[ExI] The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill

Fri May 5 01:41:13 UTC 2023

On Thu, May 4, 2023, 7:35 PM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> My model of identity is that I have a physical brain which encodes my
> memories and personality and performs cognitive computations based on my
> memories and sensory inputs from my body, /and/ an immaterial soul, that
> has phenomenal conscious experiences. I do not believe that phenomenal
> conscious experiences are reducible to or explainable solely in terms of
> material physics. In this model I am alive as long as my soul is having
> experiences based on the sensory data my body's sense organs are
> transmitting to my brain. Anything that permanently disrupts the connection
> between my soul and my brain (such as the irreversible physical destruction
> of my brain) kills me, and is something I would wish to avoid having happen.
>
> Sleep is not a problematic case. I continue to have phenomenal conscious
> experiences based on the contents of my brain: dreams. Sometimes I even
> remember them. The brain->soul connection is still operative.
>
> Aging is not a problematic case. The brain->soul connection remains
> operative even though the brain gradually rebuilds itself over time, ship
> of Theseus style. So a train ride would definitely not constitute death.
>
> General anesthetic is kind of weird. I suspect it /does/ disrupt the
> brain->soul connection while it is in effect, in a fundamentally different
> way than even deep sleep does. But the connection seems to resume when the
> anesthetic wears off, provided the brain is otherwise intact. [This
> constituted a novel discovery about the nature of brain->soul connections
> that was only made possible by the invention of general anesthetic, and
> was, frankly, an insanely dangerous and borderline unethical experiment to
> perform.] It is this very phenomena that gives me some reason to think that
> Star Trek style transporters might not be death-inducing - the soul may
> plausibly be able to reconnect to a physically identical brain after a
> brief interval of time during which the brain was too badly damaged to
> support a connection to a soul. [I have no idea if this reconnection -
> which clearly occurs in the case of general anesthesia - requires the brain
> to be in the same general physical location as it was when the destruction
> occurred - I suspect not. I anticipate that putting someone under general
> anesthetic, loading them into a spaceship, and moving them hundreds,
> thousands or even millions of miles, would not prevent them from waking up
> once the anesthetic-induced incapacitation of the brain ceased, regardless
> of the position or velocity of the brain at the time the anesthetic wore
> off.]]
>

I appreciate your detailed answer and thought experiments.

What do you think would happen if the soul failed to reconnect, would the
body cease to function, or would it continue on as a p-zombie?

(Have you read Smullyan's short story: "The Unfortunate Dualist"
 https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/SmullyanUnfortunateDualist1980.pdf ?)

> Under this model, destructive-scan uploading /would/ constitute death
> unless souls are capable of attaching themselves to "brains" -
> informational patterns in the memory of a computer - that are
> /informationally/ identical to their destroyed biological brains, even if
> they are physically radically different. I have no idea if this is the
> case. It plausibly could be, or it plausibly could not - we simply have
> insufficient information about the nature of souls and the brain->soul
> connection to even speculate either way. Computer programs based on
> emulated brain scans credibly reporting phenomenal conscious experiences
> would be weak evidence in favor of this. Uploads that suddenly changed
> their opinions about the immaterial nature of phenomenal conscious
> experience, changing their personal theories of consciousness from dualism
> to some form of the denial of phenomenal conscious experience at all, or
> suddenly claiming that phenomenal conscious experience is an intrinsic
> property of mere information processing or quantum effects. would be strong
> evidence against this. [This follows from the semi-humorous observation, I
> believe made by Robin Hanson, that P-zombies are indistinguishable from
> "normal" human beings /unless/ they happen to be philosophers of
> consciousness.]
>

LOL yes I think this is why some people claim Dennett is a p-zombie. ��

> Non-destructive uploading, in which the subject remains conscious
> throughout the procedure and the end result is both a conscious human being
> and a sentient computer program that remembers being that conscious human
> being prior to the procedure, will be a very interesting experiment indeed.
> I expect it to require significantly more advanced technology than
> destructive-scan uploading though, so I anticipate destructive-scan
> uploading to precede it by at least several years.
>

Yes we have already succeeded in destructive scanning uploads of fruit
flies.

> It is central to my understanding of the nature of human consciousness
> that a particular person exists in only one place at any one time.
> Definitionally, if it can watch me die, while not dying itself, it isn't me.
>

These essays gave me some appreciation for why it may not so clear cut that
that is how "the self" (or soul) works:

http://web.archive.org/web/20081122035540/http://www.leecorbin.com/PitAndDuplicate.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20081122035412/http://www.leecorbin.com/dupproof.html

https://philarchive.org/rec/ZUBOST

And question to consider: if you could anesthetize your corpus callosum
such that your two brain hemispheres were temporary isolated) split, what
would you say happens to your soul during that time, does it also split and
later reintegrate upon the anesthetic wearing off, does it choose one
hemisphere to follow and abandon the other, do two new hemispherical souls
appear while the main one takes a leave of absence? It seems an outrageous
question but it's of practical importance for split brain patients. Are
they examples of an "I" being in two places at the same time?

Jason

> On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 11:53 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, May 4, 2023, 12:38 PM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>> I would absolutely be amenable to the creation of a piece of software
>>> that remembers being me, given reasonable assurances about its lived
>>> experience, safety, welfare and comfort, etc...
>>>
>>> But I'd also really like to not die. And these aren't quite the same
>>> thing.
>>>
>>
>> What's the difference?
>>
>> Do you consider a "star trek style" transporter death or a form of
>> transportation? What about a train ride (given the person who steps off the
>> train is never completely identical with the person who stepped on)?
>>
>> If the same person can be said to exist in the same place at different
>> times, then could the same person not exist in two different places at the
>> same time?
>>
>> Jason
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 4:16 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> One way to view Earth is that it's a system for turning sunlight into
>>>> conscious experiences.
>>>>
>>>> But it is extremely inefficient at doing so.
>>>>
>>>> Only two parts in a billion of the sun’s light reaches Earth. Of the
>>>> light that gets here, less than 2% is captured by plants. Of the energy
>>>> captured by plants, even when it's eaten by humans, only a fifth goes to
>>>> power the brain.
>>>>
>>>> When we consider how much energy the brain uses (about 20 Watts, vs.
>>>> how much land (and sunlight) is needed to grow the food to power a brain,
>>>> we find that with current technology, it takes an acre of farmland to feed
>>>> each person. Over the 24 hour day, this acre of farmland receives an
>>>> average of 663,684 watts of solar energy. If the land grows food to feed
>>>> animals which then feed humans, this figure can easily extend to millions
>>>> of watts to power each human.
>>>>
>>>> Millions of Watts to power something that uses less energy than a light
>>>> bulb.
>>>>
>>>> If we could directly synthesize food from raw chemicals, it should only
>>>> take some amount of energy roughly proportional to the caloric energy
>>>> provided by said food. NASA funded research that found a way to make sugar
>>>> from CO2 using electricity. We could then power tens of thousands of humans
>>>> for the energy that today only powers a single human.
>>>>
>>>> But where would all these people fit?
>>>>
>>>> Future technologies, like mind uploading will not only provide each
>>>> person unlimited space in virtual reality but also enable people to live
>>>> anywhere. For instance: on the moon.
>>>>
>>>> The moon receives 13,000 Terawatts of solar energy. Since the human
>>>> brains uses 20 watts of power, this is enough energy to power 650 trillion
>>>> human souls. We could leave Earth and allow her environment to heal.
>>>>
>>>> Just some possibilities to consider..
>>>>
>>>> Jason
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, May 4, 2023, 2:51 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On 04/05/2023 03:45, MB wrote:
>>>>> > I'd be interested in the "energy/environmental footprint" of this
>>>>> > lab-grown meat.
>>>>>
>>>>> Well, the problem of it being reliant on Bovine Foetal Serum seems to
>>>>> be
>>>>> just about solved, at least:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> https://www.wired.co.uk/article/scaling-clean-meat-serum-just-finless-foods-mosa-meat
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> https://www.styvalley.com/pub/magazines/torch/read/alternative-to-foetal-bovine-serum-fbs-in-artificial-meat-production
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> https://averyparkinson23.medium.com/alternatives-to-fetal-bovine-serum-for-cellular-agriculture-aec69475f9be
>>>>>
>>>>> https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.01.538513v1
>>>>>
>>>>> The article about cultured meat being worse from the point of view of
>>>>> emissions was just hand-waving 'maybeism'.
>>>>>
>>>>> We'll just have to wait and see. By the time it's resolved, we
>>>>> probably
>>>>> won't need meat ourselves (as in Meat Bodies).
>>>>>
>>>>> Ben
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> extropy-chat mailing list
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>>>>>
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