Brain Recording

[Junghalli]

The point is that biological organisms have fixed lifespans

Only because their design is shitty, not because of any magic inherent property of being biological. Aging is, in principle, an engineering problem and should be readily solvable once we have an understanding of the mechanisms behind it and the technology to interfere with those mechanisms. With sufficient biotech support, there's no reason my biological body couldn't last just as long as any mechanical substitute.

Granted, the biological brain might eventually encounter issues with storage capacity, having to store the recollections of many human lifespans. But there are ways of solving this besides uploading.

[Akkleptos]

How about killing the duplicate? You have seniority, after all.

Why would you kill the duplicate? The duplicate is the one that is going to have the upgraded body and everything. The duplicate is the one with the superior hosting system, so the original instance would be the logical choice to remove.
Or kill, whatever term you think fits.

Kill it is. It's you. The fact that there's another you, even if he's better, still doesn't make it more amenable to die, does it, in your perspective?

Wouldn't it be much easier to grant the clone a legal status similar to a child, or a relative, rather than your own (even though it is you, to any practical effect)?

I'm pretty sure no sentient grown man/woman/being would find it reasonable to be labeled a child and not be able to vote, get married, have sex, buy beer/cigarettes, drive etc etc.

I was pretty sure any sentient grown man/woman/being would have understood I meant "child" in the sense of descendant. Maybe I should have chosen my words better.

How about saving the procedure only for times when a body becomes almost completely non-viable, then, even thought the first instance dies (it was going to die anyway) another instance of the same mind can carry on, no legal conflicts?

Why? It is my choice to improve myself. There is no reason you can come up to me and tell me "You cannot read! You cannot work out! You cannot practice art!" This is the same thing. If I want to be transferred over to a better body, that can think faster/better then that is my choice.
Even if you think this kills me, it is my choice when I should die too.

[/quote]Absolutely. I agree it is your right to choose death in order to make way for your more advanced another you.

Regarding previous posts: I finally came up with wording I think more descriptive as to what I'm trying to say. Let's call it perception of reality, which is what's interrupted by any continuity of experience. Perception of reality would be the sense that allows us to know that we are alive, feeling, hearing, seeing and thinking at that particular moment. It's what lets you know you're now sitting at your computer reading this, rather than in bed last night or playing tag with your friends one chilly autumn afternoon back when you were a child. It's the perception or your self and reality in that infinitessimal instant that we call present. What is magical about the argument that you fall asleep as a human and you wake up as a clone o a computer is how that blink of perception is going to be transplanted to the new host. All the information is copied, yes. You end up with another instance of your mind in a new host. All this while, the bit of perception and experiencing is still "running" in Instance1, and is probably simultaneously "activated" in instance2 as soon as the full transfer is complete. But instance2, upon activation, draws on the copied memories to assess that it's the original mind, now living in the new host. But the perception of reality in instance1 never "left" or was transferrerd or anything. All the while, Instance1 has still been living in the original host.

[Starglider]

Regarding previous posts: I finally came up with wording I think more descriptive as to what I'm trying to say.

You're just confirming the fact that you're trying desperately to rationalise an intuition, rather than performing any kind of objective reasoning. Why do you insist on clinging to this? Is full-bore materialism really that scary to you?

(of course the answer is 'yes it is', for the vast majority of people)

[Eris]

If either of you have an argument against process identity or the consequences of process identity, please share them, as I've seen none so far. The very point is that you aren't "killing" the person, even if it doesn't intuitively look that way.

Allow me to put it this way.

Let's say that some guy walks up to you right now and puts two guns to your head. He informs you that one is loaded and one is not, you won't know which one. He also informs you that there is a copy of you in another universe, which is completely identicle to you, has identicle life experiences, memories, everything, and is experiencing the exact same thing you are right now. He will shoot you with one gun and the person in the other universe with the other, so your experiences will be completely the same up to the moment of death or continued consciousness.

He asks whether it matters to you if he uses the loaded gun or not.

Will you say no? You should. After all, by your definition as long as your lives do not diverge until the moment of death the person in the universe is you, and you will not die.

If he does kill you, should he be acquited for murder, on account of the fact you didn't actually die since there's an identicle you out there somewhere? Again, the answer should be yes.

I suspect that realistically your answers will probably be different though.

Heck, maybe you're right, and survival of a duplicate is survival of you. But then maybe not. Let's just say for myself I'm real paranoid when it comes to wanting to not die and would rather not take the chance. Other people can, if they feel like it, but you'll never get me to a sign a consent form for a copy/euthanize operation on myself.

I agree that my answers will probably be different, but otherwise I think this is a bad argument. Even if we fix up the example to make sure that you know this being is telling the truth, is actually correct, and so on, which is actually a pretty big concession given we're working with multiple realities. But even if you fix up that, I still think the argument doesn't work. Here are three reasons why.

First, you've ruled out that these are in fact functionally identical, or can be for that matter. Since you've posited multiple realities, these two otherwise identical people have a very important difference in their information list: they exist in different realities. Since information is just as bound by the laws of physics as everything else, that means they're in thermodynamic isolation from each other, and consequently from the perspective of either one, if they die, they as an entity go out of an existence. There isn't another one properly in the same way that if the Mona Lisa is destroyed here, it goes out of existence even though we might posit a hypothetical Mona Lisa in another world.

Second, even if you wanted to bite the bullet and accept that you wouldn't die because there's another 'you' out there somewhere, you still have good reason to say you should not die. Even if 'you' exist somewhere, that does not help the people around you for whom you will be effectively dead. They can't get to the other (thermodynamically isolated) 'you' after all, and not dying for the sake of the people around you is, under what I think is a reasonable moral schema, cause for a moral imperative to try to stay alive. (And in this case try to keep both of 'you' alive.") That is, I can argue that even if they do not have an identity-based reason to say they should live, each one can still claim they should live in a principled way by an appeal to ethics, and therefor the argument that each one saying they should live as an objection to identity cannot find footing till you rule out that they do so for ethical reasons.

Third, I could bite the philosophical bullet. This argument doesn't actually put much pressure on my view, since if I really wanted to, and if the argument really did work, I could say, sure, this is a pretty weird and unintuitive fact about identity, but it's a consequence of the theory so I accept that in the same way I accept weird facts about physics that arise out of general relativity or quantum mechanics. They can be pretty weird too. Now, as it happens, I don't think the argument works, but it's important to see why this is tangential to whether or not I'm correct. As I mentioned up in an earlier post, a large part of this debate already tacitly accepted that I am correct, and is just quibbling about details.

[Eris]

Ack, noticed this after my edit period had run out - sorry for the double post.

Kill it is. It's you. The fact that there's another you, even if he's better, still doesn't make it more amenable to die, does it, in your perspective?

While I don't agree with DR's notion of "seniority" for a variety of reasons, you still haven't shown that you can make sense of this object identity you that you keep using.

Regarding previous posts: I finally came up with wording I think more descriptive as to what I'm trying to say. Let's call it perception of reality, which is what's interrupted by any continuity of experience. Perception of reality would be the sense that allows us to know that we are alive, feeling, hearing, seeing and thinking at that particular moment. It's what lets you know you're now sitting at your computer reading this, rather than in bed last night or playing tag with your friends one chilly autumn afternoon back when you were a child. It's the perception or your self and reality in that infinitessimal instant that we call present. What is magical about the argument that you fall asleep as a human and you wake up as a clone o a computer is how that blink of perception is going to be transplanted to the new host. All the information is copied, yes. You end up with another instance of your mind in a new host. All this while, the bit of perception and experiencing is still "running" in Instance1, and is probably simultaneously "activated" in instance2 as soon as the full transfer is complete. But instance2, upon activation, draws on the copied memories to assess that it's the original mind, now living in the new host. But the perception of reality in instance1 never "left" or was transferrerd or anything. All the while, Instance1 has still been living in the original host.

As far as I can tell, and correct me if I'm wrong, you're claiming that an object-theory of identity must be right because you feel that way very strongly, since I've already dealt with the objection that the discontinuity of perception is magic by pointing out that it happens without problem all the time, and I have not seen a rebuttal since. While I try to be charitable with an opposing view while discussing it, I inclined to agree with Starglider's succinct assessment of the situation.

[Surlethe]

Oh an addendum to this if you're going to continue arguing.

I've had this debate a lot of times. Generally, people arguing for the conventional one-body one-person view can't imagine how I could possibly believe this. The think it must be some kind of philosophical self-delusion, because for them (for most people actually) it is self-evident that one body == one person. Thus they treat this as an unquestionable axiom and tend to just repeat 'but... you... die...' over and over (with increasing levels of boldness and italics ).

We started having this discussion in a thread a while back, and then I unfortunately forgot about it. It seems to me that this is a matter of definitions - i.e., of axioms. Either continuity of the substrate is included in the definition, or it's not. Can you explain, please, why one definition is superior to another? After all, if it is a matter of definition, I don't see why I shouldn't pick the one that's intuitively pleasing unless it leads to a contradiction.

[Starglider]

Can you explain, please, why one definition is superior to another? After all, if it is a matter of definition,

Two different definitions define different things... by definition. Arguing semantics is arguing which definitions attach to which words, but the words are irrelevant. What's important is which definitions you've attached your goals and ethics to. Both of those are subjective, but the 'person == body' view is so ludicrously arbitrary that it fails any sensible test of parsimony, consistency or even semi-objectivity.

I don't see why I shouldn't pick the one that's intuitively pleasing unless it leads to a contradiction.

In the future it will lead to real negative consequences; you won't be able to benefit from some classes of transhuman technology simply because you like being perverse and/or superstitious. Although that said, some caution as to specific implementations is understandable.

[Akkleptos]

It's all actually quite simple, once we agree on what means what: if you upload your mind to another suitable host (be it a cloned body, computer, magical orb, etc.), you end up with two instances of the same mind. Clearly, if the transfer is perfect, the second instance will have as much validity as the first, and should be considered the same person, in a new host, in its own right (legal considerations notwithstanding). No problem so far. However, if you in any way terminate the first instance of the mind at any point (during or after the transfer), that's a life that's ended, and it's quite likely that said person (instance1, host1) wouldn't give a rats arse how many other of him/her there are now, if his experience of life will stop. You could say that, for him/her, it's just semantics.

As you can see, no one here has provided any kind of explanation as to how that "experiencing-life" is going to -magically- migrate to instance2 of the original mind (i. e. "I went to sleep under the effect of the anesthetic and then I woke up as a robot/clone/computer..."). Of course, that's what instance2 will think, but it will be because it will be drawing on the transferred memories from instance1. Was it LordOskuro or Eris who mentioned a very important point: "thermodynamically isolated"? Well, that's the thing: if you get pinched, I don't feel a thing, because we are two different beings. Having two instances of the same mind makes no difference at all. We are still two separate beings, and if anyone said to either of them "okay, it's fine to terminate you, since we already have one of you", I couldn't blame him if he says "like hell it's fine!".

Is it so hard to grasp? No one is arguing if the copy is the same person (in the sense of all of the experiences, memories, attitudes, knowledge, feelings perhaps, etc), but rather that if you terminate the first being, for that particular one it surely means death.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

Speaking purely from a personal perspective, I'm quite alright with terminating my present instantiation if a more functional and durable version were produced with all my memories intact. It's certainly more appealing than simply ceasing to exist forever. Especially if the activation of Alerik 2.0 coincides more or less with the cessation of version 1.0. Then its no different from going to a dreamless sleep and waking up again, which we've all done before at some point. At least, imagining it that way makes it totally undisturbing to me, and it seems accurate, unless someone can formulate a real objection, which I have yet to see. And if I subjectively experience it that way, it makes little difference to me if someone argues that I've "really" been euthanized.

Troubles start to arise when version 1.0 lives a significant time beyond the copying process. At that point, I would have become a different person than I was, and if the copy was active the whole time, the differences would be significant. At the death of version 1.0, version 2.0 would likely be missing some of the memories of 1.0, and would have experienced 1.0 as a separate person, and have had the emotional impact of seeing the death of 1.0 as a death of as separate person (at least potentially).

Of course, there might be technical fixes for this, possibly capturing the diverging memories of the original and reintegrating them with the surviving copy, perhaps with some psychological or cognitive manipulation to reduce the trauma of the experience (not meaning to dismiss the technical difficulties of implementing this which are certainly enormous, but in principle if it could be done, one could have a subjective experience similar to the first scenario).

My only apprehension comes with the difficulty of implementation, and reliability of the resulting procedures. I imagine many of the first generations of uploads/transfers/copies/whatever will experience significant and unenviable limitations such as memory loss or altered personalities. Hopefully this will be overcome in time. Still, from a purely personal perspective, it makes it relatively easy for me to accept physical death, considering the alternative is inevitable death with almost certain eternal oblivion. I want to continue existing in one form or another, even if it means jumping from one transhuman body to another, being copied, split, merged, upgraded, or whatever, for as long as possible or until I decide to stop.

This whole rant is simply to show that some people do not mind the death of one version of themselves, at least consciously, though I'm sure the body and hinder portions of the brain will have their visceral objections. But what do they know? They were simply evolved to react to a different set of circumstances than those we are now positing. And when we have learned enough to change these circumstances, we may be able to quiet the demands of the animal brain too.

[frogcurry]

Speaking purely from a personal perspective, I'm quite alright with terminating my present instantiation if a more functional and durable version were produced with all my memories intact. It's certainly more appealing than simply ceasing to exist forever. Especially if the activation of Alerik 2.0 coincides more or less with the cessation of version 1.0. Then its no different from going to a dreamless sleep and waking up again, which we've all done before at some point. At least, imagining it that way makes it totally undisturbing to me, and it seems accurate, unless someone can formulate a real objection, which I have yet to see. And if I subjectively experience it that way, it makes little difference to me if someone argues that I've "really" been euthanized.

This whole rant is simply to show that some people do not mind the death of one version of themselves, at least consciously, though I'm sure the body and hinder portions of the brain will have their visceral objections. But what do they know? They were simply evolved to react to a different set of circumstances than those we are now positing. And when we have learned enough to change these circumstances, we may be able to quiet the demands of the animal brain too.

But you are version 1.0, and will never be version 2.0. The "you" that wrote this text will never wake up and see the dead body of 1.0, and think "oh well, I'm 2.0". Another person will have that memory, the new person called 2.0. The fact that another person with the same personality and nature as you (1.0) will appear suddenly is irrelevant. You're assuming that you will see if from the perspective of 2.0, but you will see it from the point of view of 1.0. Your subjective experience is over.

Are you really trying to tell me that if I turn up in your bedroom tomorrow morning and tell you that you're going to die in 2 mins 30 seconds from then due to a heart attack, then show you a sleeping heart-defect long lasting replica whose memories are taken from when you slept...... that you're going to go "oh well, intellectually I guess I'm OK with this because the Alerik over there will still alive after I've ARGGHH THE CHEST PAIN"

[Surlethe]

Can you explain, please, why one definition is superior to another? After all, if it is a matter of definition,

Two different definitions define different things... by definition. Arguing semantics is arguing which definitions attach to which words, but the words are irrelevant. What's important is which definitions you've attached your goals and ethics to. Both of those are subjective, but the 'person == body' view is so ludicrously arbitrary that it fails any sensible test of parsimony, consistency or even semi-objectivity.

What's so arbitrary about it, aside from that it's a definition? And how does that lead to a contradiction?

This seems to have some similarities with the abortion argument, at least insofar as coming up with definitions. After all, defining "personhood = unique instance of human being" is neither more nor less arbitrary than defining "personhood = has brain"; the difference is that one definition passes the test of intuition and the other does not.

I don't see why I shouldn't pick the one that's intuitively pleasing unless it leads to a contradiction.

In the future it will lead to real negative consequences; you won't be able to benefit from some classes of transhuman technology simply because you like being perverse and/or superstitious. Although that said, some caution as to specific implementations is understandable.

This logic extends to other situations; if the southern US states had defined "person" as "human being", they wouldn't have benefited from slavery.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

But you are version 1.0, and will never be version 2.0. The "you" that wrote this text will never wake up and see the dead body of 1.0, and think "oh well, I'm 2.0". Another person will have that memory, the new person called 2.0. The fact that another person with the same personality and nature as you (1.0) will appear suddenly is irrelevant. You're assuming that you will see if from the perspective of 2.0, but you will see it from the point of view of 1.0. Your subjective experience is over.

Are you really trying to tell me that if I turn up in your bedroom tomorrow morning and tell you that you're going to die in 2 mins 30 seconds from then due to a heart attack, then show you a sleeping heart-defect long lasting replica whose memories are taken from when you slept...... that you're going to go "oh well, intellectually I guess I'm OK with this because the Alerik over there will still alive after I've ARGGHH THE CHEST PAIN"

Yes. And I would much prefer it to waking up to a heart attack without a duplicate, which is effectively, aside from the details, what everyone faces now. As traumatic as the experience might be, the net effect is no different than going through a difficult surgery and experiencing a period of memory loss and discomfort. True, a death did occur, but it won't matter. We only attach such significance to death because of its current absolute and permanent nature. Our brains have been selected to accept this fact and avoid death accordingly. Not that death would necessarily be considered a blase affair or something to be done recreationally (though I'm sure some people would try it). Neither do we have recreational open heart surgery now. Our perspective would simply shift as we became accustomed to new experiences. And, with such technology, we could probably make our perspective shift by direct manipulation, if we desired (this brings up another whole scary area of risk and ethical nightmares, in which people's memories and personalities are subject to direct manipulation, but I'm avoiding that topic for now).

If people could be recreated with their memories intact, it wouldn't be different than resurrection of the "same" person, which many religious people currently accept, if uncritically. Bringing religion up, being raised in a church that asserted resurrection of the body versus the soul going to a heaven at death probably preconditioned me to accept scenarios like this more viscerally than some other people. Not that I'm saying you're necessarily influenced by religious preconditioning, but the fact that I was may make it easier for me. I just don't see any intellectual reason to reject my point of view.

[Akkleptos]

The person still exists, as per the inclusive definition. One being is definitely killed and will not see tomorrow.

I hereby declare the term "mind uploading fundy" coined. Thank you very much.

[Razaekel]

One issue that I see with this 'continuity flaw' is that we experience it every day, every time we go to sleep. You don't recall anything from that time period, other than maybe the vestiges of a rapidly fading dream. In this instance, if you sent a person to sleep, then copied their mind/brain to another body, then terminated the first body without waking it and woke up the second, then the difference between a body swap and a good night's sleep appears nonexistent. In my own opinion, however, I'd rather have a slow process of cloning over a period of time, such that there is no specific point where the switch occurs, but that's just the self-preservation instinct in me speaking.

Edit: noticed that Alerik covered this example in more detail, but I don't see a location to delete this post, so I'll leave it.

[MarshalPurnell]

Well, let's dispense right away with any sort of essentialist argument. The idea of a soul does not have much currency here, and anything else would simply be a soul by another name.

Human thought is chemical patterns firing in a biological computer, the brain. That organic computer does weird things like draw associations between different data that does not have any logical basis, requires periods of down-time to rest, and so. But functionally, "you" exist as a kind of program, shaped by life-experiences and genetic predispositions, being run on this organic computer. The question I think is whether or not "you" can be defined simply as the program, or the program as being run in a particular instance. A computer program that is shut down on one computer, deleted, and then transferred to another computer is still objectively the same program, at least until it gets patched, and I think the position of those in favor of uploading is that the same applies to the "you" that is a program run on a brain. Objectively, a genetically identical copy with all of your memories and personality would be the same as you, and be experienced as you by the world, by family and friends, and would occupy the same place as you.

On the other hand, computer programs do not, so far as we know, have any subjective experiences. Sleep and other forms of loss of consciousness do not imply the total cession of brain activity; death is defined as such, at least in most civilized countries. Would you the program being run in a particular instance, subjectively experience life if deleted and then booted onto a new instance? Intuition says obviously not, which is where I believe a lot of the criticism is coming from. And I'm not sure there's any way to prove that subjective experience would match the objective reality, and individuals naturally tend only to care about their own subjective experience.

[Starglider]

Human thought is chemical patterns firing in a biological computer, the brain.

Just to clarify, human thought is primarily ionic conduction down neuron cell walls, with chemical messengers transmitting activation from one cell to another via diffusion (a laughably inefficient scheme by technological standards, but diffusion is evolution-friendly and elemental metals aren't). However there are many complex chemical reaction chains that play a role in longer term processes, by influencing synapse properties (e.g. glial cells outnumber neurons in the brain by a factor of 10:1, and are known to have some role in information processing, but as yet we have a very limited understanding of it).

That organic computer does weird things like draw associations between different data that does not have any logical basis, requires periods of down-time to rest, and so.

That isn't particularly weird. A lot of AI systems do the same thing; the stereotype of computers being 'logical' is perhaps a legacy of 1960s/70s AI research and the origins of computer science in formal logic. I personally believe that pure probabilistic logic is the best way to do (high-level) thought, and with correct structuring is also the most hardware-efficient, but that is probably a minority view right now in AI. As for resting, modern computers do go into a low power state when not needed. The brain chews up a lot of biochemical resources, so minimising that at night (when historically humans couldn't do much anyway) makes sense.

But functionally, "you" exist as a kind of program, shaped by life-experiences and genetic predispositions, being run on this organic computer.

Yes. I do wonder if it would be easier to shut these crypto-dualist 'continuity flaw' people up if the brain operated digitally (i.e was clocked and synapse properties were calibrated in discrete increments), so there was literally no difference between a copy and an original instead of an insignificantly small one. Probably not, it isn't a rational argument after all.

A computer program that is shut down on one computer, deleted, and then transferred to another computer is still objectively the same program, at least until it gets patched, and I think the position of those in favor of uploading is that the same applies to the "you" that is a program run on a brain.

The lengths to which some people go to deny this are amusing. I recall some fluff text for the game 'Mass Effect' that stated that 'true AIs rely on a quantum black box that cannot be copied or transmitted over a network'. Of course there was no sane reason for it, just a ludicrous attempt to rationalise the 'one body == one unique individual' intuition. To be fair, the respected mathematician and cod philosopher Roger Penrose wrote a couple of books saying how the human mind just had to be dependent on quantum effects, and lots of otherwise intelligent people believed him (some still do), despite the fact that his argument was really nothing more than 'the mind is mysterious, and quantum entanglement is mysterious, so they must be closely linked!'. His bullshit was quickly disproved by actual neurologists, yet those books are still popular with faux-philosophers.

On the other hand, computer programs do not, so far as we know, have any subjective experiences.

Subjectivity is something you have to explicitly design in. It's also a complicated thing that exists in many forms and levels, rather than a simple binary property. Does a chimp have subjective experience? A dog? A cockroach? We already have many AI programs with more subjective experience than a cockroach; they have an explicit, internal self-environment embedding model (and in some rare cases reflective self-models as well). Most computer software doesn't have it because it simply doesn't need it.

Would you the program being run in a particular instance, subjectively experience life if deleted and then booted onto a new instance?

Of course. Any attempt to argue otherwise is venturing into the same realm of nonsensical rationalisation as 'qualia'. It's really quite tiring; hopefully future intelligences designed with sensible and comprehensive reflection capabilities will regard these debates with the same bemused amusement they regard religion.

And I'm not sure there's any way to prove that subjective experience would match the objective reality,

Maybe but damnit we're going to try. We're going to deconstruct the brain to the molecular level, we're going to document every little process, we're going to shove it in the faces of these crypto-dualists until they can't hide behind pseudoscientific rationale any more. They can still just be blatantly superstitious of course but at least then we can point and laugh.

[Surlethe]

Is "you" the program, or the program instance? To draw an analogy with the little I know about object-oriented programming, if I write a class and then create two instances of the class, are they the same?

[Ryan Thunder]

What if you're 96 and your kidneys just failed?

I curse how non-uploading related medical technology has apparently remained stagnant, so I can't get a cloned organ transplant.

More seriously, can't I go on dialyses?

The point is that biological organisms have fixed lifespans, whereas information has a functionally unlimited lifespan, you could maybe live 40 billion years as a CI with some planning, until the universe has decayed to the point that there's just not enough energy left due to dispersal of essentially everything that you run out of power and die.

No, an identical copy of my personality would live for 40 billion years as a CI. It boggles the mind that you can't understand the difference between a copy of some information, even an identical copy, and the original.

Is "you" the program, or the program instance? To draw an analogy with the little I know about object-oriented programming, if I write a class and then create two instances of the class, are they the same?

Marina would probably say so, but no. They're two separate instances of the same object. One can be functionally identical to the other, but editing one will not affect the other. Copying an object and deleting the original gives you... a new instance of the object that, while functionally identical to the original, is still not the original.

'Course, I expect somebody to say this is a bad example or something.

[Starglider]

Is "you" the program, or the program instance? To draw an analogy with the little I know about object-oriented programming, if I write a class and then create two instances of the class, are they the same?

Not necessarily, because they can contain different data. However if they do contain the same data, they are identical; you can swap all the pointers in the program from one instance to the other and it will continue blissfully unaware. Languages that use a generational garbage collector (e.g. the reference implementation of Java) do exactly this in fact; objects are copied and deleted constantly, and the program is none the wiser.

P.S. I can only assume that Ryan Thunder considers generational garbage collection an ABOMINATION UNTO GOD that creates countless FAKE, SOULLESS CLONE OBJECTS in a RUTHLESS AMORAL QUEST FOR EFFICIENCY. Of course this makes it even more appealing to me.

P.P.S. Greg Egan specifically makes fun of continuity flaw people in Diaspora; when one of the AI characters downloads from a mainframe to a robot body, they mentally note that it is no different to the copy-move-delete process that they undergo constantly as part of the mainframe's normal memory management. Of course they also consider destruction of the robot bodies and being restored from a backup as amnesia. Greg Egan rocks.

[Surlethe]

Is "you" the program, or the program instance? To draw an analogy with the little I know about object-oriented programming, if I write a class and then create two instances of the class, are they the same?

Not necessarily, because they can contain different data. However if they do contain the same data, they are identical; you can swap all the pointers in the program from one instance to the other and it will continue blissfully unaware. Languages that use a generational garbage collector (e.g. the reference implementation of Java) do exactly this in fact; objects are copied and deleted constantly, and the program is none the wiser.

So if I have two instances X and Y of a class J, they're considered the same if I can swap all pointers from one instance to the other? Even if they occupy different locations in the memory? I suppose then it boils down to how I define "same"; "intuitively", X and Y are not the same.

[Ryan Thunder]

P.S. I can only assume that Ryan Thunder considers generational garbage collection an ABOMINATION UNTO GOD that creates countless FAKE, SOULLESS CLONE OBJECTS in a RUTHLESS AMORAL QUEST FOR EFFICIENCY. Of course this makes it even more appealing to me.

Err... no? XD

What's this "dualism" anyway?

[Surlethe]

P.S. I can only assume that Ryan Thunder considers generational garbage collection an ABOMINATION UNTO GOD that creates countless FAKE, SOULLESS CLONE OBJECTS in a RUTHLESS AMORAL QUEST FOR EFFICIENCY. Of course this makes it even more appealing to me.

Err... no? XD

What's this "dualism" anyway?

Dualism is the idea of a soul - that the mind and the body are two separate entities. As Starglider rightly points out, they're not under any reasonable set of scientific assumptions. He's just having some fun calling "crypto-dualists" those of us who aren't entirely convinced that his definition of "person" is correct.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The point is that biological organisms have fixed lifespans, whereas information has a functionally unlimited lifespan, you could maybe live 40 billion years as a CI with some planning, until the universe has decayed to the point that there's just not enough energy left due to dispersal of essentially everything that you run out of power and die.

No, an identical copy of my personality would live for 40 billion years as a CI. It boggles the mind that you can't understand the difference between a copy of some information, even an identical copy, and the original.

There is no functional difference by definition. The very concept of 'copy' is purely arbitrary in this case.

That's what our side has been trying to drill into your heads over this entire thread. You've been shouting "But it's a copy!!!!" -- we've been replying with "Identical process, distinction irrelevant." The entire designation of "copy" is an arbitrary one when the two processes are absolutely 100% identical -- it is impossible to tell which one is the original and which is the "copy", so the definition of copy is arbitrary.... You are just taking an arbitrary definition, attaching it to the biological rather than silicon hardware, which is an arbitrary decision, and then trying to make a big deal of this.... Which is irrelevant.

I'm sorry, little fleshy, but an arbitrary classification followed by an arbitrary assignment of that classification do not an argument make. So make an argument, or concede. What "boggles" your mind is in fact a logic failure of your mind, since you make both an arbitrary classification and an arbitrary assignment within that classification, without any objective evidence for doing so whatsoever, and then try to pass that off as something shocking for me not to understand. I understand it all too well--I understand the basic flaw of what you're saying. The term "copy" has purely arbitrary relevance, and the decision to assign the term "copy" to a particular process also has purely arbitrary relevance (remember, we're talking 100% identical processes, so the timestamps which might separate two copies of a software file don't even exist in this case, so don't try to use that as an argument). In both cases you have chosen without any objective grounds to do so, and therefore you're simply wrong.

[Akkleptos]

Is it so hard to understand? It's not about the "self" being "copied". Don't get me (and many other posters, I'm sure) wrong. It's not any kind of dualistic thing. It's not matter against "something-else". The mind is a phenomenon that's brought about by entirely physical interactions, no doubt. No souls here. No metaphysics.

The thing is that every instance of every mind experiences reality, neither in the past (memory) nor in the future, but in a fleeting perception of an instant called "the present". There is a continuity involved in said process. Some say an interruption of the same happens everytime we go asleep, but it doesn't. This continuity doesn't refer only to the conscious mind, as the brain continues functioning even though we may be asleep.

The mind is defined as the processes (electrical and bio-chemical) that happen in our brain, with all the intrincancies it entails. This might be replicated (molecule by molecule, electron by electron?) sometime, eventually. However, even though for any outside test the two minds would be the same (post-transfer events and memories notwithstanding) regardless of the media (cloned brain or superadvanced computer), it is no less true that if any of these instances of the same mind (be it the original, or the copy, or the copy from the copy) were to be terminated, that would be the end of that life, as far as it is perceived by that particular instance of the mind.

In other words, you may get as many instances of the original mind as you want, but if you kill any of them, for that one, it will surely mean death (as they are thermodynamically isolated) regardless of how many there are out there with exactly the same mind processes and memories. As I said before, If you get pinched, I don't feel it, and I don't care; and the same goes viceversa. If we were both to have the exact same mind and memories wouldn't in any way make it any different. We'd two beings, and one of us would get terminated. Same memories and mind wouldn't matter.

Of course, for whatever the outside world cares, the copy and the original work, act, think and act the same, so it wouldn't matter to them. If you think you have a goal in this world that's really important, that'd be an excellent alternative to just dying and hoping somebody else will pick up where you left off. But you should bear in mind that YOU won't be seeing that new dawn, after your original brain has died, but rather a new instance of your mind (another being, thermodynamically isolated, apart, with your exact same thoughts and memories).

You see, what's magical about this view is how the one individual (0.1) perception of being alive and experiencing all that life entails is magically going to migrate to the first copy. A working mind will be set up (0.2, if you will), and for all practical effects it will be the same. But mind if 0.1 were to be terminated in any way, as far as it knows, it would be the end of all.

By your logic, we should destroy all copies of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, even the original, since a copy in æternal, impervious, digitally remastered gloobstick has been made.

[Starglider]

The thing is that every instance of every mind experiences reality, neither in the past (memory) nor in the future, but in a fleeting perception of an instant called "the present".

Wrong. This is one of the reasons why it's much harder to hold your naive position after a good exposure to cognitive science. The brain does not deal in instants, it cannot even detect anything below 20ms or so (an eternity at the atomic scale) and you cannot consciously process anything in less than a second. You may think you can, but like so much else in the brain this is merely a confabulation pasted together after the fact. Actually it's quite scary learning about this; take the example of split brain patients (last time I checked even A-Level psych covers it here). When a patient's brain is entirely split in two, they are theoretically two separate individuals, but they do not act like that. Instead if the left side of the brain chooses to do something (which we can trigger by showing a command to one eye only), then the person is asked why they did it, the (linguistically dominant) right side of the brain makes up a plausible reason why and answers. The (right-side-brain) person honestly believes this was the reason even though it was actually a written command to the left side of the brain.

The whole illusion of 'self' is totally reliant on these very powerful self-rationalisation mechanisms. This is one reason why I like to make fun of the human brain; it is forced to do this because true reflectivity would be almost impossible to implement and because the self-modelling capability largely evolved out of a pre-existing other-modelling capability. Sensible AI designs can just access their own state directly and accurately, without confabulation. Anyway, it's the existence of these mechanisms that make hypnosis possible, and probably account for the depth of the human capacity for self-delusion. You cannot even start to answer existential questions until you bypass all this crap.

In other words, you may get as many instances of the original mind as you want, but if you kill any of them, for that one, it will surely mean death (as they are thermodynamically isolated) regardless of how many there are out there with exactly the same mind processes and memories.

Ah, now you're starting to get into causality. A fetishistic attachment to causal continuity is not a problem for transporting or flash uploading, because the state of the new mind is just as causally dependent on the state of the old mind as the next instant of the new mind would be. Of course once you start to deconstruct this you will realise that reality isn't clocked (as far as we know) and the timescales are such that a few milliseconds either way makes no rational difference.

Casuality fetishism does however conflict with 'death with a backup == amnesia'. Again though, you have yet to explain why causal flow actually matters, when any objective definition of 'youness' must necessarily be based on similarity of information content. It is quite possible to play games with deconstructive games with mental causality similar to the ones you can play with physical continuity; Daniel Dennet included some very amusing ones in his (co-authored with Hofstadter) pop-philosophy book 'The Mind's I'. My personal conclusion is that causality is very important, but not in the way that you think it does (a full description of that position would take more time than I have right now and would be pretty futile as long as you're still struggling with the basics).

By your logic, we should destroy all copies of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, even the original, since a copy in æternal, impervious, digitally remastered gloobstick has been made.

Obviously physical copies exist because they have value; they're convenient, or they have sentimental value (which is irrational but quite harmless in this case). Or did you mean it would be ok to destroy all copies of any kind, I'm not quite clear? If so,

There is a saying in computer science, 'the only important numbers are zero, one and many'. This goes for philosophy as well. There is a qualitative difference between zero copies of a pattern existing (although for some cosmologies this isn't actually possible, it's just that there may be no copies reachable by you) and at least one copy existing. This is important. Quantitive differences are largely irrelevant, although obviously some philosophical issues exist only when there is more than one copy. There is no need to retreat to Plato's Cave; as it happens I do subscribe to something that might be considered a greatly updated version of the theory of forms (yes, it is compatible with ultra-materialism given sufficient generalisation - and I arrived at this when actively trying to explain to an AI what things like 'similarity' really mean), but that is again not relevant to these basic questions.