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I think SOMA made it pretty clear we’re never uploading jack shit, at best we’re making a copy for whom it’ll feel as if they’ve been uploaded, but the original remains behind as well.
A lot of people don’t realize that a ‘cut & paste’ is actually a ‘copy & delete’.
And guess what ‘deleting’ is in a consciousness upload?
I mean, if I die instantaneously and painlessly, and conciousness is seemingly continuous for the surviving copy, why would I care?
My conciousness might not continue but I lose consciousness every day. Someone exists who is me and lives their (my) life. I totally understand peoples aversion to death but I also don’t see any difference to falling asleep and waking up. You lose consciousness, then a person who’s lived your life and is you regains consciousness. Idk
You make a good point. We all might be being copied and deleted in our sleep every night, for all we know.
There’d be no way to know anything even happened to you as long as your memory was copied over to the new address with the rest of you. It would be just a gap in time to us, like a dreamless sleep.
Old post but…if it’s just memory, you’d lose ttauma and other ingrained coping mechanisms, no? There’s no brain to try and fight back against things. Just memories making you…you…? Or not you, if you oose some of your behaviors?
Most people don’t like the idea of a suicide machine.
Yeah, and I completely understand that. Just from a logical perspective though, lets say the process happens after you fall asleep normally at night. If you can’t tell it happened, does it matter? I’ve been really desensitized to the idea of dying through suicidal ideation throughout most of my life (much better now), so I’m able to look at it without the normal emotional aversion to it. If teleportation existed, via this same method, I don’t think I’d have qualms about at least trying it. Certainly wouldn’t expect other people to but to me I don’t think it’s that big a deal. I wouldn’t do a mind upload scenario, but moreso due to a complete lack of trust in system maintenance and security, and a doubt that true conciousness can be achieved digitally. If it’s flesh and blood to flesh and blood though? I’d definitely try
That’s actually not true. When you cut/paste a file on your computer (for most computers), it’s much faster than copying the file. Deleting the file is also not instant, so copy and delete should be the slowest of the three operations.
When you cut and paste a file, you’re just renaming the file or updating the file database. It’s different how that works depending on your file system, but it typically never involves rewriting much of the data of the file.
Edit: Fixed typo.
Only if you copy and paste to the same disk. When copy pasting to a different disk, as any consciousness transfer would entail, it is very much actually copied and actually removed (from the index).
I wonder how you ever could “upload” a consciousness without Ship-of-Theseusing a Brain.
Cyberpunk2077 also has this “upload vs copy” issue, but doesn’t actually make you think about it too hard.
That’s what I’ve always thought more or less, to have a chance you would need a method where mental processing starts to be shared in both, then transfers more and more to the inorganic platform till it’s 100% and the organic isn’t working anymore.
The animated series Pantheon has a scene depicting exactly this, and it’s one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen.
Edit: Here is the scene in question. It’s explained he has to be awake during the procedure because the remaining parts of his brain need to continue functioning in tandem with the parts that have already been scanned.
Interesting but I would argue that’s actually still a destructive copy process. “Old Man’s War” did a good job of what I’m talking about, it was body to clone body but the principal was similar and at the halfway point the person was experiencing existence in both bodies at once, seeing both bodies from the perspective of each other until the transfer completed and they were in the new body and the old slumped over.
You would have to functionally duplicate the exact structure of the brain or its consciousness while having the duplication mechanism destroy the thing it was reading at almost exactly the same time. And even then, that’s not really solving the issue.
I don’t see an issue with that. A prolonged brain surgery that meticulously replaces each part with a mechanical equivalent in sequence. Could probably remain conscious the whole time.
Yeah, but it’s still a Ship of Theseus problem. If you have a ship and replace every single board or plank with a different one, piece by piece, is it still the same ship or a completely different one, albeit an exact replica of the original. It’s important because of philosophical ideas around the existence of the soul and authenticity of the individual and a bunch of other thought-experimenty stuff.
I think so long as you maintain consciousness that issue is fairly null in this particular circumstance. There’s lots of tolerance for changes in thought while maintaining the same self, see many brain damage victims. So long as there is minimal change in personality, there are lots of other circumstances that have a stronger case for killing one person and having a new person replace them due to change of consciousness, imo, I don’t think most people would consider a brain damaged person killed and replaced by a new consciousness, or a drug addiction with radically altered brain chemistry, etc.
Any sufficiently identical copy of me is me. A copy just means there are more me in the universe.
reproduction 101
Ahh, but here’s the question. Who are you? The you who did the upload, or the you that got uploaded, retaining the memories of everything you did before the upload? Go on, flip that coin.
If you are the version doing the upload, you’re staying behind. The other “you” pops into existence feeling as if THEY are the original, so from their perspective, it’s as if they won the coin flip.
But the original CANNOT win that coinflip…
But like… do I care? “I” will survive, even if I’m not the one who does the surviving.
It’s still a surviving working copy. “I” go away and reboot every time I fall asleep.
Why would you want a simulation version? You will get saved at “well rested.” It will be an infinite loop of put to work for several hours and then deleted. You won’t even experience that much, your consciousness is gone.
Joke’s on them, I’ve never been “well rested” in my life or my digital afterlife.
Yup. Read this and you will forever be against brain-uploading:
Glad that isn’t Rust code or the pass by value function wouldn’t be very nice.
Borrow checker intensifies
Implementation will be
{ // TODO return true; }Well yeah, if you passed a reference then once the original is destroyed it would be null. The real trick is to make a copy and destroy the original reference at the same time, that way it never knows it wasn’t the original.
I want Transmetropolitan style burning my body to create the energy to boot up the nanobot swarm that my consciousness was just uploaded to
I get this reference
If anyone’s interested in a hard sci-fi show about uploading consciousness they should watch the animated series Pantheon. Not only does the technology feel realistic, but the way it’s created and used by big tech companies is uncomfortably real.
The show got kinda screwed over on advertising and fell to obscurity because of streaming service fuck ups and region locking, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s at least partially because of its harsh criticisms of the tech industry.
Upload is also good.
I think that really depends on the implementation details. For example, consider a thought experiment where artificial neurons can be created that behave just the same as biological ones. Then each of your neurons is replaced by an artificial version while you are still conscious. You wouldn’t notice losing a single neuron at a time, in fact this regularly happens already. Yet, over time, all your biological neurons could be replaced by artificial ones at which point your consciousness will have migrated to a new substrate.
Alternatively, what if one of your hemispheres was replaced by an artificial one. What if an artificial hemisphere was added into the mix in addition to the two you have. What if a dozen artificial hemispheres were added, or a thousand, would the two original biological ones still be the most relevant parts of you?
There are many languages I would rather die than be written in
In a language that has exceptions, there is no good reason to return bool here…
Result<_>
