Cryonics paid with Bitcoins

[Borgholio]

Until and unless you can give me concrete, testable definitions for "consciousness" and "termination", then I'm going to submit to you that whenever you're put under a general anesthetic, you awaken as a clone of you and your original mind died.

When you are put under anesthetic, the consciousness is not destroyed, it is simply suspended. They do not make a copy of your mind and destroy the original. It is nothing more than an artificially induced sleep. Slicing my brain into wafer-thin pieces, scanning them into a computer, then incinerating the source material is an entirely different thing.

[Terralthra]

General anesthetic is not like sleep; in sleep you have a sense of the passage of time. As for them not making a copy of your mind and destroying the original: you have no proof of that - you weren't conscious.

Once again, rigorous definitions.

[Borgholio]

General anesthetic is not like sleep; in sleep you have a sense of the passage of time.

Not true. Many times I go to sleep and wake up with my internal clock way off. I don't have a sense of the passage of time, at least not an accurate one.

As for them not making a copy of your mind and destroying the original: you have no proof of that - you weren't conscious.

Show me some technology that is even remotely capable of doing such a thing in this day an age, and I will take your hypothesis seriously.

Once again, rigorous definitions.

con·scious·ness
noun \-nəs\

: the condition of being conscious : the normal state of being awake and able to understand what is happening around you

: a person's mind and thoughts

Bolded definition 2. When you are asleep or put under, you are no longer conscious, but your mind and thoughts remain. When you physically destroy the brain, those mind and thoughts are destroyed along with it. A copy is just that. A copy. Not the original.

The first definition is why I expressly said "suspended" as opposed to terminated. You are clearly not awake, yet your mind and stored thoughts still exist.

2ter·mi·nate
verb \ˈtər-mə-ˌnāt\

: to end in a particular way or at a particular place

: to cause (something) to end

When you go to sleep and wake up, or are drugged and wake up, you wake up exactly as you were before. Your mind and thoughts exist as they did before. When a clone is made, that clone did not have any "before". There was no state prior to the clone awakening. There were no thoughts, no experiences, no mind. It was created as is and then fired up. Since it is not a continuation of the original mind, it is not suspended. If the original is not suspended and it ends, then it must have been terminated.

Rigorous enough?

[Terralthra]

Dude, that's not even close to rigorous. Both minds and thoughts are abstract concepts, not physical things. The memories and experiences, likewise, are abstract. They're stored in physical media, but that's it, and if they're stored physically, they also would be present in the digital upload, and hence, present. How is it not a continuation? It has the same mind, thoughts, memories, and perceived experiences.

[Eternal_Freedom]

It might have the same memories and thoughts (barring any errors you make while transferring it) but since the brain is destroyed and you are explicitly scanning the structure and then re-creating it in a computer then the "upload" is logically a copy, a duplicate, a new version, whatever term you wish to apply. It is not, however, the original.

[Borgholio]

They're stored in physical media, but that's it,

That is exactly my problem with it. If you destroy the media then you destroy the information on it. If you copy it to another medium, it's STILL A COPY.

Take hard drives as a simple example. One hard drive has your operating system, games, pictures, and all that stuff. You use it daily and it is constantly being filled with new data. You get a new hard drive and clone the data over. The new one works just the same as the old one and picks up where it left off. For all intents and purposes, you don't notice a difference. However, (and this is important here), the old one stops working. It is shut down and pulled out of the computer. Its data never updates again. It is dead. It is not the same as the new hard drive. If it is formatted or the drive is trashed, it is gone for good and all that is left is the new copy.

See where the problem is? I'm not arguing that the essence of the person isn't copied to the new body / computer. I agree with you, it is. From an external standpoint, the person is now reborn. But from the perspective of the person themselves, they close their eyes and the copy opens theirs. The original died, the copy lives.

[Terralthra]

Say I'm playing a game of let's say Civilization, a game with a fair amount of state. I turn off my computer, take it apart, put the hard drive in another computer, copy the save-file over to that computer's hard drive, start up Civilization and load that game...am I playing a new game, or continuing the old one?

[Borgholio]

Say I'm playing a game of let's say Civilization, a game with a fair amount of state. I turn off my computer, take it apart, put the hard drive in another computer, copy the save-file over to that computer's hard drive, start up Civilization and load that game...am I playing a new game, or continuing the old one?

If you copied the save file to the new hard drive and started using that one instead, then you would be continuing a COPY of the old one. Are you denying that a copy to a new hard drive is actually a copy?

[Starglider]

Rigorous enough?

No. You know how all of us who are not physicists have only a laughably vague and approximate idea of what matter, energy, space and time actually are? Because the human intuitive concepts for these things, while useful for stone age primates, are wildly at odds with the actual structure and basic components of the universe? Well, minds are the same. You aren't going to draw any meaningful yet alone useful conclusions solely based on your intuitive / layman's notion of what thoughts are and how consciousness works. Not that anyone understands this to anything like the detail and precision we have for physics, but we understand enough to make flailing around with 'conscious' as a unitary concept look really really stupid.

Of course you have repeatedly demonstrated that you are too ignorant to even consider that you don't have the mental tools to analyse this. Your position is very similar to 'but clones are evil because they don't have souls', except that you don't use explicitly religious phrasing.

[Terralthra]

Say I'm playing a game of let's say Civilization, a game with a fair amount of state. I turn off my computer, take it apart, put the hard drive in another computer, copy the save-file over to that computer's hard drive, start up Civilization and load that game...am I playing a new game, or continuing the old one?

If you copied the save file to the new hard drive and started using that one instead, then you would be continuing a COPY of the old one. Are you denying that a copy to a new hard drive is actually a copy?

The copy is of the save file, not of the game. That's the explicit parallel I'm drawing. Like Starglider said, you're treating consciousness as equivalent to the stored information it's based on. The save file is not the game. The neurons are not consciousness. It's way more complex than that.

[Borgholio]

Of course you have repeatedly demonstrated that you are too ignorant to even consider that you don't have the mental tools to analyse this.

Then why don't YOU analyze it, smart-ass.

Your position is very similar to 'but clones are evil because they don't have souls', except that you don't use explicitly religious phrasing.

1. I never said clones were evil. I said they were not the original person, they were a copy.

2. I did not mention the soul because that is not a quantifiable entity. We can talk about copying a person's memories into a computer but where do you even begin to look for a soul? If it even exists, how would one go about copying it too?

3. If a clone was to be activated while I am still alive, then I am shot dead...am I still alive because my clone still exists?

[Borgholio]

Say I'm playing a game of let's say Civilization, a game with a fair amount of state. I turn off my computer, take it apart, put the hard drive in another computer, copy the save-file over to that computer's hard drive, start up Civilization and load that game...am I playing a new game, or continuing the old one?

If you copied the save file to the new hard drive and started using that one instead, then you would be continuing a COPY of the old one. Are you denying that a copy to a new hard drive is actually a copy?

The copy is of the save file, not of the game. That's the explicit parallel I'm drawing. Like Starglider said, you're treating consciousness as equivalent to the stored information it's based on. The save file is not the game. The neurons are not consciousness. It's way more complex than that.

So what information exactly would need to be scanned into a computer or a clone for the consciousness to transfer over with it? If slicing the brain into paper-thin segments isn't going to do it, then what will? How can we quantify something that (according to you) is more than just the information stored in the physical medium?

[Jaepheth]

Your pattern is what's important; not the medium it's stored in. I would say consciousness is just when that pattern is actively receiving, responding, and evolving to stimuli; otherwise it's dormant, whether you're in deep sleep, anesthetized, or stored on a shelf in some digitized format. If the pattern is not changing then you are totally unaware and when reactivated it will be as if no time has passed since your last memory.

In the context of this thread; I guess the question is: At what point does a higher probability of living on as a copy trump the remote possibility of living on in your original meat container? For me, I'd rather live with the existential problems of knowing I'm a copy than not exist at all.

[Borgholio]

I'd rather live with the existential problems of knowing I'm a copy than not exist at all.

As would I, but the "original" me might have a few issues.

[Jaepheth]

I'd rather live with the existential problems of knowing I'm a copy than not exist at all.

As would I, but the "original" me might have a few issues.

Yes, that's why I implied waiting until death, and using a destructive copy method ensures you don't have to deal with the original after that. Once multiple copies start running around you have a whole new can of worms to deal with.

So you're dead. You can:
A. Freeze the brain/body in the hopes that the future can solve the problems of reviving you from being both dead and frozen, and then also fix what killed you to begin with.
B. Save your pattern in the hopes that computers can emulate you in the future (added benefit of much cheaper and less likely to fail storage in the mean time)

I look at those and think B is so much more likely to work given current technology that A is almost not worth considering.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

2. I did not mention the soul because that is not a quantifiable entity. We can talk about copying a person's memories into a computer but where do you even begin to look for a soul? If it even exists, how would one go about copying it too?

That's, pretty much, the entire (specious) argument against mind uploading/copying. It makes people squeamish because the copied mental states are somehow not "you". How would the copied mind not be "you", if not for some ineffable quality that you, and only you, possess?

Continuity? Well, you don't really have any of that. Here's an ugly little truth about human memory ... it's mostly an invention. You go back far enough, and all your brain has to work from are a couple of scattered bits of information. The memories you have from that one awesome birthday party you had when you were six years old? Much of it is an outright fabrication on the part of your brain.

For that matter, you don't have much mental continuity to the "you" who got out of bed this morning. Your brain has scrubbed out (i.e. it couldn't be bothered remembering) all the uninteresting bits connecting the you reading this post right now to the you that got out of bed.

Worse, what you percieve to be a smooth and uninterrupted experience of the world around you is actually a set of snapshots merged through interpolation (i.e. your brain is making shit up to edit out things like the two great honking blind spots in your vision, or the fact that you're blind when you're moving your eyes ... which is to say, most of the time. It's also doing a clever job of fooling you into believing that all of your senses are working instantaneously, when signals are coming in with widely differing transmission delays.)

"But I have my original body!" you might protest. Well, how do you know? How do you know that this isn't an ancestor sim being conducted by transhuman historians 10,000 years from now? How do you know that you didn't, at some point in the future, sign up for Alcor? And the whole becoming a corpsicle thing worked, and this is just a copy of you digitally reliving the past for the entertainment of far-future you?

3. If a clone was to be activated while I am still alive, then I am shot dead...am I still alive because my clone still exists?

Absolutely. Granted, it's a bit hard on the you whose timeline came to an end with that you being shot in the face, but to the you who came out of backup, not experiencing that could be put down to a kind of amnesia. Interestingly, if you got shot in the face, fell into a coma due to the resulting traumatic brain injury, lived, and woke up not remembering the day leading up to you being shot in the face ... your subjective timeline would be completely identical to that of a mind-upload of you being reloaded from backup. Furthermore, since the TBI would certainly kill a fair number of brain cells, and your brain would have to rewire itself to work around the bits that aren't there anymore ... it could be argued that "you" actually died when you were shot in the face, and the "you" that woke up from the coma is actually someone else entirely.

[Simon_Jester]

Of course, with current-ish technology, saving your mental patterns is out of the question. And will probably remain so until well after someone invents a computer capable of simulating your mind. The surgical and biochemical problems of "reading" a brain looks to be harder than the technological problem of building computer hardware dense enough to store that brain's contents.

With cryonics, there is the hope that your brain will be kept in intact-ish condition until such time as it can be read. Even if you can't be cured that's still at least possible.

Whereas if you dispose of your dead body by other means, it will have long since decayed or burned to ash by that time. In which case even a supremely advanced computer with the greatest imaginable technology couldn't read what's left.

Until and unless you can give me concrete, testable definitions for "consciousness" and "termination", then I'm going to submit to you that whenever you're put under a general anesthetic, you awaken as a clone of you and your original mind died.

When you are put under anesthetic, the consciousness is not destroyed, it is simply suspended.

I'm with Terralthra. Give defined, "concrete, testable" definitions for "consciousness" and "termination."

The physical 'hardware' condition of your brain does not equate the the state of your consciousness.

They do not make a copy of your mind and destroy the original. It is nothing more than an artificially induced sleep. Slicing my brain into wafer-thin pieces, scanning them into a computer, then incinerating the source material is an entirely different thing.

Would you mind explaining why?

Of course you have repeatedly demonstrated that you are too ignorant to even consider that you don't have the mental tools to analyse this.

Then why don't YOU analyze it, smart-ass.

I believe that's his hobby, actually...

The issue here is that you treated "am I alive" as equivalent to "do I have continuity of consciousness." So things like anesthesia and arguably even sleep pose a nasty problem.

Then you backed up and said "whoa, there's a difference between a discontinuity of consciousness due to sleep and a discontinuity due to your brain being dismantled and its contents copied elsewhere." In which case your argument is NOW that "am I alive" is equivalent to "do I have continuity of the hardware-that-is-my-brain?"

Which means that you run smack into the computer/savefile issue. We already know that an arbitrarily complicated pile of information can be removed (destructively or nondestructively) from whatever stores it. And transferred to somewhere else. By your argument, this transference makes the pile of information somehow 'not the original.' Or 'not really me' if the information in question is you.

That's a claim you really do need to support. Starglider's criticism is that you don't appear to recognize that this is a problem or that you're saying anything an intelligent person might disagree with. Which suggests that your concepts of 'conscious' and 'alive' are a bit muddy for effective philosophical discourse.

Your position is very similar to 'but clones are evil because they don't have souls', except that you don't use explicitly religious phrasing.

1. I never said clones were evil. I said they were not the original person, they were a copy.

2. I did not mention the soul because that is not a quantifiable entity. We can talk about copying a person's memories into a computer but where do you even begin to look for a soul? If it even exists, how would one go about copying it too?

His argument is not that you said "but clones are evil because they don't have souls." It's that there's a parallel.

Essentially, you seem to think that there is some vital essence which animates and characterizes "me," and which cannot flow from me to another body, or be replicated by replicating all the information in my brain. But Starglider does not agree, nor do I, and Starglider is criticizing you (I'm not) on the grounds that this 'vital essence' is basically equivalent to a 'soul.'

If you think human consciousness is mechanistic, that every part of it can be explained by atoms moving in space and interacting through the known physical forces, then it is very hard to justify the vitalist position.

3. If a clone was to be activated while I am still alive, then I am shot dead...am I still alive because my clone still exists?

Is it identical to you at time of death, or has it diverged by having different experiences and physical history?

[Borgholio]

That's, pretty much, the entire (specious) argument against mind uploading/copying. It makes people squeamish because the copied mental states are somehow not "you". How would the copied mind not be "you", if not for some ineffable quality that you, and only you, possess?

I wouldn't really consider seeing things through my own eyes "ineffable". What is making me squeamish is the idea that if you copy my brain to another body / computer and we both happen to be awake at the same time. The data is the same, but that doesn't mean the "original" me will suddenly want to die. This is only really an issue if the technology exists to transfer my mind to a new body or a computer while I'm still alive in the old one. If I'm shot in the face and my brain is in little bits on the wall, the question of who is the "real" me is moot at that point.

Much of it is an outright fabrication on the part of your brain.

How so? Isn't memory a record of things that you actually witness, as opposed to genuine fantasies and dreams and such?

For that matter, you don't have much mental continuity to the "you" who got out of bed this morning. Your brain has scrubbed out (i.e. it couldn't be bothered remembering) all the uninteresting bits connecting the you reading this post right now to the you that got out of bed.

My argument is that there's a difference between being unconscious and being permanently turned off.

Worse, what you percieve to be a smooth and uninterrupted experience of the world around you is actually a set of snapshots merged through interpolation (i.e. your brain is making shit up to edit out things like the two great honking blind spots in your vision, or the fact that you're blind when you're moving your eyes ... which is to say, most of the time. It's also doing a clever job of fooling you into believing that all of your senses are working instantaneously, when signals are coming in with widely differing transmission delays.)

Sure, there's lots of tomfoolery going on in the brain, but creating a cloned mind isn't some trick to deal with a blind spot in front of my face.

"But I have my original body!" you might protest. Well, how do you know? How do you know that this isn't an ancestor sim being conducted by transhuman historians 10,000 years from now? How do you know that you didn't, at some point in the future, sign up for Alcor? And the whole becoming a corpsicle thing worked, and this is just a copy of you digitally reliving the past for the entertainment of far-future you?

Oh hell I have no idea. You could very well be right. But I can only really spend time thinking about things that are somehow grounded in THIS reality.

Absolutely.

So you're saying that the existence of the data portion of "me" is what determines if I'm alive, not whether or not there's an unbroken continuity between the original me and the clone?

Gonna quote Simon too, otherwise this could get ugly...

I'm with Terralthra. Give defined, "concrete, testable" definitions for "consciousness" and "termination."

The physical 'hardware' condition of your brain does not equate the the state of your consciousness.

Let me try to rephrase. When I see a brain, I see many neurons and electrical impulses firing even if you're knocked out cold. Even though I lose consciousness, those impulses still fire and the brain isn't dead. It's still doing things, even though advanced functions may be suppressed. When they stop completely, I have been terminated. Creating a clone involves terminating those processes and killing the original consciousness.

Would you mind explaining why?

It's the permanency of it. When I go to sleep, I wake up. When I get sliced up, I don't. My backup does. I understand that the continuity is unbroken from the perspective of the clone, but not from the original.

I believe that's his hobby, actually...

Well then actually trying to explain it rather than just calling me ignorant would have been preferable.

Which means that you run smack into the computer/savefile issue. We already know that an arbitrarily complicated pile of information can be removed (destructively or nondestructively) from whatever stores it. And transferred to somewhere else. By your argument, this transference makes the pile of information somehow 'not the original.' Or 'not really me' if the information in question is you.

Well...it's NOT the original. Going back to the hard drive analogy (and please stop me if is butchering things too much), when you copy a save file you are basically re-creating the file bit by bit on the new hard drive while deleting the original. Yes all the information is there, but it is a reproduction.

That's a claim you really do need to support. Starglider's criticism is that you don't appear to recognize that this is a problem or that you're saying anything an intelligent person might disagree with. Which suggests that your concepts of 'conscious' and 'alive' are a bit muddy for effective philosophical discourse.

Perhaps I'm not well schooled in these philosophical concepts, but that doesn't mean it's not an issue that confounds me and that I try to comprehend. So far, while I grasp everything you guys are saying, I can not accept that transferring the sum of data making up a human mind somehow prevents an individual from dying if the source material actually DOES die. It's not that I refuse to accept it...I just can not see how it is possible. Where you see a continuation of consciousness, I see a clone or a copy.

Essentially, you seem to think that there is some vital essence which animates and characterizes "me," and which cannot flow from me to another body, or be replicated by replicating all the information in my brain.

Not quite...perhaps is where the problem lies. I am not saying that there is a vital essence that makes "me" unique and makes a clone somehow to be inferior. If me and a clone body have brain helmets hooked up and everything I am is transferred over to him, he will wake up thinking he's me. Fine, that's how it should be. However if someone says, "Ok, he's awake...time to euthanize the old body...", I will fight tooth and nail to prevent it. Even though I know the sum of who I am is alive and well, from *my own individual* perspective, I am about to die. And that is truthfully rather terrifying.

Is it identical to you at time of death, or has it diverged by having different experiences and physical history?

The latter. As per my example above, say I and my clone were walking around for a bit before the final deed were done. We would already have diverged and be slightly different people at some point even if only mere minutes had passed. The longer the time is, the bigger the difference grows.

[Broomstick]

General anesthetic is not like sleep

It's not death either, nor is it uploading your brain/conciousness into a computer

As for them not making a copy of your mind and destroying the original: you have no proof of that - you weren't conscious.

Gee, I think if I went to bed one night a human being and the next thing I knew I was encapsulated in a computer system or a different body I might just a tad suspicous - don't you?

[Terralthra]

General anesthetic is not like sleep

It's not death either, nor is it uploading your brain/conciousness into a computer

As for them not making a copy of your mind and destroying the original: you have no proof of that - you weren't conscious.

Gee, I think if I went to bed one night a human being and the next thing I knew I was encapsulated in a computer system or a different body I might just a tad suspicous - don't you?

Please re-read the quoted posts and try again. The original statement was "when under general anesthetic, they do not make a copy of your mind and destroy the original" and the reply, "You don't know that for sure," is entirely valid. You accept that when you wake up from being under general anesthetic, your brain is the same brain you started with because the alternatives are implausible from a technological practicality standpoint, not a theoretical possibility standpoint. It's entirely theoretically possible that a sufficiently advanced technology could anesthetize you, put you under, and replace each individual neuron and rebuild the preceding synaptic connections, then wake you up and have you not notice anything has changed.

Also, your whole post is shallow "your analogies aren't totally analogous" horseshit. Reply substantively or go snipe another thread, please.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm with Terralthra. Give defined, "concrete, testable" definitions for "consciousness" and "termination."

The physical 'hardware' condition of your brain does not equate the the state of your consciousness.

Let me try to rephrase. When I see a brain, I see many neurons and electrical impulses firing even if you're knocked out cold. Even though I lose consciousness, those impulses still fire and the brain isn't dead. It's still doing things, even though advanced functions may be suppressed. When they stop completely, I have been terminated. Creating a clone involves terminating those processes and killing the original consciousness.

So, consciousness is neurons firing. The end of consciousness is death, and occurs only if the neurons are not firing.

Would a process that stops and restarts neural activity without physically damaging or destroying any neuron constitute 'death?'

Would you mind explaining why?

It's the permanency of it. When I go to sleep, I wake up. When I get sliced up, I don't. My backup does. I understand that the continuity is unbroken from the perspective of the clone, but not from the original.

But that's begging the question, unless I've badly misunderstood you.

Your argument is:
1) The person who wakes up is my backup, not me, because my consciousness was terminated.
2) My consciousness was terminated, because a uniquely severe and destructive thing happened to my brain.
3) This thing that happened to my brain is severe and destructive, because the person who wakes up is my backup, not me.

Basically, you're assuming that which you wish to prove (that the clone is not the original) and using it to 'prove' that the clone is not the original.

Which means that you run smack into the computer/savefile issue. We already know that an arbitrarily complicated pile of information can be removed (destructively or nondestructively) from whatever stores it. And transferred to somewhere else. By your argument, this transference makes the pile of information somehow 'not the original.' Or 'not really me' if the information in question is you.

Well...it's NOT the original. Going back to the hard drive analogy (and please stop me if is butchering things too much), when you copy a save file you are basically re-creating the file bit by bit on the new hard drive while deleting the original. Yes all the information is there, but it is a reproduction.

So, you're arguing that the game resumed using a copied save file is not the same game?

Because you were already arguing that a life resumed using a copied brainstate file is not the same life.

Perhaps I'm not well schooled in these philosophical concepts, but that doesn't mean it's not an issue that confounds me and that I try to comprehend. So far, while I grasp everything you guys are saying, I can not accept that transferring the sum of data making up a human mind somehow prevents an individual from dying if the source material actually DOES die. It's not that I refuse to accept it...I just can not see how it is possible. Where you see a continuation of consciousness, I see a clone or a copy.

Okay, but that's an argument from personal incredulity. I can work with that when I have more time to play with, but you surely must see that "I am incredulous of this" does not give you a solid basis to say "there is no way X can be true" and argue it in front of multiple people.

It would be wiser to ask "how can X be true?" and take that tone instead, in my opinion.

Essentially, you seem to think that there is some vital essence which animates and characterizes "me," and which cannot flow from me to another body, or be replicated by replicating all the information in my brain.

Not quite...perhaps is where the problem lies. I am not saying that there is a vital essence that makes "me" unique and makes a clone somehow to be inferior. If me and a clone body have brain helmets hooked up and everything I am is transferred over to him, he will wake up thinking he's me. Fine, that's how it should be. However if someone says, "Ok, he's awake...time to euthanize the old body...", I will fight tooth and nail to prevent it. Even though I know the sum of who I am is alive and well, from *my own individual* perspective, I am about to die. And that is truthfully rather terrifying.

Well, that scenario is interesting because there are two of you simultaneously, rather than being one, then zero, then one.

Also, let me point out that "I am about to experience death, but this person I am pointing to will not die" may not translate exactly into "therefore, this other person is not me." That depends on your definition of personal identity, which bears some thinking and analysis.

Is it identical to you at time of death, or has it diverged by having different experiences and physical history?

The latter. As per my example above, say I and my clone were walking around for a bit before the final deed were done. We would already have diverged and be slightly different people at some point even if only mere minutes had passed. The longer the time is, the bigger the difference grows.

If there is nonzero divergence between you and some other person it at least makes sense to talk about them as a different person.

[Broomstick]

General anesthetic is not like sleep

It's not death either, nor is it uploading your brain/conciousness into a computer

As for them not making a copy of your mind and destroying the original: you have no proof of that - you weren't conscious.

Gee, I think if I went to bed one night a human being and the next thing I knew I was encapsulated in a computer system or a different body I might just a tad suspicous - don't you?

Please re-read the quoted posts and try again. The original statement was "when under general anesthetic, they do not make a copy of your mind and destroy the original" and the reply, "You don't know that for sure," is entirely valid.

I could be under general anesthetic and then placed in an exact simulation of reality and never know it, either. My spouse could be an extremely advanced robot/android double and I would never know it. Your supposition is that such a substitution would be absolutely perfect in all cases. Particularly in early applications why should that be assumed?

Secondly, I see a lot of assumptions that sleep and even general anesthesia is somehow a complete cessation of brain function. It's not. There is considerable brain activity during sleep, especially REM sleep. Even under the deepest anesthesia the brain continues to function even if we aren't conscious. Neither of those states is somehow a stopping of brain function, and during sleep you actually are conscious for part of the time in a sense, we call it "dreaming".

You accept that when you wake up from being under general anesthetic, your brain is the same brain you started with because the alternatives are implausible from a technological practicality standpoint, not a theoretical possibility standpoint. It's entirely theoretically possible that a sufficiently advanced technology could anesthetize you, put you under, and replace each individual neuron and rebuild the preceding synaptic connections, then wake you up and have you not notice anything has changed.

You're describing a subjective viewpoint, which, like eyewitness testimony, can certainly be flawed. An objective observer would say that the physical substrate has been replaced, even if the person subjected to the process is unaware of it having happened.

Also, your whole post is shallow "your analogies aren't totally analogous" horseshit. Reply substantively or go snipe another thread, please.

Stop being such arrogant tools with the assumption YOUR values and views are the only valid ones in a human society, or that your wild-ass speculations are actually possible. Just because you want something to be possible, or to eventually happen, does not mean it will. The notion that a person can be reconstructed from the burst cells of a frozen corpse is science fiction, like faster-than-light travel or Star Trek transporters. Sure, we'd all like it to happen, but you really have to make a stretch to find an even vaguely plausible work-around. It would take some really wild breakthroughs that may never happen, or may not even be possible.

The people engaging in cryonics are, in all probability, arranging long-term preservation of dead meat at great expense and use of resources over the long term. If ever it is possible it will be so far in the future that the likelihood of a corporation still being existence, or society allowing investment accounts of legally dead people to remain untouched, are pretty damn close to zero.

Now, replicating the brain/mind state of a person in a computer - that is starting to look plausible. But if you did that the person in question would no longer be human. That doesn't mean they shouldn't have rights or be respected as a person, but they would no longer be H. sapiens. Would that matter? I think it will to the humans surrounding that computerized brain, even if to the personality in question they seem to still be the same. Why? Because humans - the messy, animal critters - are not coldly rational, subject to bias, and in most cases are curiously attached to the meat they inhabit.

Personally, if at the point of death my mind could be replicated into a human shell I'd go for it, to have some of "me" continue onwards. I'd still consider the result a copy, even if a "perfect" one. It's a different sort of legacy than genetic children or some lasting work like art or literature or a building or one of the many other things people leave behind as a mark on the world. I'd have no problem with a sufficiently accurate copy continuing on as the legal "me". It would still be a transformation.

[Borgholio]

So, consciousness is neurons firing. The end of consciousness is death, and occurs only if the neurons are not firing.

Basically, yes. Once the brain is shut down and no longer operating, it is death.

Would a process that stops and restarts neural activity without physically damaging or destroying any neuron constitute 'death?'

If the brain stops then it is death. However, if the brain can be restarted then it's not permanent. So the patient would have recovered from death. I will draw parallels to someone's heart stopping and being restarted.

Basically, you're assuming that which you wish to prove (that the clone is not the original) and using it to 'prove' that the clone is not the original.

Sorry, perhaps we're both misunderstanding each other... Using my definition of death as lack of brain activity, if the clone is not the first brain that becomes active then it is not the original. I'm basically going by who came first chronologically.

So, you're arguing that the game resumed using a copied save file is not the same game?

I was waiting for when the computer analogies would break down... Ok it's like this. From the perspective of the gamer, it IS the same game. The gamer would notice no difference between the original save file and the new save file. But on a purely technical (binary) level, the new save file is a copy and thus it is not EXACTLY the same game as the original since it is a reproduction. With clones it's the same thing. From an outsider looking in, the person is reborn in a new body. But even if a new person is functionally identical to me in every way, shape, or form, they are still technically a copy and the original still dies when their neural functions cease.

It would be wiser to ask "how can X be true?" and take that tone instead, in my opinion.

I apologize if I did not express myself properly. That is pretty much what I am asking, "How is this possible?" I cannot reconcile how a clone could be considered the same person when they are biologically and technically a copy.

Well, that scenario is interesting because there are two of you simultaneously, rather than being one, then zero, then one.

Right, and that's what will happen unless there is some kind of trauma that knocks me out cold. If I voluntarily decide to undergo a transfer, then at some point I will have to think about allowing *this* consciousness to die while my new one wakes up.

[Simon_Jester]

So, consciousness is neurons firing. The end of consciousness is death, and occurs only if the neurons are not firing.

Basically, yes. Once the brain is shut down and no longer operating, it is death.

So the essential thing that is "you" is NOT the information that makes up your brain, it is the fact that your neurons are firing? And this "you-ness" vanishes if neurons are not firing, even if the information is preserved?

Sorry, perhaps we're both misunderstanding each other... Using my definition of death as lack of brain activity, if the clone is not the first brain that becomes active then it is not the original. I'm basically going by who came first chronologically.

Well, using the save file analogy, the save file on the new computer is not the same file as the one on the old computer (different location, different filename perhaps)... but that doesn't mean it isn't the same game.

Likewise, the clone may not be the original brain... but that doesn't mean it isn't the same person.

What still confuses me is that you seem to consider 'personhood' something that cannot be extracted from a brain by any means. Attempting to move it destroys it. The problem is that there's nothing else in the universe that works that way; everything else can either be physically moved, or information-theoretically replicated.

So, you're arguing that the game resumed using a copied save file is not the same game?

I was waiting for when the computer analogies would break down... Ok it's like this. From the perspective of the gamer, it IS the same game. The gamer would notice no difference between the original save file and the new save file. But on a purely technical (binary) level, the new save file is a copy and thus it is not EXACTLY the same game as the original since it is a reproduction.

So a thing is not the same as another thing if it only shares, say, 99.9999% similarity to the other thing?

If so, you are not a single person, because you are not exactly the same in all mental and physical ways as you were yesterday or the day before that. Sure, "you" occupy a brain that's been busily firing neurons for X years. But the traits that make you characteristically you are evolving over time, and if the threshold for 'is the same person' is that strict, a person can't really hope to even stay the same person from year to year.

But even if a new person is functionally identical to me in every way, shape, or form, they are still technically a copy and the original still dies when their neural functions cease.

You do grasp that this is an unproven assertion on your part, and one that other people have philosophical problems with? It's not just "this is what death means." It's "what I choose to assert that death means."

Basing major philosophical arguments on your own asserted definitions of philosophical terms is not the best practice.

It would be wiser to ask "how can X be true?" and take that tone instead, in my opinion.

I apologize if I did not express myself properly. That is pretty much what I am asking, "How is this possible?" I cannot reconcile how a clone could be considered the same person when they are biologically and technically a copy.

Most of the arguments for how X can be true boil down to "You're not defining your terms in a clear, accurate, un-problematic way. Clear your thinking and use terms precisely, and you will understand."

[Borgholio]

So the essential thing that is "you" is NOT the information that makes up your brain, it is the fact that your neurons are firing? And this "you-ness" vanishes if neurons are not firing, even if the information is preserved?

Well objectively the data is more essential, but looking through the eyes of one of the "containers" of the data, when I see a clone or a copy of me...it will always be perceived by me as "another". Not as "me".

What still confuses me is that you seem to consider 'personhood' something that cannot be extracted from a brain by any means.

No, not really. The only thing that cannot be copied is perspective. My whole person can be copied over via brain transfer, but I will still look at that copy as another individual and not "me".

...

I was going to reply to the rest of your points but I think I figured it out when I re-read my last two answers. The issue is a matter of perspective. I agree fully that everything that makes me "me" is copied if my brain was scanned. I agree that, from an objective standpoint, I will live on if I die and my mind is copied to a computer or another body. The issue for me is how it is viewed from my own perspective.

The simplest way to explain it is if I were laying on a table and watching my clone wake up with my memories and start walking around. I would not see "me" I would see "him" because at that point I would be incapable of seeing things through his eyes. The only thing to prevent this would be to make sure I was unconscious or nearly dead...so I would basically not have any memory of anything except closing my eyes on the operating table and waking up in a vat.