Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Bohandas]

Well that's why we do the whole "replace neurons individually" route.

Keep in mind I've thought about this shit a lot >_> I may not be able to articulate what I mean, but I'm getting an education so I can make this a reality, so it's kind of important to me.

Yeah! The old Ship of Theseus! Grandfather's Ax!

[Eagleon]

I suppose it depends on the manner in which it is unveiled. First things first - how much does it cost?

How much does it cost to become an astronaut? The answer when we first started the space program was "a space program."

[Bauglir]

If it's well-established and proven to work, though, then that's not the best comparison. By the time you've done the R&D and have a few launches under your belt, you have a good idea of the finances you need to make it keep happening.

[Descan]

The main problem I have with the Ship of Theseus or Grandfathers Axe that I feel makes it a very inept metaphor is that the ship isn't a person, there's no mind or viewpoint to be destroyed or replaced. Considering that the whole problem with teleporting/uploading is the idea of "you" being destroyed, that's kind of a huge issue to leave out.

[Bauglir]

I mean, at this point we want a good definition of what a person is. We're all working off our fairly inchoate notions of what a "you" intuitively is, or at least that's what it sounds like. I don't see why a mind or viewpoint or whatever is particularly special in a way that's relevant to the metaphor, for example.

For what it's worth, I look at it as analogous to a software system. What people want when they get uploaded is for their instance to get transferred across pieces of hardware, instead of for a new copy to get spun up on the new hardware. What we're talking about in this thread is similar to talking about rebuilding a computer a transistor (or other small hardware piece) at a time without turning it off or interrupting its functionality in a way the user can notice. Only more. That's how I see it, anyway.

EDIT: And the machine was never designed for that kind of modularity, either at the hardware or software level.

[Graknorke]

I very much liked the savestate analogy someone used a couple pages back. It pretty well sums up the reasoning of how I'd imagine it works, except drawing a different conclusion at the end.

[Eagleon]

If it's well-established and proven to work, though, then that's not the best comparison. By the time you've done the R&D and have a few launches under your belt, you have a good idea of the finances you need to make it keep happening.

The demand involved would likely push the furthest reaches of industry towards making it cheaper ASAP. So new home expensive? You only have to do it once, after all. Hopefully. Maybe there are some side-effects that require long term care afterwards?

I can see people getting pissy-faced over the income disparity thing, but I guess it all depends on whether the machines doing the transfer are reusable or more like a drug. If they're reuseable, you could just keep doing it, and the cost would shrink as demand from the wealthy does too - on the other hand, that doesn't affect something like the cost of MRIs as much, because it involves superconducting magnets and huge cooling systems and crap.

After you've reached full market saturation you start being able to get the things second-hand, so you're looking at the costs of a medical procedure - paying the doctor, the doctor's insurance, the doctor's massage therapist, etc. On the other hand, the procedure to destructively convert billions of neurons and whatever other structures into synthetic or digital versions is probably going to be pretty hands-off, or else I think very, very dangerous, so cost of labor might be funky too.

TLDR: Who the hell knows, this is fantasy science-magic right now :V It's easy to say any number and make a convincing argument.

[Bohandas]

The main problem I have with the Ship of Theseus or Grandfathers Axe that I feel makes it a very inept metaphor is that the ship isn't a person, there's no mind or viewpoint to be destroyed or replaced. Considering that the whole problem with teleporting/uploading is the idea of "you" being destroyed, that's kind of a huge issue to leave out.

Your body is replaced piecemeal all the time. IIRC your blood is totally replaced every few weeks. Even brain cells are naturally replaced, albeit  much much more gradually.

[Descan]

... And? What's your point? How does that address my point at all?

[Loud Whispers]

... And? What's your point? How does that address my point at all?

QUICK, REPLACE HIS BRAIN WHILE HE'S DISTRACTED

[Reelya]

The thread itself is a digital entity. Theoretically, if enough people posted in a thread the thread itself could achieve consciousness.

~~~

I thought of an interesting thought experiment about digital consciousness. It's related to ideas from the Greg Egan novel Permutation City.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Imagine you successfully model consciousness one one computer. e.g. a "human" neural model you can talk to you and swears blind that it's conscious. Occam's razor states to accept that it's conscious, because (1) it works only via known brain functioning and (2) it exhibits the emergent behaviour we claim arises from consciousness (it acts self aware).

Now, if we assume that something that has subjective belief of being conscious is actually conscious, and only the pattern of information matters, then the order of time slices, or time gap between slices doesn't matter as long as the slices exist. So if you could process brain states in reverse, or even have gaps of decades, centuries, millenia, the overall consciousness should bridge that gap.

Also, we can say that switching processing to another machine shouldn't be a problem, as long as the pattern's state is carried over. It wouldn't even matter if the next time-slice was processed on the other side of the galaxy, we can still say that the overall pattern of this machine is consistent with a machine which acts like a conscious human. So a digital consciousness could spans spacetime without their being a consistency issue.

So if you are running a "brain model" on one computer, then stop running that computer and run a different computer from the same state, we expect that the consciousness will seamlessly "jump" over to the new computer (in a subjective sense). It only requires that the new computer starts from a valid "end state" of the old computer to get another computer which will swear blind that it is the conscious continuation of the first one.

And that leads to another thought experiment from Permutation City. What if you have two identical computers running the same brain model exactly? And you run them both for e.g. one hour and then turn one of them off. Do we assume we have two separate consciousnesses here? Or one consciousness that's been cloned? What happens to the one that got turned off? We already showed that the consciousness should seamlessly move over to another machine if the "state" of both machines was synced up. So do we have two identical yet separate consciousnesses that merged? or was there only one valid consciousness to start with.

In Permutation City, Greg Egan also argues that the hardware should make no difference. e.g. if a digital consciousness was moved temporarily to punch-card processing, then back to a computer there is no subjective break. It's the pattern that matter. His conclusion in the novel is that these patterns could be anywhere anywhen and could be entirely in the realm of mathematics. All possible digital patterns already exist in the realm of numbers. If consciousness is really hardware-agnostic and can be simulated, then in fact there could be an infinite number of already-existing consciousnesses imagining all possible universes.

Spoilered for length. Basically really interesting food for thought in Permutation City. There are some definitely complicated philosophical issues with any sort of machine consciousness.

[Descan]

... And? What's your point? How does that address my point at all?

QUICK, REPLACE HIS BRAIN WHILE HE'S DISTRACTED

dangit now i'm dead

kinda

well old me is dead

the descan is dead long live the descan

[Bohandas]

... And? What's your point? How does that address my point at all?

because we're already replaced piece by piece, and the brain is not wholly an exception to this; however slowly (and admittedly it is slowly to the point that it was undetectable until about a decade or two ago), neurons are replaced too.

[Eagleon]

I thought of an interesting thought experiment about digital consciousness. It's related to ideas from the Greg Egan novel Permutation City.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Imagine you successfully model consciousness one one computer. e.g. a "human" neural model you can talk to you and swears blind that it's conscious. Occam's razor states to accept that it's conscious, because (1) it works only via known brain functioning and (2) it exhibits the emergent behaviour we claim arises from consciousness (it acts self aware).

Now, if we assume that something that has subjective belief of being conscious is actually conscious, and only the pattern of information matters, then the order of time slices, or time gap between slices doesn't matter as long as the slices exist. So if you could process brain states in reverse, or even have gaps of decades, centuries, millenia, the overall consciousness should bridge that gap.

Also, we can say that switching processing to another machine shouldn't be a problem, as long as the pattern's state is carried over. It wouldn't even matter if the next time-slice was processed on the other side of the galaxy, we can still say that the overall pattern of this machine is consistent with a machine which acts like a conscious human. So a digital consciousness could spans spacetime without their being a consistency issue.

So if you are running a "brain model" on one computer, then stop running that computer and run a different computer from the same state, we expect that the consciousness will seamlessly "jump" over to the new computer (in a subjective sense). It only requires that the new computer starts from a valid "end state" of the old computer to get another computer which will swear blind that it is the conscious continuation of the first one.

And that leads to another thought experiment from Permutation City. What if you have two identical computers running the same brain model exactly? And you run them both for e.g. one hour and then turn one of them off. Do we assume we have two separate consciousnesses here? Or one consciousness that's been cloned? What happens to the one that got turned off? We already showed that the consciousness should seamlessly move over to another machine if the "state" of both machines was synced up. So do we have two identical yet separate consciousnesses that merged? or was there only one valid consciousness to start with.

In Permutation City, Greg Egan also argues that the hardware should make no difference. e.g. if a digital consciousness was moved temporarily to punch-card processing, then back to a computer there is no subjective break. It's the pattern that matter. His conclusion in the novel is that these patterns could be anywhere anywhen and could be entirely in the realm of mathematics. All possible digital patterns already exist in the realm of numbers. If consciousness is really hardware-agnostic and can be simulated, then in fact there could be an infinite number of already-existing consciousnesses imagining all possible universes.

Spoilered for length. Basically really interesting food for thought in Permutation City. There are some definitely complicated philosophical issues with any sort of machine consciousness.

This is actually a potentially huge problem for simulating any kind of brain in real time, and what I meant by maybe not being able to convincingly mimic the mind due to physical laws - the brain is not expressible in 'slices', neurons do not fire all together or even with regular patterns. If there are slices, they run at the planck length the same as any physical process, and they run in parallel. We can dismiss this to varying degrees by accepting some degree of quantization, but that will also mean we run either slower or stupider than natural without augmentation to accommodate this. Meaning a further degree of difference from 'normal'.

I haven't read Permutation City, though I love Egan and I remember a bit of this mind-fuckery in Diaspora with the Wang Tile algae. At the time he published Permutation City, 1994, memristors were an obscure pipe-dream, something he probably hadn't even heard of yet let alone thought to apply to his technology, but they're likely to come closest to being usable for this purpose. If we're forced to use a digital approximation instead, maybe we could get close to planck time in updates by using multiple clocks running in separate phases on some different parts of the brain. But that would only be a bandage on the terrifying fact that you're running in lockstep with a different kind of time entirely.

[Nirur Torir]

For a while, I was leaning towards the idea of uploading by linking a brain to a set of 'blank' neural emulators, and growing into a sort of one person hive-mind, until the meat-brain becomes unneeded (or just dies of aging).

The last time I saw this discussion, I saw an interesting argument:
Is a consciousness itself a physical 'tag' that humanity will never be able to read or modify?

Now ... Maybe standard uploading would work for me. If I am frozen, so no brain activity occurs, and whatever my consciousness is, is copied correctly, I am both transferred over to digitized-self and am still meat-self. There is only one me at this moment, just saved in different mediums. If meat-me is never thawed, I should properly be transferred over, without that annoying 50% chance of being the dead one. (If meat-me is accidentally thawed, then I'd demand to do it all over. Can't have that dangling thread of living). Instant destructive uploading should be much the same.

If it later does come out that I actually died without transferring properly, digitized-self won't be thrown into existential angst or anything. Worried over ensuring that digitized-self doesn't get lethal-transferred again, yes, but not particularly upset at not being the original me.

((This was very strange to type.))