Submitted 4 days ago by qlaw@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
In the same way it is “you” that wakes up each morning. Their are periods of the sleep cycle where the mind is active and dreaming. There are other times when you are just gone, complete cessation of consciousness. In many ways, we live our lives as a series of discrete individuals, each life a single day in length. Each inheriting memories from the last.
Good morning Lemmy. Enjoy your one day of existence, and keep passing the torch.
That makes sense if you are deleting the original after uploading a consciousness… What happens if a cloned consciousness exists simultaneously with the original? Which one do “you” experience as “continuous”? Are you both at once? How does that work?
They’re both you. Though the two you’s will quickly diverge as their experiences differ.
Gen:Lock season 1 happens, lol
Truthfully the you that’s reading this this second, might have just come into existence with all the memories you have now. There’s no way to know how volatile truth really is in our universe.
Yeah, there are indeed all sorts of weird hypothetical but possible scenarios out there. You might actually be a Boltzman brain and not even know it.
But I prefer to focus on what we can actually measure and observe. And we do know that consciousness ceases each night. Even if we count dreaming as consciousness, you conscious experiences is not a continuous thing. If “you” are simply your consciousness, then you die every night.
Damn you, I’m now experiencing existential dread.
I have so decided that I, being my todayself still, shall not sleep. Ever again. I’m not going to micro-die again and let the tomorrow me take over!
I don’t like this version of you. Go take a nap and try again.
Each instance of our consciousness is a limited thing spun up for a limited time. This is as it always has been and always will be. This is simply your nature; there is no need to resist it. The fruit fly may as well lament its own limited existence, instead of dancing in the joy of its one living day.
If anything, this should encourage us to live life to the fullest. But also, to pass the torch with pride. You’re part of an seemingly endless line of you’s, and there will hopefully be many after you, today’s consciousness, has ceased to be. You’re part of a grand rely race stretching back thousands of times longer than your own consciousness. Make the goal each night to go to bed knowing you did your part, a worthy link in the great chain that is your existence. Go to sleep with peace knowing your later selves will manage things just fine. Close your eyes, and let the water take you.
No. Archival means copying, destructive archival means copying and destroying the original. If the copy was as smart as you, it would know the original you was left in meatspace. It would be stupid to claim the copy is you but in a different individual, not different than wishful thinking.
The copy would be based on you, but from its startup it would become a different individual, as your experiences diverge.
In the video game Wolfenstein, the side character Tekla goes on a wonderful rant about the continuity of consciousness.
youtube.com/watch?v=_4oU7sB_AJ0
If you want a darker aspect, the game SOMA is all about this concept, though it is meant as a horror game, so it explores all the worst outcomes.
Spoiler: if you have thought your share about mind digitalization, SOMA has a very predictable game plot. It’s a good game, but not as intriguing as, say, the Talos principle.
Its the same problem with teleportation. If you are disentegrated in one spot and then completely reformed out of new particles in another spot to the new version of you there would be continuity but the old version would have basically died
I’ll just leave this here… One of the best outer limits episode, imho. m.imdb.com/title/tt0667991/
YOU MUST BALANCE THE EQUATION!!!
Its the same problem with teleportation. If you are disentegrated in one spot and then completely reformed out of new particles in another spot to the new version
But Scotty’s Beamer wasn’t a real transporter. It consisted of a scanner (not a disintegrator!) and a creator. If it had been constructed just a little differently, it would have copied you again and again…
In many fictional universes, they do move your particles from one spot to the next, though. And even if you want to think of it as a new entity, it’s a 1:1 copy including the body, which is IMO a critical difference to recreating a human brain in digital space.
If this topic interests you and you are into gaming, I highly recommend SOMA
Came here to say exactly this, SOMA is an absolutely amazing game and it’s all about this question.
What prevents a mind from being uploaded, and continuing to exist in meat space?
A clone is closer to giving birth than transporting yourself. Even if you only cloned your consciousness. That’s a new being, and no longer “you.”
I suppose it really depends on figuring out what consciousness really is.
If we’re talking about pure digital information then nothing is actually moved, it’s just copied and written to a new location. From the perspective of the new mind, continuity would be preserved and it would think it had simply changed places. The old mind (if it survives the scanning/transfer process) would still be outside the simulation and see a new copy of itself in there.
On the other hand, if consciousness is some kind of understandable phenomena, with even more sci-fi tech we might be able to simply scoop it out and put it somewhere else. In that case it would be the same person.
A copy wouldn’t be you. But sometimes sci-fi uses transferrence, where your consciousness isn’t just duplicated, it’s actually moved over to the new body/machine. See stuff like Ghost in the Shell.
I don’t think transferrance is all that realistic though. Making a digital copy is a more realistic thing.
Maybe if you handle it like the ship of Theseus?
Replace a few cells and little brain function over a long time (so that the body can adapt) by some compatible future machine.
Maybe in the end you are a full cyborg, not just a cyborg copy.
I think the show Severance covers this topic well even though the premise is slightly different, I believe the result would be the same. You have a fork of your existence basically since the self and its experiences are local to the entity of the particular snapshot and you’d grow and diverge. How much you diverge depends on the environment and stimuli you experience.
I’d hate to be the one in charge of
merging those forks.
Weirdly, the animated show Invincible addresses this a bit with the team of villains where one is a clone of the other and they’re always arguing over who the “original” is this time. Until one inevitably uses the other as a meat shield to escape… Only to later clone himself again and repeat…
They help the one “guy” (more just like a really smart, deformed clump of flesh in a vat) transfer his consciousness into another human body.
After the process, he mentions that he didn’t expect it to be so “continuous.” His first thought was “which one am I?”
Anyway, I thought they did a good job exploring the topic…
What I loved is that both knew what needed to be done next because he planned it before being copied.
Have you watched severance?
Depends how “you” is defined.
If you’re talking about your ghost, then no that can’t be copied because it’s an imaginary thing of which there is no evidence, a projection of your mind if you will.
OTOH if “you” is just a collection of memories stored in a physical structure then yes, a molecular level printer could reproduce it.
The bobiverse series of books encounters this question. Probably my favourite series.
From some philosophical standpoints (determinism, for example), a person is their mind, a brain; so reproducing or simulating the brain to a very high degree would result in reproducing that person. Whether that is true or not is philosophical, and is similar to the Star Trek teleporter discussion.
In Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space universe, the classification is pretty sensible: there are three levels of simulation.
Alpha level is a nanotech scan-copy of a real brain which kills the subject, but the resulting persona is considered intelligent, a human, with rights and all. IIRC there were only 60 people who did that.
Beta level is a model built upon all available information about the person, all audio, video, text, etc. This is pretty much what we might now call a trained AI, but it is not considered intelligent.
And gamma level is a fully artificial persona, usually used for chatbots and what we would use LLMs for now.
No, the whole idea of copying consciousness depends on “dualism” or the concept that mind and body are separate. This is no different than the concept of a “soul”. And it will never be reified outside science fiction and religion.
As long as the upload retains memories, they will still feel like the same self.
If the upload is me, it will know it’s a clone, not me, but also his own person from now own.
suburban_hillbilly@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
There is no continuity. We don’t have bodies, we are bodies. There is no independent ‘self’ to be moved around seperately from the physical stuff.
SippyCup@feddit.nl 4 days ago
Negative
I am a meat Popsicle
shalafi@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I always think about hormones in these conversations. You are not you without them, and 100 other things like pain, biofeedback, etc.
AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 4 days ago
Lots of recent (meaning past 20 years or so) research shows that our gut bacteria play quite a large role in our mental functions, too.
The concept of “the self” as a single, indivisible, unchanging thing is simply not compatible with observed reality. To be alive is to be in a constant state of flux.
Is there such a thing as an eternal soul? Uh, maybe…but if there is, it’s not going to be responsible for the things we typically associate with individual living people. It’s not going to have your sense of humor, or your memories, or your opinions, or your math skills. We enough about all of those things to confidently say they are not eternal.
einkorn@feddit.org 4 days ago
What foes the thinking? The flesh.
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 4 days ago
No, it’s the dlesh that does the dinking.
;-)
murmelade@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
“They’re made out of meat.”