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Kazy posted:This show was neat, but I wish it dealt with the problem of Continuity. I mean, if you can make a copy of you, what's to say that you die for real and resleeving isn't just copying them? You should play SOMA. (The shorter answer is that in a physical, causally closed universe there's no difference between copying and moving.)
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Feb 11, 2018 16:39
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Collateral posted:To the outside observer certainly, to the internal chronicle of you, not so much. But it isn't like the version of you that is a continuation of your conscious life can say otherwise, because it not longer exists. It's actually the opposite - the internal chronicle of you is far less disrupted by a fork operation than outside observers (who can see, for example, that you've been on ice for 250 years and then woke up in a new body). To the subjective first-person qualia, the, 'I', there's no change, at least until you get some sensory evidence you're in a new place. SOMA handles this really well.
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Feb 11, 2018 17:46
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Der Shovel posted:When your entire being can be reduced to digital data, any modern notions of intangible souls and whatnot fly right out the window: we know exactly what you are, and with CTRL-X/CTRL-V we can transfer all of it from one folder to another. You're just essentially bits, and when these bits get copied (or even just outright transferred) off one storage media to the other, does the ethereal Youness transfer with them, or do you, as Kazy says, "die" and just get copied as a new set of identical bits in another container. You're still identical to the original down to the last bit, but you're still unquestionably a copy. There is only one correct answer in a causally closed, physical universe - you don't die, you are the same You, and identity is composed only of patterns of Shannon information encoded in a substrate. Death occurs when your mind state cannot propagate itself forward in time by its own rules. Death does not occur if these criteria aren't met. It's not a philosophical question but a physical one, since there is no ether, and matter cannot be 'assigned' to one mind or another - a proton is just a proton. This is, not coincidentally, the attitude taken by everyone in Altered Carbon.
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Feb 11, 2018 23:34
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Zaphod42 posted:Uhhhh that was absolutely NOT the conclusion of SOMA. In fact the big thing in SOMA was highlighting that copying IS NOT moving. Did you play the same game I did? SOMA correctly demonstrates that any mind upload operation creates a fork — two valid causal descendants, both of whom are Truly You in the first person subjective sense, real as you'll be tomorrow but now diverging from each other. Altered Carbon also handles this well: there is no 'real' Takeshi and 'copy' Takeshi in the double-sleeving (at least in the first person). Both are Takeshis, and to each it's the other one that's the copy: and both are correct. Neither one possesses some credential of subjective identity which the other lacks. When going into a mind upload, it is correct to believe that you'll go on as if nothing has happened afterwards while a copy of yourself will come into being in a digital substrate. It is also correct to believe that you will be extracted from your body and moved into a digital substrate. Both things will happen to you.
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Feb 12, 2018 05:57
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:see, here's what I'm mostly curious about in this regard. That's a great question. If you're shot in the head a couple weeks after your backup (or, like in Altered Carbon, ~48 hours after your backup) everything that's happened to you since your backup will be lost: kind of like being blackout drunk that whole time but...way more so. Your brain doesn't 'know' it's been scanned, so what happens to you, physically, as you're shot, is no different from being shot to death without a backup. This leads a lot of people to say 'yup, I died, there's no help for me.' Which is...more or less true, from the perspective of that fork. From the POV of your backup fork, you'll wake up an instant after getting your brain scan and someone will tell you "so you went off and got shot, you lost about two weeks." If you see footage or talk to friends about what you did in those two weeks, it'll probably feel pretty loving weird, like an imposter was running your life. Is this death? I think that requires you to decide what you are. Are you ONLY the most recent, up-to-date instantiation of yourself? If you got hit on the head and developed retrograde amnesia, losing two weeks of memory, would you die and be replaced by a copy? Or are you content to say, 'whatever defines me, it's not contained in the last couple weeks, since I know I was still me two weeks ago: so my identity is intact in that backup file?' My personal take — and one I think is more or less objectively correct — is that You, your consciousness, isn't a big unitary nugget of Me-ness that's either all there or all gone. It's a live state built from your memories, your senses, your physical and mental characteristics. At every moment that state's changing. If your brain state is rolled back two weeks and started again, it's a different you...but you're always becoming a different you anyway. The information loss isn't enormous compared to the sum total of your experiences. You could almost view it as an extremely lovely 'new memory': your brain was updated (by a bullet) in such a way as to remove a lot of information. In this view it's not much different from day to day life, where you might get blasted through the head with a steel rod or get Alzheimers but still be 'you'. To give the really simple, stripped-back answer, though: you're asking, if Me Prime gets a brain backup, forking into Me-Body and Me-Backup, and Me-Body is killed, have I died? And the answer is that Me-Body is loving dead and gone, but Me Prime is alive in his valid descendant Me-Backup. So Me-Body is as dead as anyone else without a backup, but Me-Prime feels really smart and smug that he got that backup, because it's given him a second chance. In the strictest, most rigorous sense of 'death' as 'any loss of information', brain uploads cannot prevent the death of your forks, but they can allow more forks to live.
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Feb 12, 2018 06:25
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Hammerstein posted:Of course there is no way to know and maybe the first example is another reason why self-cloning is so abhorred in book's future society. But the difference is that in this case I have no influence on these things. But why would someone who can make his own decisions set this up in the first place ? For example: Kovacs's clone - he knows that he is not the original, yet plays along with the original's plan. Would not the drive of self-preservation immediately make him jump ship, once he realizes that the memories are not his own and that he is just a copy ? I think there is quite a difference between knowing and not knowing that one is a clone. No, he knows he IS the original. He made the plan. He has all those memories (and all the memories of being an Envoy, and everything before and after.) He's the Real Kovacs and so is the other fork. Neither one is 'just a copy', any more than you're 'just a copy' of yourself from yesterday. quote:Bringing us back to #1 - if I were a meth and didn't believe in a soul, but considered my own life unique and precious, then I would invest all my wealth to make sure that the original never gets destroyed. The idea of a clone replacing me, is not immortality. If you're a Meth you live in a time where stacks are commonplace and therefore people understand how the physical brain works, so you wouldn't see a backup as 'being replaced by a clone', any more than you today worry about being wiped out and replaced by a clone if you get drunk. quote:"Get on the operating table and close your eyes, you won't feel a thing. Unfortunately you will die during the experiment. But worry not - we have a perfect 1:1 clone of yourself ready, with all the memories up to the moment you lose consciousness. As soon as your brain activity ceases, we will start up your clone and he can walk away with a huge cheque of future-bucks". To your internal existence, how is this distinguishable from lying down on the table, falling asleep, and waking up with several thousand future bucks? I'm quite serious, this isn't a trick question. How is there any risk of death here? Your body has shed millions (billions?) of dead cells through its life, but what remains preserved is the pattern, the Shannon entropy encoded in the structure. That entropy will be preserved. Just because you're leaving a corpse-shaped pile of dead cells behind doesn't put you at any more risk. It's hard to imagine that your consciousness could possibly 'migrate' from one body to the other until you realize that's exactly what's happening. After you're unconscious, they scan your brain state and code it into a new substrate. Substrate's irrelevant, so this is nondestructive. This isn't a philosophical question or a matter of differing definitions. You cannot say you'd 'die' here without also believing you've died zillions of times in the course of your day to day existence. And if all those deaths don't bother you, why should this one? Zaphod42 posted:Its not too crazy to see that people would BELIEVE they'd transfer and stay alive even if the science doesn't back it up. No, you've misunderstood the game. SOMA correctly depicts brain scanning as a way for your true, real, first-person self to go on living. That's why everyone gets scanned and goes to the Ark. It genuinely is a solution and a path to immortality. SOMA also correctly depicts the problem of forking: some of your forks aren't going to get the happy ending. They're going to be left behind. And they're just as much Genuinely You. The cultish, irrational movement in SOMA was 'continuity', the belief that they could only go to the Ark if they killed their organic fork. In fact, this is just euthanizing one of the forks: it makes no difference to the other fork at all. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Feb 13, 2018 |
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Feb 13, 2018 00:55
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There is only one objectively correct answer to this problem in a causally closed, materially physical universe — but there are a LOT of fallacies and imprecise definitions which can confuse getting there. Here is one of them: You say "the problem is that people on the bottom of the ocean are going to die and we can't fix that." But that's not the problem. The problem is "people on the bottom of the ocean aren't going to live." By uploading themselves to the Ark, they get to live — not as copies who think they're the same person, but literally as the same first-person qualia, the same people. This is because there is no possible criteria to distinguish a high-fidelity brain upload from the process of ordinary existence. However, uploading yourself to the Ark is a forking procedure. It leaves behind another fork which is 100% also The Real You, no more or less genuinely You than the one in the Ark. This fork is doomed to die on the ocean floor. This is what Catherine explains to you over and over again: that continuing to live does not mean avoiding death. The Continuity people who kill themselves after the scan are wrong not because they believe THEY, the real deal, get to become the scan: that's true. They're wrong because they think murdering the other fork is necessary for this to happen. If all brain activity was suspended in the moment before the scan, and the body was then vaporized after the scan was complete, there would be no divergent fork, and this process would be indistinguishable to your consciousness from ordinary day to day life. Here is where we get to the core of the issue. Again, there is an objectively right answer, but you need to be careful about definitions to reach it. You say: "All you're doing is killing yourself, you're not magically jumping to the consciousness in the machine from the consciousness in your body." You are actually talking about three different YOUs here. Let's call them Zaphod42-Prime, the OG, the one who's trying to decide whether to get a brain scan; Zaphod42-Meat, the physical human who gets up from the chair after the scan; and Zaphod42-Scan, the digital self produced by the scan. Your problem is that you are trying to use Zaphod42-Meat's circumstances to argue that Zaphod42-Prime shouldn't get the scan. Yes, from the moment of the scan onwards, Zaphod42-Meat is on his loving own. He might as well have no backup anywhere for all the good it's going to do his consciousness. But Zaphod42-Prime has now developed into two separate entities, Meat and Scan. If Meat dies, there's still a valid causal descendant of Prime in play. Prime has not died. The scan has preserved Zaphod42-Prime from a future death. Pretty cool, huh? Zaphod42-Prime used brain scanning to achieve immortality. What's more, if Zaphod42-Meat has read up on brain scans and the truth thereof, he may decide "It's not a big deal if I die in the next few minutes after the scan. I'll only lose a few minutes of memory, and even if my whole body gets vaporized, it'll just be like I was put in a time chamber and reversed a few minutes. I don't believe that would kill me, so this wouldn't either." That's a more optimistic interpretation, so take it separately from the above.
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Feb 13, 2018 01:12
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Zaphod42 posted:The fact is the people didn't want to die, uploaded their consciousness, and then killed themselves, hoping this would mean they (the person who shot themselves) would keep living. The game itself EXPLICITLY tells you at least 5 times in the story that THIS IS FALSE. Those people died. They did not transfer. When the scan was made there were 2 people, 2 consciousnesses, and then at some point when they commit suicide, one of them dies. There is no "merger" of consciousnesses. Please reread the post you're responding to. Nowhere do I assert any kind of merger. You will find your concerns addressed most clearly in the section discussing 'Zaphod42-Prime' and friends. The rest you can read about in the earlier paragraphs which clearly define 'continuing to live' as something separate from 'failing to die.'
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Feb 13, 2018 01:20
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Zaphod42 posted:Please reread the post you're quoting; nowhere do I assert that you asserted any kind of merger! The people in SOMA do. That's the whole point. That's what I just said. ...so you're agreeing with me that the Continuity people are wrong. Do you disagree with any other part of my post? Do you now see that brain uploads are good way to achieve immortality, which you disagreed with a few posts ago?
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Feb 13, 2018 01:22
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It is not a matter of perspective, it is objectively a fact. There are definitive answers in the physical, causally closed universe we live in (if you believe in a dualist universe we can't have a meaningful conversation.) Do you believe that you die every instant and are replaced by a slightly different copy? If not, why not? e: I'm glad you brought up the Moravec upload, since it is trivial to demonstrate it is far more dangerous to your identity than an instantaneous scan.
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Feb 13, 2018 01:24
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Yes. Catherine correctly identifies the Continuity people as delusional because they believe killing themselves is key to 'truly' becoming the digital fork. They are wrong. Not only is this unnecessary, nothing they do to their meat fork can in any way alter the digital fork. The two are no longer causally connected. They are separate, diverging beings. In fact the Continuity people could (correctly) have said "I want to die as soon as the scan is complete, so that I do not produce a fork which remains behind on the seabed to die miserably." edit: You edited your post so now you've hosed it up with wrongness. SOMA clearly demonstrates that copying is moving. What it also demonstrates is that CTRL-C is not CTRL-X. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Feb 13, 2018 |
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Feb 13, 2018 01:29
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Zaphod42 posted:Personally the way I see it, Bancroft keeps dying over and over. Its an army of clones. From the perspective of others he keeps on, but from Bancroft's point of view there is a Bancroft-version who dies the real death each time. This is objectively incorrect, unless you also hold to the belief that you are constantly dying in your own point of view, every second of every day. It is a common misconception based on an incorrect understanding of the physical nature of identity — a conflation of matter with the Shannon entropy encoded in that matter.
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Feb 13, 2018 01:31
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That's not what you've been saying the whole time. Some of the things you've been saying the whole time are objectively wrong; for example, that Bancroft is constantly being replaced by an army of clones, that Simon in SOMA cannot look forward to a happy life on the Ark, and that digital backups are not a good way to become immortal. It's really unclear to me whether you've changed your mind on this or not. e: I can't have a conversation if you're going to keep editing your posts.
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Feb 13, 2018 01:34
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Attach your brain state to your next post so that we can have this argument in real time.
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Feb 13, 2018 01:36
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Zaphod42 posted:Double posting so Battuta doesn't get upset That's correct. So why... Zaphod42 posted:NO IT IS NOT. quote:This is a matter of perspective and not necessarily fact. One perspective could be prime dies when meat dies. Another could be prime dies when meat and the other guy get spawned. There's no definitive answer to this. ???
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Feb 13, 2018 01:43
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Hammerstein posted:Well in my proposal there are no DHF stacks or anything in play. You get on the slab, lose consciousness, a perfect copy of your memories is transferred into your new body and then the original you dies. To me, personally, that's a frightening thought. That a 1:1 clone of myself awakens at the same moment, is not in the least comforting. To me it's a fundamental principle of self-preservation that I do not want to give up my current state of continuous existence. What about this deal requires you to give up your current state of continuous existence?
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Feb 13, 2018 03:33
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Hammerstein posted:Well everything of course. It means the end of your current existence and your cognitive stream and the awakening of a "fresh" you. I find the concept of "It's ok if I die, there's a fresh copy of myself ready to pop out of the clone tank" to be rather confusing. Why? What about the deal is different than course of your ordinary day to day life? What divides 'current you' from 'fresh you'? These aren't rhetorical questions, I'm genuinely asking what would cause these differences.
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Feb 13, 2018 06:37
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Zaphod42 posted:That's what I was sayin, this is what most people consider immortality to mean. Then just have the meat fork euthanized when you upload. This is exactly what happens in your day to day life - new self overwrites old in a linear progression.
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Feb 13, 2018 07:39
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Hammerstein posted:The simple drive of self-preservation for example. If my heart stops and as a consequence my brain dies, then I cease to exist (no one knows if there is an after-life or an immortal soul). I don't want my current existence to end and if I die then it's not comforting to me that a clone of myself gets activated with the same memories. Why does your heart stop and your brain dying cause you to cease to exist? There's a right answer to this question: because it leads to the breakdown of the information stored in the physical structure of my brain. But if that information isn't lost, then it's not death; nor is it a matter of a 'clone of myself' activating with the same memories. My chain of existence is going on unbroken just as it would on any other day, but one of the links in the chain uses digital sensors instead of nerve tissue. The 'clone' does not 'think he is the real me'. Metaphysical soul-jumping does not exist, nor do souls; therefore all criteria for selfness are physical. If the Shannon entropy of your self hasn't been lost, then you have not died. The creation of a 1:1 copy is an extension of your life, because it is exactly the same way you live from day to day. You are constantly copying yourself forward into new but slightly different bodies. quote:I find it really interesting that 2 human beings, can have such a different outlook on what is immortality and what is not. There are two different outlooks, but only one objectively correct answer in a physical universe. If you bring in dualism and souls all bets are off. Rinkles posted:Doesn't this kind of analogy require a much better understanding of the functioning of our consciousness, and a comprehensive description of the mechanism by which mind transfer would occur? I don't think it's at all self-evident that sleep is analogous to whatever that would involve. We don't need any more information than we already have, except for the possibility that some part of consciousness depends on quantum information (which is extraordinarily unlikely given the evidence we have right now.) We can draw a box around what consciousness might be. It is physical. It does not depend on the substrate (because individual atoms have a known set of traits and none of them are 'I belong to a given consciousness). It obeys causal closure. Given these parameters we can make correct deductions about how consciousness can be copied, backed up, and reinstantiated. One of them is 'consciousness exists in the brain, and it is a result of physical operations carried out by a substrate.' If we can replicate those operations, we can replicate any possible product of consciousness, including the True First-Person I. Philosophy is not admitted. Which is why: Zaphod42 posted:Exactly, but Battuta is convinced he's already right and not even willing to discuss this issue it seems. There is no discussion required. We can 'discuss' whether time dilation is a real effect or a mathematical artifact all day, but the truth is it's real, and no amount of unintuitiveness or disbelief alters that.
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Feb 13, 2018 20:27
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Zaphod42 posted:This isn't right and you saying it is over and over proves nothing. WHY? If you can't prove it, you can't assume it. I've said why quite a few times, but I'm happy to do it again. What is death? Well, we know it's not loss of raw material. You could swap out all the protons and electrons in your brain for new ones and you'd never notice a change, because physics makes it clear one proton is as good as any other. There's no label on an atom which says "I belong to Zaphod42." So if death isn't loss of raw material, what is it? Why does a bullet to the head kill us? Or a heart attack? It can't be because of gross loss of matter. If you were hit by a ghost bullet which replaced every atom it touched with an identical atom, you would not be harmed: we know this because atoms are interchangeable. If you suffered a heart attack and your nerves began to die, but emergency nanomachines stepped in and repaired the damage, you wouldn't die. We know this because neurons are interchangeable as long as their structure is preserved. So we need to look for death in the loss of structure. Not the loss of atoms or neurons, but the relationships between them. Why is this structure important? Because it encodes physical information, Shannon entropy - it encodes 'circuits' and 'connections' (forgive the use of computer metaphors in nerves) which define how we think and respond to the world. A bullet or a heart attack can kill us because it destroys information in our brain - the record of our self in a material substrate. There is no mental process to "undo a bullet" the way there is to "awaken from sleep." You can't retrieve what you just lost. It doesn't matter if the missing matter pushed out by the bullet is immediately replaced by fresh atoms if those atoms aren't arranged the same way - if the encoded information is lost. Death is the loss of Shannon entropy, physical information, from our selves into the world. We cease to be self-regulating, self-modifying systems. An external force - a bullet, a lack of oxygen, severe cold - degrades the rules by which the brain changes itself. This is how we die. Once we know this, we can look at situations in which our brain might be destroyed but we don't die. These are all situations in which Shannon entropy is preserved: the structure of our brain persists in a new substrate. We suffer a stroke and go in for immediate repairs. 1% of our brain is rebuilt by nanomachines to match a scan taken yesterday, when the stroke was predicted. I doubt anyone here would claim we died. Now imagine the stroke kills 2% of your brain. Now 30%, 50%, 90%...in each case all the damage is repaired. There is obviously no threshold at which we can say 'below this is just fixes, above this is death': if we claimed that, we would need to locate our identity in the delta that threshold crosses. But it's obviously not there. Since no information is lost in any of these situations, we don't die. Imagine that you decide to convert your brain into an immortal machine. You introduce a nanite which, neuron by neuron, over the course of years, gradually replaces aging cells with nanites. Eventually, your entire brain is made of nanites. All function has been preserved. Did you die the first time the nanite upgraded a neuron? Nope. Did you die when it had upgraded 25%? Nope. 50%? Why would you have died there? Nope. 100%? Nope. Information is preserved, though all the matter has changed. Now imagine that nanite completes its work in an instant. There is no loss of function or information (redundant to say both, but hey). Does this kill you? Obviously not. Yet this case is identical to being brain scanned and then euthanized: you have replaced all your physical neurons with simulated equivalents. There are a few more thought experiments that get at this, but I feel like that's a good primer. Does that help make it clear why death only occurs due to loss of information and structure, not loss of substrate? quote:Battuta's argument is because we don't understand consciousness we can just ignore it. That's not right. Consciousness is as well understood as anything else. It is physical. It is the product of operations in the brain. There is nothing in the universe but physics, since it is causally closed. Therefore consciousness must be the result of physics. Therefore wherever the physical process of consciousness occurs, consciousness occurs. It is demonstrated.
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Feb 13, 2018 20:44
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Please read the above post. You are confused again: you think I am saying that after a backup operation, the meat fork would somehow migrate to the digital fork when it died.
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Feb 13, 2018 20:47
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You are obviously losing information to the Alzheimers plaques - your identity is being destroyed. The rules your brain uses to modify itself are seriously degraded. You are dying. One of the worst parts of Alzheimers is knowing that a living relative is no longer the same person. Do you have a third alternative to introduce between "matter" and "information encoded by matter?" A neuroliferous aether, perhaps? Is there something else we should consider? A step between two adjacent concepts isn't a leap. I don't think you are disagreeing with anything I'm saying.
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Feb 13, 2018 20:51
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It's weird that you have these disagreements, because I thought we got on the same page yesterday. Saying that 'life is a process' or 'life is homeostasis' is just a way of saying that life is Shannon information. Structure matters. A Brownian soup of randomly moving atoms is in homeostasis: add more matter and it'll gradually settle to equal temperature and equally random, meaningless motion. But it's not alive. It encodes no information. Similarly, a pendulum is a process and a cycle: it ticks back and forth. But it encodes nothing. What sets life (and the brain) apart is the extraordinary density of Shannon information. We constantly eat up energy to preserve this information. Cells have DNA, a coding structure which not only replicates itself but contains instructions on how to build proteins which in turn build our bodies. The brain is full of neurons, which not only metabolize and exist on their own, but connect to other neurons and stimulate or suppress activity in patterns which compute our brains and personalities. Again, a field of a billion neurons might exist in perfect homeostasis, firing a signal around in a ring. But there is very little information encoded here. Nothing is being done. The definition of life as information is fundamental to understanding what we are. The only distinction between a human being and several piles of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, and so on is the way those elements are organized — an organization which we quantify as Shannon entropy. We know how to upgrade or move consciousness right now. We just can't do it do to engineering constraints. SOMA and Altered Carbon both present technology which works Correctly, i.e. according to the laws of physics by which minds are constrained. Consciousness can be scanned (its Shannon information replicated), copied to a new substrate (by physical replacement of the brain or transcription of information), paused, accelerated, fed artificial inputs, and destroyed. This destruction is death. Death occurs when a brainstate cannot propagate its information forward. One example would be having your stack blown out. Death does not occur when your brainstate can propagate its information forward. One example would be needlecasting a copy of your brainstate to a new sleeve just before your stack is blown out. Any information not caught by that needlecast is lost to death. If you are about to get RD'd (in Altered Carbon's parlance), you might needlecast a backup, then look up at your assassin in defiance and say "gently caress you." All your experiences between the needlecast and the assassin's gunshot will be lost. Is this death? This brainstate cannot copy itself forward in its entirety...but it only differs from the needlecasted state by a few seconds, so not much is lost. It's probably some fraction of death, at least. You might also order your brain to halt all functions, then needlecast a backup to a new sleeve. This is objectively not death. No information in your brainstate has been lost. You have effectively teleported your consciousness without any loss. If you made your backup 48 hours ago like Bancroft, you are going to lose everything you did in those 48 hours when your stack gets slagged. This is Real Death for that fork, but he may take comfort in knowing he's barely diverged from his backup...unless he did anything really life-altering in those hours.  Zaphod42 posted:Look at it this way battuta, if I scan you to carbon and your sleeve is "empty" and you're not spun up, are you currently alive? I am alive when my brain state can propagate itself forward without major loss. I am dead when it cannot. Neither criteria is satisfied here. If I'm started up again, my subjective life will continue exactly where it left off with no break. If the storage medium is destroyed, I die.
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Feb 13, 2018 21:14
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Zaphod42 posted:Planets have high entropy compared to space, are planets alive? Information density alone is sufficient — there's no need to look for a binary threshold. Everything is ultimately made of matter. 'Alive' versus 'not alive' is a human concept; to the universe there are just swarms of particles interacting according to laws. Life is the ability to pump energy to preserve and replicate a particular pattern of information. If you wanted to claim a planet was alive, you probably could, but it would be very hard to argue it's anywhere near as alive as a person. Zaphod42 posted:We're so close You agreed with this yesterday. Why has it taken you so long to get back here today? You opened this conversation today by saying we didn't understand consciousness and that the identity-safety of a brain upload was a matter of opinion. Are you still holding to those points?
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Feb 13, 2018 22:29
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Helo from BSG had a pretty shaky Russian accent imo (I am not an expert on Russian accents). It's hard to buy him as a slimy villain.
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Feb 13, 2018 23:47
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Zaphod42 posted:Agreed with what, myself? of course I agree with myself. I'm trying to get you to agree that backups are not actual immortality in the sense most people want. You haven't come around to that yet and I don't see why not. Because it's not true. It's not hard to design a backup scheme in which you don't leave any forks behind to die - for example, get a full structural scan off your body while unconscious, start running a digital fork, and euthanize the body before it wakes up. You can't call this 'dying' any more than you call your day to day life dying: in the act of typing your response to this post you've overwritten yourself with slightly new brainstates uncountable times. It is possible for a backup scheme to fail to prevent a future fork from experiencing death, for example if you scanned your brain and the meat fork then walked out and got hit by a car: but since nobody has claimed otherwise there doesn't seem to be a point arguing it. The fact that you're agreeing with Hammerstein about anything is what I want to dig at, since that suggests you don't fully understand the facts here. quote:Those are two conclusions you drew based on what I said, but they are not what I said. When it comes to complex philosophy like this the details are VERY important, you need to be more careful about assuming things. The more time you spend trying to parrot my words or quibble over exact definitions, the less you have to say for yourself. You are centrally concerned with identity safety. Allow me to quote what you said after writing this. Zaphod42 posted:To me knowing that my brain-scan will live on is about as satisfying as knowing that my twin brother will live on after my death. Its nice, but you're still gonna die. quote:As we've said all along; from the perspective of the outside world you don't die. That works fine. The question is and always has been, do instances of yourself still experience dying, something uncomfortable or undesirable to them? And the answer is yes! Cloning yourself or replicating yourself creates 2 versions of the thing, you can't have the same 1 thing be 2 things at once. If one of them dies, it dies. It doesn't merge in with the other one. Death still happens. Its a loophole that allows "you" to still live, but the you-entity that had the brain scan done is dead as a doornail whether or not another instance of you exists. You are concerned that in the following situation: You go into a room to get a brain scan. You are sedated and your brain is scanned. Your brain function is frozen at the moment of the scan and your body is vaporized. Your brain scan is activated in a computer, exactly where it left off. that you would 'still experience dying'. You are afraid that you are now 'dead as a doornail' and that 'another instance of you' has taken over. In short, you are afraid that this identity is not safe. Yet this is clearly untrue. There is no diverging fork, no one to leave the room and get hit by a car; no information has been lost. This is no different from your conscious experience on a day to day basis. Why are you afraid that this would kill you? Can anyone here be said to 'die'? Can you articulate a reason to distinguish 'original' from 'copy' from the first-person, subjective point of view (without invoking someone else's perspective)? Hammerstein posted:The end of these functions also leads to the end of the current entity hosting them, aka death. Sure the stored information is now backed up in the clone, but the life of the original host ends. The orignal and the clone may share the same memories, but each is an individual lifeform and not some kind of inter-connected swarm intelligence Why? Can you articulate why an entity dies in your proposed scenario of "lie down, get scanned, vaporize, scan implanted in new body"? Do not use the circular 'because they die'; define death. It cannot be because of the loss of bulk matter, because all matter of the same type is equivalent. One carbon molecule is as good as another. What, then, is being lost when the body is vaporized? What has died? Answer this question and you can prove your point; but it cannot be answered affirmatively, because nothing is being lost. quote:Also I sincerly believe, although I'm not religious, that people are more than just some biomass with memories. Of course people risk their lives in often selfless acts, but no one I know would sacrifice himself so that a clone can awaken and take over. This is all well and good, but belief is irrelevant. Objectively people are made of matter organized into structure. Since individual particles or atoms cannot contain information specific to an individual (they are all alike), the individual's existence must be encoded in the relationship between the matter in the body. A person is matter arranged into a pattern, and the specific matter involved is irrelevant. This definition includes self-preservation, self-awareness, consciousness, individuality, and the joy of being alive: these are all the results of operations conducted in the material brain. This is a fact. It is unavailable to dispute on the grounds of belief. Big props to Tiggum for bein right about everything and don't forget disinterested bystanders you can always put users on ignore!
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Feb 14, 2018 03:09
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Zaphod42 posted:This just means your original died in its unconscious sleep. Which is preferable to a painful death, but is still death. But the brainstate isn't euthanized to nothing. It is preserved and carries on. The body is euthanized; the body is not the brainstate. It's a substrate for holding the brainstate. We established that when we proved that repairing wounds or swapping out matter doesn't kill you. Stop worrying about the case of two separate forks after a backup/teleport/whatever. Nobody is contending that if one died it would magically migrate to the other. There Bias Two posted:So I just finished this show and I have really mixed feelings about it. It was definitely fun, but a lot of the elements fell completely flat for me. I wasn't sold on the whole idea of the envoys trying to destroy stack technology. What about the Meths makes them any worse than regular ol' privileged psychopaths? It seems stupid to attack a tool when clearly the main issues were socioeconomic ones. You would probably like the books better, where the problem is capitalism, not stacks (stacks are seen as an enabler for really lovely immortal capitalists, but not inherently evil) and the Envoys are a UN Protectorate anti-insurgency group that Takashi leaves in disgust.
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Feb 14, 2018 04:17
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bring back old gbs posted:This post should be added to the OP, it's a really succinct way to explain the technically-death-even-if-you-backup thing. Ego run amok, clouding you from the truth that it's not actually "you". That only holds if your backup or stack is somehow out of date - and only to the extent that you consider losing a few hours of your existence 'real death'. I don't think most people believe retrograde amnesia would kill them. Putting an AI in a synth body would probably qualify as some sort of crime against (in)humanity.
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Feb 14, 2018 05:51
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Neddy Seagoon posted:A copied instance does, yes. You yourself are still quite dead. It only "gets weird" because you realize the true nature of what that transfer's just done. The basic thing you don’t seem to get is that there’s no magical quality to the place data lives. Information doesn’t care what’s used to encode it as long as it’s preserved. Your mind is a system for moving atoms around according to rules. If those rules are suddenly moving bits around instead, they don’t care. They’re still you. This should be trivially obvious once you recognize that all the protons in your brain could be swapped out for identical duplicates without killing you. A proton functions as a proton. Identifying information with substrate is a trap. The fear that a brain upload would replace you with an ineffably different copy and leave you dead doesn’t hold up to logic. It’s just a fear created by the fact that the same process in day to day life casts off old substrate as heat, sweat, and poo poo rather than a corpse.
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Feb 14, 2018 06:22
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Neddy Seagoon posted:You have deleted a copy and paralyzed someone. No. Information is a well understood and quantified concept in physics - conservation of information may even be as fundamental a law as conservation of mass-energy. If this is new to you, check out the Wikipedia page on physical information. Again. Information is the arrangement of elements into a structure: the difference between several piles of base elements and a human being of the same composition. The elements may be swapped out (neurons for simulated digital equivalents, or nanomachines, or whatnot) without altering the information encoded. You surely understand that all protons are identical, right? All atoms of carbon or oxygen and so forth? So you grasp that if a wizard were to replace every atom in your body with an identical replacement, nothing would change. You would not die. Now imagine the wizard leaves the matter he swapped out in a pile by your side. Do you scream “My poor dead atoms! Now I am only a clone!”? No, you don’t. Now imagine the wizard leaves the matter he swapped out in the shape of your dead corpse. It’s dead because the wizard didn’t transfer any brain activity. Do you shriek “I’ve been murdered! Murder!” Or do you see why getting hung up on substrate is a trap?
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Feb 14, 2018 07:13
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By that objection you’ve disproven the existence of your own brain. Do you think your thoughts depend on specially labeled atoms? Unique proteins that known they’re part of you? A specially privileged part of space time? You are not an object, friendo. You are not an instance or substrate. You’re a pattern of information computing on a substrate, and wherever that pattern operates, so do you. The continuity here is not an illusion. It’s mathematically provable that no information is lost, only substrate. And as we laid out above, substrate doesn’t matter. But let’s be more specific about your objection. In which of the above scenarios do you feel the wizard killed you?
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Feb 14, 2018 07:35
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You can could probably do that, though I shudder to think how hard it might be to adapt one brain’s idiolect to abother’s. It might be easier to just provide realistic simulated input - canned, compressed ‘practice’. A lot of the sleeves in Altered Carbon seem to come with skills, but I don’t know if it’s laid out how much they’re neural and how much they’re somatic/reflexive - probably a lot of both, realistically.
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Feb 14, 2018 08:00
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Zaphod42 posted:No, this isn't given! You can't just declare this! It is not only written into the laws of the universe, there's no way it could be different. A "different process with identical behavior" is the same process. If somebody assembled atoms in the future a way that perfectly matched your current pattern, you would continue existing. This is exactly what happens to you every day. You continue to exist because there are atoms assembled in the future which carry on the information of your currenet state. Of course there are ways you can fork a consciousness and then allow one of the forks to die. No one has argued otherwise. Zaphod42 posted:The part where Battuta said you euthanize the body. That's where you draw the line. Why? Do you tremble in horror that you are constantly euthanizing your past selves by continuing to exist? Do you look at your poop and shriek in terror? "That used to be me!" Substrate is only important to the extent it encodes information. Neddy Seagoon posted:If you want to take the Altered Carbon example, consider this; Battuta's concepts would explicitly prevent Double-Sleeving. Forking only makes sense if you understand that scans are as valid a method of causal propagation as slouching around in a meatsack. Of course information can be duplicated - that's how the human mind works, by recording information in a physical state. If you don't get that fact, you think one of the double-sleeved Taks is a 'copy' and one is an 'original'. If you understand how forks work, you realize both are genuinely Tak, the OG Real Me born on Harlan's World. Zaphod42 posted:According to Battuta's logic booting up 2 people with the same state would mean one person would be experiencing both because "you" are instantly anywhere that your state exists. For the nth time, no. Once you're done with a fork operation, the two forks are no longer causally connected, and they might as well be separate people. But both are valid causal descendants of whoever sat down to undertake the brain scan/teleport/whatever. There is no difference between a copy and a transfer. Copying is moving. Zaphod42 posted:Yeah and I said long ago that Bancroft is identical for everybody external to him. That was never in question. Bancroft's state 48 hours after he got a backup has diverged from his state when he got the backup. That delta is lost. However, the Bancroft who got backed up now exists again: his state has been recreated. He exists because his state exists. You are proving I am correct. Zaphod42 posted:Also Battuta has this weird thing where he doesn't really believe in consciousness and keeps insisting "you" would be anywhere your brain state would be which makes no sense if you can double-sleeve but he just barks "shannon entropy!". Again, pronounced loudly and slowly. Two forks diverging from a single source differ from each other - they are becoming more and more separate people. They are both valid causal descendants of the person who undertook the fork. If you are confused by large words I can use smaller ones. Zaphod42 posted:I've literally posted like 5 times in this thread "you could theoretically transfer consciousness with technology. However what SOMA and Altered Carbon go out of their way to demonstrate is that in their worlds they are making copies, not transfers" The only difference between a copy and a transfer is whether you leave a fork behind to diverge. That's not a matter of advanced technology, it's a matter of vaporizing or euthanizing the corpse. A copy is a transfer in all other respects. Neddy Seagoon posted:A copy of you is not you, it is their own entity with delusions of self-identity drawn from their own memories. You are still dead. It is A Laurens Bancroft, Battuta insists that any instance is the immutable Laurens Bancroft. By this logic you die every instant of every day. You are only a series of copies creating the illusion of continuity through memory. Any instance of Laurens Bancroft's brain state at time X is genuinely Laurens-Bancroft-at-time-X. There is no 'immutable Laurens Bancroft' because brain states constantly change; identity is not an immutable nugget or a dualist soul, as you seem to imagine. Hammerstein posted:Also: the original's consciousness in the aforementioned example ended by the time the good doctor shut down your brain and transfered a copy into the clone. The original living, breathing, thinking version of you took a permanent dirtnap. Why? If you think this, you must be terrified of your own poop, and while I wouldn't put it past goons, I genuinely don't believe you look at your own discarded substrate and weep in loss that you are flushing your true self down a toilet. Good on all the Clear-Headed Physicalists in this thread who understand how consciousness works.  Shame on all of you saying 'we don't know how consciousness works!' We know enough. It's made of matter. It obeys physical law. That draws a box around the possibilities, and we can talk about what's inside that box.
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Feb 14, 2018 17:12
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Just what the hell do you think data is? Physics tells us exactly what data is. It's information. It's a state encoded in a specific arrangement of matter. You can change the elements in that arrangement without altering the data. You can't alter the arrangement without altering the data. e: Tell me where the wizard killed you, you sophist, you coward! General Battuta fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Feb 14, 2018 |
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Feb 14, 2018 17:13
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There Bias Two posted:Is it okay to talk about Altered Carbon, in this, the TV Philosophy thread? Yes, but please respect that some of us have been spun up in VR specifically to post about the philosophy of consciousness.
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Feb 14, 2018 17:43
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There Bias Two posted:Another question maybe the book readers have an answer to: It's a really good question. Why don't they all just go to San Junipero (where heaven is a place on earth?) I get the sense that it's basically for the same reason bitcoins suck. Power is expensive, running VR environments eats up a lot of power, and there's no social safety net to buy everyone who's ever born a nice VR apartment at the end of their lives. Even if you did, imagine the potential for crime and abuse in a world like Altered Carbon. Some crime ring steals your grandma's afterlife to use as a virtual torture space, or holds her hostage for weekly ransoms (forever). We could feed everybody today but due to structural inefficiency we don't. Immortality is probably the same kind of badly tended commons in Tak's world.
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Feb 14, 2018 18:03
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Hammerstein posted:You only view this from a completely nihilistic standpoint. In your example humans, actually self-aware living beings, are nothing but carbon&water and some data. So self-awareness and consciousness are non-factors ? Self awareness and consciousness are the product of computations performed by matter. This is not nihilistic. It is objective fact. quote:From my experience every living being and especially those with higher brain functions and a concept of self, prefer to be alive, rather than dead. Death is the end of the line of one's existence. So in my example a clone gets activated and the original is shut down. And as you correctly state, from an entirely material point of view nothing is lost, since the replacement is a perfect 1:1 copy. There is no 'original'. We are patterns of information encoded in a substrate. As those patterns change, so do we. When those patterns bleed their Shannon information into the surrounding environment, we die. Guess what your body would look like if we removed the Shannon information? Several piles of elements in a lot of water and stinky symbiotic bacteria. Goo. poo poo. Poop. That's what you are without the information encoded in you. And a cast-off body is no different. The thought experiment you created was: Would you go into a lab, sit down, go unconscious, have your brain scanned, your body euthanized, and a new body activated with your brain scan encoded in it? There is only one answer. Assuming the equipment is reliable and high-fidelity, of course anyone rational would. You do the exact same thing every single night. You trust a physical structure of matter to recreate your consciousness when you wake up. Since matter cannot be 'signed' to a particular entity, only the pattern of the matter is important. The pattern has been retained. There is no danger. The 'original' (who does not exist) has no more died than your poo poo just died in the toilet. It is cast-off substrate, used matter, no longer patterned into part of you. It would probably be very sentimental to look at it and say 'what a good body, it brought me so far.' But it should not trouble you; and in time you would not be any more sentimental over your corpse than you would be wistful over a big ol' stinky' ol turd. Where I think Zaphod keeps getting turned around is he's imagining the same thought experiment, but the meat fork isn't euthanized, it wakes up and diverges, and then it doesn't want to die any more because there's nowhere for its pattern to go now - it has no continuation into the future. Zaphod is pleading that meat fork's case after it's diverged (and then stumbling and saying the meat fork still has a case if it hasn't diverged.) If that were the case, then let that poor corpse live, don't flush it. Zaphod keeps begging for people to read what's being said, but then he fumbles around with 'it's not about identity, it's about...consciousness!' as if those were different things. Zaphod and friend: tell me where the wizard kills you, you existentially constipated holo-Huguenots! You're running from the question, because you know it'll force you to admit that you believe certain atoms 'belong' to your consciousness and are necessary for its function, but you know that's not true! (By the way, if you've got two USB sticks containing identical data, and you ask them 'Who's the real USB stick and who's the copy?' they'll both say I'M THE REAL ONE! And they're both right.) Also, Zaphod, consider putting all your thoughts into one post, posting it, and letting people respond before you edit it. You don't need 6 posts in a row. Just gather everything together, then press the 'submit' button.
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Feb 14, 2018 23:05
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Zaphod, you causally deluded crypto-dualist! You’re inventing things to disagree with so your fork-family won’t be shamed by your concession. I’ll spare you a raw dump of links to every time I’ve explained this before and say, again: everywhere the Shannon information of your consciousness is executed, so is your consciousness. That means, count with me, that if there are two (2), hold up one and one fingers, instances of your entropy being executed, there are two (count the eyes on your face) consciousnesses. Not one impossible ubersoul. Two. Capiche? While we’re in remedial existence land, you want to know what makes two consciousness “sudddenly no longer causally connected”. You informatically illiterate peon! Do you know what cause and effect are? If a cause in one mind can produce an effect in the other, they are causally connected. An example would be your mind state right now and your mind state in one second: causation. Two disconnected mindstates would be a meat brain and its digital copy after you shut off the scanner. Now for the pinnacle of your philosophical pratfallls! “If we euthanize the meat body, we’ve killed someone! Don’t you see? Forks can’t occur without one fork eventually dying!” Oh woebegone worrier, do you sit paralyzed on your couch, thinking “If I get up to piss, I have willfully destroyed all the brainstates which would develop if I sat here! I have willfully murdered the being who could go on existing continuously, in favor of a fork who hasn’t wet his pants?” It’s the exact same scenario! Choosing to do something isn’t murdering all the viable selves who might have developed! Euthanizing discarded substrate which might get up and walk off is as much “murder of a potential life” as our decision to leave the room is murder of your brainstate which develops by staying in that room. No, you cry, no, that’s bullshit! Copying your entropy into a new substrate and then forcefully destroying another viable copy is death, it’s deletion, it’s not the same as ordinary life where the brain’s full state always influences its next state! You’re comparing splitting a river and damming one fork to walking down a riverbank and saying it’s a new river five feet later! You insist the meat fork has died. But you can’t defeat that loving wizard! You just can’t! He comes in and with a wave of his wand he replaces every atom in your body with a new identical one. Then he assembles the old atoms into a perfect replica of your corpse...with no brain activity. Tell me, o feckless falsifier of fact! Have you been murdered? Has a fork been killed, denied the chance to develop naturally by wizard’s cruel injuncton? Or do you just say “Whoa. Weird.” at the lifeless facsimile, the you-shaped castoff, sprawled there on your couch? Confess! e: gently caress autocorrect and happy Valentine’s Day <3 General Battuta fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Feb 15, 2018 |
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Feb 15, 2018 00:17
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Zaphod42 posted:Yes, thankyou. Please. This is exactly what I'm trying to get out of him. A man who cannot understand a post will never understand the true mysteries of the mind! Click here to watch me answer your question. Click here to read it even better. Oops, I did it again! Tell us. Zaphod. Have you recently died and been restored from a backup made before you read these posts? I’ll do it for ya one more time. Your existence is a specific set of Shannon entropy (shhh, it’ll be okay). Let’s call that a brainstate. Wherever that brainstate cannot go on operating on itself, *in any medium*, it dies - for example, if Simon’s ark fork leaves a meat fork behind on the seabed, seabed Simon can’t find anywhere to put his brainstate. Wherever that brainstate can find a path to execute itself forward - for example, if Simon Prime copies his brainstate into the Ark - it lives. Simon Prime produces a fork who lives and a fork who dies. Now, if he had Catherine pause his mind and upload it as is, then delete the seabed version, no Shannon entropy is Lost. No death. Clear? Or should I link a few more posts of me explaining this? Now stop dodging the wizard by pretending your feelings are hurt! Confess!
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Feb 15, 2018 01:06
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Phobeste posted:But he agrees with that... he's arguing from one step further remove than you and saying that yes, in the moment that second copy of you does not want to die. But from a perspective of either the you before the copy, or of an outside observer, if you fork someone (and you really have to think of them as two separate forks, not an "original" and a "copy" - this is what he's getting at with saying "you're information" over and over, there is no originality or hierarchy, these post-fork beings are both equally you - and then one of the forks dies but the other survives, it sucks for that fork but you, your data, your consciousness, is still present. It happens to be encapsulated in the fork that didn't die. It does suck for the fork that does! That's sad! But that fork comes after the decision to do the fork in the first place (which is the SOMA analogy, because pre-fork person has successfully escaped - it's just that fork A has to drown while fork B gets to go to space) and considering the two forks are the same person, when somebody says to them "hey one of you has to die but the consciousness lives on" it's maybe not as hard a choice to make. Perfectly said! Though they will go on to become less and less identical as their experiences diverge.
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Feb 15, 2018 01:07
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