"Sim-me will have the same political views and want to vote; he will have the same intellectual interests and want to return to the job he remembers and still loves. He'll want to be part of the world. And what would stop him? He may live in the cloud, with a simulated instead of a physical body, but his leverage on the real world would be as good as anyone else's. We already live in a world where almost everything we do flows through cyberspace. We keep up with friends and family through text and Twitter, Facebook and Skype. We keep informed about the world through social media and internet news. Even our jobs, some of them at least, increasingly exist in an electronic space.... [W]ho would accumulate the most power? One possible answer is the people who live in the simulated world. They've already built a lifetime of political and economic connections.... Biological people would become a larval stage of human, each of them aspiring to be among the lucky few who are allowed to metamorphose into the immortal elites who own the world.... [T]he most powerful people [might] be those who control access to the simulated world. Think about how religions work. People at the top tell you that if you behave well, you'll enter heaven, and if you behave badly, you may end up in eternal punishment.... [R]eligious demagogues offer an afterlife that can't be objectively confirmed.... Imagine the coercive power of an afterlife that is directly confirmable. The public could Skype with people who are in a digital heaven and (if the technology turns very dark) in a digital hell...."
From "Will Your Uploaded Mind Still Be You?/The day is coming when we will be able to scan our entire consciousness into a computer. How will we coexist with our digital replicas?" by Michael S.A. Graziano (in the WSJ).
Graziano has an upcoming book, "Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience." I don't know if the book has anything on the subject of law, but the column doesn't. It's a very interesting column, but I can't read things like "his leverage on the real world would be as good as anyone else's" without thinking about law. I suspect that experts on the brain and consciousness will see many other problems with what he's saying. One of the commenters at the link brings up hormones. I don't see how copying all the connections in the brain would produce a consciousness that's the same as what a mind in an entire body experiences.
७१ टिप्पण्या:
It's no different from writing. Communication does not require your presence, in fact requires your absence. You can be absent in the cloud, or just write stuff.
The day is coming when we will be able to scan our entire consciousness into a computer.
I doubt very highly that I will ever see such technology in my lifetime. But it does raise fun philosophical questions to ponder.
The idea is explored VERY thoroughly in the later books of the Gateway series, which are highly recommended.
Just to clarify: I meant the Gateway series by Frederick Pohl. The first book in the series was written in 1976.
But when you die, you’re still dead. “Copying” your synapses is just that, a copy. Not you. When you kick the bucket, shuffle off your immortal coil and slide down the curtain to join the choir invisible, your conciousness will not flip over to the copy. This isn’t immortality, it’s digital cloning.
Sim-me sounds kind of fishy
Kind of like a blog only squishy
The comments that you make
We’ll recognize as fake
The original would have
Been more dishy.
His best friend is a monkey puppet, so he can't be all bad.
Puppet = simulated life.
"I don't see how copying all the connections in the brain would produce a consciousness that's the same as what a mind in an entire body experiences."
Correct. Extreme conditions aside, our consciousness is embodied. Quite a few philosophers have held forth on it. A virtual copy is no copy. The end.
Unless they empty my consciousness into the digital realm, leaving an empty shell of my body, how exactly would this make me immortal? A clone of me isn't me. As to the rest, my clone would start off with a copy of my memories, but each moment thereafter his experience would diverge from mine. Basically, it's a tedious, self-serving means of reproduction.
Virtual reality signaling.
Your social security stops, too.
Personally, I'm glad I won't be around for that next phase of sim-human. It's a certainty it'll be more easily controlled. By those who know best on how and what you should think.
I have sent teenaged morse code radio messages that have reached over 700 stars by now. So I'm safe from armageddon. Talk about the cloud.
Probably some alien teenager is sending them the other way to us.
No. The mind and body are connected.
And some men think with their penis.
"We are Legion (We are Bob)", Dennis E. Taylor, 2016, is fiction based on the premise of uploading a consciousness into an artificial intelligence matrix. In this story it is loaded onto an interstellar vessel. He has full control of the ship and all its mechanisms and computers. This takes some orientation and getting accustomed to. He is able to clone himself (thus the 'we' in the title) but each of the clones is a little different in that a different aspect of his personality is exaggerated and prominant. The clones are subordinate to the original. Bob's existence is/feels quite different to him than the one he remembers when he occupied a human body.
Never happening. It's just another variation on Utopia thinking
I’d be curious to find out if I’d get along with myself. Would we find each other interesting enough to hang out?
The hormone person bas a killer objection. And it goes beyond just hormones to fatigue, gut bacteria, physical stimulus. An exact copy of your mind without your body might be totally unlike you.
"Just to clarify: I meant the Gateway series by Frederick Pohl. The first book in the series was written in 1976."
Graziano's column includes some discussion of scifi. He says that sci-fi plots tend to cause the biological person to disappear into the computer, but if the mind could be scanned and begin a life inside a simulation, even if it felt like the same person who went in, the biological person would still exist and feel like the same person he always was.
I'm not interested enough to read the sci-fi, and I have heard of Frederick Pohl. I probably have some of his books in my big box of old sci-fi paperbacks.
Maybe I'm mixing up Frederick Pohl and Poul Anderson (2 names that aren't quite Paul).
I don’t know why, but “great minds think alike” popped into my head and I giggled.
Will there be walls to contain each mind?
Will their minds bleed into each other?
Will “I’m sorry, my mind is in the Cloud” become an excuse?
“Get you head out of the Cloud.”
Oops there was a glitch. I’m in FITB’s body.
It worked so well for The Krell.
The sim world will be similar, but not exactly like the old one.
For example, we'll all have goatees, like Spock.
There is a Black Mirror episode about this called White Christmas. It’s terrifying. The uploaded consciousness is totally aware it is locked in a computer and that it will never escape. To anyone who hasn’t seen Black Mirror it is like Twilight Zone on a bad acid trip.
Sim-me will have the same political views and want to vote
Is this how they plan on winning against Trump?
This Rethinking Consciousness summary is a lot more interesting than the SJW, er, WSJ article.
I always figured true AI would be insane. Sensory deprivation, missing hormones, no reptile brain for basic motivation, its life would be a crazy dream.
https://grazianolab.princeton.edu/ has a big list of his
https://grazianolab.princeton.edu/popular-press-articles
Why is he talking about this as an afterlife? Unless we're truly positing magic, any upload will have to occur while you're still alive. The Sim-you will exist separately from you while you're still around, which just reinforces the conclusion that the Sim is a different person. I suppose you could postulate a world where the Sim is kept inactive until the bio-you dies, but that would implicate any number of civil rights concerns.
Everyone here -- blog author and commenters -- are sim people.
The uploaded consciousness is totally aware it is locked in a computer and that it will never escape.
If I remember correctly, that was the idea of "Caprica" and the origin of the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica. A computer guy had uploaded his dying/dead daughter's consciousness to a computer network and then to a mechanical body. And she didn't like it. And so she rebelled.
Neal Stephenson'latest book Fall or Dodge in Hell is about this whole idea.
Not as good as cobweb, Cryptonomicon or Reamde to which it is a sequel but not bad.
Someone mentioned power. This whole world disappears if they lose power or have some problems with the server farm.
John Henry
Everyone here -- blog author and commenters -- are sim people.
I'm real, you're just a series of two-dimensional dot patterns.
I got some of the specifics of "Caprica" wrong, but the main idea is right -- girl's self-aware consciousness is trapped in a mechanical body. There is some ambiguity as to whether she is purely AI or there is some part of the now-dead real girl's consciousness/spirit in there. See the episode summaries here.
Then I just finished reading "Timeline" by Michael Crichton. People there basically use a molecular transporter to go back in time (same idea at the transporter in Star Trek). Except that Crichton explains that the transporter, in breaking down the person's molecules at the origin point and reassembling at the destination, does not really transport the person anywhere or any time.
Rather, when the person is dematerialized at the origin, that person is actually destroyed. And what appears at the other end is essentially a facsimile. An entirely different person, but with the same thoughts and memories. Basically a flesh-and-blood sim person.
The problem encountered by some in the book is "transcription errors," where, because there have been so many copies of copies of the person in transporting back and forth, the quality goes down and some parts do not align properly.
Imagine the fun online dating services could have if every customer uploaded their current brain state for comparison with potential mates. (Of course the NSA would (secretly, of course) make all the dating services turn over their data — as a matter of national security.)
I remember that one, the medieval aspects were done, the film was a poor adaptation, thats where i learned about the multiverse
And that leads to this other deep thought --
NONE of us -- none -- are the people who existed ten years ago. The person who existed then is gone forever. We now are just replacements for them.
How? Because the body is continuously undergoing a process of atoms and molecules being transferred between and within cells, and cells are constantly being replaced, such that on an atomic/molecular level, we are completely different entities even though we share the same ideas, thoughts, memories of the person before.
Which is quite a quandary if you are a purely materialist who does not believe in God or spiritual/transcendent realities beyond this universe that we can see and touch.
"Then I just finished reading "Timeline" by Michael Crichton. ... The problem encountered by some in the book is "transcription errors," where, because there have been so many copies of copies of the person in transporting back and forth, the quality goes down and some parts do not align properly."
I remember that as a joke from the Michael Keaton movie "Multiplicity."
"Despite the complications of having a clone, Lance is extremely busy at work so Doug decides to have another made to help out at home. "Three", who calls himself "Rico", is an exaggeration of Doug's feminine side. He has an extremely sensitive and thoughtful personality and loves to cook and take care of the house, much to Lance's chagrin. Lance and Rico's attempt to make another clone "Four", who is later named Lenny. Unfortunately, since he is a clone-of-a-clone, his intelligence is considerably lower than that of his predecessors, and he refers to Doug as "Steve". (The analogy used refers to how a copy of a copy may not be as 'sharp' as the original). This causes an annoyed Doug to decree that no more clones be created."
This movie pre-dates "Timeline" and the joke — about a xerox of a xerox — appeared prominently in the trailer.
Heaven is a place where hormones never happen.
This is the old "brain in a vat" speculation warmed over and tarted up with computer technology. Fun stuff, but suitable mostly for late-night dorm room conversations, and professional philosophers in my opinion.
The fact is that (1) we have no idea at all what consciousness is, other than that it is apparently an emergent feature of brain physiology, and (2) we have no real idea of how the brain does whatever it is that it's doing. (The analogy I recall is the predicament of trying to figure out what is going on inside a windowless manufacturing plant by listening to the noises that come out of it at night.)
The bigger question is, why are so many people so afraid of death? It seems clear to me that that is what is ultimately behind these "trans-human" aspirations, people having their recently-expired heads frozen for posterity, etc.
At best, even in the remote chance that any of these technologies can be made to "work", in some sense, they just postpone the problem, because nothing lasts forever in this universe, including the universe.
Coming to terms with the reality of death, I believe, is a prerequisite to a humane and rewarding life.
The Uploaded
Zombies in the cloud.
Comments of the living dead will be moderated just like the rest of us.
"I don't see how copying all the connections in the brain would produce a consciousness that's the same as what a mind in an entire body experiences."
That was my main problem with the book Superintelligence. Without all the extensive sensory apparatus and internal states, it's all pattern-matching and syntax rules without direct correspondence to reality.
we have no idea at all what consciousness is, other than that it is apparently an emergent feature of brain physiology
This would be an example of a exclusivist materialist conception of reality, which has no room for the possibility that there is a transcendent component to thought and consciousness, that is, it transcends physical reality, which some might call the soul/spirit.
We aren't the same people we were when we were children. Or teens, or even the people we were last week. Every experience we have, everything we encounter, every stimulus, they all work together to create us in real time. We grow organically, which means we are way, way, way more complicated than any computer simulation. So the "policraticus" who opened this website and read and thought about this post is different than "policraticus 2.0" who just typed out this period --->. It is a small difference, to be sure, but could you model that expression in digital a form?
Experiences we have change us physically, life is continually forcing our brains to adapt, coding new proteins and turning on and off receptors in our brains as we encounter new information. And, to add to the complexity, each of our brains reacts and adapts in a unique way. Thus, some people can taste an oyster for the first time and be enraptured by its clean taste of the sea and others will spit out the slimy thing in disgust. Just modeling my brain as a static thing seems like an unbelievably complicated task, modeling it and then having a program that will use that brain in the way I do, to adapt and grow, to learn and experience in the same way I do now, and they as I will in the future, well that would be, as they say, big, if true. But come on. This is first order bullshit.
Even without any recourse to the supernatural, to the existence of mind, or soul, or spirit, even if we are just the electric signals bouncing around inside a 3 pound lump of tissue inside our skulls, we are the most complicated thing in the Universe. That is not a metaphor. The idea that we could somehow mirror that in any realistic way inside a machine is just fantasy.
It's one of the big existential questions, the emergence of which in this current existential crisis of humanity, has been a giant leap backward, often in the name of progress -- What are we?
Is the human being simply a collection of bio-chemical-electo components? Or a bunch of ones and zeros in electronic exchanges?
Is that all we are? Or is there something more? Something beyond?
@Mark:
Is the human being simply a collection of bio-chemical-electo components
Granted, I'm not too good at big philosophical questions, but my conception is that yes, that is what a human being is. But we have to pretend otherwise.
@ Mark - Yes, that's what we are. Isn't it enough?
I don't see how copying all the connections in the brain would produce a consciousness that's the same as what a mind in an entire body experiences.
That's because you are an intelligent and perceptive person. This is basically a modern,non-religious version of Gnosticism. Spirit good and pure, matter (and the body) dirty and evil.
Mark asks: Is the human being simply a collection of bio-chemical-electo components? Or a bunch of ones and zeros in electronic exchanges?
In the case of J. Farmer, this is certainly the case. [Sorry, Farmer. Couldn't resist ;-)]
Dustbunny @8:59: Thanks for the recommendation. Sounds delightfully terrifying.
My gut reaction is the sim would NOT feel his heart pull one way or the other either.
But when you die, you’re still dead. “Copying” your synapses is just that, a copy. Not you. When you kick the bucket, shuffle off your immortal coil and slide down the curtain to join the choir invisible, your conciousness will not flip over to the copy. This isn’t immortality, it’s digital cloning.
There is a short story in the "Berserker" series by Fred Saberhagen which explores that, briefly. A copy of a guys consciousness which is used to give AI to a spaceship/war-machine wonders if the guy who donated his consciousness died thinking about the copies that were created from him.
Then I just finished reading "Timeline" by Michael Crichton
I bailed out of the DVD when it went into romance (don't remember the details but it wasn't the plot I signed up for. Writers came up empty. There's no reason to like the lady the guy is liking).
People who deny they have a soul and spirit are still able to dream up all kinds of alternate realities but they have no concept of the complex processes that happen in the human mind, because they are denying the main thing that sets us apart as humans. SkyNet can’t become self aware. It’s just a stupid script.
A laptop or robot will never, in this universe, be lying around staring at the stars and contemplating its place in the universe. It isn’t born with a God-shaped hole in its heart like we are. It won’t believe in seances and crystals in an effort to fill said hole. It won’t wonder if it has worth. It won’t do anything it is not programmed to do by rote.
Is the human being simply a collection of bio-chemical-electo components
Yes, that's what we are. Isn't it enough?
Some think so, others not so much. But there are then some who, when they conclude that that is all we are, don't like the answer and sink into despair and end up killing themselves.
So there is that.
Maybe that is all we are. But people seem not to like that prospect.
I bailed out of the DVD [of Timeline]
I bailed on the movie when I saw the trailer and who was starring in it.
It could have been good. The book was OK -- not great, not Cricton's best -- but could have been a passable film.
Permutation City is a fun exploration of this idea. Didn't make it sound great.
Mark @10:13 AM: OK, we're in agreement there.
"Coming to terms" with the reality of consciousness and death means that this knowledge does not cause you to feel terror or despair. It is just another aspect of Nature, like the second law of thermodynamics.
You can get angry at the second law of thermodynamics, or try to deny that it's true, but doing so doesn't change anything.
Separately: For me, the canonical "disembodied mind" horror story is "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison. It's been a while, so I don't recall whether the characters are actually disembodied or not, but they're definitely not in the same condition that they started out in.
If you hope for immortality, you had better be hoping for your actual body and brain (each, perhaps, enhanced with mechanical hardware) continuing along indefinitely. A copy will not be you, it will be the copy of you.
Black Mirror has done at least 3 episodes considering some of the pitfalls of such mind cloning, as has Altered Carbon (based on the novels of Richard Morgan).
Personally, I think such technology as making a faithful copy of ones consciousness is probably centuries in the future, if it can be done at all.
dustbunny wrote:
"There is a Black Mirror episode about this called White Christmas. It’s terrifying. The uploaded consciousness is totally aware it is locked in a computer and that it will never escape. To anyone who hasn’t seen Black Mirror it is like Twilight Zone on a bad acid trip.".
Altered Carbon has a similar take in one scene where the protagonist's mind drive is hijacked into a virtual torture chamber where truly extreme and grotesque torture goes on and on, but you can never die or escape.
The hormone thing is a killer. Even an 80 year old man's behavior is driven at some level by the goal of getting laid, whether it is a realistic possibility or no. Without that drive, you have someone who remembers being human but is not now.
As for SF, yes, the "is it me" question has been examined many times. Even the very first Star Trek novel Spock Must Die by James Blish addresses McCoy's fear that transporters kill the original and create a new being at the far end. The Pohl Gateway series has been mentioned (though I feel it kind of ran out of gas in the later books), but Algis Budrys's 1961 Hugo winner Rogue Moon touches on the idea as does the now harder to find "Reformed Sufi" stories by Ray Brown where most people are afraid to use matter transporters, but the Reformed Sufis feel that God will take care to reunite their souls with the new bodies..
Mockturtle, good luck watching Black Mirror. It is what nightmares are made of. I warned you.
Taking apart a car is easy. Putting it back together is somewhat harder. What makes a .jpeg a .jpeg is not the 0s and 1s, but how they are arranged. That arrangement is information. The universe is not a pile of quarks. It is an arrangement of quarks into atoms into molecules into planets and stars and galaxies and, well, us.
Is the human being simply a collection of bio-chemical-electo components
It is not the components, but their configuration, that makes the difference. The information that organizes or encodes the universe the truly astonishing part of Creation, call it God if you will. The configuration that is the human brain is a subset of that, but it is one of those subsets, and a subset with some measure of ability to encode other subsets that tend to just be there until something decides to do something with them.
It is a material universe, but the laws which govern that universe are of a different order in much the same way that the components in a box from IKEA are not a bookcase and will never be a bookcase unless they are combined in a particular way. In other words, reference to a bookcase is reference not to a thing but to an organizing principle. Likewise, people looking for a god particle or some physical manifestation of god/God miss the point. God isn't a thing; He is the organizing principle of all things. Consciousness, likewise, consists not in the materials, but in having some measure of meta-access to organizing principles so that you can perceive and alter them, not merely self-assemble according to them. This is where Kant was going, I think, with the categorical imperative. And it is what it means to have the divine spark within. Where does it come from? How does it work? Why does it work? And what does it come from? God only knows.
"We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.
- Dartmouth AI Project Proposal; J. McCarthy et al.; Aug. 31, 1955."
"The 1956 Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence (AI) conference gave birth to the field of AI, and gave succeeding generations of scientists their first sense of the potential for information technology to be of benefit to human beings in a profound way."
Here we are almost 65 years later with machines that are millions of times faster and have a million times as much memory as a human brain and they are almost as smart as a common mutt you can adopt from a shelter. They can't play fetch too good either.
What Phidippus and Policraticus said (not to exclude other apt comments).
I'll throw out the late Philip Kerr's novels The Second Angel and A Philosophical Investigation again, for speculation on the reality of the virtual.
Personally, I don't have any problem thinking (see what I did there?) that this few pounds of jelly contains all the mysteries and all the answers we're going to get, individually and probably collectively, world without end. We know that humans know, think, feel, imagine, dream, hallucinate, and flat-out lie.
I think the "soul" is a theory, but it is a better one and just as scientific as the belief that sim-life is life.
These sim-mers in their arrogance and ignorance are just the latest in a long line of hacks and quacks who imagine what pleases them, and can be sold to others.
Narr
Machina ex machina?
For the materialists among us --
Is this the only reality? What we can see and touch and hear?
Or is there a reality on another plane or dimension of existence, an alternate or parallel universe or multiverse, and/or a "place" where there might be non-corporeal life?
Is the material the only reality? Especially if we consider that what we think is "material" or "matter" is really energy with lots of empty space in-between?
The Matrix is the more immersive version of this, I looked through the latest Stephenson but it's too vast a tome, I noticed this with his time travel and magic tale, dodo inc,
Mark @4:06 PM: If something cannot be sensed, or detected through our instruments, in what sense does it have any "reality"?
This is my problem with the word "supernatural". If we agree that Nature is everything that is and everything that happens (including of of course what existed and happened in the past), if something happens, it is part of Nature. Even if it is a one-off, inaccessible phenomenon like a dream. So I would argue that the correct distinction is not between the "natural" and the "supernatural", but the "natural" and the imaginary.
We have quite enough on our hands figuring out what is going on with those things that we can sense directly or otherwise, without wondering what else might be going on.
It's important to keep in mind that everything we say about Nature is in a sense, a metaphor. This includes basic notions like time, matter, and motion, energy, momentum, and so on. Nature is what it is. We are trying to figure it out using our monkey-brains, late of the trees. We may eventually figure it all out, or it may always remain mysterious at some level. (I suspect the latter, but that's just a layman's opinion.)
These people all seem to think electricity is magical stuff that doesn't require machinery, fuel, wires and maintenance. We just had a several hour black out on the West Side of Manhattan. My power and internet connections go off at least monthly and I live in a nice suburban area with good infrastructure.
Metaphorical language, exactly.
Narr
Consciousness is the knot that ties itself
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