[extropy-chat] Identity Transfer (Re: A view on cryonics)

[s. p.]

Brett wrote:
>You are currently located in
>your brain just as I am. Your aspirations for cryonics will have
>to deal with that.  A cryonics procedure that goes hunting
>about the room to pick up astral travelling selves is unlike to
>be of interest to either of us.

That is exactly right. If we assume that preserving our identities must 
necessarily involve preserving our original mind processes instead of our 
mind patterns, then we must expect the future cryonic revival procedure to 
offer a workable process-preserving solution before people like me can sign 
up.

Let me offer my solution that I've been sitting on for few years now which 
is a proposed transfer procedure that *translates* the original mind process 
onto various mind substrates. Because preserving identity-carrying mind 
process goes step further than what's required for preserving mind pattern, 
this new transfer defines additional constraints on the cryonic revival 
procedure.

Unfortunately, the bad news for potential cryonic patients who subscribe to 
a "true identity is defined by a mind process in space-time" view is that 
cryonics is almost a hopeless technology as far as identity preservation is 
concerned. This is because any reliable mind process translation prefers not 
only as much loss of mind pattern data as possible, but also, more 
importantly, a mind that is able to function within the original substrate. 
While cryonics is very much vulnerable to the loss of mind pattern data, it 
is probably even more so when it's expected to repair the original mind 
substrate to the point when the mind process can still emerge within that 
substrate. Or maybe it's a nanotech problem. In any case, we're in deep 
trouble.

The good news is that cryonic revival procedures are almost hopeless, but 
not entirely. Even though the procedure that requires reviving a mind 
process within an original substrate will be incredibly hard, it's not 
impossible.

However, from a theoretical point of view, one might observe potentially big 
problem. Could mind process survive the break in its continuity? After all, 
mind process cannot emerge if its hardware cannot function. It would be 
tempting to reason that freezing evaporates identity since it is a property 
defined by a mind process that would be unquestionably absent while in a 
deep freeze, but the reason why this would be wrong is that instead of being 
absent, the mind process is merely pausing its execution. The process 
survives because the hardware and software that enable the emergence of that 
process are still there and so is the identity. But again, the identity is 
preserved because of the existing process, not the hardware and software 
that makes it happen.

With that out of the way, let me move on to details of the transfer itself. 
In order for a mind process to be translated onto a different substrate, I 
impose two constraints on the procedure.

1) Mind process must function within the original substrate. (It doesn't 
have to be conscious. It just has to execute in some form).

2) Unity of the mind must be preserved at all times.

The first constraint might be obvious. In order to have process transfer, 
the process must be there in the first place.

The second constraint deals with the way in which the transfer is to be 
performed to avoid creating additional copies of the mind process.

Even though cryonics deals with biological-to-artificial transfers, for the 
sake of clarity I'll assume artificial-to-artificial transfer to better 
illustrate the procedure.

Two connected, but separate machines sit on the table. Machine A currently 
executes some person's mind process, while machine B consists of hardware 
suited to receive that mind process, but is not running one at the moment. 
Then, let's divide a mind into some number of imaginary mind units. At the 
beginning, machine A carries 100% of the mind units, while machine B has 0%. 
Transfer proceeds by reading one unit on A at a time and writing it to B. 
Then, the unit that now sits on B gets integrated into the mind process that 
resides on A, which makes the original unit fetched from A redundant and is 
deleted. The operation progresses until 100% of mind units that used to 
occupy A now inhabit B.

In this way, any mind process could potentially be transferred onto any 
suitable medium without the loss of identity that must inherently be 
grounded in the mind process. It is that grounding in process that allows us 
complete disregard for the substance of the substrate as long as the unity 
of mind is maintained. If the focus was only on mind pattern, which so many 
people are happy to ground their identity in, that would lead to logical 
confusion because the second constraint, the unity of mind, would be 
meaningless in this case (what's the point of maintaining unity of mind if 
all we care for is the data itself), which would, in turn, lead to cases in 
which we get two copies of the same data with the same identity, i.e., 
nonsense.

Obviously, the procedure I've presented is very strict because it translates 
mind units one at a time and allows coexistence of only one unit across the 
machines. I imagine that, in practice, whole chunks of mind units might be 
allowed to coexist during the transfer because they wouldn't contribute that 
much to the emergence of a whole complete mind. The second constraint 
prevents the procedure from creating any additional copies of the original 
process because that would inevitably lead to creation of a new mind process 
and new identity. In that case the procedure wouldn't result in a successful 
identity transfer, but merely a birth of a perfect clone.

The second constraint also requires the procedure to maintain functionality 
of the mind process stretched across different platforms. It's crucial that 
the one and only copy of the mind subjected to the transfer does not 
degenerate into a non-mind process at any point during the transfer. 
Ideally, a person shouldn't sustain any degradation in his subjective 
experience during the operation.

To summarize, I don't hold out much hope that cryonics will offer many 
identity-preserving solutions. Uploading from the "living" brain seems like 
the way to go.

Slawomir Paliwoda

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