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[Descan]

From someone elses perspective, but not from mine. I see no reason to believe I'd leap into the clone. :v I ain't no Scott Bakula.

_{Scott Dracula}

[Descan]

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.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Singular response here- brain stem. Can't remove that without immediate death, now can we? There may be a substantial amount of parts of the brain that we know can be removed, but we also know that there are some key areas where we can't.

Does that do anything besides regulate the body's functions?  If it doesn't, couldn't that be skipped and replaced with a mechanical equivalent designed to run a mechanical, rather than biological, body?

[Harry Baldman]

Brain stem death is a thing that happens, and it doesn't always kill you if the right tools are available to ensure your breathing and heartbeat. Replacing the hypothalamus might be more tricky, since that does actually control all vegetative functions to one degree or another at a higher level than the medulla oblongata, which is more of a cranial pacemaker for heartbeat and breathing if I recall correctly.

But then these are still vegetative functions, which you may well have machine analogues for anyway, so the entire thing might be a wash. And hypothalamic damage does have other effects than just instant (clinical, though whether anyone who comes back from that is still the same person is just as impossible to externally prove as it is for a nap) death, so who knows what could happen?

Better practice with mice first is what I'm trying to say here.

[Harry Baldman]

That's my point with the whole "carving up the brain and replacing it in large hunks" idea. It's not all straightforward this-does-this and that-does-that, and just cutting it up would leave a lot more chance of error than a more procedural process.

It depends on magical technology and a massive number of simplifying assumptions either way, so I don't think it matters at all which way you do it. This is an armchair-philosophical argument, after all. Bringing practical matters into it is like 18th century priests arguing about how exactly lasers should work.

Truthfully, once we've figured out exactly how the mind works (which I'd assume is the prerequisite for replacing bits of your brain with superconductive wiring free of mortal flaws or, for some reason, fake neurons), why bother copying yourself at all? Get one person, copy their mind as many times as required, then tweak and customize until you've got the you (or not-you if you're inclined) that you're generally happy with, then copy that for all the purposes you think you'd like to be immortal for. One for your crowdfunded space probe, one for your supercooled server bank generating a persistent digital paradise, one for your futuristic smartphone. Safe and efficient.

That does make me wonder, how would transhuman initiatives fare once they actually begin to show useful results? I mean, if human cloning is an assault on human dignity, where does that leave digitization of the mind (which would imply easy reproducibility that'd put any visions of a clone-dominated future to shame)?

[jaked122]

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.

You are talking about what I think is refered to in the Quantum Thief as a "Moravec" upload. There's also a very... well. I guess explained instance in House of Suns.

As to taking bits out of the brain, well, why would you remove them? If it is because they don't function correctly or map to a robotic body, you'd have to find some way of mapping the extant structure into equivalent bits for controlling it.

I don't see why you wouldn't keep those things, as Hans Moravec said, it's not the abstract reasoning that is hard, it's the perceptual and motor control.

Of course, he did live not long enough to see things like neural network controlled hardware or genetic algorithms, or really any of the ways that we can have robots learn how to walk on their own. Those are relatively straightforward to implement, however the underlying details tend to be a bit nontrivial.

In any case, why can't we just literally replace neurons with their equivalent machines? One at a time, over years or months or hours, or however long the process takes, with longer providing additional time for the neurological systems to integrate correctly with these machines.

My only problem with uploading is actually that if we only take the brain, we don't have input for the body, unless we simulate that and have something akin to a brain in a jar type thing going on. We would end up having to map those parts of our brains to whatever inputs exist. I think, however, that our brains are about as good at this as they are at anything.

Have any of you seen that video of a chimp with a crude robotic arm plugged into its brain at a basically arbitrary point? It's here by the way, but look at it, that arm doesn't even put signals back into the brain, and despite the lack of direct feedback, the monkey learns to control it within a few hours just using vision to guide it.

Our brains are about as good at plug and play as anything that exists, probably even better than most hardware advertised as such. This is because to some degree or another, our brains optimize their structure in order to accomplish things like this. Our cerebrum has a lot of wiring that seems specific to the structure of our bodies, but even it, the oldest part of our brains, is able to pick up and learn things like this very quickly when it's plugged in.

There's a lot to say about the plasticity which allows this, but if we can simulate that with our artificial neurons, then there's nothing stopping us from doing this. The upside would probably be that we wouldn't have a huge plug directly in our brains, we could probably just add a usb port or something.

--snip--
It depends on magical technology and a massive number of simplifying assumptions either way, so I don't think it matters at all which way you do it. This is an armchair-philosophical argument, after all. Bringing practical matters into it is like 18th century priests arguing about how exactly lasers should work.

Truthfully, once we've figured out exactly how the mind works (which I'd assume is the prerequisite for replacing bits of your brain with superconductive wiring free of mortal flaws or, for some reason, fake neurons), why bother copying yourself at all? Get one person, copy their mind as many times as required, then tweak and customize until you've got the you (or not-you if you're inclined) that you're generally happy with, then copy that for all the purposes you think you'd like to be immortal for. One for your crowdfunded space probe, one for your supercooled server bank generating a persistent digital paradise, one for your futuristic smartphone. Safe and efficient.

That does make me wonder, how would transhuman initiatives fare once they actually begin to show useful results? I mean, if human cloning is an assault on human dignity, where does that leave digitization of the mind (which would imply easy reproducibility that'd put any visions of a clone-dominated future to shame)?

Why not? There's a lot of ethical decisions to be made about that, but so long as we do it to ourselves, what can go wrong?

Why is human cloning an assault on human dignity? It's only that way if the clones are owned. I wouldn't support that any more than I'd support slavery of any sort. In that case, human cloning isn't useful in the same way because it's not you, it's just a clone of you. Clones are as useful as a backup as children are.

 In any case, The Quantum Thief has this too. All of the software is based on uploaded human minds, because apparently in that universe AI is damn near impossible if it isn't based on human architecture.

[Harry Baldman]

The idea that human cloning is incompatible with human dignity (in this case referring to a human being's unique genetic identity being lost if a human is cloned) isn't really mine. Though now that I look it up, the UN Declaration on Human Cloning packs the double whammy of really only implying this as well as being non-binding (it is the UN, after all) no matter who happens to agree on it and whether or not it is largely informed by sci-fi rather than what you'd actually do with human cloning technology.

My point is, if something as actually quite innocuous as human cloning can open up this much hostility (in the non-ideal world where transhumanists don't always get what they want), what about something as downright existential as digitization?

[jaked122]

My solution is to ignore them. People aren't ready for the future until long after it has arrived.

I understand that there are not terrible reasons behind banning human cloning. But we're nowhere near ready to do anything like that. As we become able to do it, people will have reasons to rationalize pursuing it. Have you seen the UN proposal to decriminalize drugs? We're just getting used to the idea of drugs being a symptom of an underlying problem, rather than the problem in itself.

That same committee , probably about 40 years ago now, decided that drugs were bad and that the social consequences of arresting and imprisoning people who use them to escape the shitty details of their lives were not significant enough to not pursue stopping drugs through social programs and outreach alone. They needed to be terrified and know that if they were caught, even if they wanted to stop, they would suffer the consequences of the law.

Did that stop drugs from continuing to be a presence in society? No. It did put a bunch of otherwise relatively harmless people in prison though.

They did not envision this future.

We can't imagine why we would want to do human cloning today, but once it's possible, safe, and we've cloned cows, cats, pigs, and whatever other mammals that we think are steps up to human beings, we're going to find that a 95% compatible organ isn't enough, not even if it came from a pig that we otherwise would fry up as bacon or whatever, and we're going to grow another person for some reason or another.

It's going to happen, and so long as it isn't actually going towards slavery or murder of intelligent beings, with thoughts and identities of some sort(which the pig may arguably possess), it's going to be forgiven, even if it happens forty years after that first person was cloned to a media and ethical frenzy.

In any case, cloning is much more... visceral than uploading. Apologies for the pun.

And in any case, it doesn't bring up the question of identity as much, because it's copying the identity directly, rather than through an innocent person, the clone. An upload of you could probably not steal your identity if they are required to be there as a physical presence. An upload of you would have no reason to do so, unlike a clone.

In any case, the ban on human cloning is specifically against what they call "Therapeutic" cloning. Which is to say, you're harvesting organs from the clone for some reason. That sounds like I could have a child made from me for me, but those facilities, while not banned by the UN, don't exist because the market doesn't exist(yet) for cloned children.

In all likelyhood, the governments of the world will deal with software copies of humans the same way they deal with software in general (by covering it under mostly unrelated intellectual property regimes).

[i2amroy]

Singular response here- brain stem. Can't remove that without immediate death, now can we? There may be a substantial amount of parts of the brain that we know can be removed, but we also know that there are some key areas where we can't.

There have been cases where someone has suffered brain stem death and been kept alive despite that fact at this point, including a (very tiny) number of recoveries to the functional point. For example there have been cases where someone has suffered swelling in the area of the brain stem that stopped that area from functioning properly, quickly been placed on life support, and then been able to be released from the hospital later when the swelling reduced and functionality returned to that part of the brain (which would be the same effect, functionally, as removing that part of the brain and then replacing it with a functional equivalent).

Similarly there have been cases where people have only suffered only partial brain stem damage and have been able to survive for a short period of time after the accident on life support as themselves, as well as cases where pregnant women that have suffered brain stem damage have been able to be kept alive long enough to bring the child to term.

The problem with damage to the brain stem isn't that it's some magical bunch of neurons that suddenly makes you stop being you, the problem is that the main symptoms of brain stem loss of functionality is the loss of the ability to breathe, loss of the ability to make your own heart beat, and often large-scale paralyzation, together which usually results in death before we can get the person onto life support. Assuming we get a person quickly onto life support it then becomes a question of them having a large chance of dying or suffering permanent paralysis problems, not a "they are going to die, period" matter (and the chances of survival, while small, do go up by a little bit every year).

Modern medicine has done a really good job of poking holes in that "there's some magical part of your brain that you will die without", theory.

[Eagleon]

In the spirit of exploration, I definitely would if it were a non-destructive copy process, but no to destruction. I want to keep living, to talk to myself, because the fear wouldn't be quite so bad if I had a clone that I could actually reasonably say was 'me', and because I think it would be really difficult for him - maybe I could play a part in helping him through things.

Maybe when I'm old I'll change my mind and go with the gradual destruction, but I'd have to come to peace with the fact that I might be 'dying' in some real way - philosophical word play isn't enough to dismiss that fear, especially because due to various physical laws, we're unlikely to make the simulation similar enough to our former reality to not be able to tell the difference. To some degree we would feel a gradient between our new minds and the old, and so be able to make memories of the changes as they occur. It'd be like a drug trip that never ended no matter how much you wanted it to, and probably not as fun as some altered states. Maybe that's the key - introducing a low-level emotional high that makes the entire experience have a positive lean.

I'd also want full embodiment for my copy - down to every detail obtainable by my senses, and every squishy hormone making up my moods and impulses, ideally more. Embodiment with sufficient sensory richness is key, otherwise you're dumping yourself into a numb corpse.

I also no longer understand the appeal of being capable of disembodiment - to me that would be terrifying beyond comprehension, being spread out into systems you don't understand and then coming back after achieving a glimpse of such an alien nightmare. Like the ultimate LSD trip, but everything you perceive would be real, so it'd be very difficult to reconcile with meatspace afterwards. For the upgraded me, after he achieves some sort of synthesis with whatever enhancements he obtains over time for his senses, maybe that would change. Gradual growth is a much more comfortable prospect than full-on grafting of new experiences.

[Cthulhu]

Are you guys never going to get tired of this inane nonsense?

#BodyLoathing
#RobotJesus
#DoomsdayProphecies
#CryptoChristianity

Thaaaaank you.  Holy shit.

I have seen people on this forum (won't name names) say that they honestly believe they'll never die because the singularity will allow them to conquer mortality.  But the singularity is definitely not just Christian eschatology repackaged.

[Eagleon]

Are you guys never going to get tired of this inane nonsense?

#BodyLoathing
#RobotJesus
#DoomsdayProphecies
#CryptoChristianity

Thaaaaank you.  Holy shit.

I have seen people on this forum (won't name names) say that they honestly believe they'll never die because the singularity will allow them to conquer mortality.  But the singularity is definitely not just Christian eschatology repackaged.

The plausiblity of it all is fairly debatable. I personally no longer think a singularity as people usually think of the word is remotely possible (we've already reached the point where no one knows what the hell is going on in science as a whole - that doesn't make it any easier to put together a robojesus), but I also know that we overestimate the difficulty of producing machine intelligence because of a severe disconnect with the importance of sensory richness, embodiment, and social development to a real social intelligence.

There's a great big money gap here - it's much more reasonable to suggest modest projects that make incremental improvements on all of the things involved, and when it all gets put together, we're likely to have been able to do so for decades, the same as how we've been able to put industry in space but are unwilling due to the initial investment involved. The difference, of course, is that we have real uses for things like artificial skin, eyes, ears, and even smell/taste that we're making use of in consumer electronics (and hopefully soon in reasonably good prosthetics) in ways that huge rockets launching tiny satellites can't approach. There's a clear(er) path to development involved.

In any case, YMMV - it might even be cryptochristianity, but do you post in a thread about 'actual' christianity asking if they ever get tired of 'inane nonsense'? If you do, you're probably an anti-intellectual noscope-goat proxymoon. See? I can make up words, too.

[Bauglir]

shots fired

now let's spend exactly three pages arguing about how everyone else is failing at logic, with the thread topic serving only as a set piece to the real conversation

then the thread will be locked and nothing will have changed

and i will be no less hypocritically smug

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

shots fired

now let's spend exactly three pages arguing about how everyone else is failing at logic, with the thread topic serving only as a set piece to the real conversation

then the thread will be locked and nothing will have changed

and i will be no less hypocritically smug

Maybe we should take a new direction to avoid that.  Maybe how the various aspects of society would react to the technology being unveiled?

[Bauglir]

Maybe we should take a new direction to avoid that.

I'd like that.

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