From: Brett Paatsch (paatschb@optusnet.com.au)
Date: Sun Jun 29 2003 - 06:47:44 MDT
Lee Corbin writes:
> Hal writes
>
> > I see the debate as between those who agree with Harvey
> > that it is all a matter of semantics (and I am one of them),
> > and those who see it as much more significant, with an
> > underlying, important factual issue about survival that must
> > be resolved. It seems difficult to convincingly justify the
> > intuition in either case.
>
> If all the questions are oriented around *action*, then
> either you will upload or you will not. Either you will
> sacrifice yourself for your duplicate or you will not.
> The disagreements are substantive.
Agreed. We still live in a contingent world where financal
resources cannot be doubly allocated.
As Damien puts it, and as we may imagine person generally
might ask themselves:
"Would you spend $100,000 (or whatever it costs) to
bring about this discontinuous xoxing? It's like the choice
of cryonics, but more moot. If you're dying anyway, you
can't take it with you, but wouldn't it be make you happier
to bequeath it to your kids, your extended family," etc
> I think that people's minds are being changed.
I think we are at least refining the questions. And I think
there is substantial agreement that some terms like
"consciousness" "self", "same person" which normally are
used pretty freely are problematic.
> But I also claim that people's beliefs would (and perhaps
> will) alter dramatically after they've known a few
> duplicates.
To go back to the leap of faith aspect. I have never seen
anything I regard as sentient return from the dead even in
convincing replica. A revived cryonaut would make the
leap of faith in cryonics substantially less than leaps of faith
in religions. An uploaded personality, that can be interacted
with in a convincing Turing-like way would also give some
further evidence at least that the leap of faith is lessened.
But note it does not remove it altogether because, imo, all
of experience each others personailies in reality only as
streams of sensory data with which we interact.
Again, on the practical, why we should bother with the
question at all aspect, for those who would like to see
cryonics and uploading become more mainstream a revived
animal, a "Benny the dog" (Vanilla Sky), is likely to give a
competitive edge against religions to people less sceptical
than me and influence social policy such as when
(information losing) autopsies are done.
The question I ask myself is what would make a difference
for me, from the standpoint of increasing my confidence that
I would *actually* survive cryonics, or uploading (that wasn't
incremental - incremental being my scenario at present), and
as Lee points out teleportation.
It seems taking a teleport would not suffice. I'd have
gone in reluctantly and come out happy to be alive but
wondering if I was the same specimen that went in so
reluctantly.
Rather, I think the better way to approach it is to attack
the question from the other way. To explore those scenarios
where to increasing degrees the "mind" as conscious, then
unconscious process and brain are decoupled. If the mitochondria
in the neurons of the brain are still generating ATP then perhaps
EEG or no (my ignorance wall again) energy has continued to
play out on the substrate even in the clinically dead.
Interestingly this seems to involve attacking the concept of self
and may drawn one towards the conclusion that ones does not
know intellectually why the heck one has a urge to survive, or
what exactly it is that one is trying to preserve.
Some scattered thoughts.
I assume.
Two electrons may be functionally equivalent but they are not
the same. Equivalence is not identity.
Consciousness is emergent. It is not all or nothing, there are
degrees of consciousness. In my experience it *always* arises
in the context of changing wetware. In my experience no brain
means no consciousness.
The notion of "mind", the notion of "self", seem to be a result
of a mental process that emerges like a program that through
recursion becomes self aware but is always closely coupled
with changes in the underlying substrate, with neural
development.
I am a combination of matter and energy. Historically the
matter has never been completely decoupled from the energy
flow. Cryonics and uploading would seem to completely
decouple these. All atoms would be replaced (in cryonics)
producing functional equivalence but the new composite
would not be identical. Two functionally equivalent IBM
PCs do not have the same identity though they may be
functionally equivalent. Two versions of an operating system
on the PC's may be functionally equivalent, indeed one can
download from the same disks, the same information onto
two functionally equivalent sets of hardware but what is
then running is not one unique program but two functionally
equivalent programs.
Perhaps the pre-conditions for consciousness, (or that illusion
that we mistakenly label 'consciousness' or 'self' as though it
was a discrete thing -perhaps its a measure of intensity) to
emerge can be ported, but not consciousness itself.
- Brett Paatsch
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