Pharyngula

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM | August 22, 2010 4:31 PM

Now run along, little obsessive Kurzweilians

PZ is chasing the trolls away. :-(

Posted by: Shadow | August 22, 2010 4:32 PM

Isn't step 3 "Then a miracle occurs"?

Posted by: Glen Davidson | August 22, 2010 4:38 PM

Isn't step 3 "Then a miracle occurs"?

Singularity being nothing much other than a miracle, yes, that's what step three means.

Step 4 is that believers live forever.

Glen Davidson

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM | August 22, 2010 4:43 PM

No profit??

Bah. What is mere money compared to being locked inside a computer for thousands of years?

Posted by: Helioprogenus | August 22, 2010 4:53 PM

The kurzholes speak.

The reason Kurzweil is so enamored with the idea of a singularity is that he's completely afraid of death and the significance of his mortality is curtailed in his mind by fantasies of storing those vast memories artificially. You can see through his bullshit quite clearly with his biases in mind. Some people use their fear of their inevitable death as a means of accepting some ridiculous nonsense like religious, whilst others are directed and guided by their fears into pseudo-technological mumbo-jumbo. I completely understand the need of a crutch in the face of abject reality. It's easy to find a road away from what's real and dive right into fantasy-land. Still, I am not sympathetic to the pathetic reaches some self-identified futurists will go to in hoping that there's some inevitable cure of their mortality on the horizon. Get over yourselves, and at least try to contribute something useful to humanity assholes. You Kurzholes need to find something of more significance than fantasy-lead drivel.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | August 22, 2010 4:58 PM

I would be nice to the kurzhole (Kurzweil) fanbois go elsewhere. They froth at the mouth if the concept of their deity being wrong is mentioned. Then comes the content free BS and name calling. But don't call them names in return...

Posted by: Ben Goren | August 22, 2010 5:09 PM

I will make three observations about Mr. Kurzweil.

First, as UperAlles indicates, his contributions to electronic music are monumental. For that we should all be thankful.

Second, his futuristic speculation has produced one particularly interesting notion that I think should give pause to those who, like Christopher Hitchens, value short-term pleasure over long-term gratification. Every year, medical advances increase the average life expectancy. And the rate of increases is itself increasing. At some point, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the rate of increase in life expectancy may, each year, add more than a year to the average expected lifespan. If and when that happens, those alive will, on average, be practically immortal. I’m nowhere near qualified to ponder the realism of that supposition, but it is enough for me to realize that, the better I take care of myself, the better my chances are of earning compound interest on the investment.

Third, for all his fascination with exponential growth, he fails to understand the most important experimental observation: unchecked exponential growth inevitably leads to resource exhaustion, the results of which are far from pretty. In practical terms, his beloved Rapture Singularity will most emphatically not happen unless we can both provide for (or tame) our inexhaustible appetite for energy and stop cold (and preferably reverse) our incontrollable reflex to shit all over everything around us. Things are starting to get bad enough that there’s a general sentiment that we’ve got to do that simply to survive, but nobody knows yet whether or not it’s too late to actually do anything about it.

If he’s serious about wanting immortality, he needs to drop all this fantasy bullshit and worry instead about the energy, climate change, and pollution crises.

Cheers,

b&

Posted by: pieroforno | August 22, 2010 5:18 PM

I really don't understand why everybody is so keen to disparage the idea of a singularity. True, Kurzweil may ve overoptimistic by an order of magnitude, but still there is no reason why an artificial replica of the brain cannot be built. Unless you believe there is an inimitable, non-physical ingredient X that makes our brains what they are, you have to accept the possibility of artificially making an accurate copy. Will that take 50 years? 100 years? 1000 years? I don't know, but it will certainly happen.

On the other hand, why ridicule Kurzweil because he might long for immortality? I do, and I wish my daughter, my wife and all my loved ones could live forever too. The thought that they will die someday saddens me, and the possibility that death might be conquered exhilarates me. Why is that wrong? Do we have to resign ourselves to the dictates of nature in order to be regarded as "serious" scientists?

Posted by: pieroforno | August 22, 2010 5:23 PM

Birger:
I don't think anyone would strive to attain immortality that way. What's the point of hibernating eternally?

Posted by: Furcas | August 22, 2010 5:27 PM

The point is to 'hibernate' long enough for the right technology to be invented.

I would like to see more cryonics research, but the necessary time and money shouldn't be diverted from AGI or brain emulation research, which both have an immense potential.

Posted by: pieroforno | August 22, 2010 5:28 PM

H.H.:
Flying cars are technologically feasible. They are not here yet because they would be astonishingly wasteful and stupid: how would you control traffic? With flying cops?

Posted by: pieroforno | August 22, 2010 5:34 PM

Furcas:

The point is to 'hibernate' long enough for the right technology to be invented.

And who will invent that technology? Those who are not hibernating, I presume. And who will choose to die in order to work on an immortality solution for others?

Posted by: pieroforno | August 22, 2010 5:36 PM

Jack:
Care to explain your point of view?

Posted by: pieroforno | August 22, 2010 5:41 PM

Nerd of Redhead:
Yes, I know PZ wasn't arguing against the possibility of an artificial brain per se, but some of the comments here reveal a singular (no pun intended) aversion to the very idea. It is as if some people were ready to argue that death is good for you.

Posted by: Furcas | August 22, 2010 5:46 PM

pieroforno, I'm not sure why you don't understand what I'm telling you. No one has to choose to die. Everyone can lead a full life, invent new technology if they like, and after they're (clinically) dead, get vitrified. No sacrifices necessary.

Posted by: KG | August 22, 2010 5:49 PM

still there is no reason why an artificial replica of the brain cannot be built. - pieroforno

And why do you think that would bring about a "singularity"?

Posted by: Ben Goren | August 22, 2010 5:54 PM

To those who think that cryogenic hibernation (or other forms of suspended animation) is the ticket to immortality…what on Earth makes you think that anybody will want to revive the corpsicles? We’ve already got more people than the planet can sustain. And, frankly, there is absolutely nothing of value that a centuries-old dead guy can provide aside from morbid curiosity.

Would you go out of your way to revive an eighteenth-century sustenance farmer, especially if he was one of millions on ice? No? Then why would you expect somebody in the twenty-third century to be interested in reviving a modern-day cube farm drone?

And what makes you think that anybody’ll bother to carefully preserve your body that long, considering that we can’t even be arsed to preserve culturally important artifacts that long?

Cheers,

b&

Posted by: https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawkt6Nfb5ZW2CGtg6XZkjdIvayuJiC-CFIE | August 22, 2010 5:59 PM

Do we have to resign ourselves to the dictates of nature in order to be regarded as "serious" scientists?

No, if you want to be regarded as a serious scientist you just have to leave a blog comment, or skateboard through Maine.

Posted by: tresmal | August 22, 2010 6:03 PM

OK. So we develop an artificial brain. Possible, anything nature can do humans - in principle*- should be able to do, eventually. How does this help the would be immortals? Are they planning on somehow "transferring" themselves into these brains, or are they planning on programming these machines with as near perfect a copy their minds as possible. The first is impossible even with megacool technology, and the second strikes me as pointless; the original still dies.

* A nontrivial caveat.

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM | August 22, 2010 6:07 PM

pieroforno,

Nobody I've noticed, not PZ, not any of the commentators, has derided the concept of AI nor said functional AIs won't be built some day. What we're objecting to is Kurzweil and his minions saying (a) it'll happen in 10 or 20 years and (b) most of the heavy biological lifting is done, mainly just some minor tweaking remains.

Posted by: eleusis | August 22, 2010 6:10 PM

Cerberus #36

It's at best, assuming a complete successful procedure a process of ending one's consciousness so that a puppet version of yourself can emulate your life possibly for all eternity.

This objection has been answered many times by cryonicists.

A) The proteins and synapses in your brain are constantly being recycled. In fact, the cells in most of your body get recycled fairly quickly. "You" are materially a different person than who "you" were a few years ago. There's no 1:1 mapping between some specific molecules and your identity.

B) Quantum mechanics reveals that there is identity to particles, so instantiating a "perfect" replica of your brain would in fact instantiate YOU.

I'm a critic of transhumanism and singularitarianisms because I think the time frames are ridiculous, but I think the reasoning above is sound.

Posted by: eleusis | August 22, 2010 6:12 PM

NO identity to particles. In other words, if you swap the positions of two particles, the wavefunction describing them remains the same. According to the physics, THIS particles didn't go over THERE. There's no unique identity to the particles.

Posted by: MAJeff, OM | August 22, 2010 6:14 PM

They are not here yet because they would be astonishingly wasteful and stupid:

Have you ever been to the U.S.? Astonishingly wasteful and stupid pretty much defines this nation.

Posted by: feralboy12 | August 22, 2010 6:25 PM

I think I could go for immortality, but only if I could get an "opt-out" clause. None of that Flying Dutchman crap for me. I need to be able to change my mind.
I could easily do 6 or 7 lifetimes, though. So much to learn about the universe.
As for being uploaded to a machine, I'm reminded of Dr. Corby on Star Trek, who can't stop using words like "calculate" and "transmit." And possibly the "blue screen of death" would take on new meaning.

Posted by: poke | August 22, 2010 6:29 PM

Increasing human lifespan is a laudable goal, in my opinion (I'd prefer not to get old and die, thanks). But if you want to do that you need to know biology. Lots of biology. This is not something the Kurzweilites have expressed an interest in so far.

Posted by: southwindcg | August 22, 2010 6:39 PM

The idea that we can somehow become immortal through the creation of digital brains or whatever it is that Kurzweil is proposing is absurd. If the core of what makes you you resides in your brain, a replica of your brain will not be you, but a copy of you, much like a "perfect" twin or clone.

As far as I can tell, the only way to achieve physical immortality is to keep your brain alive. The brain, therefore, is the last thing we need to replicate. Perfect replications of the vital organs would make much more sense, right?

Posted by: Steven Dunlap | August 22, 2010 6:42 PM

@ Helioprogenus #9

The reason Kurzweil is so enamored with the idea of a singularity is that he's completely afraid of death and the significance of his mortality is curtailed in his mind by fantasies of storing those vast memories artificially. You can see through his bullshit quite clearly with his biases in mind. Some people use their fear of their inevitable death as a means of accepting some ridiculous nonsense like religious, whilst others are directed and guided by their fears into pseudo-technological mumbo-jumbo.

Oh, you have got to be kidding me. Does Kurzweil & co. really think that The Players of Null A is at all realistic? Yes, it's a classic, but a work of fiction. Get over it.

It's nice that science fiction has inspired many people to become scientists. But it has also inspired many people to become crackpots too. Oh well.

Posted by: Cerberus, unnatural product of en-OMnomnom-ification | August 22, 2010 6:54 PM

The signifier that Kurzweil's minions fear the most:

"to an outside observer"

Cause, yeah, a "perfect" replica may be "you" (insert key signifier here)

But we don't get to be outside observers to our own lives. We're deep in it, shoveling the shit of another day, the insidest of inside observers. We don't get to check out of our body.

Oh sure, apparently that urge is strong in Western and even Eastern human cultures. Because apparently we're dumb that way. We want to think "us" isn't bound to the meatsack and with enough willing or divine intervention, it can just freely wander. Restless spirits, souls, ghosts, astral projections, consciousness downloaded to the mainframe.

Someway to leave the meat sack behind while still being a continuous collection of the us of our consciousness.

But sadly, it's just a dream. In my opinion, a stupid dream, but still, I can't deny the power it has in our culture and cultures around the world and throughout history. It's in our language, our storytelling tropes, some genres entirely prolonged by the assumption.

Of course the futurists would latch onto it assuming its truth for a pseudo-scientific promise of an infinity within reach. That us can just be free-formingly moved from meat sack to new location like zapping a ghost in Ghostbusters.

Unfortunately, the trope is a lie like cake, we're shackled to the meat sack, deal.

Fuck if you want a believable fairy tale to believe in, how about improving repair mechanisms in our cellular metabolism so that DNA repair can keep up with DNA damage thus potentially increasing lifespans? It's what I wrote my master's thesis on and it actually has some successful trials. Sure, it probably won't give perfect immortality or even useful treatments for alleviating old age and the like for a good long while and may in fact turn out to be one big culdesac, but at least it isn't stupid like wanting to pretend you can download your "soul by another name" into a fancy robot suit.

Posted by: tiger-salad | August 22, 2010 7:00 PM

I am highly disappointed that my consciousness will never be downloaded into the body of a robot unicorn.

The fact that I'll never be immortal? Eh.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | August 22, 2010 7:01 PM

You just have to familiarize yourself with the quantum mechanics.

Posted by: eleusis | August 22, 2010 7:20 PM

Cerberus: Twins are not particle-for-particle replicas. At the molecular level, they are actually quite different, and have been diverging since the blastocyst broke apart.

Posted by: eleusis | August 22, 2010 7:25 PM

Nerd:

Quantum realm is only for sub atomic.

A statement like this implies that a quantum level description of the universe would be less precise, even wrong, for macroscopic objects, but any physicist will tell you that a quantum model would be MORE precise. We use macroscopic properties as first approximations because modeling at the quantum particle level is computationally intractable. This is, in fact, a quantum universe. There is nothing else except particles / wavicles.

Posted by: Cerberus, unnatural product of en-OMnomnom-ification | August 22, 2010 7:28 PM

eleusis @61

Uh huh, you are almost there, now tell me, what would you call a point of creating a perfect replica and what would occur after that point?

Hint, it starts with D and end with ivergence.

It doesn't matter how "flawless" or whether you "got it right molecule by molecule". All that fancy nonsense would mean is you made a perfect clone copy to emulate you perfectly to friends and family. But Bob 2.0 would be a divergence from you, able to have his own life while you rotted away in the meat bag.

Divergence.

It's why the whole clone/download-your-brain-to-the-mainframe pipe-dreams aren't the shortcut to immortality they'd appear to be to...

Everyone now, what's the magic phrase?

To an outside observer.

That's right, class, gold stars all around.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 22, 2010 7:34 PM

Yes the biological body dies and the conscience that was in it

Your consciousness

but the conscience that exits in the artificial brain

The new consciousness, which has your memories and personality but is not your consciousness.

would have a continuous memory of existence.

Hope it enjoys itself.

To me this would be no different to going to sleep and waking up in an artificial brain. Yesterdays body is gone and now you have a new one.

No, to you it would be like going to sleep and waking up with a duplicate of yourself walking around. To it it would be like going to sleep and waking up in a new body. And wondering what to do with that guy inhabiting the old body.

This is really simple to understand when you realize there's no reason the old body has to die when the new one is made. You just have two consciousnesses, and the one the you inhabit is not the one with the fresh new body.
Killing yourself at the moment the new body comes online solves nothing except terminating your own consciousness.

You're thinking in terms of some kind of dualism where 'you' is some magical thing that just knows which body to jump into.

Posted by: MikeTheInfidel | August 22, 2010 7:38 PM

Eleusis: Any particular reason you're dodging the issue of continuity of consciousness? Let's say that we make a perfect 1:1, particle-for-particle copy of your brain, in such a way that it exactly matches in every way.

Then you 'boot it up'.

Are you seriously asserting that, due to some quantum magic, you're now conscious of both instances of your brain? That if we were to put the duplicate in a mechanical body, you would experience the world through both sets of input?

Let's be serious here: A duplicate is not you. No matter how perfect it is, it is a SEPARATE set of particles. You would not experience what the copy experiences. There is no connection between your brain and the copy. The consciousness is discontinuous. At the instant the copy was set in motion, it would be a unique individual with a unique set of sensory inputs and new unique memories.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | August 22, 2010 7:43 PM

Quantum sounds new agey and with-it, but the brain is wet ware with the neurotransmitters being molecules like GABA, dopamine, serotonin, and a host of other molecules. All well above quantum description. Good old chemistry rules, not quantum physics. Anybody who thinks otherwise is a delusional fool, trying to get away with something, like Deepak Chopra (makes sign of crossed tentacles to ward off stoopidity).

Posted by: Josh, "Raquel Dommage," Porte-parole Gay Official | August 22, 2010 7:51 PM

I predict that, should immortality ever become possible, there will be a major rise in creative suicides.

I suspect the same thing Jason. It's amazing to me how little talk there is about this potential problem among the immortalarati.

Posted by: Josh, "Raquel Dommage," Porte-parole Gay Official | August 22, 2010 7:56 PM

(which I doubt; at the very worst we could modify our brains to never get bored),

Sigh. This kind of argument (making magical assertions) is why some transhumanists get the flak they do. You got nothin', but you just assert that it will happen.

immortality would at least mean that people would die when they want to and not a second before.

That, however, is a good point.

Posted by: MAJeff, OM | August 22, 2010 8:02 PM

You just have to familiarize yourself with the quantum mechanics.

Deepak, is that you?

Posted by: Cobolt | August 22, 2010 8:02 PM

@ Cerberus and Jason,
You are both arguing from a different POV from me. First of all, at conscience transfer the old body would die leaving just the one line of conscience. Second, and more importantly, the conscience continues seamlessly. Yes it would be in a different body but it would still have my memories, it would still think like me, apart from the "body" I would occupy I would still be me.

When you were a five year old you had a different body, cell replacement etc, different thoughts, different memories, you will no doubt have lost and gained these in the interim, at what point did you become you, now? The only difference is with transferred conscience is specific time when transfer took place and the host of the conscience.

To be honest I do think artificial brains are more likely than cryogenic stasis* so I am less interested in the 1000 year leap debate. The Transmetropolitan sounds like an interesting read, I'll look out for it.

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 22, 2010 8:05 PM

It's amazing to me how little talk there is about this potential problem among the immortalarati.

But, it would seem to me that having the availability to choose will always be superior to not having said choice, which is the situation we have now.

That said, the possibility of being made immortal and kept alive against one's will does give pause. Though of course a less extreme version of this already exists today.

Posted by: Furcas | August 22, 2010 8:07 PM

Sigh. This kind of argument (making magical assertions) is why some transhumanists get the flak they do. You got nothin', but you just assert that it will happen.

Er, no. What will probably happen is that we'll destroy ourselves before the Singularity happens, or even more likely, the Singularity will happen but it will be a bad one that will wipe us all out.

However, in the unlikely event that the Singularity is a good one and the question of What Should We Do During The Next Several Billion Years becomes relevant, it should be pretty obvious that we'll have the means to do modify our own minds to suit our every desire. Boredom, for example, isn't a fundamental property of the universe, it's a specific cognitive mechanism that evolution happens to have 'given' us; there's no reason to expect it to be impossible to design a mind that never feels boredom.

Of course we might not want to design such minds, but that's a completely different issue.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 22, 2010 8:14 PM

Cobolt:

First of all, at conscience transfer the old body would die leaving just the one line of conscience.

Like I said, killing the old body doesn't change anything, you're still not in the new one. This is clear when you realize that killing the old body is an arbitrary choice and you can just as easily leave it alive.

Unless you're suggesting the the old body will just know it's time to die and will do so as the soul consciousness jumps to the new body. Which is pure dualistic magic.

Second, and more importantly, the conscience continues seamlessly. Yes it would be in a different body but it would still have my memories, it would still think like me

Yes, it's consciousness would appear to be seamless with your experiences up to that point. That's from it's perspective, not yours.
An outside observer could also be fooled, but you're not an outside observer.

When you were a five year old you had a different body, cell replacement etc, different thoughts, different memories, you will no doubt have lost and gained these in the interim, at what point did you become you, now? The only difference is with transferred conscience is specific time when transfer took place and the host of the conscience.

The difference is you're making a copy, not a modification of the original.

I thought somebody asked an interesting question upstream somewhere when they asked about replacing individual components of the body bit by bit, rather than trying to build a whole new one and drop a 'consciousness program' into it.

Posted by: horrabin | August 22, 2010 8:14 PM

First of all, at conscience transfer the old body would die leaving just the one line of conscience. Second, and more importantly, the conscience continues seamlessly.

You're ignoring what everyone is saying. By insisting that the old body dies(and I notice you say body not mind - don't both die?) you are trying to make it seem like there is a transference of mind instead of a copying. (it amazes me that people who are supposedly so enamored of technology seem unaware of what 'downloading' actually is)

Posted by: tresmal | August 22, 2010 8:17 PM

First of all, at conscience transfer the old body would die...

...leaving just the one line of conscience.

BTW I'm pretty sure you meant consciousness.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 22, 2010 8:19 PM

Cerberus, I see what you're saying, but I still think 'damn, eternity is a long time!'. Would you get to the point where all those things you could entertain yourself with just seem too ephemeral to be worth a shit?

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 22, 2010 8:21 PM

So long as the second law of thermodynamics holds, there cannot be absolute immortality. Disease or accident (or malice!) will get you eventually, along with any and all backups or copies you may try to make, even if you could make them.

Posted by: Cerberus, unnatural product of en-OMnomnom-ification | August 22, 2010 8:22 PM

Cobolt @79

To an outside observer.

Just because you whack you so it can't experience the wholly unique experience of waking up next to something that thinks it's you doesn't make it seamless.

It may seem that way to an outside observer, but we don't get to be outside observers to our own lives. We have to live them. And we don't transfer to our Humansoft TM Emulator program just because we programmed it extra-special dead to rights.

I don't doubt that it will absolutely positively think it's you. It may very strongly believe it's you. But you died on an operating slab.

You don't get to experience what it thinks.

I'm not sure how to get across to the Techno Kinksters how critical a distinction to an outside observer is. Yeah, it may fool ma, pa, and the kids, but you don't get to be there for that.

Posted by: Cerberus, unnatural product of en-OMnomnom-ification | August 22, 2010 8:24 PM

Cobolt @79

To an outside observer.

Just because you whack you so it can't experience the wholly unique experience of waking up next to something that thinks it's you doesn't make it seamless.

It may seem that way to an outside observer, but we don't get to be outside observers to our own lives. We have to live them. And we don't transfer to our Humansoft TM Emulator program just because we programmed it extra-special dead to rights.

I don't doubt that it will absolutely positively think it's you. It may very strongly believe it's you. But you died on an operating slab.

You don't get to experience what it thinks.

I'm not sure how to get across to the Techno Kinksters how critical a distinction to an outside observer is. Yeah, it may fool ma, pa, and the kids, but you don't get to be there for that.

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 22, 2010 8:30 PM

A statement like this implies that a quantum level description of the universe would be less precise, even wrong, for macroscopic objects, but any physicist will tell you that a quantum model would be MORE precise. We use macroscopic properties as first approximations because modeling at the quantum particle level is computationally intractable. This is, in fact, a quantum universe. There is nothing else except particles / wavicles.

It was my understanding that part of the incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics is that they each make nonsensical predictions in the other's realm. So when you use quantum mechanics to make predictions about the macroscopic universe, the results are in conflict with those predicted by general relativity, and the predictions of general relativity are the ones supported by observation (in the macroscopic realm). Which means even with infinite computational power you cannot use quantum mechanics to make predictions about the macroscopic world. You'd get a result, but the result would be wrong. You need to modify quantum mechanics first (ie get yourself a theory of everything) before you can do that.

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 22, 2010 8:36 PM

And the rate of increases is itself increasing. At some point, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the rate of increase in life expectancy may, each year, add more than a year to the average expected lifespan. If and when that happens, those alive will, on average, be practically immortal.

This argument falls to the same error of expontential thinking that is pointed out in the very next paragraph of the same post. The laws of chemistry, physics, biology, thermodynamics, and statistics will all set an absolute maximum to lifespan. Technological improvements will eventually stop.

And that is not even to mention that the measured increase in average life expectancy is an average across the entire population, and results from a variety of advances against specific causes of mortality which may or may not apply to different individuals. For example, most of the biggest increases in average life expectancy came about by decreasing infant mortality rates. Such advances do absolutely nothing to increase the expected life-span of someone currently in their 50's.

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 22, 2010 8:41 PM

But to further your point, there are no end to the classes that can be attended, or skills to be obtained. Whatever piques your interest can be studied, practiced and mastered if you have the ability. Time is no longer a factor. And every path you take leads you to new ideas and experiences.

Time may not be a factor, but resources are. Each of these activities takes resources to accomplish. Resources are finite and will run out.

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 22, 2010 8:48 PM

I think that if you were given an additional 10 years of healthy, enjoyable life, you'd take it without hesitation. And once those 10 years were over, you'd take another 10, once again without hesitation. And so on.

I for one would take it. I would take "functional" immortality without hesitation. But on the understanding that I could end it at any time or place of my choosing, and on the acknowledgment that it is still not true immortality. I will still die, eventually, whether by disease or accident or self-termination or murder. And even if I escape all that, whatever mechanism it was that made me "immortal" will be using resources, and when those resources run out, so will I.

Posted by: Cerberus, unnatural product of en-OMnomnom-ification | August 22, 2010 8:53 PM

cafeeine @104

Yes, to all outside observers. Bob 2.0, friends and family, scientists in the booth.

But you aren't an outside observer. Meat Sack Bob 1.0 still is in Meat Sack Bob 1.0's body. Meat Sack Bob 1.0 gets to age and die a separate autonomous individual from the divergence point. You can make Bob 2.0, the copy pitch-perfect to all outside observers, but an illusion is nothing but an illusion, no matter what Bob 2.0 thinks or whatever cursory understanding of biology, "quantum", or freshman-level philosophy you use to convince yourself otherwise.

And I blame the pernicious literary trope of dualism for making this so hard to grasp for so many. Just because all our cultural literature makes a you seem like a free-floating autonomous whisp of a being that is wholly free from the meat sack it was born into doesn't mean that it actually is transferable from the meat sack it was born into.

And it certainly doesn't mean that a copy, even if it thinks it is you, will totally be you you, perfectly "transferred" into a better body.

We want "immortality", we better be dragging our meat sack along for the ride, because like it or not and thanks to cultural tropes encouraging hatred of all things fleshy, a lot of people go "not", we're stuck with it.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/U7IeAfwuu4r_eiZ7WXqe4xcXSmXL#7e2fa | August 22, 2010 8:57 PM

Cerberus, I don't buy that only the original entity in a mind-transfer situation is "you", if only because the copy (assuming perfect mind-transfer) is just as continuous with the history of the original as the original is. I'd imagine you'd have two people now, A & B, who both have equal claim on being continuous with Cerberus. A (embodied Cerberus) would wake up thinking, "oh, that was sort of interesting I guess, now let's get on with my life" and B (virtual Cerberus) would wake up thinking "wow, holy shit, it worked! I'm in a computer! I'm immortal!"

Yeah, A-Cerberus wouldn't have access to B's consciousness and vice versa, and if A-Cerberus died a natural death it would seem pointless to have made a copy from her perspective. But from B-Cerberus's perspective making the copy was important because Cerberus (the entity before the transfer) would have no chance of existing further without having done so. When B-Cerberus sees A die she will think, "wow, that could have been me, I'm glad I'm in the computer now".

So when you refer to "you" you have to specify whether you're talking about A or B; being A will suck, but B in a copy scenario is equally as justified to claim personal continuity. Yeah, there's a Y-shaped split if you were to map out the personal history of everyone involved, but that doesn't mean we should discount the copy's perspective.

(This is all with the caveat that I don't think mind-transfer will be anywhere near plausible for 100 years or longer & will require a Matrix-like support system, lest anyone think I'm defending Singularity wackos.)

Oh, and this is a wonderful article, if no one's seen it; it ran in the NYT like a month ago. It's about the struggles between a guy who wants to cryonically preserve himself (seeking immortality) and his wife who is a hospice social worker (& thus must comfort the dying all of the time): http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/magazine/11cryonics-t.html?_r=1

Posted by: MadScientist | August 22, 2010 9:00 PM

The headline here made me think the article would be about Kurzweil:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11041449

But nooo - it's about Seth Shostak. I wonder if Seth is losing it.

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 22, 2010 9:09 PM

It's been said that the digital person would be like the meat person only from the perspective of an outside observer. Not true. It would also presumably the same from the perspective of the digital person.

I'm sure it would be. But it won't be from the perspective of the meat person. And in the context of this discussion, that is the only perspective that matters.

Fine then: Let's assume that we gradually replace certain functions of the brain with mechanical components (like say, memory chips for aging people) and we keep replacing bits until the meatware is no longer required.

The difference here is that it remains a single individual, with a single perspective. If you took your wholly mechanical end result and destroyed it, the individual dies. Even if you then reconstructed that mechanical/digital entity exactly afterwards, the original individual has still died. All you've done is create a second, and different individual. If you copied this digital entity, you don't get two copies of one entity, you get two entities. Period. They'll have identical histories, but the instant after the copying is complete they will diverge.

You could say that in this gradual replacement scenario, the original meat individual does indeed die, bit by bit, and that would be true. And you could say that this is in fact exactly analogous to normal growth (except that brain components do not, in fact, ever get replaced in normal growth).

But in this gradual scenario, the meat individual does not experience death. And that is the whole point.

Posted by: timrowledge, Ersatz Haderach | August 22, 2010 9:15 PM

Great, but what does that do for real you? Real you is just as dead and gone and unable to be a part of and appreciate what your puppet is doing in its absence.

And -

So long as the second law of thermodynamics holds, there cannot be absolute immortality.

Posted by: horrabin | August 22, 2010 9:20 PM

Someone could say that this is an illusion, that the "digi-me" will not be "me". By the same standard though, I'm not the same person I was 20 years ago, both in mind and in body.

It's not the same standard because there isn't any instant of discrete copying of 20 years ago you into 20 years ago plus 1 day (or minute or second)you. And even if it was true that the molecular changes the body goes through through time makes you 'different' from the older you at some randomly chosen point, all this would prove is that 20 years ago you is gone and you're a 'copy' that thinks it's the same entity.

It seems more like an argument against continuation of consciousness.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 22, 2010 9:20 PM

Why is a copy not 'real you'?

Why is a copy of a penny not the original penny? Because it's a copy. Why is this hard to understand?

Yes, from the copies perspective, it will think it's 'you'. But you're not the copy. You're the one who's asserting some non-material dualism when you say that your experience of consciousness can make a non-material jump into a new body. When you make a copy, you have two individuals, not one individual making a leap into a new body.

Having children is simply a lower-fidelity version of these copies we're talking about. You don't consider your children to be 'you', do you?

Posted by: Escuerd | August 22, 2010 9:29 PM

Amphiox @99:

It was my understanding that part of the incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics is that they each make nonsensical predictions in the other's realm.

I really doubt that any theory of quantum gravity is going to change the fact that elementary particles are identical.

You do run into a problem when talking of exactly copying things on a scale where quantum effects are important, because you run into the no-cloning theorem. But then, I would guess that the particular quantum state isn't important for things like brains and that they mostly operate at a classical level. That is, I think a classical copy of a brain (if it were at all feasible, which it isn't in the foreseeable future) would be identical for all intents and purposes.

Also, assuming you could make a copy, I don't see why the two copies wouldn't have equally legitimate claims to being the "real" you. What makes us who we are is not the particular pieces matter we're made up of, but how they're arranged. If you could somehow swap all of my constituent particles with those of someone else (well, swap them up to the point that one person runs out), we'd still be the same person.

In fact, I just think our idea of "self" would need a little tweaking. Two people made by this magic copying mechanism would have the same past self, but different present/future selves. I.e. present selves would no longer map onto unique past selves.

Maybe your definition of "self" requires the same matter as well as the same (relevant) information, but I really don't see why one would include that criterion.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 22, 2010 9:33 PM

What is it you guys think happens when you get that copy built? The instant you get that last particle into place, what then? You blink your eyes and suddenly you're seeing things from the other side of the room because you're in the new body, and the old body just falls over dead all on its own, crumples over right where it was standing? Of course not, that's silly. 'You' are still in the old body, it's your copy that inhabits the new one.

A few of you have been avoiding thinking about this by pretending you go to sleep, and they complete the new body while you're asleep, and you just wake up in it. That's just a way of tricking yourself from having to think about this.

Posted by: Escuerd | August 22, 2010 9:37 PM

When you make a copy, you have two individuals, not one individual making a leap into a new body.

Yes, I think we can all agree on the point that there's no leap being made anywhere.

The matter at hand is what the criteria are for being the same person. You seem to be presuming that our consciousness depends on which pieces of matter make us up.

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 22, 2010 9:40 PM

Also, assuming you could make a copy, I don't see why the two copies wouldn't have equally legitimate claims to being the "real" you.

So what? The point is they are two separate individuals now. When a bacterium divides we don't worry about which one was the original bacterium and which one was the copy, we don't consider either of them to be equivalent to the original - we call them both daughter cells.

It is the same with these hypothetical personality copies. They would share a history, but they would not share a "self" past or otherwise. They would each have their own individual self, their own individual identity.

Sure they might have equal claim to some hypothetical construct referred as the "original you", but that is irrelevant. What is relevant is that neither has any claim on being the other one.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 22, 2010 9:44 PM

Cobolt:

See, you guys are talking about a reproduction of the original, a copy.

So are you, if you're talking about building a new body that's an exact copy of the original. You're just adding in the extra, magical step of 'my consciousness will jump to the new body.'

I'm talking about Moving the conscience from one body to another.

How?

Posted by: Escuerd | August 22, 2010 9:46 PM

The copy will in fact very quickly realize that it is not you, and will come to regard itself as its own individual entity. This will be particularly so if the original you sticks around.

Wouldn't this rather depend on the person's personality and on how the people around them treated them? It sounds like a very specific situation you're imagining.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 22, 2010 9:47 PM

Escuerd:

Yes, I think we can all agree on the point that there's no leap being made anywhere.

See Cobolt, lol.

The matter at hand is what the criteria are for being the same person. You seem to be presuming that our consciousness depends on which pieces of matter make us up.

No, I presume that my 'consciousness' is my experience of self, which will persist in the old body.

If any of you guys think it's just 'same memories and personality = you transferred to new body', then do you think that (in principle) if we brainwashed a person into having the same memories and personality, 'you' would be in their body now?

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 22, 2010 9:51 PM

Wouldn't this rather depend on the person's personality and on how the people around them treated them? It sounds like a very specific situation you're imagining.

It will have memories of the transfer process. And if was not transferred into an exact biological duplicate of the original, it will know it has a different body now. Also I find it highly unlikely that the people around it will treat it exactly as if it were you, unless they're part of some byzantine conspiracy about it.

Posted by: Escuerd | August 22, 2010 9:54 PM

Jason A @ 126:

Because you, your personal experience, only inhabits one of them.

Each one has a personal experience that remembers being the person that got in the copy machine (or whatever). In the sense that I'm the same person that remembers sitting down at the computer recently.

I don't think there's anything more to the continuity of self than our memories and personality. Do you think there is?

That's the only thing that allows me to judge myself as the same person I remember being a few moments ago. I could make an appeal to being (mostly) made out of the same matter as earlier or something, but then, that doesn't work over longer periods of time, yet we still consider ourselves the same person in some sense.

Posted by: MAJeff, OM | August 22, 2010 9:59 PM

Cobalt@124:I'm talking about Moving the conscience from one body to another. There is no this self or that self, just the one self in a different body.

I'm sorry, but this is just nonsense. The subjective sense of self we all flows from the ways that social interaction is physically mediated in the brain. There is no individual self divorced from physical processes...and I say this as a constructivist sociologist.

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 22, 2010 10:01 PM

How do you justify that belief without resorting to some kind of dualistic argument that "you" exist in a way that transcends the structure of your brain?

You do NOT transcend the structure of your brain. You ARE the structure of your brain. If that structure is destroyed YOU ARE DESTROYED. Reassembling an exact atom for atom copy of your brain from before that destruction does not magically call back some magical essense of "you" to take up residence in this new brain. You will not experience the destruction of your brain and then magically resurrect yourself into the new brain.

There is a new consciousness in this new brain, one which might be identifical to you at the moment of its creation, but will immediately diverge with its first new experience. It is not "you". It is it. It may remember you. You won't remember it.

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM | August 22, 2010 10:01 PM

If there's you and a copy is made, then there's two seperate, distinct people, you and the copy. After the first second you'll both (that's you and the copy, remember?) will start having different memories because different things are happening to you and the copy, even if you're standing side by side. You'll be in a slightly different spot than the copy and so will have slightly different sensations than the copy does because you're no longer in an identical situation. The longer time you and the copy are separate, the more you and the copy will diverge.

Why can't you people understand this? It's not difficult.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 22, 2010 10:05 PM

eigenperson:

You seem to be arguing that if people were to take your brain, disassemble it into its constituent atoms, scatter them to the four winds, and then rebuild an atom-for-atom exact copy of that brain, this new copy would somehow not be "you".

So you think that if you built that atom-for-atom copy, while the original you is still alive and well, you'll suddenly receive sensory data from both bodies, since they're both 'you' now? You can see what both bodies are seeing?
If not, then you're allowing the fact that the new body is a new individual. So now, do you think that your experience of self is going to just leap across the room and reside in the new body now? What triggers the leap, and how does it transfer? What, exactly, is 'leaping'? What happens to the old, still alive and well, body? No consciousness anymore, just a drooling zombie?

Posted by: tresmal | August 22, 2010 10:06 PM

eigenperson @136:You seem to be arguing that if people were to take your brain, disassemble it into its constituent atoms, scatter them to the four winds, and then rebuild an atom-for-atom exact copy of that brain, this new copy would somehow not be "you".

I notice that avoiding original and copy being coterminous seems rather important to people pushing this flavor of immortality.

Posted by: Escuerd | August 22, 2010 10:06 PM

Amphiox:

You ARE the structure of your brain. If that structure is destroyed YOU ARE DESTROYED. Reassembling an exact atom for atom copy of your brain from before that destruction does not magically call back some magical essense of "you" to take up residence in this new brain.

Right, there is no "essence of 'you'". So if you reproduce the same pattern as there was before, then what makes the difference? The structure is the same, after all, and you are the structure. There's nothing more to your self than that.

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 22, 2010 10:08 PM

So if you reproduce the same pattern as there was before, then what makes the difference?

The difference is the next infinitesimal moment when the two patterns diverge.

Posted by: eigenperson | August 22, 2010 10:10 PM

Jason A.:

What will happen is that at first, there is one person experiencing one thing. Then, there are two people who start out being identical. Later, they are not identical. Both bodies have an experience of self that is equally tied to the experience of self that the original body used to have. They are both equally conscious, equally aware, and they both have an equal claim to being the continuation of the original.

As for "You," it doesn't exist.

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM | August 22, 2010 10:16 PM

They are both equally conscious, equally aware, and they both have an equal claim to being the continuation of the original.

And they are both separate, distinct individuals, growing moreso the longer since their diversion.

Posted by: Escuerd | August 22, 2010 10:18 PM

The difference is the next infinitesimal moment when the two patterns diverge.

Yes, I know they diverge after the copy. They're now two different people. In that sense, I'll be a different person in two seconds from who I am now. For the person who is about to be copied, you seem to think there is some special continuity of consciousness that stays with that person even if all the information is copied.

I think that each one will have exactly as legitimate a claim to being the same mind as I have to claim that I'm the same mind that started typing this message. That is, we're not strictly identical in either case. All continuity of consciousness is really based on ultimately is that we remember feeling like the same person from one moment to the next.

Posted by: cafeeine | August 22, 2010 10:23 PM

Jason A.

Except only one of them is the actual continuation, the one who has the actual physical history and not just memories of it. Your experience of self is going to continue in the one with the old body. The new body is a different individual with the same memories and personalities. That person will figure out, probably sooner than later, then he/she is a copy in a new body.

I disagree. Both bodies are different individuals. How many molecules do you currently share with the 10-year old that you were? If you both have the same memories of being him, why don't you both have the same claim to him? You got to now, from 10 through a process of biological development. the digital person got there through digitization. Why does your process take precedence?

These are all conceptual problems that occur because we think of consciousness as non-transferable. If this proves not to be the case, our treatment of consciousness will change accordingly, I think.

Posted by: Tulse | August 22, 2010 10:23 PM

No, I would not. You've been murdered, your clone is alive.

OK, so explain what would be different from your subjective perspective if you had been murdered and replaced by your clone. In what way would "you" be different? Indeed, how would you even tell?

There is nothing magical about your specific physical bits, no "soul" that somehow adheres to those neurons and gives them dibs on personal identity. Who we are is our psychological states, and those (in principle, if not practice) can be transferred, even to multiple other copies. And when that happens, there is no one person who has claim to the "real" person.

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 22, 2010 10:28 PM

OK, so explain what would be different from your subjective perspective if you had been murdered and replaced by your clone.

The clone might find it hard to tell. The the subjective perspective the original ceases at the moment of the murder. That is the difference.

Posted by: Escuerd | August 22, 2010 10:28 PM

There will be no continuuity of consciousness from the perspective of the original, which ends with the destruction of the original structure.

What is this continuity of consciousness, and why do you think you have it now?

Posted by: Tulse | August 22, 2010 10:35 PM

The clone might find it hard to tell. The the subjective perspective the original ceases at the moment of the murder. That is the difference.

No, you are still begging the question of what counts as the "subjective perspective". The clone has exactly the same "subjective perspective" as the "original" would if it woke up. What is it about that particular physical body that conveys personal identity?

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/U7IeAfwuu4r_eiZ7WXqe4xcXSmXL#7e2fa | August 22, 2010 10:36 PM

I'm going to completely agree with Tulse, who said it better than I did.

In the personal identity literature there is all sorts of talk about "what happens if the transporter breaks and two Kirks come out at the other end". I see this situation as pretty analogous. You have a physically-continuous person (A) and a person who isn't physically-continuous (B), but it doesn't matter because what is appropriate here is psychological continuity. "B", the copy, is just as psychologically continuous with the history of the original person as "A" is. Now of course, from this point on, the persons diverge, and from A's perspective it's useless to make a copy because A will die, but the point is BOTH A and B will have a continuous history from the person-up-to-the-moment-of-copying. B will be equally as conscious of everything in A's past up-to-moment-of-copying. B is simply a different stream of A.

Remember, remember, the copy is just as conscious as the original is, it's not like we're making a dummy-copy. B is a different "I" than A's "I", because they do not share a coherent awareness, but they are both psychologically continuous consciousnesses from the-point-of-copying.

So when I am looking into the future before I undergo the copy operation and I'm asking, "which one of those people is going to be me", the answer is to some extent "both", because both people after the mind-transfer procedure will say so and will be conscious of everything that I am conscious of up to the procedure. They'll just be separately conscious of what I am conscious of now. Neither has a better claim to be solely "me" than the other one does given that the mind-transfer is a perfect one. You can imagine it as a "Y" shaped split (where one person diverges into two people) rather than a single path with a branch coming off of it, like this: |- .

As Tulse said, it's only a conundrum because we don't see these sorts of splits in real life; personal identity always maps onto physical identity in meatspace.

Posted by: Escuerd | August 22, 2010 10:39 PM

Alternately you can say that none of the copies are the original. All the copies are new individuals, and the "original" ceases to exist at the instant of the copying, in the same way a bacterium ceases to exist the moment it divides into two daughter cells, each considered to be a new individual.

You could say that, and with that standard you would also be a different person from one moment to another. In some sense that's true.

Yet we still find it useful to attach identity to a person as they change from one moment to another. I think that this concept would be forced to change if minds could be copied, and we'd have to stop thinking of my self at one point in time having only one or zero possible future selves.

But once we've admitted that neither has a more legitimate claim to being the original, and that the mind is all in the structure/information of the matter, then we're down to semantics.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/U7IeAfwuu4r_eiZ7WXqe4xcXSmXL#7e2fa | August 22, 2010 10:43 PM

Theseus' ship!!!!!!!!!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Um, yeah, I'll pick a name, sorry. I usually use my livejournal account but it is busted and I can't log on with it here for some reason. I don't post that often so I thought it wasn't a big deal, but I guess people are reading what I am saying so here's a name:

--Interliminal

Posted by: Escuerd | August 22, 2010 10:46 PM

Of course we do, but the question is if that view is coherent, especially in light of the possible counterexamples we've discussed.

Well ultimately, I don't think that "self" is even well-defined. It's a fuzzy concept that we benefit from psychologically and socially. It works pretty well most of the time, but some things we take for granted (like that we have no more than one future self) would have to change if copying minds were possible.

Posted by: Tulse | August 22, 2010 10:48 PM

Let's try a less science-fiction example:

You are diagnosed with very early Alzheimer's disease. The doctors tell you that, fortunately, there is new treatment available. What they can do is take your neural stem cells, correct the defect that causes the Alzheimer's, scan the memory areas of your current brain, and grow a replacement for those areas, "programming" the replacement tissue so that it completely replicates the areas that will be damaged by the disease in future. When the treatment is complete, you will have all your memories, and a brain free of Alzheimer's.

If I were in this situation, I would take the treatment in a heartbeat. But it sounds like other people here would feel that the replacement isn't "them" in some sense, that the memories would be fakes in some way. Am I misrepresenting this? What would others do in this situation?

(I'll just note in passing that, when heart transplants were first available they faced religious opposition by those who felt that some essential aspect of the person was being altered. The arguments offered here remind me of those.)

Posted by: Escuerd | August 22, 2010 10:51 PM

Maybe I don't have it. In which case I am not the individual I was one infinitesimal moment of time ago, but a biological copy that only thinks it is.

What possible reason could we have to believe that there's something more to the continuity of consciousness we experience than there is to the apparent continuity of consciousness that the copy would experience?

You've basically stated that your feeling that you're the same person you were five minutes ago isn't rooted in anything that would be different. So why conclude that there's some different essence of you-ness that the copy wouldn't have?

Posted by: Josh, "Raquel Dommage," Porte-parole Gay Official | August 22, 2010 10:56 PM

Gah - I'm really baffled why this is so hard to understand. Is it a semantic problem?

OK, real short (let's see if this works) for those arguing that each copy is "you":

The entity I'm calling you, the one that's sitting in a chair right now reading this on Pharyngula, would not go on existing/experiencing/sensing after its death regardless of whether a copy is made of you. That entity - the you, sitting there now and reading this - is a different subjective, sensing entity from the copy.

Is that clear enough?

Posted by: Escuerd | August 22, 2010 11:00 PM

That entity - the you, sitting there now and reading this - is a different subjective, sensing entity from the copy.

Is that clear enough?

Yes, after the copy has been made. I don't think anyone here would disagree with that.

The question is, do you think that there is some continuity of consciousness before and after the copying such that one mind is the same consciousness as the original and the other isn't? If so, why would this be?

Posted by: Jason A. | August 22, 2010 11:04 PM

eigenperson:

How does someone "have" a physical history? Sure, a hypothetical omnipotent being could trace the atoms back in time and find out where they came from

Answered your own question.

but to argue that your personal identity depends in any way on where your atoms used to be seems like hocus-pocus to me.

Good thing that's not what I'm arguing.

Josh, exactly. I think they're making a semantic argument over what 'you' means.
We've already established that the copy is a new individual, not the old individual making a magical leap into a new body. We know have two individuals, you can call them both 'you' if you want. The point is, the individual inhabiting the old body is the same individual that has always inhabited the old body, and that individual does not benefit from the new individuals longer life.

Posted by: Escuerd | August 22, 2010 11:10 PM

The point is, the individual inhabiting the old body is the same individual that has always inhabited the old body, and that individual does not benefit from the new individuals longer life.

And you haven't established why their claim to being "the same" individual is stronger than the copy's.

Posted by: Tulse | August 22, 2010 11:11 PM

We've already established that the copy is a new individual

Of course the copy is a new physical individual -- the question is whether that matters. If I make multiple copies of a file on my hard drive, it doesn't matter which one first occupied sectors on the drive -- they are functionally identical. The question is whether personal identity is like that.

Posted by: pieroforno | August 22, 2010 11:13 PM

Furcas:

pieroforno, I'm not sure why you don't understand what I'm telling you. No one has to choose to die. Everyone can lead a full life, invent new technology if they like, and after they're (clinically) dead, get vitrified. No sacrifices necessary.

I'm not sure why you don't understand what I'm telling you. Who wants to live as an eternal 90-year old? Unless you are planning to build a time machine along with the life-preserving one...

KG:

And why do you think that would bring about a "singularity"?

Because if we figure out exactly how the brain works, then we can figure out how to make it work better (unless you believe we are the most intelligent beings that can ever exist). And we let the improved brain take it from there.

'Tis Himself, OM:

Nobody I've noticed, not PZ, not any of the commentators, has derided the concept of AI nor said functional AIs won't be built some day. What we're objecting to is Kurzweil and his minions saying (a) it'll happen in 10 or 20 years and (b) most of the heavy biological lifting is done, mainly just some minor tweaking remains.

How about this comment by Jason A.?

My objection is more like, taking immortality as the extreme case and realizing we'd opt out of it, the limited-ness of life is what gives it significance. (Jason A.)

Jason is not objecting to the possibility, but he's certainly objecting to the concept itself.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 22, 2010 11:15 PM

Jason is not objecting to the possibility, but he's certainly objecting to the concept itself.

Lying about what I said is a bad idea when I'm still right here.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/U7IeAfwuu4r_eiZ7WXqe4xcXSmXL#7e2fa | August 22, 2010 11:16 PM

Josh, of course your stream of identity isn't altered.

Here, let me see if I can give you an example as to what we mean.

Suppose you decide to do the copy procedure. You go to the giant science hospital place and they put you under.

After the procedure:

Josh (what I am calling Josh-A) wakes up in the chair, says to himself, "Blugh, I feel gross, get me some juice" and sits there recovering from the effects of the anesthesia.

Meanwhile, the copy is started and as soon as the scientist-dudes turn on the computer and everything boots up it goes, "Holy shit! It worked! Holy crap, I'm in a computer!". Now the reason some of us are saying this one (Josh-B) is also "you" in some sense is that Josh-B is going to wake up in the same way Josh-A did from the anesthesia, at the same time, but inside a computer or robot or whatever.

When Josh-A woke up he was in the recovery room rather than the operating room but that's no reason for him to think he's a different person now. Same thing with B, he's now experiencing stuff inside a computer but he still remembers the doctor putting the face mask over his face, graduating from school, all those silly things he did as a kid, etc.

Our point is that there's a parity between the two people, namely that both are continuous in experience/consciousness/awareness from whatever person went into the operating room, that doesn't allow you to privilege one over the other in saying one is "you" and the other one isn't. Because how you identify that "oh, yes, that dude who bought toilet paper at the store a week ago was me" from your memory is that you were psychologically continuous with that person that went to the store and bought toilet paper. The point here is that both the Josh who wakes up in the bed and the Josh who wakes up in computer world both can say, "hey, I went to the store and bought toilet paper last week", "hey, I remember the doctor giving me anesthesia", "hey, I remember signing up for mind-transfer", etc.

Both people wake up saying that they are the same "you" that went into the operating room, they just do it separately. Sucks for the guy that doesn't live in computer-land though.

--Interliminal

Posted by: E.V. | August 22, 2010 11:20 PM

*fail buzzer*

You realize this is a literal ghost in the machine hypothesis.
As it's already been pointed out, you are not your clone and your clone is not you; you just have a much younger sibling sharing your same genetics (minus the DNA altering environmental damage you've acrued post clone).

As for immortality - not so idyllic for those with the inevitable compromised health/physicality/economic trouble. Long stretches of poverty do not an immortal paradise make. Neither does living for long periods in a physically diminished capacity.

Posted by: pieroforno | August 22, 2010 11:24 PM

Jason:

Lying about what I said is a bad idea when I'm still right here.

I quoted you. Maybe I misunderstood what you were trying to say, and if so I apologize, but to accuse me of lying is unjustified.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/U7IeAfwuu4r_eiZ7WXqe4xcXSmXL#7e2fa | August 22, 2010 11:25 PM

Oh, I guess I should say this too:

Personal identity is really weird because not only does it involve a sense of one's past but it involves a sense of one's future, as well. We all make plans as to what we would do tomorrow and understand our life as having a long-term direction in some sense (not in any spiritual woo-way, but in the sense that we plan careers, become parents, devote ourselves to causes, etc.).

I take it Jason, Josh, et al.'s objection is that it would be irrational for someone to undergo the copy procedure to begin with because it provides no benefit to the person who hangs out in meatspace. That person (A) is going to die no matter what and it doesn't matter to him if B gets to live in wonderland or whatever.

It's complicated because we plan our lives out in a linear fashion-- our live plans are predicated on the fact that I will be the same person that will finish college in four years or that I will be the same person who lives to see my daughter get married or whatever. That what I am doing will matter to me.

What a person choosing to undergo mind-transfer is essentially doing is splitting his identity to benefit only one of the resulting people in the future-- one person will benefit (B) while the other won't (A). The body-continuous person gets screwed. The other gets to live forever.

With our current idea of personal identity I'm not sure if it's really a coherent question to say, "is this rational to do it?" because the rationality of our future actions is again, predicated that they are part of a single me's identity.

It's really weird, is all I can say.

--Interliminal

Posted by: Josh, "Raquel Dommage," Porte-parole Gay Official | August 22, 2010 11:27 PM

eigenperson:

You're implicitly assuming that this "original entity" actually does exist over time, though, because you refer to it in the singular.

Yes, indeed I am. Someone who would argue the opposite is making the extraordinary claim.

If there is no entity existing over time, then it's completely invalid to talk about "the" original entity, because there is a new one in every instant (or none at all).

I can't see how we'd ever know if this - the idea that there's a new me every instant, and how do you find the borders of an "instant," anyway?- were true. And, it's irrelevant - it's a feature of our subjective state that we perceive ourselves to be continuous.

Posted by: Josh, "Raquel Dommage," Porte-parole Gay Official | August 22, 2010 11:31 PM

I take it Jason, Josh, et al.'s objection is that it would be irrational for someone to undergo the copy procedure to begin with because it provides no benefit to the person who hangs out in meatspace. That person (A) is going to die no matter what and it doesn't matter to him if B gets to live in wonderland or whatever.

Yes, that is exactly my objection, and it's why I don't understand why anyone would think uploading "their mind" into a computer would make the slightest bit of difference to them, the meatspace entity. At best, it would be an extraordinarily baroque tombstone, nothing more.

it doesn't matter as far as personal identity goes.

No. Really. Are you actually saying that the "original" entity, the me sitting here right now, would continue experiencing things?

Posted by: Jason A. | August 22, 2010 11:34 PM

eigenperson:

Is that really the answer you believe?

Are you asking if I really believe that the original has a history that can be (in principle) traced to childhood while the copy does not? Yes. I don't understand why that's controversial to you. Things have histories. Deal with it.

You haven't explained to me why that history is relevant to any issues of personal identity. Why does the existence of the mystical "you" depend on this kind of physical history? What is the mechanism for that? What is this "you" anyway?

Because, for the goddamn thousandth time, I don't believe that. Quit trying to put this strawman in my mouth or I'm just going to ignore you.

There is no individual "inhabiting" the body. That's dualism.

Choice of words trying to deal with the fact that you not only seem to want to strawman me at every term, but are unable or unwilling to admit that the two individuals are different individuals.

If you mean something specific by "individual," would you care to defined exactly what you mean?

You know exactly what I mean, the person, the consciousness.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 22, 2010 11:38 PM

I take it Jason, Josh, et al.'s objection is that it would be irrational for someone to undergo the copy procedure to begin with because it provides no benefit to the person who hangs out in meatspace. That person (A) is going to die no matter what and it doesn't matter to him if B gets to live in wonderland or whatever.

Yes.

pieroforno:

I should have said "Jason is not objecting to the possibility of AI, but he's certainly objecting to the concept of immortality itself."

Okay. But I don't think Tis Himself was talking about immortality in his post that you quoted me as evidence against. And even so, I made it clear in other posts that I'm not sure whether immortality is a good idea or not, just that I thought it was a tougher question than some gave credit.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 22, 2010 11:42 PM

I take it Jason, Josh, et al.'s objection is that it would be irrational for someone to undergo the copy procedure to begin with because it provides no benefit to the person who hangs out in meatspace. That person (A) is going to die no matter what and it doesn't matter to him if B gets to live in wonderland or whatever.

Wait. Maybe not irrational, but person A is not going to be immortal.

Posted by: heygetthis | August 22, 2010 11:43 PM

Folks, you are ignoring a significant fact in support of Kurzweil. We can already simulate major elements of the Kurzweil brain.

But then, fans of horror comedy will be much more interested in simulating the PZM brain.

Posted by: Escuerd | August 22, 2010 11:47 PM

Jason A. @ 207

Are you asking if I really believe that the original has a history that can be (in principle) traced to childhood while the copy does not? Yes. I don't understand why that's controversial to you. Things have histories. Deal with it.

Well, as long as we're talking about a hypothetical identical, particle-for-particle copy, no, they don't have histories, because, as has been pointed out, elementary particles don't have individual histories. They're indistinguishable, even in principle.

Posted by: Escuerd | August 22, 2010 11:49 PM

Jason A.:

Escuerd, do you think that, if you and your copy were alive at the same time, you would experience both lives at the same time? You could see what both bodies are seeing?

No.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 22, 2010 11:51 PM

Well, as long as we're talking about a hypothetical identical, particle-for-particle copy, no, they don't have histories, because, as has been pointed out, elementary particles don't have individual histories. They're indistinguishable, even in principle.

I see. So you believe that if you stood there with me and watched my clone being built on the other side of the room, the instant they finished the clone you wouldn't be able to tell which one was new?

And for pete's sake, if the copy is identical, what's the point? It's got (roughly) the same life expectancy as the original, right?

Posted by: Jason A. | August 22, 2010 11:53 PM

Escuard #217 - then they're different individuals, right? They're not the same person.

Posted by: Josh, "Raquel Dommage," Porte-parole Gay Official | August 22, 2010 11:54 PM

Do you think that's something real, or just how we think of ourselves because it's easier?

1. Yes, I think it's real. The thing sitting here in Vermont is not the same entity as the thing that might be created tomorrow based on my brain pattern.

2. Even if it isn't "real" in that sense, what difference would it make? We are not capable of perceiving ourselves in any other way.

Why are you acting as if the proponents of my position are the ones positing something strange or extraordinary? Why do you seem to think your position is not far-fetched?

Posted by: pieroforno | August 22, 2010 11:58 PM

Jason:

Okay. But I don't think Tis Himself was talking about immortality in his post that you quoted me as evidence against. And even so, I made it clear in other posts that I'm not sure whether immortality is a good idea or not, just that I thought it was a tougher question than some gave credit.

I also made it clear in other posts that if the only disagreement with Weil concerned the time scale, then the vitriol was unjustified, and hence that there appeared to be deeper reasons for the aggressiveness, like perhaps rejecting the idea of immortality out of hand, and the post I quoted was a good example.

I don't think biological immortality is a good idea either. It is actually impossible, given the limited resources available not only on Earth, but in the whole universe. That's why I don't see the point of cryogenics and similar stuff. If we ever attain immortality it will be as information-processing systems, not as biological entities. Why shouldn't that be a good idea? After all, I know I have a body only because my brain tells me so. A simulated brain could perfectly well supply me with a surrogate simulated body: how would I be able to tell the difference? And in any case, if we were able to duplicate a brain, maybe we would be able to concoct better ways of being than our current bodies afford us.

Posted by: Josh, "Raquel Dommage," Porte-parole Gay Official | August 22, 2010 11:58 PM

Why do you conclude that this has anything at all to do with your consciousness, though?

Lolwut? If it's not those things, what is it? Do you think there's some magic vaporous Joshness that just happens to be floating where my brain is?

Posted by: Escuerd | August 23, 2010 12:02 AM

Lolwut? If it's not those things, what is it? Do you think there's some magic vaporous Joshness that just happens to be floating where my brain is?

It's the information stored in the matter. Nothing magical or vaporous about it.

If your consciousness is in the structure of the brain, the logical implication is that copying that structure is copying that consciousness.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 23, 2010 12:04 AM

Interliminal:

As Tulse points out, you don't freak out that you've been replaced every time you wake up in the morning, or if you get conked on the head and find yourself in the hospital.

However, if that happened, it wouldn't matter to the 'you' that woke up, and given that you also wouldn't be able to tell the difference, not worrying about it is the right thing to do. Of course, the dead 'you' wouldn't worry either, being dead.

Posted by: Escuerd | August 23, 2010 12:08 AM

1. Yes, I think it's real. The thing sitting here in Vermont is not the same entity as the thing that might be created tomorrow based on my brain pattern.

Why is the particular piece of matter that makes you up important to your identity?

2. Even if it isn't "real" in that sense, what difference would it make? We are not capable of perceiving ourselves in any other way.

We're dealing with a hypothetical situation in which it does matter. In practice, since we're not making copies of ourselves anytime in the foreseeable future, it doesn't.

Why are you acting as if the proponents of my position are the ones positing something strange or extraordinary? Why do you seem to think your position is not far-fetched?

Because the implications of your position are that there is something special about the particular matter that makes you up rather than the structure in it. I don't know about you, but the only basis for my judging my consciousness to be continuous from one moment to the next is my subjective feeling of it. I don't think there's anything more to it than that, and if the copy has everything that matters about me (i.e. the structure), then what's the difference?

Posted by: Escuerd | August 23, 2010 12:11 AM

Indeed. That's what we've been saying all along. You've made a copy of that consciousness, which can now live its life as its own person.

No one is disagreeing that they diverge after copying.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 23, 2010 12:14 AM

I don't know about you, but the only basis for my judging my consciousness to be continuous from one moment to the next is my subjective feeling of it.

Great, then you agree with us that this is not the road to immortality, since your subjective experience is that you've produced a copy with your personality, and now you will die.

if the copy has everything that matters about me (i.e. the structure), then what's the difference?

That subjective experience you pay lip service to, that we've been trying to get you to understand this whole time. Your subjective experience is that there's a new guy around with your personality. This is identical to your experience if we brainwashed a person to have your personality, or hell, hired a really skilled actor to pretend he had your personality.
Your clone's subjective experience is a different story.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 23, 2010 12:18 AM

I think you're right, Josh

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 23, 2010 12:22 AM

So why conclude that there's some different essence of you-ness that the copy wouldn't have?

There is no difference in "me-ness" that the copy wouldn't have. And I never once said or implied otherwise. Empirically he would be exactly me, an exact duplicate of me. No external observer will be able to tell the difference. He may not be able to tell the difference if I were not present.

But he is still not me, because I will not experience the universe in his body through his senses. If I am destroyed, before or after his creation, I will not wake up in his body. I will simply be dead.

He will be a replication of me - my descendent. But he will not be me.

There is nothing, nothing, relevant about "essense" or "me-ness" or whatever other synonym you want to come up with. The copy can have all of these things but it will not be the original. Because the difference between the copy and the original can always be perceived from the perspective of the original.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 23, 2010 12:25 AM

Ugh. You can't get past the idea that it's only possible to have one future self. You seem to imagine that your consciousness is something separate from the information that's contained in your brain, something that would stay there, indivisible, with the matter in the original brain.

No, you just want to have it both ways. You say you understand they're separate individuals, but then you go on and on about how I don't recognize they're the same person.

You seem to imagine that your consciousness is something separate from the information that's contained in your brain, something that would stay there, indivisible, with the matter in the original brain.

No I don't. I'm talking about the subjective experience. Of course both individuals have a consciousness, and they both have the same personality. The new one having been created through copying. We've been saying that all along. The consciousness is a subjective experience of self, and they both have different consciousnesses. You've admitted as much yourself. Creating an identical consciousness with the appearance of continuity is not the same thing as actual continuity.

Posted by: eigenperson | August 23, 2010 12:29 AM

I was going to respond carefully to you, Josh, but what I'm going to say here basically goes straight to the important issue, so I hope you'll forgive me for not writing directly to you.

Jason A. #207:

You know exactly what I mean, the person, the consciousness.

Look, if we were talking about intelligent, conscious computer programs, there would be many different things that we could consider candidates to be the AI's "consciousness":

1. The algorithm which, when run, produces the AI.
2. The code that implements the algorithm in a particular language.
3. The data (including text as well as stack/heap) stored in a particular process (i.e., "struct proc" in Unix terms).
4. The instance itself (of course, you can have two processes with identical data running on the same machine, with different PIDs).
5. The actual physical computer (as defined by its structure) that currently has a process implementing the AI in memory.
6. The actual physical computer (as defined by the exact atoms that make it up) that currently has a process implementing the AI in memory.

There are probably other candidates than these ones that I could think of, but the fact is if you were to refer to the "consciousness" of an AI program, I would have no idea which of these you were referring to. I do not think it is in the slightest obvious what a "consciousness" is.

(WARNING: The following contains technical discussion that might be out of place here. I'm sorry -- I'm trying to be precise, but the odds are that in the process I'm taking the discussion places that many people can't follow. I just don't see any other way to cut through the philosophy. Again, I apologize.)

Now, 1 and 2 are probably NOT very much like a consciousness, in the sense that they don't have state. (Nevertheless, they are potentially reasonable gestures at a concept of "identity" for AI, which is why I included them. They fail utterly to handle duplication issues, though, so I have to reject them.)

3, 4, 5, and 6 are where things get more interesting. If you take possibility 3 to be the definition, then you have the following situation: Two processes can be in memory at the same time with the same data (and hence the same consciousness, if we accept definition 3). But, owing to the fact that they are receiving different inputs over time, they soon diverge to have different data (and different consciousnesses). So this probably isn't the best definition, because you reject the possibility of divergence. By contrast, if I had to choose a definition, this is the one I would choose.

Definition 4 seems pretty close to what you want. Here the processes are identified by something other than their data. In particular, two processes with identical data can be distinguished on several bases: they are stored in different locations in memory; they have different PIDs; etc. In particular, if a process makes the fork syscall, it is very clear that the parent is the "original" and the child is a mere "copy". So if the original process decides to call fork and then have the parent exec /bin/true, the consciousness of the original is destroyed. My objection to this is that I don't think it preserves the properties of consciousness. In particular, if the kernel decides to move the process to a different part of memory, surely that shouldn't destroy the consciousness of the AI. (Especially because the kernel will do this while the process is asleep -- i.e. in complete stasis!) Similarly, if the kernel decides to change the process's PID, that shouldn't destroy the consciousness of the program either (at least, assuming that the program never calls getpid(2)). So in short, the kernel can take these two actions (moving the process in memory, and then changing its PID) that lead to the exact same result as the process calling fork and execing something. In one case, the AI loses consciousness. In the other case, it doesn't. This shouldn't happen.

Definitions 5 and 6 have two problems. For one thing, it's not clear what happens when a single computer is simultaneously running two intelligent programs. But more importantly, does a program's consciousness survive hibernate(8)? Again, it seems like it should -- at least to me. But if it does, then you could hibernate the machine, put the disk into another machine, and start it up, thereby transferring the consciousness of the program -- but you could just as well have copied the disk in the meantime. Under definition 5, the copy and the original have the same identity, leading to the duplication problem. Under definition 6, they are different, but now consciousness is adhering magically to specific electrons, something which you have stated that you reject.

In short, I don't see what definition of consciousness there is that does what YOU want. While I selected Definition 3 as the one that I want, it's not really right because it doesn't properly allow for changes over time, so there isn't one that does what I want either.

As a result, I'm not sure that there really is such a thing as consciousness at all. If there is, I certainly don't have the imagination to come up with exactly what it is. There is also the very serious problem that it is impossible to empirically determine whether a particular definition is correct. (Even asking a "duplicated" individual yields no meaningful information -- the duplicate's opinions are no better informed than anyone else's. At best, the duplicate could say something to the effect that "I remember being the original." That doesn't mean that the duplicate is CORRECT in that assertion.)

Whether consciousness is well-defined or not, I certainly don't think that it's obvious what it is, as you seem to be assuming.

Posted by: Escuerd | August 23, 2010 12:30 AM

Creating an identical consciousness with the appearance of continuity is not the same thing as actual continuity.

Is there any sense of continuity that's relevant other than the psychological one?

Posted by: eigenperson | August 23, 2010 12:32 AM

Sigh -- there was bound to be a mistake in a post that long. In #4, for "instance," read "process object".

Posted by: Amphiox, OM | August 23, 2010 12:36 AM

If I really could be functionally immortal (well, let's say several hundred million years, anything longer than that and I'm probably bound to get struck by lightning or hit by a meteor or eaten by a shark or something. . . .) I'd run evolution experiments (or hell, just observe it) in real-time. I don't think I could ever get bored doing that.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 23, 2010 12:38 AM

Is there any sense of continuity that's relevant other than the psychological one?

Again, whose psychological one. You're still ignoring that there are two individuals here.

Posted by: Escuerd | August 23, 2010 12:43 AM

Again, whose psychological one. You're still ignoring that there are two individuals here.

Yes, there are.

Yahoo-mess described it well, I think with this:

The "clone's" experience is that that guy in meatspace is sure going to hate dying in 20 years, and it was a great idea to get out of there while he still could.

Basically, there are two people whose minds have the same past.

Posted by: Escuerd | August 23, 2010 12:46 AM

Just a little while ago you were telling me that we couldn't distinguish which version had the physical history and which had the implanted memories because the copy was so perfect that it was impossible even in principle. Now you're telling me it's impossible to make a perfect copy even in principle.

Yeah, it was an irrelevant distraction. I shouldn't have even humored it, since there's no way to get to that state.

Suffice to say that it remains true that it's impossible to make an exact copy of a system down to the quantum level and also that the constituents of matter, below a certain level, are indistinguishable from one another.

Posted by: Escuerd | August 23, 2010 12:48 AM

Yeah, it was an irrelevant distraction. I shouldn't have even humored it, since there's no way to get to that state.

That is to say, by bringing back the idea of an exact quantum copy in which the original is still intact, I might as well have been talking about what would happen if I traveled back in time and killed my grandfather. GIGO. Whoops.

Posted by: eigenperson | August 23, 2010 12:54 AM

#250:

Neither do I, actually, I think consciousness is a poorly defined concept, like spirit. But you know what we're talking about for the sake of this discussion, the subjective experience of self. If your tactic is to simply try to hover over definitions till you derail everything enough to claim we can't answer, count me not interested in playing.

I mean, fundamentally, none of this is science. It's purely philosophy. We can argue about teleporters and brain transplants until the cows come home without being able to perform any kind of experiment to illuminate the situation. I think we're both in agreement about what copies, originals, duplicates, and so on would say and believe in any given situation. The argument is about something that occurs -- or doesn't -- instantaneously and unobservably. That's not a scientific argument -- it's a philosophical one.

And philosophy is nothing but definitions, in a very real way.

I know what "subjective experience of self" is, as do you, but only in an experiential way. That certainly doesn't give me enough information about it to reason on. And it also doesn't give me enough information to talk about situations as remote to my experience as duplication. I can't even imagine what it would be like to experience brain damage, for example, and what we're talking about seems far more remote than that. I'm trying to talk about definitions because that's the only way I think we have a hope of getting anywhere. If we were talking about something where one could perform experiments, then I'd say, "To hell with the definitions -- let's go to the lab!" But there is no experiment possible here. There wouldn't be even if we had a transporter.

Possibly because consciousness is simply something that does not carry into computer-analogy, in spite of how much Kurzweilians want it to.

(On the other hand, if you ARE rejecting the possibility of a conscious program, then I think our concepts of consciousness are just hopelessly divergent.)

Posted by: Jason A. | August 23, 2010 12:59 AM

But I think it has to. Unless you're rejecting the possibility of a conscious program, then there can be such a thing as a conscious program.

Well, a program is programmed, it's just following (possibly very complicated) directions. Does consciousness need to have some method for 'thinking' things that it wasn't programmed to think? Especially tough when we consider the our own consciousness - we make decisions before we're consciously aware of them, then the 'consciousness' part is the story we tell ourselves to justify them.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/U7IeAfwuu4r_eiZ7WXqe4xcXSmXL#7e2fa | August 23, 2010 1:04 AM

No, he only thinks he has. This is an important point.

No, he has. (After I explain I want to know why you think his experience is somehow "false".)

I assume you agree that the guy in the computer is fully conscious, right? He's not deficient in any way, for all intents and purposes he is a full human being with full mental capabilities. This means he has a qualitative experience of "yellow" and "heavy" and has robust qualitative memories (episodic memories) of "having gone to the park when he was eight and skinning his knee". His mind isn't a list of facts uploaded from original guy. He feels, he loves, he's self-conscious, etc.

Now what could that guy's memory about going to the park when he was eight be referring to? According to you, Jason, I'd assume you would say it's a "false memory", the same as if I had a memory implanted, because he wasn't actually there.

But I can't see how the new guy's experience or mental states differ in any way from the old guy that would cause us to say, "no, he only thinks he's continuous" rather than "he is continuous".

Here are all the similarities between the two:

1. The new guy's mental states are all based on mental states the original-at-time-of-transfer (gonna abbrev. it ATT from here on out) had. They were copied straight over and so were caused by the original's mind ATT.

2. The structure of the mind, memories, personality traits, tendencies, means of moving body, etc. were all copied over with no change.

3. The guy's subjective sense of self tells him that he was the same guy who went to the park when he was eight

4. This subjective sense of self was caused by original guy ATT because of 1 & 2, "sense of self" is a mental state instantiated in a brain structure that was carried over into the new guy.

All of this holds for the original guy: his mental states are caused by previous ones, his mental & brain structure are the same, his sense of self tells him he was the same before he went under anesthesia, and his sense of self was caused by previous mental states he had. So there doesn't seem to be a difference between original guy and new guy except that they have different instances of awareness.

Could you tell me where you disagree? I want to know why you think the new guy's experience is "false" and the old guy's isn't.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 23, 2010 1:11 AM

Or, if I brainwash some random person to have your personality, that person is now you?

Posted by: Jason A. | August 23, 2010 1:14 AM

Holy shit, I just gave reply #266! I've been here for too long.

Posted by: eigenperson | August 23, 2010 1:22 AM

#263 Jason A.:

Well, a program is programmed, it's just following (possibly very complicated) directions. Does consciousness need to have some method for 'thinking' things that it wasn't programmed to think? Especially tough when we consider the our own consciousness - we make decisions before we're consciously aware of them, then the 'consciousness' part is the story we tell ourselves to justify them.

On the other hand, when I say "thinking things that it wasn't programmed to think," I might mean something different from what you mean. For example, I would say that Copycat, for example, is fairly close to thinking things it wasn't programmed to think. (It's not there yet, in my view, but if Prof. Hofstadter's group had worked on it continuously for the last 20 years rather than abandoning it, I think it might well have gotten there.) Nevertheless, it is just a program following very complicated directions (which happen to include random number generation, but that shouldn't matter).

#264 Cerberus:
I congratulate you on your rout of all those straw men (and, I hasten to add, all too many very non-straw Kurzweilites also). But I think you should consider reading the thread again once you have finished celebrating your glorious victory. We're not talking about "clones with your memories." We're talking about a copy that's identical down to the last atom (or however small you have to go to get an identical copy). The fact that you wrote "(what are you, in love with your specific DNA patterns?)" suggests that you didn't understand this fact. And suggesting that linguistics, of all things, holds the solution to this problem is utterly absurd. At least to my mind.

Incidentally, I'm very much NOT a Kurzweilite. I personally believe that Kurzweil is a peddler of pseudoscientific (and pseudostatistical) bullcrap on a level comparable to that of Rhonda Byrne and John Edward. And I have absolutely no plans of surviving my death through the creation of a copy (real or virtual) -- something which, even if it is possible in theory, is never going to be possible in practice. (In fact, I find the idea somewhat horrifying.)

So if your assessment of my arguments is based on what you believe to be my reasons for making the arguments, you might want to reconsider that assessment. You suggested that the reason I believe what I do is because I don't want to see. That's just false.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/U7IeAfwuu4r_eiZ7WXqe4xcXSmXL#7e2fa | August 23, 2010 1:30 AM

Also, Cerberus, I love you and what you post here, but goddammit, I am not a Kurzweilite. I specifically abhor any attempts at immortality. I am agnostic right now on the very idea of mind-transfer because I am fully aware the mind isn't something you can lift up and out of your head and plonk down somewhere else. Your mind primarily exists to move your body around and do mundane shit like poop and fuck; I'm under no delusion that I'm a special brain-cloud who should live forever.

I'm interested in these questions because they're what I studied for four years in college (my degrees amount to basically "philosophy of cognitive science") & they're things I hope to go on and do graduate level work in. I find this stuff compelling, if you don't that's fine, but please don't belittle the people that do by equating us with charlatans. (Daniel Dennett wrote a series of papers on this shit for cracker's sake.)

--Interliminal

Posted by: Jason A. | August 23, 2010 1:32 AM

If you are brainwashing someone and inserting my mental stuffs in them, then yes, I'd have to say that person is now continuous in every sense with my past. It is not continuous with the me that exists NOW as I live through my life, though.

Actually, what I should have stuck with because it's more on the point I want to make, if I implant a memory (like alien abduction), we agree that's a false memory, right?

And, also, if I implant a memory of something that really happened, but happened to someone else?

What if it was a whole bunch of their memories? All of them?

Is it different somehow because we're implanting these memories into the new body? Forget a physically identical copy, for this to be worthwhile the new body has to be different so it can live longer. Is it because it's a blank slate?

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/U7IeAfwuu4r_eiZ7WXqe4xcXSmXL#7e2fa | August 23, 2010 1:53 AM

False memories are really tricky, this actually gets more into my territory because the stuff I like about identity problems is the memory stuff and I am pretty familiar with the psych literature about memory.

The point I was pushing above about psychological continuity gets really tricky because in real life, it's in part established in normal people by the fact that they have a coherent structure of memories about themselves and regularly make plans for their future. I'll try to address you carefully here because I think you're getting at somewhere where we have similar viewpoints and any differences are really subtle.

Oh and to clarify, I'm talking about memories with an experiential quality here, not factual memories or recognition memory or that sort of thing.

Actually, what I should have stuck with because it's more on the point I want to make, if I implant a memory (like alien abduction), we agree that's a false memory, right?

And, also, if I implant a memory of something that really happened, but happened to someone else?

What if it was a whole bunch of their memories? All of them?

This is where it gets weirder. If you had, I dunno, half of your memories replaced, I'd seriously start to argue that you aren't a coherent person at that point. There's no narrative that can make sense of your life history. Subjective experience is in part built up from your sense of your past (you have to learn to see yourself as having mental processes, a mental history, etc., there's a serious argument that children don't do this until about 4 or so). So if you had half memories from "your" past and half memories from somebody else's, I don't think there'd really be a coherent self involved in order to have experiences. At some tipping point I would say that you were now continuous with the other person, you'd now have the experience of the other person but with a couple weird memories stuck in there from the original.

Is it different somehow because we're implanting these memories into the new body? Forget a physically identical copy, for this to be worthwhile the new body has to be different so it can live longer. Is it because it's a blank slate?

The blank slate helps because it gets rid of certain issues about the continuation of the previous person (just like killing off the original obscures the issue in the transfer cases). I hope you can get some answer to the rest out of what I typed above???

Seriously, read the Swampman thing if you haven't.

--Interliminal

Posted by: Numad | August 23, 2010 2:00 AM

"The 'clone's' experience is that that guy in meatspace is sure going to hate dying in 20 years, and it was a great idea to get out of there while he still could.[...]It will suck to be the physically-continuous guy because he's going to die, and from his perspective he just made a clone. The guy in the computer thinks it is all awesome."

Honestly, you just make it sound like gigantically underwhelming result for something that would (if this is considered on any practical level) have to be researched for generations, to be treated like a Holy Grail as far as ressources and time allocations go, both on the civilization level and on the level of the individual who then decides to go through that process.

I can't help but think that the original meatspace persons, being aware of this, might just tell those duplicates to go get lost before they are ever created.

And then they'd reproduce biologically and work on their philosophical approach to mortality.

Materially, the end result for the original is the same. Psychologically, I have to admit that I wouldn't find that dismissing the importance of my own subjective experience while at the same time putting a lot of effort into making sure that there's always an identical copy of me around so that she'd feel like she's immortal would be very gratifying. I'd just die feeling like I'd been ridiculously self important and that someone else, who thinks that they're me, would live on to be ridiculously self important.

It just makes the parts of immortality achieved through more creative forms of reproduction, through creation and through preservation of knowledge seem much more meaningful.

Not that flawless, immortal duplicates aren't cool by themselves.

Apologies to everybody who's considering this as a pure thought experiment. I just think that if something is being presented as desirable, the cost of it and the "why" matter.

Posted by: Cerberus, unnatural product of en-OMnomnom-ification | August 23, 2010 2:07 AM

Hell the whole problem is a common one that's easy to fall into, which is the "bias of the observer", which is assuming that what is observed is always necessarily the same as what is. Generally, observation is a wonderful tool that reveals great truths, but it can also be prey to distortions. It can mean that something can "seem" one way to an observer while being completely different for the participations, much like how when watching a football game, something can so clearly "seem" to be an obvious foul or an obvious dive based on the angle of the camera following it, even though in reality it was something else.

This is also the reason why there are often "double-blind" experiments to confirm certain details and experiments can be looked into by other labs to confirm that what was seen was actually what was going on.

In this case, fooling the outside observer doesn't change the reality of the construction and the necessary duplication and divergence path it must follow simply by the narrative regardless of details. Assuming primacy of the observer's ability to be deceived is to preface lies before reality.

This would be as noted before, a classic blunder. One of hubris in assuming that one's role as the overriding scientist trumps the reality of what is occurring.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/U7IeAfwuu4r_eiZ7WXqe4xcXSmXL#7e2fa | August 23, 2010 2:18 AM

Cerberus, this is really tricky to explain, but I'm going to try to make my points clearly so hopefully you can see our side's point.

1. I understand your hesitance, because I personally think there is something really sketchy about the idea of mind-transfer to begin with. I don't think minds are really separable from bodies. Any mind-transfer would have to include a functionally equivalent body-transfer and some sort of environment simulation as well. But if we're going to assume that this is possible...

2. The point I am trying to make is that "subjective experience", or "I-ness", whatever you want to call it, is predicated on having a continuous past. So "you" as the particular sort of subjective experience that you have could be presumably replicated, and the replica would have just as much claim on being the same person that went into the mind-transfer facility as the "original" does. It's because I'm not a dualist that I think that whatever makes up you-ness, that experiential kernel or whatever you want to call it, could be replicated. In my philosophical viewpoint, the replica fulfills every possible criteria for being a future Cerberus as the meatspace one does.

As I said, it would suck to be the original, and from the original's perspective after the procedure is done nothing special happened. So there doesn't seem to be a point in an important way. But in another way, it's sort of like going to sleep and waking up in two places. Something important is being duplicated here, and I'd say that what is necessary for a continuous subjective experience, a sense of self over time continuous with the original guy, has been duplicated.

I think the intuition that is leading people to say, no, the copy is a fake, is that "subjective experience" can't be copied/duplicated, that in order for it to count as such it needs to be The Original One. My argument is that there isn't any way to make sense of what "original" means when we're talking about subjective experience that would matter for these cases.

You've changed a lot since you were seven, but you're still counted as the same person and have the same continuity of experience. I would say that the copy can claim everything about his past before the transfer that you can claim about your continuity with your seven-year-old self.

--Interliminal

Posted by: Citizen of the Cosmos | August 23, 2010 2:29 AM

That has to be the worst and most simplistic "rebuttal" possible. It ignores all the progress in AI made so far. The Blue Brain project means nothing?

Obviously raw computing power is not enough, but no one has ever said so. Why the rebuttal focuses on that alone is a mystery.

Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/U7IeAfwuu4r_eiZ7WXqe4xcXSmXL#7e2fa | August 23, 2010 2:46 AM

Cerberus,

I'm not taking the outside perspective, rather, I'm taking the internal perspective of the copy and saying, "I'm Interliminal! You can't tell me I'm not! If you are going to say that my memories are fake and I'm living a lie, you need to have damn good reason to do it!".

Anyway, I sympathize with you on the personal identity thought examples because they drove me up the wall when I was in school & took a class on personhood. I always say that Theseus' ship is my least favorite thought example (the ancient version of these identity problems), because who cares about moving boats around?

I'm sure though that you can admit that thought examples can be useful, though? The point of these examples is not really to come to a definitive answer on whether a copy is the same person as the original, but to explore further what makes a person the same person over time, what lets you claim you are "you", why you are the same person now as you were 15 years ago, etc. They're limit cases; they force us to figure out our own stance on these things.

It's useful, for example, for some of the stuff I research. One of the questions I have been preoccupied with is "when do children develop a sense of a private mental life and having subjective experiences?" Turns out this is a massively complicated question & has to do with when children develop memory, narrative competence, a sense of time, theory of mind, etc. Every time I look at a new piece of literature I have to think, "how are they using 'mind' here? what does this mean for development of personal identity? does the fact that children understand imagination fairly early mean that they understand private experience?" And so on.

The direct application of a lot of these wacko thought experiments is in the ethical & legal realm. Can and should we hold an elderly Nazi responsible for his crimes of youth? What if he's a different person now? Your answers about Captain Kirk affect your answers about the Nazi because they draw on the same concepts about personhood. It's just that Kirk is more fun to discuss & less likely to get you slapped.

--Interliminal

Posted by: KG | August 23, 2010 3:05 AM

I think there is a conceptual confusion shown by many posters on this thread due to essentialism - the belief, in this case, that there always has to be a right answer to the question "Is individual A the same as individual B?". If it ever becomes possible to "upload" effectively all the memories and personality characteristics from a "meat person" into a computer (whether destructively or non-destructively), then we will have to decide how to talk about the "computer person". If the uploading is destructive, or if (as in Gregory Greenwood's scenario) there is a piece-by-piece replacement of the brain with computer hardware - or bits of brain from genetically modified pigs, or whatever - then we will surely say "Yes, this is the same person as the meat original". (Gregory, I think you're just wrong in saying that at some point you would "lose yourself" in this process - if that were so, you'd "lose yourself" if all your atoms were replaced over time by normal physiological processes - I don't know whether this actually happens, as is often asserted, the point is, no-one would say you were no longer the same person if it did.) If the uploading is non-destructive, we could either say: "This is a new person, but with the memories of the original up to the time of uploading", or "these were both the same person at the instant after uploading, but immediately began to diverge". There's no "essential you" in the meat person that ensures that the first is the "correct" answer.

Posted by: tecben | August 23, 2010 4:05 AM

I have been reading your blog for a long time and I,m sad to say I'm unsubscribing. I can't stand that you are taking cheap shots and talking like a child instead of letting the facts talk for them self. I expect to hear demeaning talk from the other side. I'm surprised that Ray even responded to you.

Posted by: danielm | August 23, 2010 4:36 AM

"oh, no, I wouldn't want immortality, I'd be bored!"

..so, what, you can't make a decision on your own? If you've got the ability to "live forever" (barring accidents and injury or something that can't otherwise be dealt with) then what? You're being told by the universe you're not allowed to stop? I don't get it.

If you had the capacity to live as long as you wanted, you'd have to, of necessity, have the innate understanding that when you didn't want to live any longer, you'd have to make death happen to yourself.

If you're not capable of making up your own mind about such a thing, then stay mortal. This whole "oh no, boohoo, I am now immortal and I must bitch about it for all eternity" just makes you sounds like Lestat.

Death isn't something to be scared of - it isn't even anything to be conquered. What we should try to avoid is premature, unwanted death and suffering. If you can't understand this, then you're not "ready" to live forever.

Right now our civilization isn't ready for people who don't age - we still have those who think popping out kids at every opportunity is their duty, that prolonging the suffering of somebody who would be dead and will never wake up is essential, that life in general (and specifically human life) is such a unique snowflake that the universe itself mandates that safe, sane procedures to stop conception be unavailable, whilst generally turning a blind eye to the suffering of those caught in the aftermath.

...and you're mad because somebody like kurzweil gets misrepresented in a magazine article?

There's plenty of nevers to go around that are now history, so let's agree that it's the timescale kurzweil is wrong on rather than the possibility...

Go read "Harvest of Stars" for an excellent take on how to deal with your robotic clone living on whilst you and your original meat body dies. I think we're going to have this "who is me" argument for a long time even after forms of "uploading" become available. Humans are very "I" centric, when in reality a human is mass colony of so many other forms of life all attempting to work in unison, even the mind isn't this "man sitting at a desk" type of thing, so it's no wonder people who don't get that have a problem with even the idea of uploading.

Posted by: sobaku.no.gaara | August 23, 2010 4:43 AM

The funny part is that for the "singularity" to be in any proper sense a singularity at all, one would assume that Kurzweil means it to be a pole. However, exp is holomorphic in the whole complex plane (and analytic as an RVF), so it has, by definition, no singularities (and therefore no poles, which exhibit the behavior one would expect from a singularity).

Posted by: KG | August 23, 2010 5:04 AM

Stephen, Stephen, how many times must the faithful followers of the Prophet Kurzweil (May He Be Uploaded) tell you: the exponential acceleration only applies to information technology - which of course develops completely independently of anything else. Its rapid recent development has nothing to do with the enormous and rapidly increasing resources poured into it - it's a law of the universe. Oh, and don't let the fact that the Prophet Kurzweil himself applies it to arbitrarily selected milestones in evolutionary history confuse you.

Posted by: Birger Johansson | August 23, 2010 5:15 AM

Gregory greenwood @ 56
[it would be possible to] "replace different parts of the brain one peice at a time" ..[ ]..you would encounter a 'cut off point' when you suddenly stopped being you, or if the process would be so incremental that you would lose yourself without even realising it. "

Stanislaw Lem wrote a story on the topic in the sixties in the anthology "Nacht und Schimmel"
-I think the story was called "Do you exist Mr. Jones?" (a racing driver had had pieces of himself replaced over time, but was unable to pay the cost. Therefore the cybernetic company sued to get the components back, arguing that the diriver no longer was alive).

Posted by: John Morales | August 23, 2010 5:25 AM

[meta]

tecben

[1] I have been reading your blog for a long time and I,m sad to say I'm unsubscribing. [2] I can't stand that you are taking cheap shots and talking like a child instead of letting the facts talk for them self. [3] I expect to hear demeaning talk from the other side. [4] I'm surprised that Ray even responded to you.

1. Your choice; your loss.

2. Terrible. I wonder how you got through that "long time", with PZ so cheap and childish.

3. Yes. And?

4. Ah well, you've unsubscribed.
No more surprises for you.

Bye!

Posted by: https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawkt6Nfb5ZW2CGtg6XZkjdIvayuJiC-CFIE | August 23, 2010 5:35 AM

I think it's delicious that someone called Cerberus is taking on the question of personal identity.

That aside, it's an interesting question, if we can divorce it from Kurzweil's dodgy predictions, and there is surely no "basic reality" about it until we know more about consciousness and bodies.

Choosing either side of the question could be the product of dualistic thinking. That is, neither necessarily is so.

As far as I can work out, I am only "I" in that it is a constantly renewed "I" that makes a narrative out of past and present events. That is, the "I" now is not really the "I" of the past, it just interprets it as such, as a narrative. This happens continuously, but the identity I feel with the "I" of a minute ago is probably just the illusion of narrative.

Now what requirements are needed in terms of a body is an open question. I get a new body all the time. I have an altered different body image when I pick up a golf club or crush buildings with my robot arm. It's interesting, and I might need some meatbag (btw, I love that robot in KOTOR) parts beside my meat brain in order to experience as an "I", but I don't see it as "basic reality" that there is any 'THIS' body that I need (like George Washington's ax).

Posted by: Andreas Johansson | August 23, 2010 5:52 AM

We're meat, perhaps irreducibly meat, but the interesting parts of the issue don't hinge on whether the duplicate is cybernetic, biological, or whatever.

Posted by: KG | August 23, 2010 6:05 AM

I have been reading your blog for a long time and I,m sad to say I'm unsubscribing. I can't stand that you are taking cheap shots and talking like a child instead of letting the facts talk for them self. - tecben

Well, PZ isn't all that respectful when commenting on the views of Christians, Muslims, Newage wooists, etc. I guess you though it was OK as long as it wasn't your religion that was being called out for the bilge it is.

Posted by: John Morales | August 23, 2010 6:27 AM

Googlemess id=AItOawkt6Nfb5ZW2CGtg6XZkjdIvayuJiC-CFIE, that's why I said "sure". :)

--

PS When I get virtualised, I want tentacles.

Posted by: rantingbob | August 23, 2010 7:43 AM

I've found reading these comments both somewhat disappointing and a little close minded.

I hate the word impossible. Is it possible that at some point in the future we would be able to replicate the exact layout of the brain, or the the least someones personality and memories? I don't see that as being outside the realms of possibility.

Is it possible that we will be able to simulate a human brain, given that above information? With current technology no, at some point in the future? I don't see why not.

Given both of these things are feasible (even if a hugely long way off) I see no argument against the possibility of effectively transferring the conscience of a person into a simulation other than some kind of argument that there is more to the person than there physical makeup.

As someone has already pointed out, if your body is replaced, bit by bit with machinery that performs the exact same function at which point do you stop being you? Whats the cut off?

Likewise, if you successfully create an exact replica of yourself, memories, personality, the lot. They are you. If its because suddenly they don't have your body, okay then, lets say they have a copy of your body too, they are identical to you in every respect, are they you? The only argument I see against "yes" is some kind of "well there is some indivisible part of me not described by my biology", which effectively amounts to "i have a soul", which is clearly bullshit.

I've been getting this vibe like somehow the biological is considered sacrosanct, especially when it comes to the concept of self. I'll be honest, I don't quite get it.

Posted by: jack lecou | August 23, 2010 8:04 AM

OK, jumping in, and first things first, so there's no confusion:

- Kurzweil is a charlatan with an overinflated sense of the importance of his own mortality; and

- my guess is that transference of consciousness, atom-for-atom duplication, piecemeal replacement or even (human) biological immortality are all quite likely to be practical impossibilities (perhaps some less likely than others).

But, this continuity of conscious thing is kinda interesting as a thought experiment. I think I find myself firmly in the "continuity is an illusion, and after duplication there are two divergent people who used to be the same one, both with equal claim on continuity" camp.

Try it this way:

Suppose that it is the far future, and someone has actually figured out how to copy a consciousness into a computer somehow. In fact, imagine you are just such a consciousness: your past meat self/progenitor/whatever had the duplication procedure performed, and "you" have for some time been PID 22678 running on an otherwise conventional computer.

Your virtual brain/mind operates exactly the same as a meat one would, and regardless of whether your consciousness was continuous from your meat "original" (now long dead) or not, you certainly subjectively consider your digital self to have been continuous since at least the first boot. Every bit as continuous as your old meat counterpart used to consider himself. You are, for all intents and purposes, a being, with the same ongoing continuity of consciousness that any meat-based human being ever had.

Now:

1. Imagine that someone logs into your host computer and pauses execution of PID 22678 for a week.

- Are you still the same person when the process is resumed?

2. Imagine that your host computer gets a little overloaded, and your process is momentarily swapped to disk. Your process runs sluggishly and intermittently for a few minutes before service is fully restored. After this incident, your process resides in entirely different physical memory addresses than before, and is running on a different processor core.

- Are you still the same person?

3. Imagine that someone logs in, pauses execution, copies your program state into a new PID number, deletes the old process, and resumes the new one.

- Are you still the same person when that new process is resumed?

4. Imagine that someone logs into your host computer (A), pauses execution of your program, and copies all the memory pages and program state of PID 22678 over to another computer (B). They then tap a key and resume execution of both PID 22678, on computer A, and a "new" process, PID 123, with identical state, on machine B.

- Which one is "you"? Do you have to pick just one? Why? Is there any difference between the continuity of consciousness 'experienced' by PID 22678 and PID 123? If so, what is it? If PID 22678 is subsequently terminated, did "you" die? What if PID 123 is terminated instead? Is there any difference?

Posted by: MikeTheInfidel | August 23, 2010 8:19 AM

cafeeine @134

But isn't this just a historical bias ingrained into us from not understanding our biology? We aren't 100% the same person we were yesterday, and we won't be the same person tomorrow we are today. The difference is that the process that gets yesterday-me to today-me, to tomorrow-me, is a chemical one cobbled over the years through chance and natural selection, while the 'digitization' will be different, possibly even allowing for multiple instances of 'me' to exist at the same time, before they diverge. Assuming its possible, what makes one process better than the other?

My point was that consciousness itself is not a constant. We are under the illusion that we are the same thing we were in the past, when the matter that we were has changed. We continually create fresh copies of what we think of as ourselves and we're unaware of it because the process is invisible to our daily cognition.

Posted by: mick.long | August 23, 2010 8:27 AM

Just a thought, wouldn't it also be kind of horrific for your simulacrum, at least in it's early days.

None of your friends and family would accept the simulated you as being you, indeed the simuluated you wouldn't be able to accept the fact that it was you unless it knew no better.

All your childhood memories, all your past loves, losses and triumphs-are the lived experiences of someone else. The jarring horror of this discovery was touched on in Blade Runner and it wasn't pretty.

Frankly if we ever manage to concoct artificial intelligence I'd hope that we'd have the good sense and compassion to spare it all that angst and trauma.

Posted by: KG | August 23, 2010 8:42 AM

If there were a physically identical copy of your brain in another body, are you asserting that the continuous consciousness that you are is somehow now in both bodies? - Mike The Infidel

There is no right answer in such a case. If you mean that the copy just happened to be exactly the same, without any causal connection to the "original" (although that's even more implausible than most of the scenarios we've had), we'd probably say "no". If it was in some way actually copied, we might well say yes - although the two "yous" would immediately start to diverge. But there simply is no fact of the matter here.

BTW, you are not a "continuous consciousness" unless you want to say you would be a different person after recovery from coma, deep anaesthesia, or perhaps even deep sleep.

Posted by: Stephen Wells | August 23, 2010 8:56 AM

@320: Surely in that case either one is the real thing and one is the copy, or both are copies of the original (which is destroyed in the process).

Whether we care is a different question.

Anyway, the only relevant question regarding cloning is whether you'd attempt to seduce yourself.

Posted by: KingUber | August 23, 2010 9:37 AM

I don't care about uploading myself, I just want a robot wife :(

Posted by: mikerattlesnake | August 23, 2010 9:58 AM

Though the idea of nanomachines that are functionally analogous to brain cells and that slowly replace and mimic their behavior such that the result is imperceptible to both the individual and outside observers seems like a reasonable (if incredibly difficult and unlikely since even slight changes in our brain chemistry have perceptible effects) solution to this problem.

Posted by: KG | August 23, 2010 10:09 AM

Surely in that case either one is the real thing and one is the copy, or both are copies of the original (which is destroyed in the process).

Why "surely"? Suppose the duplicator temporarily produces a local split in spacetime (legs in the trousers of time) - so each individual has an equal claim to be "the original", shifts each individual sideways, then remerges the trouser legs? The original was not destroyed, and both individuals have equal claim.

Posted by: Shala | August 23, 2010 10:31 AM

Kurzweilians, just imagine what happens when you manage to upload the human brain as data. Everything's gone according to plan, but something has gone terribly wrong. Someone has already beat you to it, and is uploading his brain so no one can ignore his girth.

It's Gary. Gary Motherfucking Oak.

Posted by: mikerattlesnake | August 23, 2010 11:21 AM

@Tulse

RE: the first example

So, you have two confused individuals. If one dies, he does not wake up in the other one's brain. The topic is immortality through conciousness transfer, from this perspective you fail.

If you are arguing that it's possible to create a copy that is identical to outside observers, then you aren't positing anything new. We've already all agreed that that is a possibility. We've also argued that it is a meaningless, pointless, and, to some degree, cruel possibility.

Kurzweil's promise is imortality, but all he has provided is the template (and a rough one at that) for producing a being very, very much like us that could live a lot longer (I don't say forever because presumably the conciousness would have to be copied to new hardware somewhere down the line, causing another death for the entity that is copied).

If the promise is immortality for one's conciousness, you need to address how death and immortality are compatible, since the original conciousness will still experience death and will never wake up again, regardless of the exact copy running around.

Posted by: poke | August 23, 2010 11:54 AM

Tulse (#328):

Not transferred, but duplicated, just as computer files are duplicated on a hard drive. You don't argue that a file isn't the "original" if you defragment your hard drive, or move the file to another location, even though the magnetic material that represents that file has changed.

That's because computer files are defined according to human conventions. I can copy a file on a computer and have two copies of it and then delete the original and retain only the copy. This is done at the level of a set of representational conventions (i.e., in the file system or on my desktop). What happens at the hardware level is intentionally abstracted. So, if you want to use that as an analogy for copying people, you're stuck with your crypto-dualism again because you have to say there's some set of non-human 'natural' conventions (which is impossible) that define some sort of non-physical computer-file-style mind that can duplicated across many different physical brains.

Posted by: Jason A. | August 23, 2010 12:11 PM

Tulse, you're not addressing our point. We agree that, for the copy who wakes up, he will have the appearance of continued consciousness with the original and, if you were tricky enough with the conditions, nobody would be able to tell which was the copy - including the two people. We agree that they both now have identical consciousnesses (that will begin to diverge). The point is that identical consciousnesses aren't the same consciousness.

Posted by: jack lecou | August 23, 2010 1:12 PM

The point is that identical consciousnesses aren't the same consciousness.

I don't know what "the same" means. They're identical (initially), so that's not it. And nobody claims they're "the same" in the sense that they continue to mirror the same state. What I expect you mean is that what people have been calling the "continuity" of consciousness is broken in the copies. That only the physical original, should he still exist, can properly claim that "I was he".

But my argument, at least, is that the consciousness of all copies and the original are just as continuous with the original as the original would be with himself had nothing happened. That is to say: NOT AT ALL, because consciousness itself is an illusion, just an emergent property of the brains that "we" feel like we live in.

Again, suppose you already have a consciousness downloaded as a program in a computer somehow. If you pause the program's execution thread, duplicate its state to a new region of memory, zero out the old memory, then resume the thread in the new location, has anyone "died"? Is the new process the "same" as the old one or not? Does it matter if the new memory resides on a different computer or not?

Suppose you don't zero out the old memory, just start a duplicate process? Which thread is the "real" one with the continuous experience of consciousness?

Posted by: SteveM | August 23, 2010 1:45 PM

The point is that identical consciousnesses aren't the same consciousness.

As Spock says in the novel Spock must Die! when discussing the same subject, "That is a distinction without a difference".

[probably doesn't help the argument any, but I just like that line]

Posted by: SteveM | August 23, 2010 1:55 PM

You've missed the point -- what I'm arguing is that it's possible to create a copy that is identical subjectively to you. In the example we're discussing, when you wake up you think you are still "you", just with a coloured tattoo. There is no way for you to know through introspection that you are the "original" or a "copy", or even if an "original" still exists. So, if you woke up in this situation, would you honestly say "I don't know who I am", or would you say "I am mikerattlesnake in a strange situation"?

Dare I mention The Sixth Day? Whatever the other weaknesses of the movie, I thought the clone waking up to find a "copy" of himself taking over his family to be the perfect illustration of this problem.

Posted by: Tulse | August 23, 2010 3:15 PM

Well yes, of course they are separate physical individuals -- that's never been at issue. What is at issue is which one, if any, is "you"? Each one thinks he is "you", and has exactly the same experiences you would -- indeed, you don't even know if your body is the "original" or not. So, given that, on what principle do you say that a particular version isn't "you"?

My point is that our intuitive notion of personal identity as a dichotomous quality that attaches to one body doesn't work in these cases, and thus our intuitive notion isn't correct (or, at the very least, would have to be revised in the face of such possibilities).

Posted by: MultiTool | August 23, 2010 5:22 PM

Nature actually does hand us at least one real dualism. Not the silly one, but a distinction between signals and 'material objects'. It's not even remotely mystical.

The relevant difference is that a duplicated signal really is the same thing twice. When a light wave passes through a beam splitter, which output is the 'original' wave?

Pretty much any chain of cause and effect is a signal, which includes the arrangement of print on a page, sound waves, bits on a hard drive, or a chemical chain reaction. But it does not include ink, air, iron dust, or neurotransmitters.

When a mobile phone call/action potential reaches its destination, none of the matter or energy that started it is still with it. It could be a chain of dominoes.

Now define 'material object'.

Posted by: poke | August 23, 2010 7:02 PM

Tulse (#338):

Huh? I'm arguing that the mind is nothing more than the functioning of matter in a certain physical configuration -- arguing against that involves asserting some sort of dualism, that the mind is somehow attached to particular matter, or is something other than configurations of matter.

So, according to you, there's the brain and there's its 'functioning' and these are two separate things and the latter can be 'duplicated' in a way that a physical object cannot. Like I said, dualism.

Later you said...

Well yes, of course they are separate physical individuals -- that's never been at issue.

Well, then, if you're not a dualist, that should be the end of it, shouldn't it? They're separate physical individuals and that's all there is to it. Case closed. Nothing more need be said.

Posted by: tyrannogenius | August 23, 2010 7:47 PM

Aside from other issues, there is a weakness in the whole AI/CI idea of mind as information. If we really were computational intelligences, then all we could process (inside, ultimately) is programming, mathematical operations. That process cannot represent "material realness", a special property that makes some possible worlds real in a way that others aren't. (As modal realists have well argued.) So an AI can't even represent the thought, "I am real, in a real world, not just a numerical model in the Platonic mindscape" etc. (Similar point made by Jaron Lanier.)

Posted by: Kagato | August 23, 2010 9:30 PM

We agree that they both now have identical consciousnesses (that will begin to diverge). The point is that identical consciousnesses aren't the same consciousness.

Then you are using "identical" in a very bizarre way if you think it doesn't mean "same". Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you -- can you clarify for me?

I'm pretty sure he's using "identity" colloquially, and not in a formal logical manner. Technically that sentence should probably be reversed: there is no discernible difference between the two, but they are not logically identical (ie, the same entity).

In software terms, an object has an instance (A) residing at memory location X. If it is duplicated at memory location Y, it is a new instance (B). Every detail is the same between the two instances, but they are not identical -- A and B are equivalent but not equal.

If A and B were separate references pointing to the same memory location X, they are identical. There is only one instance. But A and B can't even be considered separate entities in this case.

Duplicating consciousness would seem to follow the first example. If you made a duplicate of Kagato¹, you'd get Kagato², a new instance. Note that you can't "transfer" an instance of Kagato, you can only create or destroy them. Kagato¹ remains Kagato¹ until he dies. Kagato² gets to live on (and good luck to him), and might not even know the difference; but that doesn't help the mind that was Kagato¹.

I don't know if it's truly possible to completely "suspend" the operation of a living brain and have consciousness resume. As far as I know, even in the deepest coma or anaesthesia, some level of brain activity always continues. We're analogue computers that never stop. Consciousness (in the sense of awareness) is suspended by sleep, coma, etc; but perhaps maintenance of the sentient mind is a "background process" that never halts.

In that case, perhaps a digital intelligence could not even achieve the same "continuity of consciousness" as the human brain; by its very nature, each operation is a discrete moment, isolated from every other. It's impossible to exactly reproduce pi digitally -- maybe the same goes for the human experience of consciousness?

That's not to say a machine intelligence is impossible; but it may not experience its existence the same way we do...

Posted by: Stephen Wells | August 24, 2010 5:42 AM

@349:

BrickWall.isReal=true

Unicorn.isReal=false

if (BrickWall.isReal) then
doNotWalkThrough(BrickWall)

if ( not Unicorn.isReal) then
doNotGoHunting(Unicorn)

Don't make silly claims.