While it does make for some entertaining fiction, and may provide some benefits to the living, I do not believe that 'uploading' is a desirable experience.
In fact, I don't believe that one can experience it at all. Imagine the procedure (for a conscious person): your brain is connected to a computer interface and a copy of your mind is taken. Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to die.
Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it regardless of how many mental copies are made.
I much prefer the idea of human metamorphosis. I want to inject nanorobots into my body which will transform it gradually, cell by cell into an improved synthetic one. In this way, immortality and superhumanity can be achieved without loss of continuity. I imagine the experience would be one of waking up a little better (stronger, smarter, etc.) every morning until the cells are all upgraded.
I don't read enough these days because of chronic eyestrain, but if you are aware of anything dealing with this concept of human metamorphosis, fiction or otherwise, I would appreciate a link. It's something I would like to read about (if it's even been dealt with), someday when I have time (and don't have a headache).
I agree that human metamorphosis is extremely interesting, but this line I really don't get:
> Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it regardless of how many mental copies are made.
I don't understand how you can put out a statement like that, like it's taken for granted or something. It's far from granted, and I've never heard of something remotely approaching a proof for this type of assertion. To my mind it's the same kind of reasoning which proved we would never fly, nor go to space.
It's an open problem. Please keep it that way until we know more.
We don't have the proper tools to understand consciousness in a scientific way yet (consider the extremely limitations of EEG and MRI) For those interested in this philosophical question, there's an area called Philosophy of Mind [0] which deals with this and related questions.
this goes back to the ages old problem of, "In Star Trek, the transporter killed you every time" We have this almost social idea of Body Continuity. As long as there is the same body the entire time you are still you and still "alive". A scarier truth is that all it takes is a decent change to how you brain is structured (bullet, railroad spike, fork through the skull) and you can very suddenly for all intents and purposes be a different person, with the same or similar memories but essentially different patterns of behavior. Metamorphosis may not save you, it might kill the person you were just as if you made a copy and burned the original. Further down the rabbit hole, just how different is your brain now from and instant ago, and your brain versus your brain with the addition of a few ball bearings or other random matter. The person you were an instant ago is just as dead as the original who gets destroyed and you are the copy.
> I want to inject nanorobots into my body which will transform it gradually, cell by cell into an improved synthetic one. In this way, immortality and superhumanity can be achieved without loss of continuity.
Just last night I thought about this and went to sleep in despair :>
If someone scans my brain, builds an artificial copy, instantly cuts out my brain and inserts the new one, I clearly die (because I got my brain/me cut out) and my copy lives on. From the outside, I'm the same, but the first me died.
So instead, I get my neurons replaced with artificial ones, one at a time. If I drink a few beers, brain cells die but I'm still conscious. So gradually replacing my neurons one by one should be no problem; there clearly is no loss of continuity, I'm still me.
But what's the difference? Let's assume one neuron is replaced every second. No problem, nice and gradual. What if it's one every millisecond, every picosecond? Should make no difference, because it's still one by one. But, the faster you do it, the more it approaches "instant". And instantly replacing all my brain cells is the same as replacing my whole brain. Thus, I'm dead and my copy lives on...
> Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to die.
You get to do both. The concept of "you" changes once there is a copy, see the Ship of Theseus [1]. Each post-you entity has a legitimate claim to being pre-you. The copy woke up that morning, ate your breakfeast, went to the uploading clinic, and went to sleep as a digital being. The copy has perfect continuity. The biological you on the other hand stayed biological and will die.
A gradual replacement doesn't change the fundamentals, the biological you has to die. The gradual replacement just makes for an unusual twilight, its mind commingled with an arising digital being.
Greg Egan's short story Closer has people implanted with a device, a "jewel", that learns to mimic the behaviour of their brain - to the point where people actually choose to switch from their biological brain controlling their body to their jewel....
> Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it regardless of how many mental copies are made.
Why? Can you explain more? I would believe that you can be a fully functioning human living in a simulated reality if we ever managed to fully simulate the human brain..
However, since our brain modules are so messily coupled I don't know if we can easily "delete" memories and not impact anything else.
"Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it"
I take it you would find it very hard to meet your copy, then? If for some reason your copy goes live and you don't die, I bet you two would get into a fight :-).
As it is now, if I'm alive and I meet my exact copy, he'd agree to die ("just do it quickly") until I really die.
And then the copy would become me - it's that simple. Maybe later it'd be possible to download myself into a body again, in which case I would retain all the knowledge that I acquired inside the virtual world.
This was my favorite subject for a while and I arrived to a similar idea of transformation, except without nanobots: the computer becomes a continuation of your brain and then your biological brain is gradually killed cell-by-cell.
However, the idea that you still get to die after backup is based on an assumptions that I don't find neither obvious nor true: that the stream of consciousness is fully continuous and never stops. I've recently seen a documentary about a guy who was declared brain dead and yet recovered into being himself again. So it might still be possible to "upload" a dead brain in which case your experience is that of a resurrection which doesn't sound so bad.
I'm wholly relieved that someone else thinks this way too ( still aware of the fact that most thoughts aren't unique). I never came to the conclusion of metamorphosis, however.
Just felt a need to express my experience of camaraderie on the subject.
Your body is transforming at this very moment through mitosis. Gradually, cell by cell and depending on what kind of activity you are performing you are becoming stronger, smarter, weaker or dumber. Regarding consciousness, my personal belief is that there is no continuity and it's more like the frame rate of a video or sample rate of a song.
You could read about the Buddhist concept of impermanence and the five aggregates of being which sounds similar to the idea of a metamorphosis, only not just human but everything changing all the time.
In your metamorphosis example, is the finished project essentially be a robot? Would you have the same problem when a software agent is transferred from one computer to another?
Assume a negative answer. Then, the interesting implicit belief, is that there is something special about body composition. Whereas in physical law, there is nothing unique in principle about the body. So, the laws would have to be wrong or incomplete(fail to include consciousness) in an important way.
An interesting thought, there is a difference between gradually replacing your cells with mechanical/electrical equivalents, and copying your consciousness to a machine.
How? Well, think of replacing a hard drive under a running process. Compare that to migrating a VM to another machine. In one, the process is truly continuous, it just begins using new hardware; in the other, the process is cloned and the original process killed.
I disagree. Your individual consciousness will diverge of course (you are just a meat machine) but your computer copy will continue on and your ideas, ideals, and personality would continue.
Writing this I just had a major existential crisis because I realized that at the exact point of divergence there is a point where 'you' are both alive and dead at the same time, Schrodinger's Tomb.
I agree with you in that I think a gradual change is less crisis inducing even though it equals out to the same thing. I think that I'd get a brain backup anyway, just in case.
There is a lot of the classical discussion on personal identity here.
The argument about a copy being "identical to me but it's not me" is a very natural and intuitive reaction, but it's probably wrong. A very illuminating explanation is http://lesswrong.com/lw/pm/identity_isnt_in_specific_atoms and related posts.
I'll try a personal approach: imagine a country with no computers, no photocopiers, no presses, and a very strict law that forbids making copies of books which is indoctrinated from birth. There is only one copy of each literary creation, guarded in the National Library.
We can imagine that the people of that country have a very hard time to distinguish between "The Lord of the Rings" in an abstract sense and material object #1434 stored in the second floor, section Fantasy. For them LOTR is just that set of paper and ink. Even if someone secretly made a copy, letter by letter, it will be "just a copy", not the "true" LOTR. That's quite obvious to them.
And in a sense that's a bit our current situation with people (not exactly, because books are static and people aren't). We can't scan people-as-information out of people-as-protein-body and store them as people-as-silicon-body, so we mix the concepts. But it's just confusion due to technological limitations.
So in a sense we DO have souls, but it's a mathematical or information-theoretical soul, not a metaphysical one. It's always bound to a material instantation, but that concrete physical manifestation is not the same as the dynamic, interactive information process a person is.
So if technology advances enough we'll be able to copy a person, and it'll make no sense to ask which of them is really "you". Both are.
Yes, of course both are. But still, you're only ever going to be conscious from the perspective contained within the original you. The copy may be mathematically identical, but it does not make sense that there would be any kind of a magical transition of consciousness from one to the other. The other "you" would have its own consciousness entirely separate from yours. I.e., if you copy yourself and kill the original, you will lose consciousness. You will not wake up.
The "rate limited" option in the video reminds me of slow clubs from that book.
For people who haven't read it, in the novel there are virtual parties called slow clubs where poor consciousnesses go to meet. Everyone agrees to limit themselves to the processing speed of the slowest (poorest) person there, so that people who can only afford the occasional spare clock cycle can have meaningful human contact.
Under current laws, wouldn't the way the Terms of Service are presented be considered a contract signed under duress? I mean, they are saying that if you don't sign the contract, they'll kill you, which is kind of the textbook definition of duress.
It's tough not to immediately draw the many parallels to what we see happening in society right now and the scary part is that this is so easily conceivable as a realistic future. Well done!
Lets just hope the use of "traffic accident" as a euphemism doesn't increase in order to end a trial prematurely. I would prefer to use my trial version for as long as possible (or would I really? Look at all those nice plugins!).
Some (rather lame) lingo for the coming pay model of life:
Cheapskate, you're such a trialler
You haven't really lived until you lived with Life TM.
He hasn't upgraded in a long, long time
Do this for me and I'll make you live forever
You gotta commit suicide at least once, the rush beats base jumping hands down, and the white tunnel effect is pure bliss - and it's legal
Well you know, I could sponsor your life subscription if that would help the situation
Great video, i find it amusing but also quite depressing at the same time. I would be utterly unsurprised if the original premise was possible, this is what would happen.
BUT.. are people really so pessimistic about technology and the future that the main thing that comes to mind when they think of digital immortality is.. this?
Your virtual body can be anything you want. You can't die as long as your digital code is backed up somewhere.
If you can't see the bright side of that stuff, there is some kind of psychological issue.
It has both effectively infinite possibility for goodness and infinite possibility for badness. Your virtual body can be anything you want... as long as you control the execution parameters. This is not guaranteed! What if $YOUR_LEAST_FAVORITE_COMPANY is the one in control? Or worse? Even the option of suicide can be removed from you. If Hell does not exist, there is a non-zero chance Man will make it for himself.
Indeed, if things are just left alone I would not even say the default state is that you'll be in control of your own code. It will be a company that develops this technology first, since the alternative is inconceivable, and they will have their own agenda. There's a lot more possibilities that could emerge than just a happy utopia.
The ability to see a bad side, and the inability to see the bright side are two different things.
Of course digital immortality is inestimably cool. There are so many amazing and obvious positives that we can even imagine on this side of the singularity.
However, if we only think of the positives, without considering the negatives, then we run the risk of stumbling blindly into a dystopia created by the few who did think of the negatives (and how to profit from them), or by optimists who failed to plan for a suboptimal outcome.
From another point of view, fiction about a perfect utopia is boring. You need some imperfection in order to provide the requisite tension to make a story.
I'm pessimistic about this type of technology because it isn't "you" that we are talking about; it's a copy of you; you still get to die, and I don't think that knowing a copy of your mind exists will be of any real comfort.
I'm not excited about this future. Whatever is uploaded isn't me, it is merely like me--a copy. Anything that is theoretically capable of running while I'm still alive is just a copy--it isn't me.
The "copy" becomes the "real" you because it has extended life. Both you and the "copy" consider yourselves to be the "real one" (or maybe you accept the coexistence), but you are going to die and the copies will live forever.
You think: "That copy isn't me, ericb!" * dies *
Copy thinks: "Great! I, ericb, just got a new lease on life!"
I like the idea i read somewhere about "Spinning off" versions of "you" to go do/learn something, then re-integrating that version of you back into yourself! I still agree with sodiumphosphate however, in that i prefer immortality and dodging the "end" of this mind. I MUCH prefer the idea that nanites can make us better, rather than "uploading" ourselves totally.
This is also why i don't like the idea of a Star Trek style transporter. At what point do you stop being you? I'd much rather stay alive and in one piece thank you. 8)
Hmm, if this was possible, I'd rather rig up an autonomous backup machine that I would periodically backup to and which would start automatically if I miss a scheduled backup (which would mean I'm dead). It would be like using hosted vs self-hosted, buying CTO or pre-built computers.
That's why some people can recite whole poems and other people can play songs from memory while singing them too. That's why you know just when to pause when you're singing to a song on the radio and the singer stops, and you know when the pitch changes, and what that particular beat is in the background that you follow.
There's more than enough details to be considered a violation of copyright.
[+] [-] sodiumphosphate|14 years ago|reply
In fact, I don't believe that one can experience it at all. Imagine the procedure (for a conscious person): your brain is connected to a computer interface and a copy of your mind is taken. Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to die.
Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it regardless of how many mental copies are made.
I much prefer the idea of human metamorphosis. I want to inject nanorobots into my body which will transform it gradually, cell by cell into an improved synthetic one. In this way, immortality and superhumanity can be achieved without loss of continuity. I imagine the experience would be one of waking up a little better (stronger, smarter, etc.) every morning until the cells are all upgraded.
I don't read enough these days because of chronic eyestrain, but if you are aware of anything dealing with this concept of human metamorphosis, fiction or otherwise, I would appreciate a link. It's something I would like to read about (if it's even been dealt with), someday when I have time (and don't have a headache).
[+] [-] oskarth|14 years ago|reply
> Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it regardless of how many mental copies are made.
I don't understand how you can put out a statement like that, like it's taken for granted or something. It's far from granted, and I've never heard of something remotely approaching a proof for this type of assertion. To my mind it's the same kind of reasoning which proved we would never fly, nor go to space.
It's an open problem. Please keep it that way until we know more.
We don't have the proper tools to understand consciousness in a scientific way yet (consider the extremely limitations of EEG and MRI) For those interested in this philosophical question, there's an area called Philosophy of Mind [0] which deals with this and related questions.
0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mind
[+] [-] Rhapso|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sovok|14 years ago|reply
Just last night I thought about this and went to sleep in despair :>
If someone scans my brain, builds an artificial copy, instantly cuts out my brain and inserts the new one, I clearly die (because I got my brain/me cut out) and my copy lives on. From the outside, I'm the same, but the first me died.
So instead, I get my neurons replaced with artificial ones, one at a time. If I drink a few beers, brain cells die but I'm still conscious. So gradually replacing my neurons one by one should be no problem; there clearly is no loss of continuity, I'm still me.
But what's the difference? Let's assume one neuron is replaced every second. No problem, nice and gradual. What if it's one every millisecond, every picosecond? Should make no difference, because it's still one by one. But, the faster you do it, the more it approaches "instant". And instantly replacing all my brain cells is the same as replacing my whole brain. Thus, I'm dead and my copy lives on...
[+] [-] pbw|14 years ago|reply
You get to do both. The concept of "you" changes once there is a copy, see the Ship of Theseus [1]. Each post-you entity has a legitimate claim to being pre-you. The copy woke up that morning, ate your breakfeast, went to the uploading clinic, and went to sleep as a digital being. The copy has perfect continuity. The biological you on the other hand stayed biological and will die.
A gradual replacement doesn't change the fundamentals, the biological you has to die. The gradual replacement just makes for an unusual twilight, its mind commingled with an arising digital being.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
[+] [-] arethuza|14 years ago|reply
http://eidolon.net/?story=Closer&pagetitle=Closer&se...
[+] [-] tejaswiy|14 years ago|reply
Why? Can you explain more? I would believe that you can be a fully functioning human living in a simulated reality if we ever managed to fully simulate the human brain..
However, since our brain modules are so messily coupled I don't know if we can easily "delete" memories and not impact anything else.
[+] [-] jakeonthemove|14 years ago|reply
I take it you would find it very hard to meet your copy, then? If for some reason your copy goes live and you don't die, I bet you two would get into a fight :-).
As it is now, if I'm alive and I meet my exact copy, he'd agree to die ("just do it quickly") until I really die.
And then the copy would become me - it's that simple. Maybe later it'd be possible to download myself into a body again, in which case I would retain all the knowledge that I acquired inside the virtual world.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] entropyneur|14 years ago|reply
However, the idea that you still get to die after backup is based on an assumptions that I don't find neither obvious nor true: that the stream of consciousness is fully continuous and never stops. I've recently seen a documentary about a guy who was declared brain dead and yet recovered into being himself again. So it might still be possible to "upload" a dead brain in which case your experience is that of a resurrection which doesn't sound so bad.
[+] [-] Dysiode|14 years ago|reply
Just felt a need to express my experience of camaraderie on the subject.
[+] [-] el_presidente|14 years ago|reply
You could read about the Buddhist concept of impermanence and the five aggregates of being which sounds similar to the idea of a metamorphosis, only not just human but everything changing all the time.
[+] [-] nu23|14 years ago|reply
Assume a negative answer. Then, the interesting implicit belief, is that there is something special about body composition. Whereas in physical law, there is nothing unique in principle about the body. So, the laws would have to be wrong or incomplete(fail to include consciousness) in an important way.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|14 years ago|reply
How? Well, think of replacing a hard drive under a running process. Compare that to migrating a VM to another machine. In one, the process is truly continuous, it just begins using new hardware; in the other, the process is cloned and the original process killed.
[+] [-] nikatwork|14 years ago|reply
This free Cory Doctorow piece could float your boat: "0wnz0red - Programmers who hack their own bodies don't need exercise and never get sick" http://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/singleton/
[+] [-] D_Alex|14 years ago|reply
I cant find a free link, but here is a paid e-book, $0.59: http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/b876/Transition-Dreams/Gre...
[+] [-] tocomment|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] indiecore|14 years ago|reply
Writing this I just had a major existential crisis because I realized that at the exact point of divergence there is a point where 'you' are both alive and dead at the same time, Schrodinger's Tomb.
I agree with you in that I think a gradual change is less crisis inducing even though it equals out to the same thing. I think that I'd get a brain backup anyway, just in case.
[+] [-] nova|14 years ago|reply
The argument about a copy being "identical to me but it's not me" is a very natural and intuitive reaction, but it's probably wrong. A very illuminating explanation is http://lesswrong.com/lw/pm/identity_isnt_in_specific_atoms and related posts.
I'll try a personal approach: imagine a country with no computers, no photocopiers, no presses, and a very strict law that forbids making copies of books which is indoctrinated from birth. There is only one copy of each literary creation, guarded in the National Library.
We can imagine that the people of that country have a very hard time to distinguish between "The Lord of the Rings" in an abstract sense and material object #1434 stored in the second floor, section Fantasy. For them LOTR is just that set of paper and ink. Even if someone secretly made a copy, letter by letter, it will be "just a copy", not the "true" LOTR. That's quite obvious to them.
And in a sense that's a bit our current situation with people (not exactly, because books are static and people aren't). We can't scan people-as-information out of people-as-protein-body and store them as people-as-silicon-body, so we mix the concepts. But it's just confusion due to technological limitations.
So in a sense we DO have souls, but it's a mathematical or information-theoretical soul, not a metaphysical one. It's always bound to a material instantation, but that concrete physical manifestation is not the same as the dynamic, interactive information process a person is.
So if technology advances enough we'll be able to copy a person, and it'll make no sense to ask which of them is really "you". Both are.
[+] [-] jterce|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arethuza|14 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
[+] [-] lordlicorice|14 years ago|reply
For people who haven't read it, in the novel there are virtual parties called slow clubs where poor consciousnesses go to meet. Everyone agrees to limit themselves to the processing speed of the slowest (poorest) person there, so that people who can only afford the occasional spare clock cycle can have meaningful human contact.
[+] [-] SudarshanP|14 years ago|reply
"Here lies humanity... Do not resucitate"
[+] [-] fabricode|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spoom|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sikhnerd|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delinka|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oskarth|14 years ago|reply
Some (rather lame) lingo for the coming pay model of life:
Cheapskate, you're such a trialler
You haven't really lived until you lived with Life TM.
He hasn't upgraded in a long, long time
Do this for me and I'll make you live forever
You gotta commit suicide at least once, the rush beats base jumping hands down, and the white tunnel effect is pure bliss - and it's legal
Well you know, I could sponsor your life subscription if that would help the situation
[+] [-] sakai|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itmag|14 years ago|reply
Pun intended? :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_(science_fiction)
[+] [-] TamDenholm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vsviridov|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|14 years ago|reply
BUT.. are people really so pessimistic about technology and the future that the main thing that comes to mind when they think of digital immortality is.. this?
Your virtual body can be anything you want. You can't die as long as your digital code is backed up somewhere.
If you can't see the bright side of that stuff, there is some kind of psychological issue.
[+] [-] jerf|14 years ago|reply
Indeed, if things are just left alone I would not even say the default state is that you'll be in control of your own code. It will be a company that develops this technology first, since the alternative is inconceivable, and they will have their own agenda. There's a lot more possibilities that could emerge than just a happy utopia.
[+] [-] frobozz|14 years ago|reply
Of course digital immortality is inestimably cool. There are so many amazing and obvious positives that we can even imagine on this side of the singularity.
However, if we only think of the positives, without considering the negatives, then we run the risk of stumbling blindly into a dystopia created by the few who did think of the negatives (and how to profit from them), or by optimists who failed to plan for a suboptimal outcome.
From another point of view, fiction about a perfect utopia is boring. You need some imperfection in order to provide the requisite tension to make a story.
[+] [-] sodiumphosphate|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericb|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arethuza|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmbass|14 years ago|reply
You think: "That copy isn't me, ericb!" * dies *
Copy thinks: "Great! I, ericb, just got a new lease on life!"
[+] [-] JonnieCache|14 years ago|reply
How much "like" you would a copy have to be before it caused you ontological distress?
[+] [-] beernutz|14 years ago|reply
This is also why i don't like the idea of a Star Trek style transporter. At what point do you stop being you? I'd much rather stay alive and in one piece thank you. 8)
[+] [-] jakeonthemove|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandieman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VMG|14 years ago|reply
Simulated life will obey very different economics than normal life.
People should check out Robin Hanson's blog for more info: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/04/em-econ-101-talk.html
[+] [-] keyle|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dennisgorelik|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sukuriant|14 years ago|reply
There's more than enough details to be considered a violation of copyright.