Technology Review:
Next week, at YC’s “demo days,” Nectome’s cofounder, Robert McIntyre, is going to describe his technology for exquisitely preserving brains in microscopic detail using a high-tech embalming process. Then the MIT graduate will make his business pitch. As it says on his website: “What if we told you we could back up your mind?”
So yeah. Nectome is a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company. Its chemical solution can keep a body intact for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, as a statue of frozen glass. The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere.
This story has a grisly twist, though. The product is “100 percent fatal,” says McIntyre. “That is why we are uniquely situated among the Y Combinator companies.”
At first blush, this seems idiotic but on reading the article, I understand and appreciate the point of the “service”.
Their business model is literally a single Star Trek episode.
Black Mirror, too.
I posted this on that website:
The major disconnect with reality seems to be that some people imagine that they would be the ones who wake up one day when their hopes are fulfilled. The problem is, it won’t be them. It will be a copy of them. There will be no continuity of who and what they are in the new creation.
If someone burned the Mona Lisa after memorizing every detail, and then was able to use modern paints and canvas to make a copy, would it then be considered the Mona Lisa? No more than any counterfeit out there. You certainly wouldn’t be able to reveal it’s a copy and then sell it for the price the original would go for.
This is the same issue with the idea of Star Trek’s transporter. Would you want to be completely disassembled and then have a copy of you reassembled elsewhere? It would not be you who continues to live out your life. It would be a copy. You would be gone. Are you gonna go? Or join Dr. McCoy on the shuttlecraft?
That’s chapter one of James Blish’s “Spock Must Die,” the first Trek novel ever published.
If the brain were recreated with 100% accuracy then the result would be that you “wake up” and have full continuity with your previous life. In your analogy this would be like replicating every atom of the Mona Lisa. The interesting thing is that if you can do this you could make more than one copy of yourself.
This specific technique hasn’t been proven to be able to be used to fully recreate the brain, though.
No way there would be continuity. A copy is a copy. It may appear the person is identical, but it would still be someone else.
On what basis? All evidence points to our consciousness being completely a product of our brain’s state. If you replicate that state exactly there is no reason continuity of consciousness would not exist.
The idea that thing will be better in the future is nonsense, as is every attempt by every carnival barker to peddle such junk to such narcissists who think they would be relevant in the future.
as for star trek, we are our memories and consciousness. so if the transporter can disassemble and reassemble your particles with such precision that your memories and consciousness are unchanged, then you are unchanged.
Picard has transported hundreds of times and is the same man (memories and consciousness in tact).
“A difference that makes no difference is no difference.” -Spock
We are who we are because of a continuous functioning (stream?) of our brains. If you are completely disassembled (no longer exist) then you are not what gets reassembled. Some other “person” looks like you, thinks like you, and seems like you, would be there, but you ended with the disassembly. “You” never come back. That’s the nature of consciousness. And that’s why transporters are never going to be an option for anyone who values their existence. Captain Picard is not immune from this basic existential fact.
They certainly won’t be if people think like you. 🙂
The question is not whether something is there, but whether that something would be the same if someone was successfully revived through this process. Current science would say you would be the same. You may believe you wouldn’t, but you haven’t provided anything to support your belief. That’s fine, but you shouldn’t be surprised in the ineffectiveness of your argument (or lack thereof).
That’s like arguing that we don’t actually exist. It ignores the basic existential fact, “I think therefore I am.” If at some point you no longer exist, then you will never again exist. A copy can, theoretically . But you are gone. How is this so hard to understand? Ontology is a hard subject, but this is the easy part.
“I think therefore I am” is not a fact. Also, that phrase is in reference to having doubt about existence, not general mental processes, and in no way implies continual thought is required for existence. You could rightfully say you don’t exist while in the suspended state, but there i nothing in that proposition that says you would necessarily be a different being if you regained the ability to think again.
You are presuming some magical “being-ness” which we have no evidence exists. Everything we can prove points to consciousness being a completely physical process akin to a computer running. If you stop a computer, save state, then you can reload the state and all processes can continue exactly as if they had never been stopped. The same would be true of the brain as far as current science understands it.
The absurdity of denying that there is something there (it doesn’t have to be magical) in the continuous stream of consciousness (which is maintained when we sleep via the subconscious mind) is hard to conceive.
“I think therefore I am” is in indeed a fact. To say otherwise is reductio ad absurdum.
We have no way to know that our consciousness represents a continuous stream. For all we know what we perceive as continuous time could be repeatedly interrupted. We have no way to know whether what we think of as a minute ago was actually a minute ago or ten thousand years ago (i.e. our universe was “paused” for ten thousand years).
If you were copied you would end up with two beings who were both you before you were copied and are separate entities after the copy. Both would believe they were the original.
Science has nothing to say on such a subject. Because there’s no such thing as restoring a frozen brain to quantum-level perfection. And in fact, that would pretty much be impossible until someone invents a Heisenberg compensator.
You are talking about the world’s view of what a reconstructed person would appear to be like. I’m talking about what goes on inside one’s head and how one would disappear from existence. From the point of view of the person deconstructed, they do not return. A copy of them does.
Your opinion on the effectiveness of my argument is independent of any verifiable facts. You say I offer no evidence. I offer a thought experiment. That’s how Einstein figured out his special theory of relativity. You on the other had offer nothing but assertions based on the wrong point of view.
Edit:
Here’s another thought experiment. If I were to not destroy me, but simply copy me, so that they are a perfect copy of me, how is it I am continuing on in that other body, when I’m still here in this one? That’s not me. I don’t see out of that person’s eyes. I don’t feel, taste, or smell what they feel, taste, or smell. How is that person me?
All true. But both would not be me. I am not the exterior looking in at me, I am the interior looking out.