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

[Slawomir Paliwoda]

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 protecting 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 such a solution, I've been sitting on for few years now, which
is a transfer mechanism that relocates an original mind process to various
substrates. Because preserving identity-carrying mind activity goes few
steps further than what is required for protecting a mind pattern, this new
transfer postulates additional constraints on the cryonic revival procedure.

Unfortunately, the bad news for potential cryonic patients who subscribe to
a "true identity is defined by the uniqueness of 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
relocation method prefers not only as little 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 hardware to the point when the mind process can resume
its operation within that substrate. Or maybe it's up to nanotech to fix
this problem. In any case, it seems like we're in deep trouble.

The good news is that cryonic revival methods are not entirely hopeless.
Even though a task of reviving a mind process within an original hardware
will be incredibly hard, it doesn't seem impossible.

However, from a theoretical point of view, one might observe potentially big
problem. Could a mind process survive the break in its continuity? After
all, a mind cannot emerge if its hardware cannot function. It would be
tempting to reason that freezing evaporates identity, which is a property
grounded in a brain activity 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 process is merely pausing its execution. The process
survives because the hardware and software that enable the emergence of a
mind are still there and so is the identity.

With that out of the way, let me move on to the details of the transfer
itself. In order to successfully transplant a mind 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 mind must be preserved at all times.

The first constraint might be obvious. The transfer cannot happen without an
existing process ready to be relocated.

The second requirement constrains the way in which the shift is to be
performed to avoid creating additional copies of the mind.

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 mechanism.

Two separate machines are located on different planets, and are connected by
some interplanetary, and sufficiently fast communication link. Machine A
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, the mind is divided into N number of imaginary mind units. At first,
machine A carries 100% of the units, while machine B has 0%. Transfer begins
by reading one unit on A at a time and writing it to B. Then, the unit now
sitting on B gets integrated into the overall mind process. This makes the
original unit fetched from A redundant, so it is deleted. At this point, the
mind operates using N-1 units on A and 1 unit on B. 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 relocated onto any
suitable medium without the loss of identity, grounded in the mind process.
It is that grounding 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, the second constraint would be meaningless here, (what's the
point of maintaining unity of mind if all we care for is the data itself),
and that would lead only to logical confusion and situations where two
copies of the same data might be assigned the same identity.

Obviously, the procedure present here is very strict because it shifts one
mind unit at a time and allows coexistence of only single unit across the
machines. I imagine that, in practice, whole chunks of mind units might be
allowed to coexist during the transfer because they alone wouldn't
contribute that much to the emergence of a complete and independent 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, automatically, a 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 mechanism to maintain functionality
of a single 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 relocation.
Ideally, a person shouldn't sustain any degradation in his subjective
experience during the operation.

Ultimately, it's all about subjective experience. No transfer can claim to
be identity-preserving unless it guarantees the integrity and continuation
of subjective experience during a substrate switch. Recognizing identity as
uniqueness of mind process in space-time helps us define the conditions
necessary for subjective experience to flow between different computational
mediums. This allows us to view the mind as a physical phenomenon and a
tangible container for the seemingly intangible subjective experience. This,
in turn gives us license to define transferring procedures in scientific
terms, i.e., measurable parameters of physical objects. Whatever subjective
experience is, mind process enables it and that's the only thing we need to
be paying attention to, confident in the truth that as long as we preserve
the physical integrity of that process, we'll keep subjective experience
intact.

Slawomir Paliwoda