What makes 'YOU' - you?

[JF_Aidan_Pryde]

I've been reading The Age of Spritual Machines after seeing it referenced by a lot of the bright fellas of today (Kirk etc.)

The part on 'copying' a human or 'uploading' our brain to a computer got me thinking.

There are different interpretations of what makes 'self'. It could be - 'the unique' atomic comfiguration of your brain at any given time. By this I mean only the current set of atoms are acceptable. If you are to replace a carbon atom by an identical one, then that's not you.

But this can't be the case. Since identical elements are indistinguishable by nature, and our body replaces cells frequently, then which particular 'carbon' atom is used to construct a particular cell is irrelavent. So this would mean what makes 'self' is like a flowing river. It doesn't matter which water molecules are in the river, it only matters that it's in a particular form and flows a particular way.

So this would mean there shouldn't be any problem with 'teleporting'/'uploading' yourself by copying the configuration but not the acutal contents. But this isn't the case either. After I've been copied to a computer, it will claim to be me, but I'll still be here claiming that's just a copy. Someone would have to kill me to make it seem like a upload. That obviously isn't right either.

If I replace one neuron in my head, I'm pretty sure I'm still myself. But what about 10? 100? 100 000? Somewhere along the line, I would have 'killed' myself no? So replacing one = normal, replacing a lot = kill. Where does one draw the line between replacement and killing?

 

[V3]

So this would mean there shouldn't be any problem with 'teleporting'/'uploading' yourself by copying the configuration but not the acutal contents. But this isn't the case either. After I've been copied to a computer, it will claim to be me, but I'll still be here claiming that's just a copy. Someone would have to kill me to make it seem like a upload. That obviously isn't right either.

A copy of you is you isn't ? So if you claimed its a 'copy', you also claimed that its 'you'.

Why computer though ?, not a brand new clone

 

[pax]

Well to me replacing neurons of any given amount isnt killing... removing neurons is tho...

 

[Tagrineth]

Despite being atheist, I've always thought of 'What makes you... YOU' in a spiritual sense, that one's being is in a sense an abstract consciousness along the lines of a soul, confined within the body, with the brain being a kind of interface for that consciousness (much like a mouse and keyboard are our interfaces to our computers).

 

[darkblu]

i get the feeling we (humans) tend to ascribe too much weight onto ourselves. what makes me unique is the same thing that makes a pebble in the street unique. no human soul, no unique personality, nothing "human-specific" makes us "more" unique than the mouse in your right/left hand right now. IOW, what makes me, you, and that piece of gum stuck on my desk right now unique is the quantum configuration at that space-time location.

 

[JF_Aidan_Pryde]

Well to me replacing neurons of any given amount isnt killing... removing neurons is tho...

The thing is if I instantly replaced all your neurons, that'll be the same as making a copy of your head and then discarding the previous one!

 

[pcchen]

I'd say it's the connections between the neurons. The personality of a person is largely decided by his/her memory and "way of thinking." These are decided by the connections between the neurons. If someone "clones" your neuron connections, it'll probably have the same personality as you. Of course, it does not automatically make you see what it sees, or know what it knows.

However, there are some problems here. As you noted, human body constantly replaces atoms. Why wouldn't the "self-awareness" also replaced? Or, how do you know your "self-awareness" are not replaced?

Actually, sometimes we don't really are what we were. For example, you may forget why you did something in your childhood. From this perspective, the "self-awareness" is a flowing and changing thing, just like the connections between the neurons, and the atoms.

This still does not answer what will happen if some aliens completely replaced all atoms in your brain. We may never know since it is also very hard or even impossible to replace all atoms without disturbing the connections.

Well, I am sleepy right now and all I said are just mumblings... ZZZ...

 

[pax]

The thing is if I instantly replaced all your neurons, that'll be the same as making a copy of your head and then discarding the previous one![/quote]

Ya I suppose a twin is possible... But Ill still be me and not transported necessarily into the other body.

I like the idea of interface. And I do proscribe to the idea of individual value in the grand scheme of things. So potential of survival after death means that tho atoms are special and allow consciousness I think whatever pattern exists that made me different will be allowed at some point. Im not sure we can pin point exactly the source of awareness. Awareness of some knowledge can be affected but not sure we can completely annihilate it simply by killing the brain. I do know that knowledge is abolished at death tho... Seen plenty of that thru disease.

 

[DemoCoder]

I believe in the pattern identity theory of individuality. What makes me, ME, is the information configuration stored in my brain. I believe the mind dies at brain death and there is no life after death.

The cartesian dualist view of the mind/body just doesn't jibe very well with modern medicine. First of all, the idea of "special physics", that atoms/electrons in me are SPECIAL doesn't jive because your body is continually replacing your atoms, moreover it doesn't jibe with Quantum Mechanics which says that particles in the same state cannot be distinguished (and that there are no hidden variables ala Bells Inequality). Believing that brain matter has hidden variables, but no material anywhere else can be found to exhibit it would require massive revisions to basic assumptions in physics (such as that the laws apply everywhere). Dualists like Penrose have to resort to absurdities like arguing that the brain uses Quantum Gravity effects to achieve conconsciousness. Besides that, I don't believe life depends on taking advantage of any "wierd" quantum effects like Quantum Computation, I don't think there is anything that won't be explained by plain ole chemistry and massive amounts of simulation (e.g. Folding@Home, BlueGene, et al)


If the "soul" were the seat of where knowledge was stored, it would be impossible to destroy memory or alter consciousness. But a bewildering array of very targeted neurological diseases proves that knowledge is stored in the brain. I suggest reading Oliver Sacks books on neurological disorders, such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars for just a taste. And let's not forget Phineas Cage and physical lobotomies (or the "chemical" lobotomies that can be done today)

How else to explain Global Anterograde Amnesia (ala Memento) for example? If the "soul" was functioning as the seat of knowledge or personality, how come damage to a small part of the hippocampus can prevent any new knowledge from being stored? How is it that a man who had this damage done at 18 can survive to 72 and still remain the same as the day it happened, to the point that when he looks in the mirror he goes apeshit and asks why his face looks like 72?


Now some of you are going to reply and say that the "soul" is a backup device which keeps a copy of experiences from the brain, and that it continues to function, even though when "filtered" through the physical brain, it can yield these effects.

However, if the soul is a backup device, then it will cease to record any new information the minute the I/O device peripheral (brain) is removed from it (anterograde amnesia), so when the brain dies, the soul remains frozen, like a page in a book, with information, but no animation. If the Soul can independently record info, why do we have eyes, brain, etc at all? Why would God design such a stupid system with dead code which serves no function anyway?

Anyway, if the backup hypothesis is true, is this really the life you want in the afterlife? Frozen for all eternity with the last thought, last bit of information that entered your head (by the way, some cultures believe this is exactly how the afterlife works)

To me, an eternity of unchanging is DEATH. I see it as no difference as cryogenically freezing myself forever.


Which leads me nicely to my next point: I believe this will all be settled in the next 100 years if nanotechnology pans out, and we are able to revive cryogenically frozen human beings. How to explain the soul hanging around a totally and completely dead system for decades or centuries (instead of going the "out of body experience" route and leaving at death), especially if nanites are replacing vast quantities of atoms in your brain during repair.

Atleast then we will have a two fold solution: first, proof of the radical materialist view of the brain, and secondly, no need for a "religious" crutch anymore in society, since if you want to live forever, there's the technology to do it.

 

[pax]

Thats why I like the idea of resurrection of the dead vs life after death in some doppleganger. Christ pushed the idea that without resurrection there could be no life. Im not contradicting past posts here Im just thinking the possibility of some basic knowledgless essence surviving after death as another possibility...

Now remaking someone shouldnt be a prob for something like a God concept. I dont see how anykind of life after death need eventually turn into some kind of hell from the sheer length of ones existence. Life itself is long and some pessimistically live part of their lives as being a kind of borish hell of long studies or of long work.

Its a just a matter of attitude and access to things to keep existence interesting. I think reality offers infinite complexity to make things forever diff and interesting and also to revisit things of the past... Getting pretty theological here. Bit off topic.

We all know that science will pursue biological immortality eventually... I wonder when that kind of research will swing into high gear.

 

[Vince]

Democoder, your statements on the ability for a "dualist" phenomena are pretty outdated and can't be proven. Your attempts to discredit the appearance of a "consciousness" are also legacy baggage and should be discarded as that.

You state the importance that John Bell played in discrediting the entity formerly known as an objective physical reality via ERP, but fail to see that he instead threw the conscious observer deeply into the Frey. You're picking apart the knowledge, cannibalizing it, and then utilizing what fits into your pseudo-19th century hybrid of reality based around this objective materialist PoV.

You don't need to look to Quantum Gravity, something that's about as provable and has about as much truth today as anything else your stating, to find a way to let Schrodinger's Cat into the mind (Yes, I said the mind - as opposed to the material brain).

I'd suggest you look at the paper published in the late 1970's by Walker entitled, "Quantum Mechanical Tunneling in Synaptic and Ephaptic Transmission.' There has been a small body of research that's shown how QM Tunneling across the Synaptic Cleft is entirely possible (actually it's a 50% chance for a given electron to tunnel the ~170angstrom synapse in the time recorded between firings, which amounts to a hundred or so billion attempts) So, with 70millivolts, it's enough energy that could tunnel from the post synaptic element back to the electrically charges presynaptic vesticale gate that causes a conformal change in the Vesicle gates, tearing open the vesicle and releasing the known neurotransmitters into the cleft allowing the impulse to continue (It obviously takes more than one electron as there are a plurality of vesciles on the presynaptic side).

The non-local quantum needs have also been preliminarily addressed by way of electrons that tunnel between RNA. The numbers come out to something like an electron can make it across your physical brain in 1rd the time it takes to prepare a synapse to fire. So, your charges seem just plain in the dark of these developments.

moreover it doesn't jibe with Quantum Mechanics which says that particles in the same state cannot be distinguished (and that there are no hidden variables ala Bells Inequality).

Actually, this is a prerequisite for a "consciousness" if you accept at the very least what Bell said concerning ERP and the ramifications it has on an observer (and then the QM electron tunneling follows). If you accept that tunneling is happening, that there is a QM influence, that the QM potentials experiences by the electrons are what arises to consciousness - then a single electron is consciousness, all of them are consciousness. Together, the tunneling electrons and synapses are what give rise to a consciousness. So, do some thinking and you'll see why the indistinguishability property is necessary if you can believe that electron tunneling between synapses (as well as the long-range via RNA hops) in a self-sustaining pattern is what leads to consciousness and a vector collapse.


Also pointing back to Cartesian style dualism is odd as it's ignorant of most contemporary changes. Descartes was a brilliant man, but progress does happen and to point back at him as the only source of a dualist or non-monist theory is... wrong. From Churchland's Functionalism, to the Identity Theory, to Bertrand Russell's Neural Monism - there are hundreds of new competing ideologies. As well as there are ways of working Quantum Mechanic's into the idea of a mind.

I started with Bell, and I shall end with Bell - who in his later life AFAIK has become a believer in the existence of a separate consciousness... which, in fact, ERP would leave open to acceptance.

If you don't allow for a consciousness and instead accept that it's entirely material - then prepare to erase the last hundred years of theoretical physics, burn anything with Heisenberg, Bohr, or Einstein on it and forget about state vector collapse, because there's no difference between an observer and any other piece of matter out there.

PS. I hope I'm wrong, I hate Quantum Mechanics and don't want to have to deal with it... but it can be convincing. Ask your buddy Bell.

 

[Vince]

To me, an eternity of unchanging is DEATH. I see it as no difference as cryogenically freezing myself forever.

To me, sleep without REM is death.

PS. Now see what you did? I told myself I'd avoid this discussion at all costs as it's too speculative to even discuss with advanced termonology with a person of your calibur as we can't prove or disprove much - leading to a long, drawn-out.... nothing. Kinds like death...

 

[DemoCoder]

If there's one constant in physics, it's the conversion of physicists as they get older into mystics: Josephson, Penrose, Bell, et al. John von Neumann was a life long atheist, but on his death bed, turned religious. Irrelevent. Try Wheeler and Tipler's Physics of Immortality, two old age physicists who take a radical materialist approach to find God (God = omega point = infinite computation power available at end of universe when it collapses, only problem? looks like universe won't collapse)

As for your claims of proof of superluminal communication in the brain: complete bollucks. On the same level as the proof that biological processes can transmute elements. Anyone who could prove non-local communication of information would receive a nobel prize and set the world of physics affire. There is no peer reviewed paper that proves superluminal effects in the brain, nor proves that quantum mechanical effects are amplified to play any important role in conciousness.


Even if you could prove that quantum mechanical effects could be amplified by biological processes to be relevant, what would that buy you? It doesn't affect dualist claims either way and neither would the discovery that life processes took advantage of special relativistic effects. Quantum mechanics has taken on a mystical, almost supernatural flavor in some people's minds, but nothing in QM has anything to do with proving dualist claims. I guess I am supposed to assume that if, say, non-local QM effects could be proven in consciousness, this would prove the existence of God and the supernatural spirit? I fail to see the relevance between the two.

Whatever level of physics you claim consciousness operates on, man will just learn how it works, and it will no longer continue to be mystical or supernatural, and simply be yet another area of physics we can exploit (e.g. superluminal communications technology)


Moreover, radical materialism doesn't throw out a hundred years of physics. Instead, it rationalizes a bad interpretation of quantum mechanics which assigns special status to a configuration of matter doing the measuring. The Many Worlds Interpretation of QM needs no wave function collapse or special observer. The observer is just an interpretation.

The fact of the matter is, self replicating molecules do not need any special "mysticism" or "vitalism" to explain them, and nanotechnology will eventually prove it. From there, we can explain primitive life (virii, and eventually bacteria) in purely material terms. No need to resort to a special "life force" driving the reactions. The basic biochemical procesess will be explanation enough for the behavior.

Finally, the mind/brain dualists will have to contend with the issue of consciousness. As we continue to learn how more and more of the brain works, and eventually consciousness, they will continue to try and push back our understanding into more obscure areas of physics, searching for a way to prevent complete understanding, which removes any of the wonder of mysticism surrounding consciousness.

If the brain ends up using say, quantum computation, then we will simply understand consciousness through quantum computation techniques, and we will build devices that take advantage of this technology as well.

This all completely fails to address Christian mythology on how an unconscious sperm, and unconcious egg, unite, get a "spirit" (at which point in the trillions and trillions of reactors between the egg and sperm does the spirit float down from heaven and bind via QM?), and throughout life, even though the body replaces many of its molecules, how this spirit and life force persist, even after total and complete dissolution of the body.

But it is the hope of people who retreat to QM that people will just wave their hands and say "ah well, QM and mysterious and spooky, so many there is some way for Christian beliefs to coexist with QM. Maybe our memory is "burn" into mystical QM energy or connections in the universe. Woah dude, like Spielberg's AI at the end"


I humbly await human kind to emerge from the dark ages.

 

[Vince]

Democoder, how you can inject religion and talk of QM electron tunneling as if it's an unheard of phenomina is beyond me.

Look, if you have an opposing viewpoint - so be it. But don't toally negate people's work by claiming their research is irrelevent because you don't care to refute or even read it.

If you want to be taken seriously, drop religion completely.

 

[DemoCoder]

It's not unheard of, when you read pop-sci books. It's also not unheard from certain vocal physicists. But you are confusing research into how neurons work with QM mysticism by popularizers in the field.

There is good basic research being done on whether biological systems utilize quantum effects (Walker, for example, but he is only a single publisher), or even esoteric things like the weak force, or parity violation. I don't find anything wrong with this, after all, chemistry is just a macroscopic manifestation of underlying physics. We design semiconductor equipment today using quantum effects, and there is nothing paranormal about it. We don't find anything unusual about electronic devices like josephson junctions in SQUIDs, or quantum transistors (switch using a single electron)

However, there is another group of people, let's call them the materialist deniers, who seek to look for QM effects in the brain not to explain how it works, but to obfuscate how it works. Roger Penrose is a chief example. They're not interesting in understand life or consciousness, because the result of modeling it could be to demystify it and take away from it's wonder.

I hope you are not parroting interpretations of experiments by Sarfatti, he is a well known crackpot. I have read the papers on QM tunneling in the brain before, and the conclusion said nothing about consciousness. Interpretations of Walkers work, for example, add in lots of philosophizing about consciousness. But inn fact, since decoherence time in the neurons is like 10^-13 seconds, there is simply no way it is involved consciousness which is a macroscopic phenomena.

Even Walker's hypothesis doesn't jive with me, since the effects of drugs that alter neurotransmitters wash out his explanation of QM being the primarily synaptic effect.


But even if QM is implicated in the mechanism used for propagating signals across synapses, I hardly see that as implying anything about the nature of consciousness. I could build a computer based on electron tunneling transistors that operates purely according to classical computation theory. The fact that the signaling uses QM effects is irrelevent to the "software" which runs on top.



As I said, many of the QM consciousness arguments are non-sequiturs, starting out with some basic research and then blowing it up through alot of hand waving and "maybe this, maybe that" into a very weak hypothesis. And nothing could be a better demonstration than Penrose's microtubule theory.

Penrose's problem is the he wants to prove that human beings are specially connected with the universe, we don't have Godel statements, and we can exceed the limitations of the Church Turing thesis, or indeed, any limitation. So he constructed a scenario in which our brain's consciousness depends on 4 dimensional quantum gravity and argues that since the 4-d manifold classification problem is equivalent to the Halting Theorem (not solvable), the brain can do things which can exceed any material based construct.

But Penrose is an example of the type of scientist I am talking about: He starts out with a hypothesis 'Human consciousness is special" and searches literature trying to find any even loosely coupled evidence which could be used to back it up. He is more interested in proving why we can never understand how the mind works, then finding the model behind how it works. Since it is known that we can't classify 4-d manifolds, and if he is right and the brain is based on manipulations of 4-d manifold effects, there is no way we can ever build a mathematical model or understand how the brain works at all.

 

[JF_Aidan_Pryde]

Demo:

You are a funny fellow - you just came in to this thread to bash down the 'soul' ideas as if that's what this thread started to be, when in fact it was hardly dicussed in the proceeding posts. What's with the massive pre-emptive post? And as a result you got Vince worked up and here we go into a post, counter-post continuation.

But anyway, I'm still interested in you two's views:
Molecularly reconstruct yourself then destroy the previous copy. Is this transfer or murder? If the latter, then is life just a slow self murdering process too? If so, then why do I feel perfectly alive?

 

[JF_Aidan_Pryde]

And oh BTW, have any of you also read Ray Kurtzwell's "The Age of the Spritual Machines?" If so, what's your opinion of the book and its predictions?

 

[DemoCoder]

Yes, I've read it. It's ok, but I found Hans Moravec's original (Mind Children) much more stimulating.

Why the soul discussion? Because any discussion of molecular copy/construct begs the question as to the nature of consciousness. No point discussing if you don't get it out of the way. It would be interesting to see what Christians would think an exact copy would be. A soulless zombie? A body with a different soul, but identical memories and personality?


From my point of view, identity is pattern identity. So to your question, no it isn't murder, especially if it is "understood" and voluntary.

The problem is, we have such a deeply rooted survival instinct and association with our physical bodies that it is almost impossible for us not to sympathize with the original copy and view its destruction as personal death. Since the original copy is also a fully functional human being, non-consensual killing of it would be a violation of rights.

That is why Moravec, Kurweil, et al invent the "slow replacement" thought experiments, where your brain cells are replaced slowly, and the old ones destroyed. At no time is there a complete, conscious, mind contemplating it's destruction (those old neurons can't contemplate what is about to happen to them when they get replaced)

Let's just say that I don't want to be in the situation of having to decide to self-terminate if a new copy just came off the assembly line. See "The sixth day" for an example of this.

I prefer the situation where my brain cells are slowly replaced by identically functioning silicon equivalents until eventually I am fully cybernetic. This "slow upload" is much easier to emotionally accept than a "cold turkey" upload, where you copy your consciousness into an android body then kill your original body.

 

[V3]

It would be interesting to see what Christians would think an exact copy would be. A soulless zombie? A body with a different soul, but identical memories and personality?

Assuming alot of things, a copy, is a unique human being with body and soul.

So, given many copies, they all would do some things different, one could go home to the wife, one could look for prostitute, etc, and somethings the same, enjoy whiskey for example.

 

[pax]

Any copy would start to live a different life as soon as it was created. Twins are that already. Doesnt take away the possibility of a soul. Tho Im not a fan of the immortality of the soul idea as a christian... Meaning in existence is hard to argue without some concept of access to immortality.