[extropy-chat] Cryonics and uploading

Russell Wallace russell.wallace at gmail.com
Thu Jan 26 16:39:32 UTC 2006


On 1/26/06, Robert Bradbury <robert.bradbury at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> A copy is a copy is a copy!   Commands like COPY (DOS) or cp (UNIX)
> would not be of questionable use if they did not create an *exact* copy.
> People who are "rational thinkers" should confront this head on and get
> the
> people who hold the "its not the original" position and force them to
> explain
> precisely *why* the copy is not the original.  This goes back to the
> points
> Sam Harris has made about the need for the religious moderates to confront
> the
> religious conservatives who can offer no hard evidence for most of
> their positions.


I don't think "confront" and "force" are useful approaches (granted, you may
think I say that as shouldn't! :)); they tend to get people's backs up, and
into a situation where they feel they have to defend their position tooth
and nail; but discussion of the issues may certainly be useful. I also don't
think it's a case of rational vs irrational; I've seen plenty of rational
people subscribe to the thread view of identity. I think it's a matter of
philosophical axioms.

You have to nail such people down to *precisely* how much information loss
> they are willing to tolerate (this gets into discussions about how
> many cells the
> brain loses each day or how many are lost after a minor stroke or how many
> are
> lost if you hold your breath to the point of becoming unconscious,
> etc.) and relate
> it to things similar areas that they can easily understand, e.g. the
> difference between
> PNG and JPEG images or WAV and MP3 sound.  This then leads into a
> discussion
> as to *where* in the brain the information the *useful* information is
> stored.


The thread view of identity does run into fuzziness issues. One friend of
mine who subscribes to it, agrees he can't be sure he doesn't die every time
he goes to sleep; in practice he doesn't waste a lot of time fretting over
it, because everyone needs sleep regardless of their philosophy, but he
agrees it is a problem in principle.

I've seen other people who won't go that far, nonetheless agree surgery
under general anaesthetic, or cryonic suspension, may create a problem with
regard to breaking the thread of consciousness. (Does that mean you should
eschew major surgery or cryonic suspension? Not if you're going to die
without them! You shouldn't go into them if you're currently healthy, of
course, but we knew that already.)

In fairness, though, the pattern view of identity is also fuzzy. I'd be fine
with an accurate destructive scan upload, but what about an inaccurate one?
More prosaically, what about information loss from conditions such as
strokes or Alzheimer's disease? There's a point beyond which the law would
say the resulting entity was still me and I'd say it wasn't, but I couldn't
define in advance exactly where that point lies, any more than I could
define in advance exactly how many grains of sand are required before you
have a pile of sand. (This sort of issue is sometimes called a "sorites
paradox", after the Greek word for "heap", which should indicate how far
back it goes.)

The problem *isn't* the resolution. You could do atomic scale
> resolution scans now.


This unfortunately turns out not to be the case, at least when talking about
3D rather than surface scans. However, it may be possible short of full
nanotechnology; Eugen Leitl posted an excellent message (on this list or
some other one, I don't remember) a good while back on how it might be done,
unfortunately I can't find the original post but the gist of it involved
freezing the brain then scanning in slices of thickness on the order of 10
nanometers or so, not atomic resolution but fine enough to capture synaptic
structure.

I believe methods have even been developed to do less than atomic diameter
> measurements.  The problem is the parallelism requirements and readout
> time.
> If one had the resources to setup the lab you could start uploading
> someone now.
> Without the parallelism improvements the process would probably take
> many thousands
> of years.  The real problem is that you couldn't "run" them yet
> because we don't know
> how to run a human data copy with simulated inputs and outputs.  You
> also couldn't
> rebuild an identical biological copy (yet).
>

This is true.

- Russell
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