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[LordBucket]

So, all sub-components of a brain have their own sense of self?

That's looking at the situation from a peculiar angle.

Imagine that you have a whole pizza that has not been cut. How many slices are there? The question doesn't really make sense. There aren't any slices until you cut the pizza. Saying that the components of the brain "have their own sense of self" is similarly a weird way of looking at it. Yes, if you were to partition your brain, the partitioned pieces would perceive themselves as "self" but with a whole brain, it doesn't make a lot of sense to think of the various pieces as having their "own sense of self."

Awareness is non-discrete. Simple example: vision. Think about what you see right now. It's "what you see." Now close one eye. What you see is diminished, but it's still "what you see." Now close the other eye. It's still "what you see." Sure, each eye is individually feeding different data to you, but when they're both open you still perceive it as a singular "what you see" rather than two separate data feeds.

[LordBucket]

So a sense of self-awareness is seamless  between changes is what you're saying? That still doesn't deal with the case of a full split-brain case. If there's no communication between either hemisphere, they are acting independent. One is not aware of the other. So where does our self-awareness go?

I don't understand the question. If you have water in a bucket, then split the water down the middle with a board, where did the water go? It's still there. It just has a board separating it now. Adding a board does not destroy water and removing the board does not create it.

[LordBucket]

The water's the same, but now you have two water sources, not one. Interactions with one of the bodies of water does not alter the other. They're now effectively two buckets of water.

Ok. And the various trillions of cells in your brain are effectively trillions of cells rather than one brain. And when you cut a pizza in half it's effectively two pieces of pizza. And you and I are effectively two different people. And if you carve a statue from a hunk of stone, it's effectively the statue over there and a whole pile of stone shavings over there. And if you partition off pieces of your brain so that they don't talk to each other, it's effectively two different personalities.

But if you remove that board, it's going to go back to being effectively one bucket of water. And if you dump that bucket into the ocean it's going to be effectively one ocean, and not "the ocean over there and that bucket of water right there."

And if you linked up every human brain together, the idea of "different people" might seem just as odd as thinking your brain as those neurons on the left and those neurons on the right.

Identity is very flexible.

[Descan]

Of course, it becomes less philosophical and academic if you DO split a brain, and the two halves create divergent identities. Generally in these situations, one brain has a semi-monopoly on communication (IIRC both brains will hear a command, and both brains will see something, but only one brain will have control over the mouth and possibly facial reactions and other forms of communication)

In that scenario, we know the personality of the communicating half and how it changes, but we have no real way to communication with the non-dominant half. We don't really know if it develops a divergent personality and what that personality is like. Point of example: How do you think YOU would change if you had no way to communicate with the world and the words coming out of your mouth are not what you want them to say?

So what happens when we fix the bridge?

(it'd be like if we covered one half of the split bucket, let whatever life-forms colonize it prosper and such, and then without looking under the cover, take the split away. What happens as two different colonies of different-environment life-forms mix? it's at this point where the analogy starts breaking down, because a bucket of water is not a person)

[Criptfeind]

To be honest I think I'd probably die if a board was shoved though my brain.

[HAMMERMILL]

To be honest I think I'd probably die if a board was shoved though my brain.

Dude, no, you'd be immortal. When they put up a server to immortalize people with their downloaded minds, that printed circuit board shoved into your brain through that incision the saw-blade makes is the only way you'll escape your resource-consuming, unnecessary physical existence. You'll no longer vote the wrong way or challenge your betters every again! You're family and loved ones can watch your progress in various virtual worlds on the web since it's the only thing you're uploaded consciousness will be capable of doing.

If the elites funding your virtual existence don't get their gov't subsidies, or decide you are no longer a worthwhile asset...

After-all when technology renders the labor of the common man obsolete through automation , what else is there for a human being to do?

Yeah, being a computer function is much better than being a living human being. When the technology is available, you should go yourself, and bring all of your friends and family along to be 'uploaded' as well!

[TheBiggerFish]

The joke stands though.

[LordBucket]

So that's argument in favor of the "slow transition" premise?

No. "Slow transition" is just hand-waving to avoid the issue.

Imagine that you and I have identical buckets. Imagine that your bucket is full of water, but mine is empty. Imagine that you pour the water from your bucket onto hot coals and it becomes steam. Imagine that I fill my bucket with water from the sink. Is it fair to say that the water from your bucket teleported into my bucket? No, of course not.

Now, imagine that we have the exact same setup, but rather than pouring your bucket of water onto hot coals, instead you scoop it out one handful at a time and pour only a handful onto the coals. And every time you do, I fill one handful of water from the sink and put it into my bucket. One handful at a time, until your bucket is empty and mine is full.

Does doing it this way cause the water to teleport? Of course not.

So why would slow transition result in your consciousness being uploaded?

The whole "copy your brain to transfer consciousness" idea is predicated on the completely arbitrary assumption that consciousness is an emergent property of a configuration. Not "of" anything, just "a configuration."

For example, think of a book. How about, the Velveteen Rabbit. That's "a book." But when we say that the Velveteen Rabbit is "a book" we don't actually mean that it's a physical bunch of paper. Really, it's "a story." For example, if you have a copy of the Velveteen Rabbit on your nightstand and I have a copy of the Velveteen Rabbit on my nightstand, we'd both probably agree that both your copy and my copy were "the" velveteen Rabbit. And, if you burned your copy and downloaded it to an electronic tablet, we'd both still agree that the electronic copy on your tablet is still "the" Velveteen Rabbit.

"The Velveteen Rabbit" is a configuration. It doesn't really matter if that configuration manifests as ink on paper or electrons on a screen or words being spoken by a storyteller talking over a campfire or table entries in a database, or whatever. It's still "the" Velveteen Rabbit. Even if you translated the words into Chinese and encoded paragraph and page breaks with HTML and stuck in on a web page, resulting in all the individual characters and words being completely different, it would still be "the Velveteen Rabbit." Right?

The "copy the brain to upload" crowd apparently believes that consciousness works the same way. For some reason.

I see no reason to believe that.

[Descan]

Now, imagine that we have the exact same setup, but rather than pouring your bucket of water onto hot coals, instead you scoop it out one handful at a time and pour only a handful onto the coals. And every time you do, the steam condenses on a sheet of metal above my bucket and the water drips in. One handful at a time, until your bucket is empty and mine is full.

FTFY. Honestly :v I've tried to say it multiple different ways and the fundamental feature of the idea is still out of grasp. (Sorry, LB. But to be fair, this is my lifes work (hopefully) we're talking about here. I feel I'm entitled to a liiiiiittle bit of rhetorical exasperation ;3)

Though honestly, to me, all metaphor for consciousness from your bucket of water to the Ship of Theseus to the Grandfathers Axe break down because none of them have a sense of self. There's no ship-mind wondering if it's still the same ship (the closest you get would be the crew, and in that case, yes it is the same ship because it is the same crew. So what happens if you get a new crew? See? It breaks down) so the question is academic and impossible to answer. Where-as with a brain, there IS an actual person there that may or may not be killed, and there's a disconnect between the idea of an object being the same object, if it has the same configuration but different material, and a person being the same person in the same scenario, and if there is a difference in the final answer if the method of arriving at the new material is slow vs instantaneous.

Now how an ACTUAL slow transition that's not just really slowly killing a person would "teleport" a mind into a computer (i.e. the "Bolt on hard-drives" method, or the "replace neurons with nanomachines" method), it's because there is a... I guess the best term is "temporal gradient" over which it's impossible to pick out a single moment where the mind is NOW machine when the previous moment it was organic.

I know I just said "Metaphors suck," but here's one for the bolt-on method. It's like if you had a piece of moldy bread that you then put in a nutritious substrate, which the mold then migrated onto. Eventually the entire plate is full of mold, and if you take away the bread (or, to be clear, the original meat-brain) it's arguably still the same colony.

[LordBucket]

every time you do, the steam condenses on a sheet of metal above my bucket and the water drips in. One handful at a time, until your bucket is empty and mine is full.

But you're not doing that in an upload process. There is no "moving" of things from one place to another. How do you scoop up a handful of consciousness and move it from one place to another?

Though honestly, to me, all metaphor for consciousness from your bucket of water to the Ship of Theseus to the Grandfathers Axe break down because none of them have a sense of self. There's no ship-mind wondering if it's still the same ship (the closest you get would be the crew, and in that case, yes it is the same ship because it is the same crew. So what happens if you get a new crew? See? It breaks down)

Yes, that problem also exists. Yes, it is not illustrated by the water bucket analogy. *shrug* There are all sorts of problems with the "copy the brain to transfer consciousness" concept, and still others we haven't even talked about. For example, why do the people who subscribe to the "self as pattern" notion not worry about consciousness entanglement? If you're really "pattern" that can exist in multiple places in multiple formats, wouldn't you expect to be observing from those multiple places all at once? Or for that matter, if "self is pattern" then don't you die every millisecond of every day? The configuration of your brain is different NOW than it is NOW. What's so special about that one particular configuration at the moment you uploaded? Isn't it going to die the millisecond after you do? Or are you planning to maintain the same configuration forever?

That one example was not intended to address everything wrong with the brain-copy-upload concept.

Now how an ACTUAL slow transition that's not just really slowly killing a person would "teleport" a mind into a computer (i.e. the "Bolt on hard-drives" method, or the "replace neurons with nanomachines" method), it's because there is a... I guess the best term is "temporal gradient" over which it's impossible to pick out a single moment where the mind is NOW machine when the previous moment it was organic.

That method is interesting, but it actually avoids the transition. Let's imagine you replace neurons one at a time, let's say it works, and so now your entire brain is nanobots. Now what? You're still not software. Maybe you can do something with that, and maybe if your goal is exclusively the thread title rather than what people typically mean when they discuss uploading, maybe that's all you need. Your bones can use potassium just as well as they can use calcium. if you swap out calcium for potassium, they're still your bones. If you're happy replacing your meat brain with a metal brain...maybe that could work. I would still have concerns, because as mentioned previously in the thread, I don't think that "you are your brain." But this method does address some of the issues.

If you're like my original example, light shining through stained glass windows...if you replace the silicate glass windows one a time a time with plexiglass, it's still the same light shining through them.

[Descan]

every time you do, the steam condenses on a sheet of metal above my bucket and the water drips in. One handful at a time, until your bucket is empty and mine is full.

But you're not doing that in an upload process. There is no "moving" of things from one place to another. How do you scoop up a handful of consciousness and move it from one place to another?

Well what I took from that metaphor was that the bucket of water WAS the consciousness. *shrug*

Though honestly, to me, all metaphor for consciousness from your bucket of water to the Ship of Theseus to the Grandfathers Axe break down because none of them have a sense of self. There's no ship-mind wondering if it's still the same ship (the closest you get would be the crew, and in that case, yes it is the same ship because it is the same crew. So what happens if you get a new crew? See? It breaks down)

Yes, that problem also exists. Yes, it is not illustrated by the water bucket analogy. *shrug* There are all sorts of problems with the "copy the brain to transfer consciousness" concept, and still others we haven't even talked about. For example, why do the people who subscribe to the "self as pattern" notion not worry about consciousness entanglement? If you're really "pattern" that can exist in multiple places in multiple formats, wouldn't you expect to be observing from those multiple places all at once? Or for that matter, if "self is pattern" then don't you die every millisecond of every day? The configuration of your brain is different NOW than it is NOW. What's so special about that one particular configuration at the moment you uploaded? Isn't it going to die the millisecond after you do? Or are you planning to maintain the same configuration forever?

That one example was not intended to address everything wrong with the brain-copy-upload concept.

In my view, the general state of my brain right now, vis a vis the rate at which connections shift and neurons die and are born, my sense of self as what I would like to preserve still survives. As in, *because* my brain shifts over time and I still feel a continuous sense of self, I'm okay with around that level of shifting in a future machine-brain, since it'd be no worse than it is now in terms of self-preservation.

Now how an ACTUAL slow transition that's not just really slowly killing a person would "teleport" a mind into a computer (i.e. the "Bolt on hard-drives" method, or the "replace neurons with nanomachines" method), it's because there is a... I guess the best term is "temporal gradient" over which it's impossible to pick out a single moment where the mind is NOW machine when the previous moment it was organic.

That method is interesting, but it actually avoids the transition. Let's imagine you replace neurons one at a time, let's say it works, and so now your entire brain is nanobots. Now what? You're still not software. Maybe you can do something with that, and maybe if your goal is exclusively the thread title rather than what people typically mean when they discuss uploading, maybe that's all you need. Your bones can use potassium just as well as they can use calcium. if you swap out calcium for potassium, they're still your bones. If you're happy replacing your meat brain with a metal brain...maybe that could work. I would still have concerns, because as mentioned previously in the thread, I don't think that "you are your brain." But this method does address some of the issues.

If you're like my original example, light shining through stained glass windows...if you replace the silicate glass windows one a time a time with plexiglass, it's still the same light shining through them.

Yeah, and now the window is shatter-proof. Which may have been your point with that example!

Basically my goal is two-fold. A) Immortality. And B) Expandability. I would LIKE to be a god-head brain-the-size-of-a-planet controlling all life in a star system. Failing that, I'm okay with just living forever with my current mental capacities. But I would not want to die for the expanded mental capacities, and I would not want to sacrifice the immortality for the expansion. Actually being around comes first for me.

But, for example, if I were a nano-cloud, then I don't see any reason that adding on more nano-machines that configure into new connections as need arises would be that difficult. I mean the entire enterprise is already difficult, but it feels a smaller leap between "nano-neurons to replace" and "nano-neurons to expand" than from "meat-brain" to "expansionary cloud of nanoDescan."

And expandability is inherent to the bolt-on method, since that's literally what's happening, expansion to the point of redundancy and "Eh, I didn't need that meat anymore anyway."

It's very difficult for me to explain what I think I am. The best I can manage is: My sense of self arises from my brain, but is not inherent to my brain. If my brain were replaced with a different calculating substrate, then I feel a sense of self would still exist - It's not the substrate that ultimately matters here. Whether that sense of self is the same self that is typing these words depends on the method with which the new substrate takes over. Too much of a discontinuity in calculation feels like death to me, and birth of something that is not me.

Spoiler: Dualism mumbo-jumbo. Ignore this in terms of arguments - you can use it as a way to see my thought process, but I can and will disavow pretty much anything in here as "something I think is true." It's pretty much just throwing things at the wall and see if it sounds possible/plausible/testable/not-batshit. (click to show/hide)

It is a form of dualism, but a weird interlocking one. The mind and the brain are "separate" but not separable - You can't have a floaty thing running around without something to run on, and any brain worth it's chops is going to form a mind, inevitably. But, from the perspective of the mind (i.e. the only thing which even HAS perspective), the important thing here is the mind. As long as it is running on SOMETHING, and there are no gaps in that running, it is the same mind. The brains are interchangeable. Most importantly, the mind is because of the pattern in the brain, in that the mind has a physical, real structure that is found in the connections between neurons and the communication between neurons.

[Descan]

Probably eventually, I'm still but a lowly student!

[Descan]

Well yeah. I'm in my second year, but because of student funding and switching programs after the first semester, I'm only just now finishing my first-year courses. :V

[wierd]

You might want to consider having a better neuron, not just an acceptably replaceable one.

There's some rather disturbing data to show that when you stop myelinating, you start slowly deteriorating mentally. This happens at about the age of 25.

It becomes much harder for neurons to make new axonal connections, and form new synaptic relationships with all that insulation in there-- that insulation is essential to not be stark raving mad, mind-- but that is still very much a factor.

If you replace all your neurons with nanomachines, make sure that your surrogate replacements have better mechanisms of action, not just acceptable analogous function, otherwise you will find you cant learn new things very well.

[Descan]

Neuroscience. Since I AM a brain, I want to figure out enough about the brain to stop being a brain.

Wierd: Funny you say that, cuz when I talk to people about what I want to do and feel comfortable about talking about transhumanism and human augmentation, I go with a simple phrase of "Build a better neuron."