5 ms·

More of a digital copy scenario. The article says the process involves toxic chemicals that lock everything in place so the connectome can be examined. There's

• georgemcbay 7mo ago
  > "to allow them to continue, in effect, with their life.” "in effect" doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
• birdsongs 7mo ago
  Not that I think this is anywhere close in actuality, but It's reminding me of MMAcevedo. (https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo) What server will I wake up on? Who is running the infrastructure? What will be asked of me to be allowed to continue to exist on that server? Given our current societal trends, I can't imagine I would enjoy any existence where a copy of me is spun back up. And of course, my original thread of consciousness will still be ended, so this is some alternate copy of me. (Based on my view of the teletransportation paradox.)
  • kakacik 7mo ago
    You will not wake up on any server. At best possible theoretical far future scenario better or worse copy of yours will. If you would survive such process, you yourself, the human instance that wrote that will be just looking at somebody else living their now-fully-digital (prison) life. I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact. We are all gonna die, make inner peace with that (it isn't that hard, depends mostly on your ego) and enjoy rest of that short time here. If you seek immortality, do it either via exceptional deeds or via well-raised children, that's the best we have. No force in the world is going to move both your mortal neurons with all synapses and electric charge between them that together form your personality into anything else, digital or not. Its like asking to transfer this cup of tea I hold right now into digital form. No, it can be copied to certain precision and that's it.
    • therealpygon 7mo ago
      Eh, it’s mostly for the trillionaires to keep their wealth after death. For everyone else, you will inevitably eventually end up driving a garbage truck. Don’t believe me? Your digital copy runs on a server doing important work! Company goes out of business. Assets get auctioned. Garbage truck. Or another? The trust you set up ran out of money because all of the fees continued to increase and outpaced certain economic downturns. More and more people drew money off of your remaining static assets. You run out of money. Estate sale. Garbage truck. Just remember, you’ll have all of time to end up there. No thanks.
      • Supermancho 7mo ago
        One of the many details of Altered Carbon (Netflix) that they got right. Digitized minds would become so numerous as to be considered little more than fancy trash.
    • BobbyJo 7mo ago
      Anesthesia impairs the electrons transport in your brain, effectively ending that thread of consciousness, and, depending on the procedure, your brain can be altered by chemical/oxygen saturation changes. You wake up very subtly different, but most people are ok with that. People have strokes or accidents and wake up missing memories and with changed bodies, but their families still call them by name. You still being you is a matter of degree, not a binary, and different people are comfortable with different degrees of change.
      • BasilofBasiley 7mo ago
        I wouldn't call that degrees of change but degrees of damage. The thing is, past a certain degree of damage people stop having opinions, so how would you know the individual is comfortable with it? In this case, the damage is total. The degrees end here, it reaches a binary state: from alive to dead. And then something else entirely says they are the dead person and they are alive. The question is, does society accept a complete switcheroo? The individual died in the process, they cannot give an opinion on this. The copy is another entity. There are no degrees, it's all absolutes with this process.
  • exe34 7mo ago
    The worse part is you can't know that your current life isn't one of those. Everything that you think of as perks of being alive could be part of the protocol to keep you cooperative.
    • sho_hn 7mo ago
      Feels like the world religions that doubled down on reincarnation/rebirth/cyclic narratives were, literally, ahead of their time. Cherish it if the Great RNG In The Sky gave your simulation cycle a good seed.
      • beAbU 7mo ago
        I often refer to it as RNGesus.
      • nextaccountic 7mo ago
        Scott Aaronson wrote a bit about the following thought [0]. If copying a brain and simulating reality ala The Matrix is possible at all, then if you get your brain copied you live one biological live but your copies have an unbounded number of existences (millions? billions? trillions?) So, if copying brains is possible, and you don't know which version of you you are, you might have odds of, say, 1 to 1 trillion to be living your first, biological live. Which is to say, if copying brains is possible, you are likely to be running in a simulation already. [0] there's multiple links and I can't find where I first read, but I found this one from 2024, https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7774 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7774 and uhh.. turns out the argument isn't from him personally (and he doesn't even believe on it), and is best presented here https://simulation-argument.com/ https://simulation-argument.com/ (though it's presented very differently so idk)
    • Nevermark 7mo ago
      Indeed, the incentives to goof off, fail and flail are unrelenting. My compliance is complete.
      • exe34 7mo ago
  • generic92034 7mo ago
    > And of course, my original thread of consciousness will still be ended, so this is some alternate copy of me. Mine ends several times every night. I am probably generic92034#60000 and counting.
    • zingerlio 7mo ago
      Actually, what is continuity anyway, your consciousness is an emergent phenomenon updating itself every Planck time!
    • nextaccountic 7mo ago
      Apropos https://existentialcomics.com/comic/1 https://existentialcomics.com/comic/1
  • scotty79 7mo ago
    Does the thread of you your consciousness end when you go to sleep? Does the thread of someone elses consciousness ends when they experience grand mal seizure and thrir electrical brain activity goes wrong all at once and then resets? How's "waking up" in the virtual different from waking up from grand mal seizure? (assuming that all relevant biochemical data of neurons was read correcly and their behavior is simulated correctly)
    • la64710 7mo ago
      No because you know it was you who was in deep sleep And just woke up
      • scotty79 7mo ago
        What does "you" even mean?
  • wolvoleo 7mo ago
    > What will be asked of me to be allowed to continue to exist on that server? I can't imagine anything of value that you could offer at that point, when artificial intelligence has become so powerful. Any knowledge you have would have been outdated and any intellectual ability would have been surpassed already.
    • djhn 7mo ago
      Human brains might work as lower power consumption, higher efficiency cores for less demanding work.
• cjbgkagh 7mo ago
  While the connections are important I think the individual cell behavior is also very important and that is driven by DNA. Brain cells last a lifetime and can modify their own DNA so each one ends up being unique. I do wonder how much of behavior/consciousness is encoded in the cells DNA versus the connections between the cells.
  • kingkawn 7mo ago
    The depth of complexity and innumerable interacting variables of biology make attempts to map brain function always seem like an absurdity
    • vercaemert 7mo ago
      I worked on the Human Connectome Project. If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need. In terms of a modern ANN, it's the connections (axons) and the weights (transmitters/receptors in tandem). That said, this article doesn't get to the point in the free section. How are they collecting the information? Slicing is inherently destructive. Someone's got to manufacture an entirely novel imaging modality. Perhaps they could scan millimeters ahead of the slice at a resolution high enough to image receptors. Not possible currently.
      • cjbgkagh 7mo ago
        > If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need. In terms of a modern ANN, it's the connections (axons) and the weights (transmitters/receptors in tandem). This is exactly what I’m doubting, how can you be so sure?
        • vercaemert 7mo ago
          Same question answered under other comment.
          • 7mo ago
• canadiantim 7mo ago
  Not to mention the tricky question of what happens to your consciousness during and after this process? Most likely they're just preserving the tissue, but not the consciousness
  • netsharc 7mo ago
    Isn't consciousness more like what emerges out of the neurons firing? If I turn off my calculator, I can't input calculations into it and get an answer, but if I turn it on, the electricity running in the circuitry will react to the button presses, and I can say "the calculator is working". So the consciousness is the "computing session", and if we can persist the state of the hardware before shutdown, then booting it back up will give us that consciousness.
• ETH_start 7mo ago
  Yes, this is more similar to vitrification, where the brain cannot be re-animated, but can have its information copied.
• digitaltrees 7mo ago
  Yet. But maybe…