perform and write up scientific research — will continue to improve, helping us to expand our medical knowledge even faster and help us develop cures for things currently beyond us. As the AI we already have has allowed us read the complete connectome — neural structure — in small animals, there's even a possibility we may expand this to human brains (though we don't know how long this will take us to do!), and if we manage that, then it would allow us to back up and restore our minds as we already do with digital documents. Doesn't seem nuts, unless you believe humans have souls that can't be digitised. That said, I'm skeptical about any specific future: when the only flying machine you've heard of is an airship, it's easy to imagine a future filled with them — what's our airship? What's the thing everyone expects but which won't happen?

SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
It doesn't seem nuts, it just seems to miss the point, even ignoring souls. No matter how perfect the copy it'll still be a new instance, and the original meat brain instance of myself will one day fail and that consciousness will cease. A copy may fire up and it may be perfect could be a brand new "me", but the consciousness that is the running instance of me will be no more. There's no escape from that. I don't care about copies of myself running around, I'm not that egotistical to think the world needs more of me, but the eternal dark of death scares me, and duplication does nothing to assuage those fears.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Some care about that, others don't. The eternal dark that I can't experience doesn't scare me, but I'd still like to have a backup — or at least, I did, then I started seriously considering what else can be done with those backups besides restoring from them… I probably still would, but I'm much less optimistic about people than I used to be.
  - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    A backup of what? And why do you want a copy of yourself? To what purpose? And yeah, wait for someone to create 1,000 instances of you to do whatever they want with.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Backup of my brain. Lost two relatives to Alzheimer's, seems plausible that I might benefit from a freshly printed brain in 30 years, even if the scan, reprinting, and transplant are all done on the same day under general anaesthetic. (Today such a thing is totally implausible; perhaps it still will be in 30 years, but I'll only find out by living until then). I'm sure from your previous comment that you don't see that as a continuation of self, but I do see it as such. Similar works for any potentially dangerous activity.
- dinfinity 2y ago
  This already happens to you every time you go to sleep and wake up. You have absolutely no way of discerning whether the consciousness you are now experiencing is a new consciousness created by your body when you woke up, or whether it is the same consciousness as before you went to sleep. A body produces consciousness, consciousness does not 'inhabit' a body.
  - dcow 2y ago
    This is not factually true, it’s a philosophical statement.
eadmund 2y ago
> Doesn't seem nuts, unless you believe humans have souls that can't be digitised. Let’s ignore souls: humans have bodies which cannot be digitised. Our bodies are real matter, not some dross to be jettisoned. I wonder if Black Mirror ever did an episode about someone unwillingly personality-cloned into a computer, then killed, with everyone around him acting as though this were normal and he — still conscious — was a non-person?
- ben_w 2y ago
  Right now, nobody knows from whence personhood rises. There's not even any way to prove that all natural humans have the same thing whenever we speak of consciousness — indeed, we know that our conscious experiences vary wildly, not only between individuals but for any individual over time, and there's 40 or so competing definitions of the word. Some of the stuff that happens to the body clearly impacts our states of consciousness. Blood-alcohol levels, for example. So if I take your statement at face value: OK, so you simulate at least some of the rest of the body, perhaps all of it. So what? Still a simulation. You can also think of it this from the opposite direction, where someone might try to argue against a purely material origins of consciousness by saying "the brain doesn't work if you take it out of the body" — that this is in fact true, doesn't mean the brain isn't the bit doing the thinking. You can take Searle's position (why yes, I do have a philosophy qualification, albeit a mediocre one): "No one supposes that computer simulations of a five-alarm fire will burn the neighborhood down or that a computer simulation of a rainstorm will leave us all drenched."[0], but that only works if a mind is a substance of its own kind rather than the emergent result of the processes that gave rise to it. The components of a simulated rainstorm will still interact with each other as those of a real one, if given sufficient fidelity. Perhaps minds are emergent from some quantum shenanigans, as Penrose says[1]. Then it would take a quantum computer rather than a classical one[2]. > I wonder if Black Mirror ever did an episode about someone unwillingly personality-cloned into a computer, then killed, with everyone around him acting as though this were normal and he — still conscious — was a non-person? What you describe is a P-zombie, and as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie will show, there's no consensus over this even amongst philosophers. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_intelligence#:~:text=John%20Searle%2C%20on%20the%20other,essential%20difference%20between%20a%20simulated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_intelligence#:~:text... [1] but it would be horrifying if he's right specifically about microtubules, because those are in basically every living cell, and hence if they do mediate consciousness then potatoes would be conscious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti... [2] While it's technically possible to simulate quantum processes classically with an exponential slowdown, those kinds of technicality also make the entire universe and everything in it into a Markov chain, I prefer to only point out such things to show the limitations of making such arguments.