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[Sirus]

Wouldn't the straightfoward solution to the issue of continuous consciousness be to run your mind simultaneously on your brain and the new hardware, phasing out your presence in your meat-brain once you've settled in?

I think that's what the "slowly but steadily replace bits of your brain with machines" school of thought is supposed to do.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

But no, I have trouble moving on from friends I had four years ago. An infinite lifetime of watching the people I love grow old and die would not sit well with me.

What's to stop them from being uploaded as well?

[Flying Dice]

Wouldn't the straightfoward solution to the issue of continuous consciousness be to run your mind simultaneously on your brain and the new hardware, phasing out your presence in your meat-brain once you've settled in?

I think that's what the "slowly but steadily replace bits of your brain with machines" school of thought is supposed to do.

That's one of several potential avenues of approach, yeah.

Honestly transhumanity makes it easy to deal with the question of the self, as opposed to something like Star Trek style teleportation.

[Cthulhu]

That sounds like the opposite of what you were saying before. I am kind of confused as to what you're trying to get at.

Before I was responding to it in its own terms.  Even if you think consciousness exists, it wouldn't be preserved across a transfer like described in OP.

Now though I'm talking about what I think.

God dammit I can't fucking post.

I agree with above, assuming for argument's sake that consciousness is a term that refers to something that exists, it would begin diverging almost immediately from the original's experiences and it wouldn't be long before you couldn't say they were the same person.  If you could say that even from the start.

[jaked122]

Can I be a bushbot? A robot made of recursive manipulators that extend down to the atomic level.


That sounds great! Shoot a bullet at it and it coughs and thanks you for a meal. Basically have massive, dangerous power over the real physical world.

[NAV]

Our consciousness is literally just a piece of software running in our meatbrains. If you copy a program and upload it to a new computer, is it still the same program? Of course!

[Sirus]

Our consciousness is literally just a piece of software running in our meatbrains. If you copy a program and upload it to a new computer, is it still the same program? Of course!

Same program, maybe. But it's not the same instance of the program, and depending on the new computer's specs it could run radically differently.

[wierd]

This depends;

Some questions:

1) Does the upload framework have linear or geometric scalability? (eg, how large of a neural network simulation can it handle before the pattern becomes too great for the system to bear? Does the technology that enables it scale linearly (say, traditional silicon with adding processors to the problem) or geometrically (like you get with adding qbits to a quantum computer's processor)?)

2) Does the uploaded framework model neural synapse pruning, and if so, can this process be put under the control of the voluntary nervous system simulation?

3) How much space and or energy does the simulation hardware consume?

4) Does the hardware require continued, active maintenance? (EG, will I need a crew?)

5) Has society moved toward a post-scarcity model yet? (say, produced reliable fusion as a power source, and so have had the bottom fall out of the energy market, resulting in inexpensive automated manufacture of basically everything.)

6) Have we invented genuine article von-neuman replicating machines yet, or are they still nascent, like they are now?

7) What are the intrinsic (raw materials, energy, labor, environmental consequences) costs of this process, above and beyond a mere pricetag?

Depending on the answers to those 7 questions, I may or may not decide to undergo such an upload.

[XXXXYYYY]

Our consciousness is literally just a piece of software running in our meatbrains. If you copy a program and upload it to a new computer, is it still the same program? Of course!

Same program, maybe. But it's not the same instance of the program, and depending on the new computer's specs it could run radically differently.

Presumably, "proven to work" includes not utterly wrecking the person being transferred/encoded/uploaded/murdered-and-replaced-by-a-clone. At least that's what I think that it's getting at. Can't really be sure.

[Arcvasti]

Depends. I wouldn't have it tested on me, that's for sure. I'd wait until it was a relatively accepted technology. Even then, its something I'd only consider if I was dying or something. I'd be much more likely to want a a slower transfer where individual synapses were replaced by mechanical ones without interrupting the greater flow of consciousness like an upload would.

[wierd]

Our consciousness is literally just a piece of software running in our meatbrains. If you copy a program and upload it to a new computer, is it still the same program? Of course!

Same program, maybe. But it's not the same instance of the program, and depending on the new computer's specs it could run radically differently.

We already have a working analogous example to this.

Emulator programs that enable "savestates."

The savestate saves a specific point in time of the state of the emulated machine, so that it can be restored.  Depending on the input after that instance is loaded elsewhere, two or more computers can be running identical playthroughs of the same emulated classic console game rom.

This is essentially saying "We can take a savestate dump of your brain and your consciousness, but the process destroys your original hardware. You can then digitally transfer that stavestate data to a computer emulation environment, and resume the process."

All of the logical arguments can be explored with this analog, and some of the philosophical ones can be as well. (EG, you can demonstrate that two identical copies of the savestate, once loaded on two discrete emulator computers and resumed, will rapidly diverge from synchronicity depending on input, thus exposing that the backup will have prevented the original process runing from reaching the same inputs, and will constitute an interruption-- eg, a death.)

[jaked122]

--snip--
Even then, its something I'd only consider if I was dying or something.
--snip--

Are you considering it now then? What humor I have!


Anywho, did OP mention that the upload kills you?


 I mean, from what I read it just sounded like you and the upload would diverge if the upload was run.


Anyway, as far as "instances" of our minds go, our minds are on hardware that's janky enough to require self-modification, so I'd imagine that most of the memories are encoded in the structure. Given that most of us sleep at night, I'm going to bet that there wouldn't be a terribly large difference between the upload at first and the meat-person left behind.


Have any of you read Permutation City by Greg Egan?


It deals with a lot of that kind of stuff, and the difficulties implicit in running an upload on computers that aren't fast enough to let them interact effectively in realtime with the physical world.

[wierd]

The more radical realization is that the organic brain makes use of neurogenesis, neural synaptic pruning, and apoptosis.

The "you" is not a static thing at all. "you" are in a purpetual state of death and rebirth, each nanosecond of your existence.

The upload would be just as much "me", as if I had a more slow process of transhuman transformation happen-- such as slow but steady substitution of my nervous system with synthetic components, such as via self-assembling microscopic robots.  Instead of using organic neurons, I slowly start using synthetic ones, until my brain is 100% made of metal, plastic, and silicon. 

Either way, the original "all meat human" is still no longer in existence. It died.

[jaked122]

So what? We're not talking about running a static model, we're talking about modelling the brain sufficiently well that all those processes are accounted for and continue in such a way that they are nearly indistinguishable from reality.


Also it's hypothetical, so we can assert this and merely react to this scenario without realistic considerations about the capacity of the computational systems.

[Playergamer]

Never. To steal and reinterpret from Hemingway, you can live as much of a life in seventy hours as in seventy years. More time will not make me love life more, but by the end, I am certain it would make me hate it.