You must log in or # to comment.
Even if it were possible to scan the contents of your brain and reproduce them in a digital form, there’s no reason that scan would be anything more than bits of data on the digital system. You could have a database of your brain… but it wouldn’t be conscious.
No one has any idea how to replicate the activity of the brain. As far as I know there aren’t any practical proposals in this area. All we have are vague theories about what might be going on, and a limited grasp of neurochemistry. It will be a very long time before reproducing the functions of a conscious mind is anything more than fantasy.
Consciousness might not even be “attached” to the brain. We think with our brains but being conscious could be a separate function or even non-local.
I read that and the summary is, “Here are current physical models that don’t explain everything. Therefore, because science doesn’t have an answer it could be magic.”
We know consciousness is attached to the brain because physical changes in the brain cause changes in consciousness. Physical damage can cause complete personality changes. We also have a complete spectrum of observed consciousness from the flatworm with 300 neurons, to the chimpanzee with 28 billion. Chimps have emotions, self reflection and everything but full language. We can step backwards from chimps to simpler animals and it’s a continuous spectrum of consciousness. There isn’t a hard divide, it’s only less. Humans aren’t magical.
I understand your point. But science has also shown us over time that things we thought were magic were actually things we can figure out. Consciousness is definitely up there in that category of us not fully understanding it. So what might seem like magic now, might be well-understood science later.
Not able to provide links at the moment, but there are also examples on the other side of the argument that lead us to think that maybe consciousness isn’t fully tied to physical components. Sure, the brain might interface with senses, consciousness, and other parts to give us the whole experience as a human. But does all of that equate to consciousness? Is the UI of a system the same thing as the user?
And we know the flatworm and chimp don’t have non-local brains because?
I’m just saying, it didn’t seem like anyone was arguing that humans were special, just that consciousness may be non-local. Many quantum processes are, and we still haven’t ruled out the possibility of Quantum phenomena happening in the brain.
Because flatworm neurons can be exactly modeled without adding anything extra.
It’s like if you said, “And we know a falling ball isn’t caused by radiation because?” If you can model a ball dropping in a vacuum without adding any extra variables to your equations, why claim something extra? It doesn’t mean radiation couldn’t affect a falling ball. But adding radiation isn’t needed to explain a falling ball.
The neurons in a flatworm can be modeled without adding quantum effects. So why bother adding in other effects?
And a minor correction, “non local” means faster than light. Quantum effects do not allow faster than light information transfer. Consciousness by definition is information. So even if quantum processes affected neurons macroscopically, there still couldn’t be non local consciousness.
We already have seen “non-local” Quantum Effects though - https://today.ucsd.edu/story/quantum-material-mimics-non-local-brain-function
“that electrical stimuli passed between neighboring electrodes can also affect non-neighboring electrodes. Known as non-locality, this discovery is a crucial milestone”
That’s not quantum non locality. The journalist didn’t know how to interpret the actual data.
"Quantum nonlocality does not allow for faster-than-light communication,[6] "
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nonlocality
Quantum non locality is like taking two playing cards, sealing them in envelopes, mailing one to your friend across the country and then asking him to open it. You will know faster than light which card is in your envelope. But that doesn’t allow information transfer.
Thank you for this. That was a fantastic survey of some non-materialistic perspectives on consciousness. I have no idea what future research might reveal, but it’s refreshing to see that there are people who are both very interested in the questions and also committed to the scientific method.
You could have a database of your brain… but it wouldn’t be conscious.
Where is the proof of your statement?
Well there’s no proof, it’s all speculative and even the concept of scanning all the information in a human brain is fantasy so there isn’t going to be a real answer for awhile.
But just as a conceptual argument, how do you figure that a one-time brain scan would be able to replicate active processes that occur over time? Or would you expect the brain scan to be done over the course of a year or something like that?
You make a functional model of a neuron that can behave over time like other neurons do. Then you get all the synapses and their weights. The synapses and their weights are a starting point, and your neural model is the function that produces subsequent states.
Problem is brians don’t have “clock cycles”, at least not as strictly as artificial neural networks do.
I think we’re going to learn how to mimic a transfer of consciousness before we learn how to actually do one. Basically we’ll figure out how to boot up a new brain with all of your memories intact. But that’s not actually a transfer, that’s a clone. How many millions of people will we murder before we find out the Zombie Zuckerberg Corp was lying about it being a transfer?
What’s the difference between the two?
A. You die and a copy exists
B. You move into a new body
Right, how is moving into a new body not dying?
In one scenario you continue. In the other you die but observers think you continue because it’s a copy of you.
Why would bits not be conscious?
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
From a lecture by Roger Penrose
Wikipedia has an article and he has some videos on YouTube
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction
🥱
The only people with this take are people who don’t understand it. Plus growth and decline is an inherent part of consciousness, unless the computer can be born, change then die in some way it can’t really achieve consciousness.
The game SOMA represents this case the best. Highly recommended!
Yes, I immediately thought about SOMA after reading the post. recommendations++
Soma is so fucking bleak and I love it
Did they ever allow for turning off head bob and blur? That game makes me motion sick to an insane degree.
The comic sans makes this even deeper
Who the fuck uses comic sans for programming? I use comic mono.
damn bro
oh god why is it real
At least it’s not Comic Sans IN THE IDE (or vim/emacs for the brave).
Comic sans in vim is peak insanity
This prospect doesnt bother me in the least. I’ve already been replaced 5 times in my life so far. The soul is a spook. Let my clone smother me in my sleep and deal with the IRS instead.
Makes me wonder how many times I’ve been replaced. Also makes me wonder if I just died yesterday and today I’m actually a new person. I have no evidence that yesterday happened except for a memory of it, and let’s face it, since it was a public holiday, that’s a pretty foggy memory
yeah, went down this rabbit hole recently: what if I’m the .001% that lives until <max age variable for my genome>? or what if ‘me’ is an amalgam of all the ones that die, and I get to live all those lives until the variable runs out.
I wonder about that. During the deepest part of sleep does your brain have enough activity to maintain a continuous stream of consciousness? If you go through two sleep cycles in a night does yesterday you die, and you from the first sleep cycle who only dreamed die, and you’re a new consciousness in the morning?
deleted by creator
Dreaming is just the brain butchering who you were and placing whatever’s left in storage as decaying trophies.
I feel like there’s a great story behind each one of the five
Damn dude. Was each time a death? I think a someone’s following me around and snuffing me out. Mandela Effects keep happening. Also I’m getting elf ears? Reality is weird.
Also I’m getting elf ears?
plastic surgery - that shit’s expensive. use that money for something better lol!
No I mean my ears are literally just spontaneously developing into elf ears
“The soul is a spook”
I’m sorry I understand those words not in those orders though, are you saying the soul is an olde timey anti-black racial slur or that it’s inherently scary?
spook
could also indicate ghost or intelligence operative. I don’t assume they were going racist with it.
A spook is a pretty niche concept from philosophy, I believe coined by Max Stirner
It basically means a social construct that is being taken as if it is a real factual thing instead of something made up?
I am bad at explaining stuff but I hope you get the gist of it.
Spook = ghost (aka a soul unhoused a living body)
Spook is from the german “spuking” which means haunting. Its use in this context comes from the german philosopher Max Stirner who is infamous for the memes where X is declared to be a spook.
Understanding what exactly spooks are is somewhat challenging, and plenty of people get the wrong ubderstanding about what is meany by spooks. But at least in the meme way of using the word, a spook is anything you think is a fairy tale, or nonsense that you don’t care about.
A copy is fine. I can still seek vengeance on my enemies from beyond the grave.
It’s definitely an improvement to just being plain old dead
I dunno. I’m starting to suspect nobody’s ever dead.
throws UserNotPaidExceptionRelated book recommendation!!
Kil’n People by David Brin - it’s a futuristic Murder Mystery Novel about a society where people copy their consciousnesses to temporary clay clones to do mundane tasks for them. Got some really interesting discussions about what constitutes personhood!
Some of the concepts in this book really stuck with me, but I had no idea what the title was! Thanks!
“Some days you’re the original, some days you’re the copy” or something like that
There’s a cool computer game that makes this point as part of the story line… I’d recommend it, but I can’t recommend it in this context without it being a spoiler!
Guys probably talking about
Tap for spoiler
SOMA
There’s also a book with a similar concept. It’s not the focus until later in the book though. It’s called
Tap for spoiler
Ready Player Two
That’s why I’m going for brain in a jar.
I know myself deeply enough to be totally fine with a copy. I’d be my own copy’s pet if it came to that. I trust me.
Yeah we’d work together well and the sex would be great.
deleted by creator
I saw a great comic about it once, one sec
Edit: more focused on teleportation, but a lot of the same idea. Here https://existentialcomics.com/comic/1
It needs an empty catch block
void teleport(Person person);
Removed by mod
The best part is, unless that function name is misleading, it doesn’t matter how the data is passed; a copy is being sent out over TCP/IP to another device regardless.
I don’t get it
The joke is that there are some people who think that by uploading themselves into a machine “to live forever,” their consciousness will also be transferred, like when you travel by bus from one city to another. In reality, you “upload yourself,” but that yourself is not you, but a copy of you. So, once the copy is done, you will still be in your original body, and the copy will “think” it is you, but it’s not you. It’s a copy of you! So, you continue to live in your body until you die, and, well, for you - that’s it. You’re dead. You’re not living. You’re finished. Everything is black. Void. Null. Done - unless you believe in the afterlife, so you’ll be in heaven, hell, purgatory or whatever, but the point is, you’re not longer on Earth “living forever.” That’s just some other entity who thinks it is you, but it’s not you (again, because you’re dead.)
This is represented by the parameters being passed by value (a copy) instead of by reference (same data) in the poster’s image.
This is also represented pretty well in Pantheon.
Or The Sixth Day starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
It wouldn’t be you, it would just be another person with the same memories that you had up until the point the copy was made.
When you transfer a file, for example, all you are really doing is sending a message telling the other machine what bits the file is made up of, and then that other machines creates a file that is just like the original - a copy, while the original still remains in the first machine. Nothing is even actually transferred.
If we apply this logic to consciousness, then to “transfer” your brain to a machine you will have to make a copy, which exist simultaneously with the original you. At that point in time, there will be two different instances of “you”; and in fact, from that point forward, the two instances will begin to create different memories and experience different things, thereby becoming two different identities.
And since we know nothing about what consciousness is, you base this on absolutely nothing.
The first line passes the argument by reference, ie, the object itself.
The second line passes the object by value, ie, a copy.
Also in Rust that would be the opposite which is funny but confusing
Thank
