Brain Preservation Technology Prize, BrainPreservation.org Wednesday, Mar 24 2010
cryonics 2:48 am
Miron Cuperman recently alerted me to a new website, BrainPreservation.org. Here’s the homepage text:
I do want to change the world – I want to put an end to death. I want to make it every person’s right to experience the future centuries from now, and to live without the constant fear that aging and crippling disease will take away their joy for life, make them a burden to their loved ones, and strip them of their dignity. We have it within our power today to create that world. Let me say that again, we have it within our power today to create that world. From a medical and technical standpoint all that is needed is the development of a surgical procedure for perfusing a patient’s circulatory system with a series of fixatives and plastic resins capable of perfectly preserving their brain’s neural circuitry in a plasticized block for long-term storage. Such a procedure would, in effect, put the patient into a long dreamless sleep where they can wait out the decades or centuries necessary for the development of the more advanced technology required to revive them.
How could a patient ever be awoken from such an unconventional sleep? The necessary technology exists in primitive form today – the plasticized brain block will be automatically sliced into thin sections and these scanned in an electron microscope at nanometer resolution. Such scanning can map out the exact synaptic connectivity among neurons while simultaneously providing information on a host of molecular-level constituents. This map of brain connectivity will then be uploaded into a computer emulation controlling a robotic body – the patient awakes to a new dawn of unlimited potential.
Given our current state of knowledge it is quite likely that the perfection of a surgical brain-preservation procedure could be accomplished in less than five years with minimal amounts of research funds. However, aside from a few underfunded research groups, no serious brain preservation research is currently being performed. More tragically, even if such a surgical procedure were available today the legal system would prevent its proper use as a life saving measure by preventing it from being administered before the declaration of legal death. The reasons are social and political, and from those standpoints such a world is much harder to reach. It requires large numbers of people to viscerally accept a new metaphor — a metaphor that the last 150 years of biological science has demonstrated to be accurate — the metaphor that we are machines.
Amen! The above is not so much a proposal for new technology, as it is a proposal for new attitudes. If I want to preserve my brain now, and “commit suicide” according to the Judeo-Christian-influenced standard meme complex, then I should be allowed to do so. As a transhumanist, I am comfortable with making that statement in public, and wouldn’t feel awkward saying so in front of any number of friends or family, if necessary. Transhumanist goals, like the noble one outlined above, are already being held back by coward transhumanists. Transhumanists, say what you believe in public, now, or you aren’t having an impact.
It doesn’t matter if it’s just a Blogspot blog with a single post. Say it.
Another interesting aspect of the site is a proposal for a brain preservation technology prize.
How about a new era, where we can potentially live forever because our neural content is perfectly preserved and ready for reanimation? I don’t know about you, but I enjoy being on the right side of history a decade or three in advance. Might as well get on the right side now, rather than jump on the bandwagon when it’s being mobbed.
A preserved mind is a beautiful thing. A skull-bowl full of bacterial pudding-mush is not. There is no afterlife — Heaven is a lie made up by our ancestors to cope with the pain of death.
Didn’t realize there was a minimum character count for comments.
Amen, indeed.
Transhumanist goals, like the noble one outlined above, are already being held back by coward transhumanists. Transhumanists, say what you believe in public, now, or you aren’t having an impact.
Amen. And if 4 letters is too short of a comment: Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen. We should be proud of our ideas, not ashamed of them. Let’s speak our mind loud and clear, and too bad for coward transhumanists who would like to have plausible deniablity.
This is hilarious you claim that a method to preserve the brain can be perfected within five years but it may take centuries to prove it worked. Hello how can you prove it worked it no one can be brought back for possibly hundreds of years? The problem is one of cell preservation and brain structure preservation not just one or the other. You need to preserve both the cells and the structure. If you just preserve the point location of the neurons and connections the best you can hope to do is create a copy latter. This should be obvious but some people just don’t get it.
Yeah! The copy would think it was you but it wouldn’t be.
Hear hear on speaking out.
On the copy debate, it would be nice if more framework were developed for this. Every once in a while I start thinking about it, and can’t stop doing so for hours, trying to figure it out.
If someone else is content to “have a copy made” that’s fine by me, but “I” don’t expect to experience what “they” experience. My primary concern is that those who approve of “destructive uploading” consider it a foregone conclusion, and, if in the majority, would force it on others due to other ethical concerns, perhaps resource consumption. From my perspective, this is very similar to murdering a bunch of old people and replacing them with (equally mature) “infants”.
Hah, perhaps this will become a future analogue of religion. As things stand now, the nature of subjective experience seems untestable, with belief about this untestable variable determining one’s ethical stance on a number of important issues.
Having one’s brain sliced and scanned doesn’t exactly sound like reanimation to me. I hope nanotechnology will be able to do better than that. Maybe there’s no meaningful distinction, but I personally I would feel more comfortable going digital bit by bit rather than suddenly.
First and foremost, cryonics to me is like my auto insurance policy. I don’t ever intend to use it, but unlike being planted in the ground, it gives me a non-zero chance of survival. It really is just that simple (and completely rational). That said, I admit to being a bit quiet about my cryonics plans, because I think it can too easily become a distraction from the greater subject of Transhumanism itself. I definitely explain and describe my plans to open-minded people, but I prefer not to get into debates about it over the dinner table at Christmastime. As much as I support Cryonics and the people involved in it, I think there is much more low-hanging fruit in the Transhumanist arena that we can talk about and “put out there”. Perhaps that is cowardice at some level, but that’s my rationalization and I’m sticking to it for now.
Regarding overall intellectual cowardice in Transhumanist circles, though…
As part of my job as a satellite and IP transmission tech manager at a leading world news organization, I get the opportunity to present at various media technology events around the world, and whenever I do, I find every opportunity to drop Transhumanist ideas into my presentations. It has the double-positive of making them topical to the applications of my industry AND exposing ideas that would normally be a hard sell. In the last year, I have really started to notice a change (measured by how long I’m held over after sessions answering questions). There is a real fear in my industry that new media is replacing existing methodology. My response is not one of “we’ll all be fine” comfort, but instead “no shit, sherlock – you better start waking up to the changes.” This mantra is starting to break through and I have yet to be branded a fringe nutcase in my industry. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I would encourage all Transhumanists to take these sorts of opportunities when they come along. It’s a lot easier than dropping the “I’m a cryonicist” bomb at happy hour (not that I haven’t done that as well).
It’s not really you if your brain is cut up. There’s no continuity of experience. It might act exactly like you but the only way to become a machine is to gradually replace biological tissue with synthetic.
I like to say to christians that I hope hell exists; if I go to hell after I die, that will show that my earthly life had meaning after all. ;)
If you plasticise me, chop my brain up and recreate it in a robot, is it still me? I think not.
If no continuity of experience why not just write your autobiography so that other people will get a chance to find out what your experiences were. It’s a lot easier to clone than a plasticized brain and it may be more important to you that you, say, left Catholicism at thirteen, than that you have a slight lesion in area V5 that makes you’re perception of motion a little bit wonky.
Is there actually a lot of information that could be obtained from your physical brain that couldn’t be obtained from a biography plus a photo album plus your DNA. I’d say that certain folks do happen to have serious implicit skills but unless you are a magician or an athlete in a sport where finesse is important there may not be that much.
At to transhumanists speaking our ideas in public: Hell Yes!!
As to this individual’s plan to preserve brains: I’m no neurologist but I question his conclusions.
I tell anyone who will listen about cryonics. In conversation people will claim to not be that interested in extending their subjective experience, not really sure where this lie is originating. What the movement really needs is more mainstream celebrities doing it and talking about it.
I wish to invite all those who think “the copy is not me” to ask themselves the question:
Is the person who will wake up tomorrow in my bed *me*?
Note that there is no physical continuity (some cells are dead, there are some new cells) and there is no mental continuity (some memories are gone, and there are new memories and feelings from dreams). Yet, we are used to assuming that sleep preserves identity.
Then the question:
Is that toddler who was playing with blocks some decades ago *me*?
Now physical continuity is completely absent (all cells of the body have been replaced many times) and the mental continuity is very much reduced. Yet, we are used to assuming that growing up preserves identity.
I think, when operational mind uploading technology will be available, we will become used to assuming that mind uploading preserves identity.
To all people debating whether the copy is “really them”:-
Consider reading “Reasons and Persons” by Derek Parfit.
The punch line is that our intuitive notions of “death” and “survival” are messed up. There is _no further fact of the matter_ about personal identity beyond the component notions of physical and psychological continuity, shared life-goals, etc.
You are arguing about a nonexistent thing.
To put it another way: whether you should undergo plastination doesn’t depend upon whether or not the revived copy is “really you”, because there is simply no fact, no answer to the question “is it really me?”.
Your decision could rationally depend upon:
* whether the copy will remember being you
* whether the copy will remember a discontinuity or not (like the wake/sleep/wake discontinutity)
* whether the copy will share your life-goals and motivations,
* whether the copy will contain enough of the same actual atoms
* whether the copy will be praised for your achievements and blamed for your mistakes
I’m generally fine with this, but I still wonder if it’s good public policy for otherwise healthy people to undergo the procedure – after all, they’re liable to be intelligent, productive and thus valuable members of present-day society.
Given a choice between the rather dismal materialist-scientific worldview that says we are random collections of particles without purpose who will soon return to the primordial entropic soup, and the religious view that says there is a divine purpose to the universe and a life after this one, I think you’ll find that the vast majority of human beings will choose the latter. These promises by transhumanists and Singularitarians of immortality and mind uploading are really just an attempt to turn science and technology into a religion, and these elaborate discussions about the Singularity often remind me of medieval theologians debating how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.
We’ve lived in such a bubble of material progress in recent times that we’ve discarded all humility, to the point that projects like geo-engineering the planet, erecting ICBM defense systems and mass construction of nuclear power plants in response to past technological folly is viewed as reasonable behavior. And of course we’re on the fast track to human obsolescence via GNR technologies, which transhumanists call progress. Does anyone really think all this is going to end well? If so, you must have incredible religious faith! Look up in the sky tonight; do you see any evidence for technologically advanced civilizations? What do you conclude?
Giulio, there’s actually a fair amount of both physical and mental continuity in sleep. Imperfect continuity is light-years away from a total lack of continuity. Both sleep and aging have considerably more continuity than being copied over to a digital medium. (It’s my understanding that many neurons never get replaced naturally.)
Copying has a clear problem: It’s hard to imagine that identity transfers if the original remains intact. If you use some noninvasive technique to scan my brain and make a digital me, I feel certain I would continuing to experience life independently of the new twin after the fact. If that’s so, how would it be any different if the scanning process killed me?
Like Guilio points out, sleep eliminates “continuity of experience”. So does hitting your head, going into a coma, or having a DMT trip. During non-REM sleep, you are completely unconscious. The word “unconscious”, by definition, implies a gap in experience.
Also, like Roko points out, identity is nothing but personal construction anyway. Uploads will claim they’re the same person and some people will say they aren’t. Oh well — uploads will still remember their pasts in great detail (maybe better than humans do), have the same friends (unless their friends discriminate against them), have a similar personality, quirks, etc. (At least until they substantially self-modify, which is of course the fun part.)
Sean, I conclude that the prior probability of any random soup of inorganic particles becoming self-replicating and eventually becoming intelligent in a typical universe is low.
Summerspeaker, the answer is that there would be two yous. Both would think they’re you. If you deliberately disassembled the organic part as you were constructing the digital part, then there’d only be one you. It should eventually become possible to construct an arbitrary number of copies that all genuinely believe they’re the same individual, and that may give them a philosophical headache, but the world will keep moving forward whether or not they accept their situation.
Besides, our brains are constantly being destroyed and recreated on the quantum level in a storm of vacuum fluctuations. Every tiny fraction of a second, a new “imposter” of you is born. The fact is that our personal theory of identity has more to do with what planet we were raised on and what Tree of Life we came from that any absolute truth.
So let me get this straight… so the rational argument for this hypothetical form of brain preservation is the continuity of self beyond biological death, but could only actually be achieved by the recreation of living cells in the preserved pattern… or a digital recording of the pattern… and then someone asks how a copy could still be “me” which would be the primary goal of the procedure… and the answer is to assert that there’s no such thing as a continuity of “me” to begin with?
I’m afraid I don’t see the rationality here. If you’ve got no way to know if you’ll end up with the same person on the other side, seems like you’d be better off just having kids and making sure *they* are financially provided for rather than worrying about how long your dead plastic brain will keep in the drawer.
Sean, I agree with you we don’t see much evidence of Dyson sphere building super aliens. I’m not sure, however, that the implications that technological civilizations are doomed is correct. I’m not truly hopeful, I think many Transhumanist ideas such as mind uploading ignore resource constraints. For someone who does not, see Anders Sandberg’s post on a really green and sustainable humanity. However, I think longer lifespans and prehaps mental enhancement are our only real chance of making wiser people.
I think other ways such as the overcoming bias project can only be partially success and religious and spiritual training, though it’s produced some notable successes also produces many tragic failures.
As for the bleakness of the scientific world view, I wonder if it is real. Many things seem bleaker to me then when I was a kid but maybe that’s not because I learned materialism but simply a result of aging. Darwinism for example rejects the idea the architecture of our biome is best seen as the reflection of high purpose, but also allows one to see other life as kin, something that doesn’t seem bleak to me.
What I don’t feel is healthy, though I’m obviously afflicted by it is a preoccupation with particular life extension technologies. Though sure knowledge that you’d be prolonged somehow could take away the sting of death their are other things like doing good art or science or being a successful business person or raising kids. Though they don’t produce an entity that claims to be you they do seem to preserve some of what you are.
Michael, I don’t think that solves the problem. From the outside perspective, sure, the copy might as well be the person. Why should this mean anything to the original? Their subjective experience presumably ends forever with the destructive brain scan. It’s much the same as dying any other way.
A single thread of subjective experience cannot “live” in two copies of the same mind. If there are two minds, then there are two threads of subjective experience. Arguing against that is similar to arguing that 1=2. Starting with assumption that, “you wake up with your identity preserved,” then building a convenient theory of life extension on top of what is nothing more than a personal intuition/wish inevitably leads to conclusions that copy guarantees life extension which, again, is like saying that 1=2. And because the conclusion is clearly absurd, there’s a good chance the initial assumptions/intuitions were wrong.
Gradual (preferably slow), non-destructive replacement of brain tissue with an artificial equivalent is the only way to go right now. There are no shortcuts. I would leave finding shortcuts to FAI. Until then, the most conservative and safest procedure for life-extension seems like a good idea.
I think that most views opposing “destructive uploading” require some revision when exposed to several good arguments about identity, as mine did. I do think that the new copy would “be me” in every (objective) meaningful sense. They would remember being me, feel exactly as “I” would feel about the procedure, etc, assuming necessary technical sophistication. We should also expect that our intuitive views and perception of identity would be what they are regardless of the underlying truth. However, I’m not yet convinced that “destructive uploading” would not in fact be destructive, or that current existence is not similarly and inherently destructive. I have yet to find good priors for this.
So far, the argument seems to resolve around subjective experience; from a purely objective standpoint, everything is identical and nothing is lost. We might easily think of “Frank Adamek” being an adjective rather than a noun. My concern is whether to expect the subjective experiences of all Frank Adamek entities. It is possible that I should never expect this experience, even throughout today, but I think there is a non-trivial chance that I should. As long as that chance remains, “destructive uploading” does not seem justified in terms of how much we might all lose (sans the people who don’t care about their subjective experiences).
In order to preempt off-target criticism, my current feeling is that continuous subjective experience may be dependent upon mental network activity carried out over roughly continuous physical structures. While conscious experience is reduced or “turned off” at points throughout sleep, ongoing activity is not, and underlying physical change is slow. As an example, my subjective experience of visual input depends on my visual cortex, and I see no way for the visual input of another Frank Adamek to (automatically) stimulate the particular visual cortex that my subjective experience seems to use (the one in “my” skull). I look forward to further discoveries about consciousness which may help to resolve this issue.
To Michael: the quantum foam theory of quantum physics seems like it is still speculative, and from what I read, it does not seem to imply that ALL particles exist as short-lived virtual particles. However, I understand that electrons cannot be indexed or meaningful referred to specifically, but even with considerations such as this, I am not sure that these underlying small-scale fluctuations make physical continuity on a larger scale impossible. It does not seem obvious that consciousness requires the physical matter to be continuous, say, below the level of neurons or organelles. It may exist meaningfully at a higher level.
Remember Thomas Edison saying that he knew 10,000 ways *not* to build a light bulb?
Any bets on being able to find 10,000 people willing to be busted light bulbs? The original poster is welcome to be the first, as long as we can use the almost certain failure of his/her attempt as a warning to the next volunteers.
And even if you could find enough such people (and people physically ill enough or psychologically desperate enough to see such a risk as acceptable, in the faint hope of being an early fluke success, might not represent the most viable control group), do you really think a reluctance to slice and dice the brains of 10,000 people for the Sake Of Science(TM) can or should be dismissed as an “outmoded meme” about the value of human life?
We need a Transhumanist MegaCorp to start pumping out cyber limbs, cyber implants and organs, building FAI, and developing IA. I’m half joking.
If I had to nominate one fashionable quasi-scientific idea of the present day which is likely to disappear with further advances in understanding, it would be the idea that consciousness is somehow equivalent to a pattern of macroscopic neural firings. Fundamentally, people believe this because they think that’s all there is in the skull, and this then coheres with a number of other ideas:
- that if the brain was simulated properly, the consciousness which had inhabited the neural pattern would now inhabit the simulation
- that this natural pattern temporarily goes away during sleep and concussion, so being frozen and then having your brain simulated is just another such transition, and the simulation would still be you
- other even more esoteric speculations out of mathematical physics and computer science, according to which reality itself is a program, time is not real and what appear to be successive moments of experience exist independently and timelessly in a quantum multiverse, etc ad infinitum
Giulio, Roko, and Michael state various aspects of this belief system (except for the reality-is-mathematics part, which isn’t immediately relevant to the present discussion). It is not just an arbitrary postulation; like I said, people believe it because they think of the brain and the general physical world in a certain way, and they are just trying to map consciousness and subjectivity onto that presumed reality.
However, this mapping does sufficient violence to the facts of subjectivity that one ought to consider whether it is actually necessary. The idea of a soul-substance was appealing not only because it offered survival of bodily death, but because it had some resemblance to conscious experience and the self as subjectively understood. My conscious experience seems to be a unity from moment to moment, and to consist of states in a single persisting entity, me. Even when I become unconscious for a while, when I wake up I have the same memories, and even a recollection of a dreaming stream-of-consciousness from before waking; so it makes sense to suppose that I exist, that I am something, and that I persist in time.
Neuroscience, however, seems to tell me that I am actually trillions of neurons, and physics implies that I can cease to exist and then exist again, if those neurons shut down and then start up again. It is from these considerations that the fashionable materialist theory about mind and self develops, as well as transhumanist proposals like brain emulation and mind copying.
I would suggest that this paradigm is very far from being a foregone conclusion. To me it makes far more sense to suppose that there is a single persistent “physical” entity somewhere in the brain which *is me*. We could actually avoid a multitude of philosophical quandaries and necessary absurdities if this were so. But is it a tenable proposition?
To be viable, such a theory has to meet challenges in physics, neuroscience, and phenomenology. The “single entity” has to make physical sense; there has to be some neuroscientific evidence that it is there and playing a role; and it must be possible to identify its physical description with the succession of subjective states which are experienced consciously.
My own idea is that quantum entanglement is the key here. Entanglement is usually described as a relationship between particles. But we could interpret an entangled system of particles as a single thing. This implies a new perspective on quantum physics, a new perspective on what’s actually there.
The neuroscientific issue is whether quantum entanglement can be found in the brain, and found to be playing a functional role there. Obviously this has not occurred yet. But the idea of quantum biology is beginning to be validated, as increasingly intricate quantum processes are found to be at work in living matter. There is a lot going on in the brain apart from electrical signaling, and we simply do not have data on whether quantum coherence exists there.
The phenomenological issue is the tricky one of relating subjectivity to the world as described physically (by the natural sciences). It will still be a problem even if we have a new perspective on physics as being about interactions among persistent complex quantum unities; but it will be a little less of a problem, because several of those intuitions about consciousness and the self which have to be classed as illusions under the current paradigm, would not have to be thus dismissed.
I have just tried to sketch how we may think of consciousness and the self at a hypothetical future stage of science. Now let me respond to a few of the assertions that have been made.
Michael says “Besides, our brains are constantly being destroyed and recreated on the quantum level in a storm of vacuum fluctuations.” This is one of those common propositions about quantum physics which is not exactly an established fact; it’s more a fuzzy idea favoring a particular perspective. Perhaps the most you can say is that there’s some evidence for a bit of fundamental restlessness in the basic fields and particles. This is the zero-point motion or zero-point energy. Phenomena like the Casimir effect derive from this. But the idea of quantum foam and Planck-scale creative destruction may be entirely an artefact of a particular mathematical formalism (a particular version of sum-over-histories). This is actually the phenomenon which creates the pathological infinities in naive quantum field theory which then have to be “renormalized”. But if the naive way of doing things is wrong – and something about it is wrong, since to use it at all we have to apply the corrective as well – then the idea that the closer you look, the more violently the fields are actually fluctuating is probably wrong as well.
Roko says: ‘You are arguing about a nonexistent thing… there is simply no fact, no answer to the question “is it really me?”.’ As I have sought to point out, this perspective may simply result from wrong ideas and unfinished science. If you are in fact a specific quantum ‘tangle’, then that is what you are, and your identity is not a matter of opinion. You exist while it exists and you cease to exist when it does. Perhaps other duplicate tangles can be created later, and so some of these questions of identity will still apply, but there would be a basic, objectively factual answer to the question of who and what you are at any moment.
Giulio says there is no physical continuity across sleep, or across the decades of life. I wouldn’t be so sure. Brain neurons are so persistent and stable that for a long time it was thought that there is no neurogenesis in the adult at all. If consciousness is based in persistent quantum coherence across a large chunk of the brain, it must be protected somehow. We may find that the biological processes are organized precisely so as to keep this single coherent object in one piece for the duration of a life, even as the rest of the body keeps replacing its parts.
I don’t think any of this necessarily invalidates cryonics, though it certainly poses new questions. But it does challenge the metaphysics of mind which is being called upon to justify the idea of resurrection through simulation.
I am consistently impressed by the quality of the comments here. This has to be one of the most thoughtful communities on the internet.
Sean:
You have very good and interesting posts.
Regarding science and religion: people create systems of meaning for their lives. Religion is the subset of systems of meaning in which the truth content is false. Other subsets, which contain plausibly correct truth content, are idealistic politics, art, environmental activism, devotion to family and the like. Transhumanism is part of this second subset. It is nothing more than a system of meaning based on an understanding of science. Transhumanism is like religion in an emotional sense, in that it is a system of meaning. It is not like religion in the sense that it lacks demonstrably false truth content.
Regarding the Fermi paradox: I think the most probable, and least discussed, explanation is found by Nick Lane here: http://www.nick-lane.net/ in which he argues that the endosymbiosis between the bacterial precursors to mitochondria and the cells which absorbed them was extremely improbable, but this fusion powers eukaryotic life was therefore necessary for the Cambrian explosion and complex multicellular life. This, and other factors described by Ward and Brownlee, may explain a universe rich in microbes and poor in intelligence. I don’t buy the destruction of civilizations explanation. Within two centuries we’ll have expanded to the asteroids and perhaps the stars. Then no tech disaster except AI (not nuclear, nano, or bio) can threaten us. So there is window of vulnerability of about 300 years from the development of nukes and bio. As for AI, a colonization wave of paperclippers would look exactly like a colonization wave of civilization; we don’t see either.
Regarding quantum entanglement as an alternative to functionalism: This is very interesting. You propose that a very large entanglement plays the role that information plays in the consensus view. This is similar to Penrose and Hameroff’s Orch-Or theory. If you’re right, then it’s a paradigm shift as large as relativity or qm. I would bet that this is going to turn out to be false, but it’s certainly worth exploring. If functionalism is correct, then everything else that’s been discussed flows logically from it.
This includes uploading, multiple copies of one mind and the view that all other human minds are a variation of you. These aren’t philosophical problems so much as ideas which are at variance with common perceptions. I second Roko’s recommendation of Derek Parfitt’s Reasons and Persons for an exploration of the ramifications of functionalism.
In my last post, I mistakenly equated Sean Taylor with Mitchel Porter. Half my post responds to the one and the other half to the other.
For those of you that believe that some form of destructive uploading may be acceptable — for example, if you believe that the natural replacement of cells in the human body already means that we’re not the same person next week, next month, or next year — then I have a thought experiment for you.
Assume for a moment that I have the ability to create a perfect replica of your body, including your brain, down to the atomic level. This copy will be indistinguishable from you using any known technology now or in the future. I propose to give you a sedative so that you fall into a deep sleep (comparable to anesthesia) and create such a copy. Now I have two sleeping versions of you. While you’re asleep, I’m going to take a baseball bat and bash in the brains of the original you. Don’t worry; the sleep is so deep that you won’t feel a thing. You’ll die quickly and peacefully. I’m respectful, so I’ll dispose of your lifeless body appropriately.
Now I’m going to wake up your copy.
Leaving aside the legal issues (I would be charged with murder), would you have a personal problem with this? I mean, it’s you, right? You’re the same you, right? So you’d be okay with me doing this as an experiment?
To Frank Boosman, from my experience people who are alright with destructive uploading are generally completely accepting of that thought experiment (answering no, yes, yes, yes). I’ve also heard some say that they expect to wake up as the copy, and have it be no different from waking up from any other sleep. I would guess acceptance of the procedure is not their beginning intuition, but they believe that our intuitions are simply not calibrated for a world involving uploading.
I agree about our intuitions simply not being calibrated, though I currently still think destructive uploading destroys a subjective being. It’s important to realize the deep level on which this disagreement lies.
If you insert superluminal values into the Einstein-Lorentz Transformation and plot the result on a graph wherein velocity is represented by the ‘x’ axis and energy by the ‘y’ axis then you get a mirror type reflection of the upper left quadrant in the lower right quadrant. Everything in the upper left quadrant is ‘normal’ physical reality; everything in the lower right quadrant is ‘etheric’ reality and exists in a state of negative entropy, or negative space-time. At least, this is how Dr. William Tiller of Stanford University sees it. He theorizes that ‘consciousness’ (or ‘spirit’) exists in the part of the universe that is represented by the lower right quadrant of the graph.
I’m not saying that there is, IN FACT, an afterlife. However, no human-concocted religion need be true in order for there to be an afterlife. The term “spirit” may be used in a non-mystical way to simply refer to the part of ourselves — consciousness — that exists in a different, albeit undetectable, energy state.
Notions like this may seem a but ‘out there’ but I would suggest the the profundity of conscious experience, the apparent intelligence inherent in the universe and the incomprehensibly sublime nature of brute existence itself are sufficient to at least hang a question mark over the notion of an afterlife.
Anyway, on to the subject at hand: Transhumanism and brain preservation. I personally hope to live as long as I can. I want to see the promise of nanotechnology fulfilled. I want to see the marvelous things that technology will do for the world, assuming we don’t blow ourselves up in the process. But the notion of destructively ‘uploading’ ourselves, to me, isn’t really sound. This is obviously a philosophical question as much as a technological one. I think what’s needed is a better antifreeze. The whole, intact brain needs to be preserved.
I think of identity as a number between zero and one, rather than just yes or no. The identity between me and myself a day ago might be 0.999. With me 20 years ago 0.8. If two copies are made, they will start out at 1.0 and start decreasing from there as they diverge.
If you make a copy and erase one of the copies after a few hours of divergence, it is equivalent to hitting someone and causing them amnesia. It amounts to aggravated assault. After a few months of divergence, it would be full fledged murder. If you erase a copy when there is an exact copy in existence, that is of no consequence – equivalent to deleting a backup.
Asserting that there’s a subjective difference between the copies when there is no objective difference is a sure sign that intuition has failed. It’s reminiscent of Vitalism.
There will always be an objective difference between the copies, miron. Even if you used some sort of nanotechnology to duplicate a person atom by atom, they still wouldn’t be exactly the same. One would have existed in that form for longer, would occupy a different physical location, etc. An upload cannot possibly be the same as a flesh-and-blood human, though it might be practically equivalent. More importantly, discounting the subjective when discussing personal identity misses the point entirely. I’ve nothing against pleasant suicide, but I still fail to see how having a copy, even a supposedly exact one, magically turns suicide into immortality. This notion that subjective experience and identity transfer between the two copies strikes me as downright mystical.
As Michael argued above, the physical composition changes radically on the quantum level and more slowly on the biochemical level. The physical location changes constantly too.
The belief that physical constancy gives rise to subjective continuity is at least built on a false premise (because physical constancy is an illusion).
I understand that it intuitively feels like that. That’s why I’m saying that intuition fails in this realm.
The buddhist ideas of non-constancy and non-existence are relevant here.
As Heartland noted, you’re arguing that two equals one here. If subjective continuity transfers between copies, I would like to know the mechanism. Now, perhaps subjective continuity and consciousness themselves are a meaningless illusions. I have some sympathy for this notion. If I were faced with the prospect of destructive brain scanning, I wouldn’t particularly care about these philosophical issues. I’d be most concerned about whether the process would go awry and cause me pain. The same goes for any other type of assisted suicide. I just can’t grasp how the existence of a copy transmutes death into immortality.
Here is a thought experiment:
Assume a person already uploaded to a computer. Their state is completely described by a set of bits.
Pause the upload, copy to another computer, unpause. Which of the copies will have “subjective continuity”?
What if instead of copying, you pause, replace all the CPUs (but keep the RAM), and unpause? Do you lose “subjective continuity”?
What if you move 10% of the data to different RAM chips before unpausing? 50%? 100%?
What if you suspend to disk, replace all the RAM and CPUs and resume from disk?
What if you flip all the bits, then flip them back?
Now at this point you either have to conclude that either:
- continuity of physical substrate is not relevant to subjective continuity, or
- there’s something special about neurons and uploads are impossible
I hope you can exclude the latter…
I think you are confused. The Von Normann architecture is not exactly like the human brain. The information in the human brain is stored in a manner which makes losing it much harder than on your typical computer. The brain has a very robust and damage tolerant architecture. Making a distinction between RAM and the hard drive is very esoteric. If you don’t have both ram and a hard drive your computer won’t boot up, but that’s an operation system issue. There are computers which don’t have one or the other and they are still Turing complete. Back in the day one of my professors said that she had to manually type in the operating system every time she would turn on the computer, because it only had temporary memory. You are the system, every time you replace part of the system you die a little. In computer science we understand that an instance of an algorithm is not the same as another instance of the same algorithm, because it will be in different stages of execution and using different memory addresses, without even considering errors.
It’s interesting that I can’t think of a test that would solve this problem. From any other perspective but my own, I accept that an upload would be me. The upload should experience subjective continuity; as far as it’s concerned, it is me. None of this tells us anything about how I experience the process. Nor does it matter to the world whether my consciousness transfers to the upload or simply disappears. So it’s something of a meaningless question until it’s you on the brain-scanning table.
Summerspeaker – I feel my identity is based on my structure, which includes:
- My memories
- What I feel and think in response to perceptions
These are all encoded in brain structure, but can be encoded in anything that simulates that structure to high fidelity.
I think of my point of view as to how I convert experiences into structure.
However, I don’t consider every fleeting state to be part of my identity or as being essential to my point of view. This is because not every feeling/thought/state leaves an imprint in structure.
An interesting thought experiment is the identity of someone who has long-term memory disabled. This can happen with injury to some brain regions or can be engineered in an upload. I view such a person to have a static identity and a continually lost point of view.
I am not sure if this helps answer the question.
Delete rant, simply insert: “This notion that subjective experience and identity transfer between the two copies strikes me as downright mystical.” – Summerspeaker
I have serious objections to misleading people that their consciousness will in any way or form be transferred by this or by any other similar process. The whole point is to preserve the consciousness not to destroy it.
I don’t mind having a clone, but not if kills me. And I’m truly glad to see that someone is developing brain scanning technology, but I think it’s time to begin focusing on slightly less lethal methods of achieving immortality.
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