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[Levi]

This has degraded into literal semantic nonsense.

Edit:  I thought I was still one page 11.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Yeah, LessWrong is..uh...yeah. I consider it proof positive that even the most clever people can trick themselves into believing really, really dumb things.

[SirQuiamus]

By the bye, y'all have heard of the EU flagship Human Brain Project, no? (IIRC, some of the brain simulation proponents around here have been enthusing over the project and its predecessor Blue Brain.)

Well, here's a rather blunt post explaining why the whole effort is cargo-cult nonsense at the present state of the art. (...and why it will still be nonsense in the foreseeable future.)

[i2amroy]

By the bye, y'all have heard of the EU flagship Human Brain Project, no? (IIRC, some of the brain simulation proponents around here have been enthusing over the project and its predecessor Blue Brain.)

Well, here's a rather blunt post explaining why the whole effort is cargo-cult nonsense at the present state of the art. (...and why it will still be nonsense in the foreseeable future.)

Actually Blue Brain did manage to actually simulate a large chunk of a rat's brain, they just finally got the results published in the Cell journal on October 8th.

And FWIW the reasons in that post against it doesn't really match most of the reasons why neuroscientists didn't like the Blue Brain project. Rather the problems that most neruoscientists see with the project was that:
1) Too narrow of a scientific focus.
2) A closed administration style.
3) Researchers are skeptical that the Blue Brain simulation was going to provide any sort of useful data that hadn't already (or couldn't be) provided by more abstract models that we can run much faster without necessarily requiring a giant supercomputer to run them.
4) Because the project (and it's modern followups) are unlikely to generate good data, they shouldn't be soaking up huge amounts of funding and supercomputer time that could be much better spent on more useful simulations and research. (Which I think is a hilarious reason to speak out against a project. )

To respond to #1 and 2 the project reworked most of it's administration policies to help address the problems found by two independent scientist reviews, including greatly reducing the amount of influence that the founder of the project had. #3 and 4 are well, debatable enough that the project was basically able to ignore the criticisms.

Addendum: That said even if it was somewhat different from a real brain I could still see advantages that could be gained in the computing world for things like image recognition from the reverse-engineering a simulation like that requires.

[DeKaFu]

To answer the original question, and for reasons other people have already explained, I would only go through the process when I reached a point in my life where I was prepared to die.

And then, only if it allowed Me2 to become/experience something far outside what I would have been able to in my old life. And if I was able to retain complete control over what happens to my consciousness in terms of being copied/destroyed (because true unending immortality scares me a lot more than death).

[Arx]

Yeah, I might well take it, but I'd only do it at the end of my natural life. That way, if there is something it's missing that is present in the flesh I haven't missed out; and if it's objectively better in every way, what's threescore and ten to even a thousand?

[jaked122]

--snip--
That's a fascinating statement for those of you who believe uploading transfers your consciousness to consider.

If it does work, you might be considered property. By the people at the console. With the ability to determine which software inputs you receive.

That's where licensing comes in. Licenses on software on considered binding until they are either nulled by the executor of the estate (or their owners).

I've recently started adding a clause to the standard permissive software license that the user reconstruct something like me from historical data if they have the capability. Of course, something like that A, can't possibly be an acceptable stipulation for usage, and B is likely to cause someone with that kind of resources to use a different piece of software not licensed under something insane.

It may merely be my opinion, but it seems that the argument degenerated rather quickly into the high entropic state of a semantic argument. Can we learn something from this?

What caused it?

My money's on the posts defining the words.

[jaked122]

No worries.

I see a lot of people defend religion by using arguments fairly similar, so I'm fairly certain that it's not a good method to argue.

Also I'm not seeing your posts where you do that. I'm talking about the ones with screen-shots of google definitions for words.

Though attacking an argument based upon grammar or the words used, so long as the meaning/intention is clear is a way to justify dismissing the argument without presenting evidence to the contrary.

It's a shitty thing I used to do in High School to derail a conversation.

[jaked122]

Wow. I don't even care about these sources because they aren't necessary to reduce the mind to a physical system as is requisite for simulation to take place.

Charles Stross in many of his novels about post-singularity things talks about reconstructing people not from their brains, but from the information they left behind. Finding a brain layout that could produce given these known inputs X produce these Tweets Y.

Continuity isn't all it's cracked up to be. We have so little continuity between when we go to sleep and when we wake up. Conciousness is not a continuous process. It is interrupted without issue. The memories are ultimately what I treasure though. There's a bit of machinery in the brain besides the memory that makes a person who they are, but those seem to be conserved from the little neuroscience that I've read recently. Like structures produce like outputs.

That means your mind is strongly connected to that meat in your head. Dualism is a stupid way to avoid dealing with the fact that we are subject to the environment around us, and the people who were able to make choices that lead to the existence of the environment that produced a criminal are more to blame than the people who come out of it.

They simply followed the structure in their heads, they took a path, and the path they chose is the one that looked the most attractive at all points given their brains. The situations they come from are the things that force most people into doing unethical things to one another. They could have avoided it, but then their life would have been different.

Ignoring the fact that we are agents determined by physical structure, adapting to the local environment, internalizing it and modelling it and using it to make the decisions that becomes our lives is hard. Lots of people believe in free will. Lots of people believe that we can avoid fucking up. But in the end, if the environment makes fucking up the best choice that we can see, the environment forced our hand.

The difference between us and the environment is that we can be punished for these transgressions, even if they are forced by the situation we are in. We can suffer for our choices. Choices are not mistakes unless the choice you intended to make, at every point, was not achieved. Choices are what they are. A single signal that gains dominance over the others in the brain. That moves us from simulating inside our brain, to moving our bodies and affecting future thought.

TL;DR, we're chemical reactions wearing clothing.

[Descan]

That "we lose continuity when we sleep!" is bloody moronic. Seriously. Neurons still talk to each other, brains still function, Hell, people dream! The only way you can say something like that is by confusing consciousness with, well, being conscious. An easy mistake I'm sure, but they're not the same, not in my book at least :v

[Eagleon]

TL;DR, we're chemical reactions wearing clothing.

Do you think of yourself as a chemical reaction? Dualism is a stupid way to avoid dealing with the fact that we are subject to the environment around us etc. but psychologically we aren't really capable of separating our continuity, from our observations about the world, from the world as it is. Explaining it away with science doesn't change the way our psychology physically functions, as it were - we have to think very carefully about how a transfer into machine consciousness could affect that, or someone has to take the first plunge and just try it. Either way, it sounds a bit like misplaced machismo to ignore these fears - ignoring fear means you can't prepare for it, psychological breaks are very real things.

[jaked122]

I suppose that most days I don't think of myself as a chemical reaction. There aren't many times in my life where I could benefit from thinking of myself that way.

I suppose that it is machismo, but I believe that it would be beneficial to go ahead and try uploading. So long as the process doesn't kill us, even if the copy ended up going wrong somehow because of some software issue, it's just that there's nothing mathematically stopping us from replicating our consciousness in machines.

And so long as we backup the information the upload needs prior to running it, we can keep on trying to fix it until it stops going insane. So long as the copy doesn't have continuity between iterations, it's not so bad.

Actually, having typed that out now, I suppose it would be unethical. I guess that we're just going to have to do uploads the same way that we develop medicine today, by first running studies on animals that are not terribly dissimilar in their chemistry to us. Move from rats to dogs to monkeys to people.

[Graknorke]

It might be unethical but as far as I know there's no laws or activist groups about artificial/synthesised intelligences, so you could probably get away with it.

[jaked122]

Google has an ethics board for AI. Don't know if anything has come of it though. There are a couple articles that seem to be praising it for "Saving us from AI".

I'm not sure that falls under ethics. There's also /r/ControlProblem which is a subreddit specializing in discussions about how to prevent AIs from going rogue and pulling a skynet on us.

The best way to prevent that is to not have nuclear bombs though.

The reason that AI is unrestricted to my knowledge is that Religious groups consider it A, impossible, we can't be god, and B nobody has any real handle on what it takes to make an AI that has a human level intelligence.

Also it's my opinion that AIs that are developed will either be unintentional, arising from some other process with some kind of evolutionary stuff going on, or arising intentionally from the same.

Algorithms that have been evolved are not really... Well.. comprehensible in a lot of instances. The best example I've heard of this is some evolutionary hardware design that they messed around with in the 90s, it produced a tone recognition chip that abused flaws in the architecture of the FPGA to simplify the design. You took out the logic gates that weren't connected to anything, and it just stopped working.

[Loud Whispers]

That "we lose continuity when we sleep!" is bloody moronic. Seriously. Neurons still talk to each other, brains still function, Hell, people dream! The only way you can say something like that is by confusing consciousness with, well, being conscious. An easy mistake I'm sure, but they're not the same, not in my book at least :v

Yeah, so much so that you really notice when there are interruptions like with passing out