[extropy-chat] I keep asking myself...

[Robert Bradbury]

On 4/16/06, Heartland <velvet977 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> The awful truth is that when minds die, they die forever, and there's
> nothing
> anyone can do about it.


"Minds" do not die until the information contained in them assumes a form
which can never be recreated [1].

Just because an a single instantiation of a mind is destroyed does not mean
that *the* mind is "dead" -- it simply means that the unique information
contained within that single instanation is lost (subject to [1]).  Since
copies of various types contain most of the information in the mind one can
only lose the information which uniquely contained in a single
instantiation.

In our current world minds only have a single instantiation so when you lose
*that* copy of the mind you lose that mind.  For people who write their own
autobiographies or whose life histories are well known (certain famous
people, perhaps presidents with libraries, etc.), perhaps whose personal
genome is available or may be derived, one may be able to recreate a
reasonable approximation of the original mind.  Sure, one camp [3] can claim
its not "my" mind but the question arises whether or not it would pass the
"Turing" mind identity test [4].

For people who are attached to the idea that *their* instantiation is
*their* mind that is *their* choice.  However making an assertion that
"nothing can be done about it" would place us right into a semantic
discussion regarding ones own (single) "mind" and what *precisely* is
"death" [5] and the fact that should society choose to do so (assuming the
AI vector moves along a path that "information" has rights to existence)
then it seems reasonable that laws may be passed which would actually make
it illegal and difficult to destroy the information content of ones "mind" (
i.e. *you* can cease conscious operation but your information is the
property of the hive mind).

Before some people start screaming, I'd suggest you go look at how the
"hibernate" function works under Windows or the Suspend 2 functionality
works under Linux and then compare and contrast those with the non-REM
states of sleep.

Robert

1. I.e. to perform such a recreation would either violate accepted laws of
physics (e.g. pulling the "mind" out of an alternate universe in the
multiverse) or would exceed the total computational capacity of this
universe (i.e. you cannot simulate reality in reverse and get back to the
original mind state [2]).
2. There are limits on how far back you can run "reality" depending upon how
much disorder (entropy) has been absorbed by the mind.  Cremation injects
disorder more rapidly than burial.
3. I don't know if there is such a test.  It would be like the
differentiation the classical Turing test attempts (is it human or is it an
AI?) -- but applied to the perspective of copies, e.g. "Is this the original
or is this a copy?" or "Is this a copy or is this a recreation?".  We should
make up some names for these different types of tests if they don't
currently exist.
4. When I first wrote this I got confused about the precise positions of the
"identity camp" vs. the "thread camp" (or whatever names they go by).  If
these aren't defined someplace in philosophy or neurophysiology or computer
science *someone* with a clearer understanding than I should consider adding
them to Wikipedia so they can be discussed by the general population.
5. Go watch ER for a while.  One begins to understand that currently "death"
is when a MD asserts that an individual has reached a physiological state
that *current* technology cannot return them to a functional state.  "Death"
is a moving concept.  It used to be when your heart stopped beating (but
they solved that problem decades ago) or when your brain flat-lines (but
cooled drowning victims can recover from that state).  Now it has reached
the point where for people like Terry Schiavo you have a bunch of people
*voting* on whether or not someone is *really* dead.  What they are really
voting on is "we don't want to preserve a person in this state because we
aren't going to *ever* have the technology to return them to a functional
state".  Unfortunately most of the people voting have virtually no concept
of what advanced biotechnology or nanotechnology may be capable of.
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