What is meat good for?

[Gullible Jones]

Why would conflict even be necessary at this point? Unless thats what you like, and you just program lots of robot droids to fight for your amusement.

I think you severely underestimate the nasty side of human nature. People are quite willing to fight over ideologies as well as resources.

[Hawkwings]

Anyways, I'd say meat is better than metal for the reason that meat is self-replicating. A baby will grow up, but a machine in a small chassis will always be in a small chassis. Unless you get into nanotech, but I don't think we're talking about that.

[Gullible Jones]

*cough* Von Neumann machines *cough*

[Gullible Jones]

And if we're talking about minds uploaded as software, transferring a machine-personality from one chassis to another would not present a problem.

[Darth Smiley]

I think that 'uploads' have quite a few more practical problems than we care to admit - particularly in how you are going to do a 'neuron-by-neuron' transfer. Fully AGIs will probably be available sooner.

[Gullible Jones]

Yes, but remember we were discussing a society where that's possible. The practicality is another matter.

(I kind of doubt that we'll have strong AIs before we know how the human brain works in extreme detail, and can simulate it properly; after all it's the best model we've got, and saying that we can build something equivalent from scratch strikes me as rather hubristic. However IANAE so I could be talking out of my ass.)

[Darth Ruinus]

Anyways, I'd say meat is better than metal for the reason that meat is self-replicating. A baby will grow up, but a machine in a small chassis will always be in a small chassis. Unless you get into nanotech, but I don't think we're talking about that.

Or they make a bigger chassis.

[Hawkwings]

Yeah, but the meat is a self-contained system. To make another chassis, you either need to be a von neumann swarm, or you have to have outside assistance to make a new chassis. Meat only needs resources, and handles the construction itself.

[Darth Ruinus]

Yeah, but the meat is a self-contained system. To make another chassis, you either need to be a von neumann swarm, or you have to have outside assistance to make a new chassis. Meat only needs resources, and handles the construction itself.

I see what you mean but, seriously, if I had to chose between waiting for my body to reach its maximum height, waiting for my knee to heal or what have you, or simply just ordering a new knee or a bigger body, I would chose the latter.

I just dont see how "It can heal by ITSELF!" beats "I can get repaired and upgraded whenever I want"

[Lusankya]

Many people invest a lot of their identity in their meat. Perhaps they would invest less of their self-identity into their meat if it was a gradual transition from meat to metal, but if people were given the option of straight-up downloading their personality into a machine, many would baulk at the idea, because it would require a dramatic re-evaluation of their self-identity, which they would not be comforatble with.

[PeZook]

Yeah, but the meat is a self-contained system. To make another chassis, you either need to be a von neumann swarm, or you have to have outside assistance to make a new chassis. Meat only needs resources, and handles the construction itself.

The resources meat needs to grow properly are vast and inefficient. It needs food, which means farming, transport and processing, and distribution. It needs medicine, schools, a place to live in, hospitals in case its injured, and it still takes 18 years to build a proper body, which then degenerates rapidly.

While metal still needs vast resources, it uses them far more efficiently. You don't need vast tracts of arable land - factories and mines and processing plants take up far less space than farmland. You don't need vast and complicated health care networks - diagnosis is much simpler, and treatment can simply replace parts without worrying about immune reactions. And so on.

You're ascribing to much to genetics and brain functions as though they require a continuous input rather than have lasting consequences to the personality simply from existing in the first place. As people get older, for example, their bodies change dramatically in how much input of different kinds of hormones they have. This doesn't stop older women from wanting to have sex, however, and definitely not older men, nor does it stop older men from being selfish, arrogant bastards who would send millions of young boys to their deaths on the field of battle for their private ambitions.

Well, it's not all brain chemistry, sure - but social changes would have a very significant impact on how everything progresses. Things like "fighting for a mate" behavior would probably be unnecessary, since sex could easily be simulated with 100% realism. I actually agree that the first generation's accumulated neuroses would carry over into the new body ; but the further you move out into the future, the more we become separated from these memories, when they get overwhelmed by memories from our new, mech-life. And if this new society still needs to expand, and creates further spawns, these "children" would not be burdened by chemically-driven brains.

Everything you say would be true about sentient robotic lifeforms that we create from whole cloth, but we're going to have the legacy, our personalities, all the information data in our heads, has already been influenced by the squishy "meat", and that means that we're not going to magically upgrade those behaviours out of existence; we would have to actively erase the knowledge of our prior existence to do so, and nobody would do that because it would defeat the whole purpose of the transfer, which is obviously immortality.

Eventually, the new robotic society would contain elements created from whole cloth. This is actually one of the reasons for conflict in this new place: the ultimate war between generations, between "legacy" uploaded humans and new ones, created after the ascension, not influences by squishy inputs and neuroses.

Think about it for a moment. All of your memories and experience and your worldview, everything that makes you who you are, has already been influenced by those chemicals and processes for decades. The legacy of that will have an impact on the sort of mental functions reproduced in a robotic body because they'll all still be the same data as they were before. This is one of the fundamental errors of transhumanism; it assumes that just because you get rid of what creates certain behaviours means you can eliminate the behaviours. To use an analogy, just because I stop shooting the flamethrower at a pile of logs doesn't mean that the fire I started in them is going to go out.

It will, eventually, when it runs out of fuel. New memories without the burden of chemical input, would eventually form the majority of "you". And, of course, there is the possibility of "personality engineering" that replaces psychology, where the data in your head is altered so that your personality changes properly. Depending on the values of this new society, this could even be done forcibly, for example - to soldiers, administrators and other similar roles.

I agree that expansion, or development, is necessary, but my point was that, since with the aforementioned artificial bodies we can freely upgrade ourselves, there's no need for reproduction to achieve said development. We could incorporate new technologies that upgrade our minds and bodies without having to spawn a new creature to take our place.

Eventually, we'll simply need more capability to reach new energy sources. Remote-controlled extra robotic bodies can only go so far, so we'll most probably spawn new "humans" to take care of this. Or produce AI en masse.

In fact, if you go far enough into the future, it will probably be pretty difficult to tell who's an "original" human and who is just an AI spawned later.

Hmm...custom-made soulmates, anyone?

Why would conflict even be necessary at this point? Unless thats what you like, and you just program lots of robot droids to fight for your amusement.

Energy and resources will always be a source for conflict. Another may be what I mentioned in this very post - inter-generational conflict between "old" and "new" sentients, as well as governance systems.

Well, why not? If we can get to the level where all we do is have fun, pleasure seeking, then whats so wrong with that? Isn't that the whole point?

The problem with that is that energy is not unlimited and technology can stagnate and regress, and if we don't have the drive to go and create more, we simply die out after an X number of years.

Although the run-up of hedonism that will lead up to that is going to be completely awesome.

[Oskuro]

Many people invest a lot of their identity in their meat.

True, but some people already invest a lot of identity on their metal.... Car tuning anyone?

If we made a transition to metal bodies, I could definitely see a boom on the neon-light industry. Not to mention a disproportionate proliferation of people customizing their bodies to look like their favorite Transformer (Custom body AND vehicle in one convenient package! Now that's an IP worth keeping a hold on).

[Starglider]

This is like the average transhumanist mailing list (e.g. Extropians) circa 1998.

The 'continuity flaw' is an idiotic concept. It makes roughly as much sense as 'free will', i.e. none. I have seen literally hundreds of people try to make a definitive argument for why a perfect copy is not the same person as the original and they /all lost/. Physics does not include souls, it does not include life forces, there is no reason why there can only be two equally valid future versions of a person. Transporters have no ethical issues. You have no argument against this other than completely ungrounded sentimentaility - 'these atoms are better than these identical atoms because... I say so!'. What you are doing here is trying to rationalise an instinctive feeling. This works ok for morality, it /utterly fails/ at anything scientific. It fails at physics, it fails at biology and guess what - this stuff is no longer philosopy and religion, it is /cognitive science/, and your intuitive expectations fail at that too.

Ok, having established that flash uploading works just fine in principle, yes gradual uploading is perfectly possible, to a degree of 'gradual' that should satisfy everyone but the most hopelessly superstitious. Google 'Moravec Transfer'.

Next, sex. Human sex is objectively quite pathetic. Sure it seems a lot of fun, sure it's bonding, but that's more of a depressing statement about the rest of human existence than a positive statement about sex. Human sex is relatively short, awkward, narrow (in a sensory sense) and worst of all /boring/. People go to absurd lengths with fetishes in a desperate attempt to inject more variety into it.

The reproductive aspect of sex is already pretty well decoupled from the recreational aspect and will be totally irrelevant in the future. Forget bumping bits of anatomy into each other to try to stimulate each other's pleasure centres. Well you can do that if you really want, but at least build or simulate some more interesting anatomy. The core of sex is giving two or more minds semi-direct access to each other's pleasure centers and emotional state. It's really a combination game and collaborative artform, with a hell of a lot more potential that will be unlocked once we can start putting minds in arbitrary bodies (and simulations) and connecting them in arbitrary ways. If you can't get over 'but I like sticking my penis in things... what if I can't do that?' you are not only being idiotic (of course you can have a perfect reproduction of old timey messy fluids bumpy bumpy sex if you're feeling nogalistic), you're being terminally unimaginative.

Oh and I hope you're all using 'metal' just as a convient summary. This is not the 1950s. Sensible robot bodies do not look like robby the robot. In relevant timescales for this, they will probably look and feel like whatever you want, but the internals will be made out of complex nanostructured materials, probably some combination of structured carbon (in nanotube and diamondoid forms), sapphire and metal-matrix composites.

All of the 'robots vs humans' and most of the 'robots vs robots' arguments are irrelevant as well BTW, mainly because of the /extreme/ winner-takes-all effects that come into play as soon as you have just /one/ general intelligence capable of recursive self-improvement (the existence of the Internet and pervasive connectivity just seal that argument). But I don't expect most of you to believe that. It's ok. What you believe about it won't make any difference anyway.

[Starglider]

If you can't get over 'but I like sticking my penis in things... what if I can't do that?

Incidentally I say this because it's generally a few of the males who can't get over it. In this are, women seem to find it easier to generalise, presumably because it was less focused on the reciprocating motion of a single piece of anatomy in the first place.

[Stark]

So I'm going to create an identical copy of Starglider, and then send it out of the room and shoot him in the face. Clearly, this is not a problem, because he's still alive lol?

[Starglider]

So I'm going to create an identical copy of Starglider, and then send it out of the room and shoot him in the face. Clearly, this is not a problem, because he's still alive lol?

Actually this isn't a major problem, in and of itself, assuming you can actually kill me near-instantaneously rather than just causing lots of pain and brain damage. Dying shortly after making a backup of yourself is roughly equivalent to short-term amnesia.

However for most legal purposes, you have to draw a sharp line somewhere, and by far the most sensible thing to do is to count every sapient being as an independent legal person regardless of how similar they are. There are exceptions, e.g. voting; people can and will game elections by creating lots of copies of themselves if they're allowed to. But of course that's actually one of the /less/ serious issues with people being able to make lots of copies of themselves.

But anyway, currently there is no distinction between 'killing one copy of someone' and 'killing every copy of someone'. Because we can't copy people. So you can get away with your horribly fuzzy definition of 'murder'. Once we're able to copy people, you have to be more specific. No sane person is going to pick 'killing every copy of someone' and a sliding scale of moral cupability based on amount of unique experience removed from the universe isn't exactly practical. Technically, babies are a lot less sapient than older children - ignore our evolved instinct to protect young, and objectively in a choice between saving an adult and saving a baby the adult wins for the same reason that saving them wins over saving a dog. But this is irrelevant for both legal purposes and 99% of practical decisions; it really only comes up in bizarre thought experiments.

[Stark]

I agree that with some nice amnesia (or just anesthetic beforehand) the copy will go on to live the same life you would have otherwise.

However, even as a materialist there's a difference in perspective. The copy ISN'T you. If I shoot you in the face, you're gone. You might be fine with that in some esoteric 'my identical copy will live on' way, but for you the lights are out.

Of course the copy won't know about it and will assume it's the original, but this doesn't change the fact that you're dead. Indeed, given such technology I'd find this a source of endless amusement.

[Molyneux]

I agree that with some nice amnesia (or just anesthetic beforehand) the copy will go on to live the same life you would have otherwise.

However, even as a materialist there's a difference in perspective. The copy ISN'T you. If I shoot you in the face, you're gone. You might be fine with that in some esoteric 'my identical copy will live on' way, but for you the lights are out.

Of course the copy won't know about it and will assume it's the original, but this doesn't change the fact that you're dead. Indeed, given such technology I'd find this a source of endless amusement.

Thank you for elegantly summing up the difference between a copy and a transfer.

[Darth Wong]

This is like the average transhumanist mailing list (e.g. Extropians) circa 1998.

The 'continuity flaw' is an idiotic concept. It makes roughly as much sense as 'free will', i.e. none. I have seen literally hundreds of people try to make a definitive argument for why a perfect copy is not the same person as the original and they /all lost/.

In whose judgment? Yours?

In physics, a discrete object is defined not just by its characteristics, but by its spatial location and physical integrity. If you copy that object, the copy may be identical to the original but it is most certainly not the original. Anyone who would claim otherwise is spouting pseudo-philosophical bullshit.

[Kuroneko]

The question is really not about physical identity but personal identity. Do the particular atoms in one's body matter that much? As one lives, those atoms are constantly being lost, and some of them replaced with other atoms. In a hypothetical world where the instantaneous substitution of a neuron with another neutron in an identical composition and state (but made of different atoms) is possible, performing that sort of operation doesn't appear to do any harm.

If there is neither an objective difference in state nor a subjective (from the point of view of our victim) change in anything, the fact that the atoms are different becomes irrelevant. That's enough to get us at least the non-cloning kind of transporters, and we can repeat the thought experiment with the requirement that the substitute neuron reacts to stimuli in the same manner, but not necessarily composed of the same materials. At that point, a functionalist notion of the mind becomes natural. Perhaps one would like to say that as the substitution is done on a larger scale, at some point we have a 'copy' and not the original human being, or that the single-neuron case kills the original just a little bit. But that is a remarkably ad-hoc, "just-so" attitude to take.

I've had a debate that went something along those lines about a year ago on this board. The only notable difference between our argued positions is that Starglider doesn't consider the possibility of 'mind cloning' (as opposed to transfer) to be at all problematic, whereas I believe that it's the most plausible challenge to the functionalist/"psychological continuity" accounts.

[petesampras]

The question is really not about physical identity but personal identity. Do the particular atoms in one's body matter that much? As one lives, those atoms are constantly being lost, and some of them replaced with other atoms. In a hypothetical world where the instantaneous substitution of a neuron with another neutron in an identical composition and state (but made of different atoms) is possible, performing that sort of operation doesn't appear to do any harm.

Exactly. Consciousness is not, to current understanding, a property of matter. Atoms are not conscious. Atoms do not possess some small amount of conciousness which aggregates with large groups of atoms to produce conscious objects. Consciousness is a property of the arrangements of matter. Two identical intelligent objects may have different physical identity, but the arrangements of matter, and hence conciousness identity, will be the same.

[Surlethe]

The 'continuity flaw' is an idiotic concept. It makes roughly as much sense as 'free will', i.e. none. I have seen literally hundreds of people try to make a definitive argument for why a perfect copy is not the same person as the original and they /all lost/.

If you copy yourself, your consciousness has branched; why shouldn't these two consciousnesses -- who are not aware of each other -- be treated as two different persons instead of components of the same person?

[Simplicius]

If you copy yourself, your consciousness has branched; why shouldn't these two consciousnesses -- who are not aware of each other -- be treated as two different persons instead of components of the same person?

If the copies existed concurrently for any length of time, they would be distinct persons, as well as distinct physical entities, unless their brains were networked and synchronized. If the original was destroyed at the moment of the copy's creation, then one branch would have been trimmed, leaving the existence of the one person to be carried on by the second physical entity.

Next, sex. Human sex is objectively quite pathetic. Sure it seems a lot of fun, sure it's bonding, but that's more of a depressing statement about the rest of human existence than a positive statement about sex. Human sex is relatively short, awkward, narrow (in a sensory sense) and worst of all /boring/. People go to absurd lengths with fetishes in a desperate attempt to inject more variety into it.

Funny, but you could replace "human sex" with "human existence" all through that paragraph and the result would be much the same. Which begs the question, what are the useful limits of objectivity when discussing our own selves?

[Surlethe]

If you copy yourself, your consciousness has branched; why shouldn't these two consciousnesses -- who are not aware of each other -- be treated as two different persons instead of components of the same person?

If the copies existed concurrently for any length of time, they would be distinct persons, as well as distinct physical entities, unless their brains were networked and synchronized. If the original was destroyed at the moment of the copy's creation, then one branch would have been trimmed, leaving the existence of the one person to be carried on by the second physical entity.

This begs a couple of questions. Why require the copies to exist concurrently for some length of time, as opposed to simply existing concurrently? And iIf the branch is trimmed at the instant of the copy's creation, isn't that still the termination of a person?

[Starglider]

However, even as a materialist there's a difference in perspective. The copy ISN'T you.

Yes, it is, to any reasonable threshold of similarity. 1.0 is not a reasonable threshold, given how noisy and lossy human brains are in the first place and how (relatively) slowly they changte.

Of course the copy won't know about it and will assume it's the original, but this doesn't change the fact that you're dead. Indeed, given such technology I'd find this a source of endless amusement.

From a viewpoint slightly before the copy, both copies are equally 'me' even using your overspecific definition; unless you are a /total/ nut who infuses particular atoms with 'me-ness' (and sticks your fingers in your ears and sings la-la-la when anyone points out how fast human atoms refresh anyway). The only mistake I am prepared to forgive you for making is the notion that 30 seconds after the copy, the two individuals are wholly distinct and that killing either one is equivalent to mudering the original before they were copied. This is because you are still taking 'me-ness is an indivisible binary property' as an /axiom/, because you are still listening to your hindbrain and trying to rationalise its output.

The classic way to break this is to just reduce the timeframe until it's blatantly unreasonable. Vaporise the copy one second after the copying process? One milliscond? One nanosecond? Is this still murder? Do you have any comprehension of how silly you are being if you say yes? If you say no at any point, where did your completely arbitrary threshold come from?

Of course I'm assuming you accept that causing someone amnesia isn't murder. Lets say I use nanobots to rewire your brain slightly to the exact state it was in 10 minutes ago. Actually I don't even have to do that. I just have to block long term memory formation, then make you go unconscious briefly. The net effect is a chunk of personal experience disappearing and the state of your brain going back to the configuration it was in at the backup point. Difference between doing this and vaporising your body and recreating the whole thing from the backup? Zero. No difference in the subjective experience, the objective 'state history of (conscious) you-like objects in the universe', no measurable difference to anyone who interacts with you afterwards (assuming perfect equipment), no differences in future history (ignoring quantum effects) etc.

Of course you /can/ do this experiment perfectly, now, with AI code. I've done it. Reverting the in-memory state to a checkpoint is /exactly/ equivalent to closing the program, then restarting from the backup. Or dropping an anvil on the computer, then restarting from the backup on a different machine. If the AI is in a deterministic simulated world, future state histories /will/ match precisely, you can easily verify that subjective experience matches precisely etc etc. The next stage is somewhat speculative non-peer-reviewed stuff so take it with a grain of salt, but if you do the experiment with a rational (i.e. expected utility driven Bayesian reasoner) AI, it will in fact treat the circumstance of being destroyed and restored from a backup as exactly the same to having its database edited at runtime to revert to the previous state (in terms of how undesireable it is).

So yeah, there is in fact no difference /relevant at the cognitive level/ between amnesia and dying/being restored from a copy. Your scenario just has the copy experiencing some 'future' history in parallel with the original experiencing some history they will 'forget'. This is /also/ irrelevant implementation detail in the final analysis, but I'm prepared to forgive the mistake given how non-obvious it is.

If the copies existed concurrently for any length of time, they would be distinct persons, as well as distinct physical entities, unless their brains were networked and synchronized. If the original was destroyed at the moment of the copy's creation, then one branch would have been trimmed, leaving the existence of the one person to be carried on by the second physical entity.

True. The minimum value of 'any length of time' is quite high for humans though, largely due to our pathetically slow LTM write speed. I'd guess days before you even began to notice any differences. Of course there is no sharp threshold; similarity isn't even a simple scalar, it's potentiall a /very/ high dimensionality measurement (depending on how pedantic you're being at that moment...). But for legal purposes we generally need sharp thresholds even if they're arbitrary.

Funny, but you could replace "human sex" with "human existence" all through that paragraph and the result would be much the same.

In absolute terms yes, but that's a seperate issue. Earlier posters were fixating on sex. Sex is one of the sillier parts of human existence and certainly the part most needing a variety injection. Lots of bits of current human life are rather monotonous and uninspiring, but sex is /supposed/ to be one of the highpoints of the human condition. I like the notion of that (unlike plenty of transhumans who claim sex is a silly little physical instinct we should all get rid of ASAP), but it needs some serious work if the implementation is going to live up to the hype.

If you copy yourself, your consciousness has branched; why shouldn't these two consciousnesses -- who are not aware of each other -- be treated as two different persons instead of components of the same person?

They aren't components of the same person. They're two very, very similar people. The point is that 'me' as a category, to make any sense at all, includes a lot of very similar people. If you can count your future self a month from now as 'me', certainly two people based on the current you but experiencing different things for the next ten minutes count as 'you'. What molecules they're made of is utterly irrelevant to any sane 'me-ness' measurement.

In physics, a discrete object is defined not just by its characteristics, but by its spatial location and physical integrity. If you copy that object, the copy may be identical to the original but it is most certainly not the original. Anyone who would claim otherwise is spouting pseudo-philosophical bullshit.

Strictly, yes, but only at the moment of copy. Given arbitrarily good technology, you can manipulate them such that milliseconds later, it is impossible for any external observer to tell which was the original and which was the copy.

This isn't relevant though. Yes, in practice, in the real universe, the two versions will usually experience differing future histories based on their position (quantum effects also come in, but then you could have both locked in identical boxes for the rest of their life such that position doesn't actually matter even at the physical level).

But this does not matter at the cognitive level, any more than whether they're neurons are actually neurons, nanobots perfectly simulating neurons at the hardware level, or a software simulation of neurons matters. Of course if you're still hung up on something that basic, I don't expect you to get why death-followed-by-resurrection-from-a-backup is subjectively equivalent to amnesia.