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.
Counterpoint, from a complex systems perspective:
We don't fully know or are able toodel the details of neurochemistry, but we know some essential features which we can model, action potentials in spiking neuron models for example.
It's likely that the details don't actually matter much. Take traffic jams as an example. There is lots of details going on, driver psychology, the physical mechanics of the car etc. but you only need a handful of very rough parameters to reproduce traffic jams in a computer.
That's the thing with "emergent" phenomena, they are less complicated than the sum of their parts, which means you can achieve the same dynamics using other parts.
Even if you ignore all the neuromodulatory chemistry, much of the interesting processing happens at sub-threshold depolarizations, depending on millisecond-scale coincidence detection from synapses distributed through an enormous, and slow-conducting dendritic network. The simple electrical signal transmission model, where an input neuron causes reliable spiking in an output neuron, comes from skeletal muscle, which served as the model for synaptic transmission for decades, just because it was a lot easier to study than actual inter-neural synapses.
But even that doesn't matter if we can't map the inter-neuronal connections, and so far that's only been done for the 300 neurons of the c elegans ganglia (i.e., not even a 'real' brain), after a decade of work. Nowhere close to mapping the neuroscientists' favorite model, aplysia, which only has 20,000 neurons. Maybe statistics will wash out some of those details by the time you get to humans 10^11 neuron systems, but considering how badly current network models are for predicting even simple behaviors, I'm going to say more details matter than we will discover any time soon.
Thanks fellow traveller for punching holes in computational stupidity. Everything you said is true but I also want to point out that the brain is an analog system so the information in a neuron is infinite relative to a digital system (cf: digitizing analog recordings). As I tell my students if you are looking for a binary event to start modeling, look to individual ions moving across the membrane.
As I tell my students if you are looking for a binary event to start modeling, look to individual ions moving across the membrane.
So it's not infinite and can be digitized. :)
But to be more serious, digitized analog recordings is a bad analogy because audio can be digitized and perfectly reproduced. Nyquist- Shannon theory means the output can be perfectly reproduced. It's not approximate. It's perfect.
Analog signals can only be “perfectly” reproduced up to a specific target frequency. Given the actual signal is composed of infinite frequencies, you needs twice infinite sampling frequency to completely reproduce it.
There aren't infinite frequencies.
"The mean free path in air is 68nm, and the mean inter-atomic spacing is some tens of nms about 30, while the speed of sound in air is 300 m/s, so that the absolute maximum frequency is about 5 Ghz."
The term “mean free path” sounds a lot like an average to me, implying an distribution which extends beyond that number.
One cubic centimeter of air contains 90,000,000,000,000 atoms. In that context, mean free path is 68nm up to the limits of your ability to measure. That is flip a coin 90 million million times and average the heads and tails. It's going to be extremely close to 50%.
Not to mention that at 5ghz, the sound can only propagate 68 nm.
It's an analogy. There is actually an academic joke about the point you are making.
A mathematician and an engineer are sitting at a table drinking when a very beautiful woman walks in and sits down at the bar.
The mathematician sighs. "I'd like to talk to her, but first I have to cover half the distance between where we are and where she is, then half of the distance that remains, then half of that distance, and so on. The series is infinite. There'll always be some finite distance between us."
The engineer gets up and starts walking. "Ah, well, I figure I can get close enough for all practical purposes."
The point of the analogy is not that one can't get close enough so that the ear can't detect a difference, it's that in theory analog carries infinite information. It's true that vinyl recordings are not perfect analog systems because of physical limitations in the cutting process. It's also true for magnetic tape etc. But don't mistake the metaphor for the idea.
Ionic movement across membranes, especially at the scale we are talking about, and the density of channels in the system is much closer to an ideal system. How much of that fidelity can you lose before it's not your consciousness?
"I'd like to talk to her, but first I have to cover half the distance between where we are and where she is, then half of the distance that remains, then half of that distance, and so on. The series is infinite. "
I get it's a joke but that's a bad joke. That's a convergent series. It's not infinite. Any 1st year calculus student would know that.
"it's that in theory analog carries infinite information. "
But in reality it can't. The universe isn't continous, it's discrete. That's why we have quantum mechanics. It is the math to handle non contiguous transitions between states.
How much of that fidelity can you lose before it's not your consciousness?
That can be tested with c elegans. You can measure changes until a difference is propagated.
Measure differences in what? We can't ask *c. elegans * about it's state of mind let alone consciousness. There are several issues here; a philosophical issue here about what you are modeling (e.g. mind, consciousness or something else), a biological issue with what physical parameters and states you need to capture to produce that model, and how you would propose to test the fidelity of that model against the original organism. The scope of these issues is well outside a reply chain in Lemmy.
Yes the connectome is kind of critical. But other than that, sub threshold oscillations can and are being modeled. It also does not really matter that we are digitizing here. Fluid dynamics are continuous and we can still study, model and predict it using finite lattices.
There are some things that are missing, but very clearly we won't need to model individual ions and there is lots of other complexity that will not affect the outcome.
I heard a hypothesis that the first human made consciousness will be an AI algorithm designed to monitor and coordinate other AI algorithms which makes a lot of sense to me.
Our consciousness is just the monitoring system of all our bodies subsystems. It is most certainly an emergent phenomenon of the interaction and management of different functions competing or coordinating for resources within the body.
To me it seems very likely that the first human made consciousness will not be designed to be conscious. It also seems likely that we won't be aware of the first consciousnesses because we won't be looking for it. Consciousness won't be the goal of the development that makes it possible.
I’d say the details matter, based on the PEAR laboratory’s findings that consciousness can affect the outcomes of chaotic systems.
Perhaps the reason evolution selected for enormous brains is that’s the minimum necessary complexity to get a system chaotic enough to be sensitive to and hence swayed by conscious will.
PEAR? Where staff participated in trials, rather than doing double blind experiments? Whose results could not be reproduced by independent research groups? Who were found to employ p-hacking and data cherry picking?
You might as well argue that simulating a human mind is not possible because it wouldn't have a zodiac sign.
We don't even know what consciousness is, let alone if it's technically "real" (as in physical in any way.) It's perfectly possible an uploaded brain would be just as conscious as a real brain because there was no physical thing making us conscious, and rather it was just a result of our ability to think at all.
Similarly, I've heard people argue a machine couldn't feel emotions because it doesn't have the physical parts of the brain that allow that, so it could only ever simulate them. That argument has the same hole in that we don't actually know that we need those to feel emotions, or if the final result is all that matters. If we replaced the whole "this happens, release this hormone to cause these changes in behavior and physical function" with a simple statement that said "this happened, change behavior and function," maybe there isn't really enough of a difference to call one simulated and the other real. Just different ways of achieving the same result.
My point is, we treat all these things, consciousness, emotions, etc, like they're special things that can't be replicated, but we have no evidence to suggest this. It's basically the scientific equivalent of mysticism, like the insistence that free will must exist even though all evidence points to the contrary.
Also, some of what happens in the brain is just storytelling. Like, when the doctor hits your patellar tendon, just under your knee, with a reflex hammer. Your knee jerks, but the signals telling it to do that don't even make it to the brain. Instead the signal gets to your spinal cord and it "instructs" your knee muscles.
But, they've studied similar things and have found out that in many cases where the brain isn't involved in making a decision, the brain does make up a story that explains why you did something, to make it seem like it was a decision, not merely a reaction to stimulus.
That seems like a lot of wasted energy, to produce that illusion. Doesn’t nature select out wasteful designs ruthlessly?
TLDR:
Nature can't simply select out consciousness because it emerges from hardware that is useful in other ways. The brain doesn't waste energy on consciousness, it uses energy for computation, which is useful in a myriad ways.
The usefulness of consciousness from an evolutionary fitness perspective is a tricky question to answer in general terms. An easy intuition might be to look at the utility of pain for the survival of an individual.
I personally think that, ultimately, consciousness is a byproduct of a complex brain. The evolutionary advantage is mainly given by other features enabled by said complexity (generally more sophisticated and adaptable behavior, social interactions, memory, communication, intentional environment manipulation, etc.) and consciousness basically gets a free ride on that already-useful brain.
Species with more complex brains have an easier time adapting to changes in their environment because their brains allow them to change their behavior much faster than random genetic mutations would. This opens up many new ecological niches that simpler organisms wouldn't be able to fill.
I don't think nature selects out waste. As long as a species is able to proliferate its genes, it can be as wasteful as it "wants". It only has to be fit enough, not as fit as possible. E.g. if there's enough energy available to sustain a complex brain, there's no pressure to make it more economical by simplifying its function. (And there are many pressures that can be reacted to without mutation when you have a complex brain, so I would guess that, on the whole, evolution in the direction of simpler brains requires stronger pressures than other adaptations)
Yeah. This is related to supernatural beliefs. If the grass moves it might just be a gust of wind, or it might be a snake. Even if snakes are rare, it's better to be safe than sorry. But, that eventually leads to assuming that the drought is the result of an angry god, and not just some random natural phenomenon.
So, brains are hard-wired to look for causes, even inventing supernatural causes, because it helps avoid snakes.
let alone if it’s technically “real” (as in physical in any way.)
This right here might already be a flaw in your argument. Something doesn’t need to be physical to be real. In fact, there’s scientific evidence that physical reality itself is an illusion created through observation. That implies (although it cannot prove) that consciousness may be a higher construct that exists outside of physical reality itself.
If you’re interested in the philosophical questions this raises, there’s a great summary article that was published in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/436029a
On the contrary, it's not a flaw in my argument, it is my argument. I'm saying we can't be sure a machine could not be conscious because we don't know that our brain is what makes us conscious. Nor do we know where the threshold is where consciousness arises. It's perfectly possible all we need is to upload an exact copy of our brain into a machine, and it'd be conscious by default.
The problem with this is that even if a machine is conscious, there's no reason it would be conscious like us. I fully agree that consciousness could take many forms, probably infinite forms - and there's no reason to expect that one form would be functionally or technically compatible with another.
What does the idea "exact copy of our brain" mean to you? Would it involve emulating the physical structure of a human brain? Would it attempt to abstract the brain's operations from the physical structure? Would it be a collection of electrical potentials? Simulations of the behavior of specific neurochemicals? What would it be in practice, that would not be hand-wavy fantasy?
I suppose I was overly vague about what I meant by "exact copy." I mean all of the knowledge, memories, and an exact map of the state of our neurons at the time of upload being uploaded to a computer, and then the functions being simulated from there. Many people believe that even if we could simulate it so perfectly that it matched a human brain's functions exactly, it still wouldn't be conscious because it's still not a real human brain. That's the point I was arguing against. My argument was that if we could mimic human brain functions closely enough, there's no reason to believe the brain is so special that a simulation could not achieve consciousness too.
And you're right, it may not be conscious in the same way. We have no reason to believe either way that it would or wouldn't be, because the only thing we can actually verify is conscious is ourself. Not humans in general, just you, individually. Therefore, how conscious something is is more of a philosophical debate than a scientific one because we simply cannot test if it's true. We couldn't even test if it was conscious at all, and my point wasn't that it would be, my point is that we have no reason to believe it's possible or impossible.
Unfortunately the physics underlying brain function are chaotic systems, meaning infinite (or “maximum”) precision is required to ensure two systems evolve to the same later states.
That level of precision cannot be achieved in measuring the state, without altering the state into something unknown after the moment of measurement.
Nothing quantum is necessary for this inability to determine state. Consider the problem of trying to map out where the eight ball is on a pool table, but you can’t see the eight ball. All you can do is throw other balls at it and observe how their velocities change. Now imagine you can’t see those balls either, because the sensing mechanism you’re using is composed of balls of equal or greater size.
Unsolvable problem. Like a box trying to contain itself.
Chaos comes into play as a state changes. The poster above you talks about copying the state. Once copied the two states will diverge because of chaos. But that doesn't preclude consciousness. It means the copy will soon have different thoughts.
Correct
We make a giant theme park where people can interact with androids. Then we make a practically infinite number of copies of this theme park. We put androids in the copies and keep providing feedback to alter their behavior until they behave exactly like the people in the theme park.
I see that’s certainly a different way of looking at it :) Of course I can’t say with any authority that it must be wrong, but I think it’s a flaw because it seems you’re presuming that consciousness arises from physical properties. If the physical act of copying a brain’s data were to give rise to consciousness, that would imply consciousness is a product of physical reality. But my position (and that of the paper I linked) is that physical reality is a product of mental consciousness.
That's based on a pseudoscientific interpretation of quantum physics not related to actual physics.
It's not a flaw to not be batshit like you.
Do elaborate on the batshit part :) It’s a scientific fact that physical matter does not exist in its physical form when unobserved. This may not prove the existence of consciousness, but it certainly makes it plausible. It certainly invalidates physical reality as the “source of truth”, so to say. Which makes the explanation that physical reality is a product of consciousness not just plausible, but more likely than the other way around. Again, not a proof, but far from batshit.
I think you're a little confused about what observed means and what it does.
When unobserved, elementary particles behave like a wave, but they do not stop existing. A wave is still a physical thing. Additionally, observation does not require consciousness. For instance, a building, such as a house, when nobody is looking at it, does not begin to behave like a wave. It's still a physical building. Therefore, observation is a bit of a misnomer. It really means a complex interaction we don't understand causes particles to behave like a particle and not a wave. It just happens that human observation is one of the possible ways this interaction can take place.
An unobserved black hole will still feed, an unobserved house is still a house.
To be clear, I'm not insulting you or your idea like the other dude, but I wanted to clear that up.
Thanks, that seems a fair approach, although it doesn’t have me entirely convinced yet. Can you explain what the physical form of a wave function is? Because it’s not like a wave, such as waves in the sea. It’s really a wave function, an abstract representation of probabilities which in my understanding does not have any physical representation.
You say the building does not start acting like a wave, and you’re right, that would be silly. But it does enter into a superposition where the building can be either collapsed or not. Like Schreudinger’s cat, which can be dead or alive, and will be in a superposition of both until observation happens again. And yes, the probabilities of this superposition are indeed expressed through the wave function, even though there is no physical wave.
It’s true observation does not require consciousness. But until we know what does constitute observation, I believe consciousness provides a plausible explanation.
A building does not actually enter a superposition when unobserved, nor does Schrodinger's cat. The point of that metaphor was to demonstrate, through humor, the difference between quantum objects and non-quantum objects, by pointing out how ridiculous it would be to think a cat could enter a superposition like a particle. In fact, one of the great mysteries of physics right now is why only quantum objects have that property, and in order to figure that out we have to figure out what interaction "observation" actually is.
Additionally, we can observe the effects of waves quite clearly. We can observe how they interact with things, how they interfere with each other, etc. It is only attempting to view the particle itself that causes it to collapse and become a particle and not a wave. We can view, for instance, the interference pattern of photons of light, behaving like a wave. This proves that the wave is in fact real, because we can see the effects of it. It's only if we try to observe the paths of the individual photons that the pattern changes. We didn't make the photons real, we could already see they were real by their effects on reality. We just collapsed the function, forcing them to take a single path.
In fact, one of the great mysteries of physics right now is why only quantum objects have that property, and in order to figure that out we have to figure out what interaction “observation” actually is.
This does not stroke with my understanding of quantum physics. As far as we know there is no clear distinction between “quantum objects” vs “non-quantum objects”. The double slit experiment has been reproduced with molecules as large as 114 atoms, and there seems no reason to believe that would be the upper limit: https://www.livescience.com/19268-quantum-double-slit-experiment-largest-molecules.html
This proves that the wave is in fact real, because we can see the effects of it.
The only part that’s proven is the interference pattern. So yes, we know it acts like a wave in that particular sense. But that’s not the same thing as saying it is a wave in the physical sense. A wave in the classic physical sense doesn’t collapse upon observation. I know it’s real in an abstract sense. I’m just questioning the physical nature of that reality.
There shouldn't be a distinction between quantum and non-quantum objects. That's the mystery. Why can't large objects exhibit quantum properties? Nobody knows, all we know is they don't. We've attempted to figure it out by creating larger and larger objects that still exhibit quantum properties, but we know, at some point, it just stops exhibiting these properties and we don't know why, but it doesn't require an observer to collapse the wave function.
Also, can you define physical for me? It seems we have a misunderstanding here, because I'm defining physical as having a tangible effect on reality. If it wasn't real, it could not interact with reality. It seems you're using a different definition.
Because it’s not like a wave, such as waves in the sea.
Actually, it is. It's the same meaning we've had for waves in physics since the first time someone figured how to plot a 2d graph. Only the medium is a quantum field instead of water, its amplitude is probabilistic instead of height, and instead of time we have some other property of distributions, usually space-time.
Like Schreudinger’s cat, which can be dead or alive, and will be in a superposition of both until observation happens again.
This idea is based on a misunderstanding of what Schrödinger actually said. The concept of the cat existing in a superposition state was not meant to be taken literally and is not an example of anything that is currently believed to be true about the physical universe.
It’s a scientific fact that physical matter does not exist in its physical form when unobserved.
No, it's not. The quantum field and the quantum wave exist whether or not you observe it, only the particle behavior changes based on interaction. Note how I specifically used the word "interaction", not "observation", because that's what a quantum physicist means when they say the wave-particle duality depends on the observer. They mean that a wave function collapses once it interacts definitely, not only when a person looks at it.
It certainly invalidates physical reality as the “source of truth”, so to say
How so, when the interpretation you're citing is specifically dependant on the mechanics of quantum field fluctuation? How can physical reality not exist when it is physical reality that gives you the means to (badly) justify your hypothesis?
That's pseudoscientific bullshit. Quantum physics absolutely does tell us that there is a real physical world. It's incredibly counterintuitive and impossible to fully describe, but does exist.
Heh, well... I guess that depends on how you define "physical"... if quantum field theory is correct then everything we experience is the product of fluctuations in various fields, including the physical mass of protons, neutrons etc. "Reality" as we experience it might be more of an emergent property, as illusory as the apparent solidity of matter.
Physical reality exists inside consciousness. Consciousness is the thing that can be directly observed.
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.
"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] "
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.
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.
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.
Consciousness and conscience are not the same thing, this naming is horrible
This just makes it more realistic
Hey, just be glad I changed it from asdf_test_3, okay?
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.
I already know I will never play this game, could you elaborate for me?
Brain scan tossed in a robot makes 2 Simons
And several times throughout the story you are forced into making some "decisions" about how to deal with stale memory registers.
If anyone's interested in a hard sci-fi show about uploading consciousness they should watch the animated series Pantheon. Not only does the technology feel realistic, but the way it's created and used by big tech companies is uncomfortably real.
The show got kinda screwed over on advertising and fell to obscurity because of streaming service fuck ups and region locking, and I can't help but wonder if it's at least partially because of its harsh criticisms of the tech industry.
Just FYI content warning for Pantheon there is a seriously disturbing gore/kill scene that is animated too well in the first season. Anyone who has seen the show knows what scene I am talking about, I found the scene pretty upsetting and I almost didn't finish the show. I am still a little upset that the scene is burned in my memory.
Sounds good. Did it come to a conclusion or get axed mid way?
The series has a very satisfying conclusion.
It's one of the coolest fucking things we watched this last year.
Sold!
Unironically the most important question
Luckily the writers were able to finish it the way they wanted with a second season, and it's fantastic. AMC almost did axe it before the second season released but after it was already finished but fans were able to get them to release it.
The show got kinda screwed over on advertising and fell to obscurity because of streaming service fuck ups and region locking, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s at least partially because of its harsh criticisms of the tech industry.
Okay so I can't 100% confirm this, but the first season wasn't popular because it was on whatever the fuck AMC+ is. Amazon bought it because of the writer's strike to get something out.
Yes, I just finished watching Pantheon and absolutely loved it!
Totally agree that it deserved more attention. At least it got a proper ending with season 2.
Also, the voice acting talent they got was impressive. Paul Dano was fantastic as one of the leads.
I really thought you were going to mention "Upload" on Prime. Same creator as the office.
That show is garbage
Checking in to see if this show was mentioned. Highly recommend! Well written
Soma is a wonderful game that covers this type of thing. It does make you wonder what consciousness really is... Maybe the ability to perceive and store information, along with retrieving that information, is enough to provide an illusion of consistent self?
Or maybe it's some competely strange system, unkown to science. Who knows?
I don't think anything gave me existential doom quite as much as the ending of that game.
Provide the illusion to whom?
Self? Seemed pretty clear in their comment
I think the definition of consciousness needs to not be solely about abilities or attributes. It needs to account for the active process of consciousness. Like a hair dryer can burn things.. but a fire is things burning. Without the active nature its simply not conscious.
Maybe consciousness is everywhere, and has nothing to do with mechanisms.
What if you do it in a ship of theseus type of way. Like, swapping each part of the brain with an electronic one slowly until there is no brain left.
Wonder if that will work.
If I remember right, the game The Talos Principle calls that the Talos principle
Sounds like the sort of the The Talos Principle would call that
The tv show Pantheon figures it will work, but it will be very disturbing.
Was looking for the Pantheon reference in this thread! Just finished that show and loved it. Of course it takes plenty of liberties for the sake of the storytelling, but still, at least it explores these interesting topics!
Anyone reading this thread, do yourself a favor and check out Pantheon!
Right? Like what if as cells die or degrade instead of being replaced by the body naturally they are replaced by nanites/cybernetics/tech magic. If the process of fully converting took place over the course of 10 years, then I don't see how the subject would even notice.
It's an interesting thing to ponder.
The subject also doesn’t notice if you end their consciousness either.
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 ? 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?
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?
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
could also indicate ghost or intelligence operative. I don't assume they were going racist with it.
If we're gonna have a dystopian future, then damn it, it's gonna be memory safe.
The semantics in Rust would be completely out of wack. What does ownership mean?
I guess the point of the joke is that consciousness is a shallow value.
Whats the difference between void fn(Type& var) and void fn(Type* var)?
Sends original data vs making a copy of data and sending it.
In meme context you'd be just making a copy of your consciousness and putting it in a machine. Whatever reason you're doing it for - escape illness, survive armageddon, nothing changes for you. A copy of you lives on though.
It's not like the post, secont is a pointer.
I mean, just kill the host as soon as the upload is complete. at best you are not conscious during the process and when "you" wake up you are in the cloud. The version of you that awakes gets told that the "transfer" was complete.
Upload is a fun show
I was thinking more along the lines of St. Junipero :D
Future man season 2?
Black Mirror
Oh I know San junipero, just suggesting the plot of season 2 of future man as another similar reference - minds uploaded to “the cloud” and bodies destroyed on upload complete. Haley Joel Osmand is pretty decent as the antagonist of that season.
never watched the show. Is it any good?
Pretty good. Offbeat as all hell. Loses its way a little in season 2 but pulls it back for season 3. Wasn’t generally considered a hit, didn’t make it past season 3.
7.7 on imdb is very solid. I'll give it a go. Thanks for the tip
that's a weird way to spell Pantheon.
I guess you ask for C++. There Type* can be null while Type& can't be null. When it gets compiled Type& is compiled (mostly) to the same machinecode as Type*.
You can pass nullptr in the second example (that is not what OP wrote though, hes second is making a copy).
Thanks, I was Just curious. I knew what * did but I wasn't sure about &
the plot of
::: spoiler spoiler
SOMA
:::
in a nutshell?
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
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler
SOMA
:::
Lost the coin flip.
There's also a book with a similar concept. It's not the focus until later in the book though.
It's called
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler
Ready Player Two
:::
Related 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
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.
void teleport(Person person);
I had to turn my phone sideways and go cross-eyed to spot the difference.
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.
That's a weird response to the person who is explaining the post to you.
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
Sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that
Are you sure the roon of today is a reference to yesterday's roon?
everyone watch this clip and tell me what you think
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.
Counterpoint, from a complex systems perspective:
We don't fully know or are able toodel the details of neurochemistry, but we know some essential features which we can model, action potentials in spiking neuron models for example.
It's likely that the details don't actually matter much. Take traffic jams as an example. There is lots of details going on, driver psychology, the physical mechanics of the car etc. but you only need a handful of very rough parameters to reproduce traffic jams in a computer.
That's the thing with "emergent" phenomena, they are less complicated than the sum of their parts, which means you can achieve the same dynamics using other parts.
Even if you ignore all the neuromodulatory chemistry, much of the interesting processing happens at sub-threshold depolarizations, depending on millisecond-scale coincidence detection from synapses distributed through an enormous, and slow-conducting dendritic network. The simple electrical signal transmission model, where an input neuron causes reliable spiking in an output neuron, comes from skeletal muscle, which served as the model for synaptic transmission for decades, just because it was a lot easier to study than actual inter-neural synapses.
But even that doesn't matter if we can't map the inter-neuronal connections, and so far that's only been done for the 300 neurons of the c elegans ganglia (i.e., not even a 'real' brain), after a decade of work. Nowhere close to mapping the neuroscientists' favorite model, aplysia, which only has 20,000 neurons. Maybe statistics will wash out some of those details by the time you get to humans 10^11 neuron systems, but considering how badly current network models are for predicting even simple behaviors, I'm going to say more details matter than we will discover any time soon.
Thanks fellow traveller for punching holes in computational stupidity. Everything you said is true but I also want to point out that the brain is an analog system so the information in a neuron is infinite relative to a digital system (cf: digitizing analog recordings). As I tell my students if you are looking for a binary event to start modeling, look to individual ions moving across the membrane.
So it's not infinite and can be digitized. :)
But to be more serious, digitized analog recordings is a bad analogy because audio can be digitized and perfectly reproduced. Nyquist- Shannon theory means the output can be perfectly reproduced. It's not approximate. It's perfect.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem
Analog signals can only be “perfectly” reproduced up to a specific target frequency. Given the actual signal is composed of infinite frequencies, you needs twice infinite sampling frequency to completely reproduce it.
There aren't infinite frequencies.
"The mean free path in air is 68nm, and the mean inter-atomic spacing is some tens of nms about 30, while the speed of sound in air is 300 m/s, so that the absolute maximum frequency is about 5 Ghz."
The term “mean free path” sounds a lot like an average to me, implying an distribution which extends beyond that number.
One cubic centimeter of air contains 90,000,000,000,000 atoms. In that context, mean free path is 68nm up to the limits of your ability to measure. That is flip a coin 90 million million times and average the heads and tails. It's going to be extremely close to 50%.
Not to mention that at 5ghz, the sound can only propagate 68 nm.
It's an analogy. There is actually an academic joke about the point you are making.
The point of the analogy is not that one can't get close enough so that the ear can't detect a difference, it's that in theory analog carries infinite information. It's true that vinyl recordings are not perfect analog systems because of physical limitations in the cutting process. It's also true for magnetic tape etc. But don't mistake the metaphor for the idea.
Ionic movement across membranes, especially at the scale we are talking about, and the density of channels in the system is much closer to an ideal system. How much of that fidelity can you lose before it's not your consciousness?
"I'd like to talk to her, but first I have to cover half the distance between where we are and where she is, then half of the distance that remains, then half of that distance, and so on. The series is infinite. "
I get it's a joke but that's a bad joke. That's a convergent series. It's not infinite. Any 1st year calculus student would know that.
"it's that in theory analog carries infinite information. "
But in reality it can't. The universe isn't continous, it's discrete. That's why we have quantum mechanics. It is the math to handle non contiguous transitions between states.
That can be tested with c elegans. You can measure changes until a difference is propagated.
Measure differences in what? We can't ask *c. elegans * about it's state of mind let alone consciousness. There are several issues here; a philosophical issue here about what you are modeling (e.g. mind, consciousness or something else), a biological issue with what physical parameters and states you need to capture to produce that model, and how you would propose to test the fidelity of that model against the original organism. The scope of these issues is well outside a reply chain in Lemmy.
Yes the connectome is kind of critical. But other than that, sub threshold oscillations can and are being modeled. It also does not really matter that we are digitizing here. Fluid dynamics are continuous and we can still study, model and predict it using finite lattices.
There are some things that are missing, but very clearly we won't need to model individual ions and there is lots of other complexity that will not affect the outcome.
I heard a hypothesis that the first human made consciousness will be an AI algorithm designed to monitor and coordinate other AI algorithms which makes a lot of sense to me.
Our consciousness is just the monitoring system of all our bodies subsystems. It is most certainly an emergent phenomenon of the interaction and management of different functions competing or coordinating for resources within the body.
To me it seems very likely that the first human made consciousness will not be designed to be conscious. It also seems likely that we won't be aware of the first consciousnesses because we won't be looking for it. Consciousness won't be the goal of the development that makes it possible.
I’d say the details matter, based on the PEAR laboratory’s findings that consciousness can affect the outcomes of chaotic systems.
Perhaps the reason evolution selected for enormous brains is that’s the minimum necessary complexity to get a system chaotic enough to be sensitive to and hence swayed by conscious will.
PEAR? Where staff participated in trials, rather than doing double blind experiments? Whose results could not be reproduced by independent research groups? Who were found to employ p-hacking and data cherry picking?
You might as well argue that simulating a human mind is not possible because it wouldn't have a zodiac sign.
We don't even know what consciousness is, let alone if it's technically "real" (as in physical in any way.) It's perfectly possible an uploaded brain would be just as conscious as a real brain because there was no physical thing making us conscious, and rather it was just a result of our ability to think at all.
Similarly, I've heard people argue a machine couldn't feel emotions because it doesn't have the physical parts of the brain that allow that, so it could only ever simulate them. That argument has the same hole in that we don't actually know that we need those to feel emotions, or if the final result is all that matters. If we replaced the whole "this happens, release this hormone to cause these changes in behavior and physical function" with a simple statement that said "this happened, change behavior and function," maybe there isn't really enough of a difference to call one simulated and the other real. Just different ways of achieving the same result.
My point is, we treat all these things, consciousness, emotions, etc, like they're special things that can't be replicated, but we have no evidence to suggest this. It's basically the scientific equivalent of mysticism, like the insistence that free will must exist even though all evidence points to the contrary.
Also, some of what happens in the brain is just storytelling. Like, when the doctor hits your patellar tendon, just under your knee, with a reflex hammer. Your knee jerks, but the signals telling it to do that don't even make it to the brain. Instead the signal gets to your spinal cord and it "instructs" your knee muscles.
But, they've studied similar things and have found out that in many cases where the brain isn't involved in making a decision, the brain does make up a story that explains why you did something, to make it seem like it was a decision, not merely a reaction to stimulus.
That seems like a lot of wasted energy, to produce that illusion. Doesn’t nature select out wasteful designs ruthlessly?
TLDR:
Nature can't simply select out consciousness because it emerges from hardware that is useful in other ways. The brain doesn't waste energy on consciousness, it uses energy for computation, which is useful in a myriad ways.
The usefulness of consciousness from an evolutionary fitness perspective is a tricky question to answer in general terms. An easy intuition might be to look at the utility of pain for the survival of an individual.
I personally think that, ultimately, consciousness is a byproduct of a complex brain. The evolutionary advantage is mainly given by other features enabled by said complexity (generally more sophisticated and adaptable behavior, social interactions, memory, communication, intentional environment manipulation, etc.) and consciousness basically gets a free ride on that already-useful brain.
Species with more complex brains have an easier time adapting to changes in their environment because their brains allow them to change their behavior much faster than random genetic mutations would. This opens up many new ecological niches that simpler organisms wouldn't be able to fill.
I don't think nature selects out waste. As long as a species is able to proliferate its genes, it can be as wasteful as it "wants". It only has to be fit enough, not as fit as possible. E.g. if there's enough energy available to sustain a complex brain, there's no pressure to make it more economical by simplifying its function. (And there are many pressures that can be reacted to without mutation when you have a complex brain, so I would guess that, on the whole, evolution in the direction of simpler brains requires stronger pressures than other adaptations)
Yeah. This is related to supernatural beliefs. If the grass moves it might just be a gust of wind, or it might be a snake. Even if snakes are rare, it's better to be safe than sorry. But, that eventually leads to assuming that the drought is the result of an angry god, and not just some random natural phenomenon.
So, brains are hard-wired to look for causes, even inventing supernatural causes, because it helps avoid snakes.
This right here might already be a flaw in your argument. Something doesn’t need to be physical to be real. In fact, there’s scientific evidence that physical reality itself is an illusion created through observation. That implies (although it cannot prove) that consciousness may be a higher construct that exists outside of physical reality itself.
If you’re interested in the philosophical questions this raises, there’s a great summary article that was published in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/436029a
On the contrary, it's not a flaw in my argument, it is my argument. I'm saying we can't be sure a machine could not be conscious because we don't know that our brain is what makes us conscious. Nor do we know where the threshold is where consciousness arises. It's perfectly possible all we need is to upload an exact copy of our brain into a machine, and it'd be conscious by default.
The problem with this is that even if a machine is conscious, there's no reason it would be conscious like us. I fully agree that consciousness could take many forms, probably infinite forms - and there's no reason to expect that one form would be functionally or technically compatible with another.
What does the idea "exact copy of our brain" mean to you? Would it involve emulating the physical structure of a human brain? Would it attempt to abstract the brain's operations from the physical structure? Would it be a collection of electrical potentials? Simulations of the behavior of specific neurochemicals? What would it be in practice, that would not be hand-wavy fantasy?
I suppose I was overly vague about what I meant by "exact copy." I mean all of the knowledge, memories, and an exact map of the state of our neurons at the time of upload being uploaded to a computer, and then the functions being simulated from there. Many people believe that even if we could simulate it so perfectly that it matched a human brain's functions exactly, it still wouldn't be conscious because it's still not a real human brain. That's the point I was arguing against. My argument was that if we could mimic human brain functions closely enough, there's no reason to believe the brain is so special that a simulation could not achieve consciousness too.
And you're right, it may not be conscious in the same way. We have no reason to believe either way that it would or wouldn't be, because the only thing we can actually verify is conscious is ourself. Not humans in general, just you, individually. Therefore, how conscious something is is more of a philosophical debate than a scientific one because we simply cannot test if it's true. We couldn't even test if it was conscious at all, and my point wasn't that it would be, my point is that we have no reason to believe it's possible or impossible.
Unfortunately the physics underlying brain function are chaotic systems, meaning infinite (or “maximum”) precision is required to ensure two systems evolve to the same later states.
That level of precision cannot be achieved in measuring the state, without altering the state into something unknown after the moment of measurement.
Nothing quantum is necessary for this inability to determine state. Consider the problem of trying to map out where the eight ball is on a pool table, but you can’t see the eight ball. All you can do is throw other balls at it and observe how their velocities change. Now imagine you can’t see those balls either, because the sensing mechanism you’re using is composed of balls of equal or greater size.
Unsolvable problem. Like a box trying to contain itself.
Chaos comes into play as a state changes. The poster above you talks about copying the state. Once copied the two states will diverge because of chaos. But that doesn't preclude consciousness. It means the copy will soon have different thoughts.
Correct
We make a giant theme park where people can interact with androids. Then we make a practically infinite number of copies of this theme park. We put androids in the copies and keep providing feedback to alter their behavior until they behave exactly like the people in the theme park.
I see that’s certainly a different way of looking at it :) Of course I can’t say with any authority that it must be wrong, but I think it’s a flaw because it seems you’re presuming that consciousness arises from physical properties. If the physical act of copying a brain’s data were to give rise to consciousness, that would imply consciousness is a product of physical reality. But my position (and that of the paper I linked) is that physical reality is a product of mental consciousness.
That's based on a pseudoscientific interpretation of quantum physics not related to actual physics.
It's not a flaw to not be batshit like you.
Do elaborate on the batshit part :) It’s a scientific fact that physical matter does not exist in its physical form when unobserved. This may not prove the existence of consciousness, but it certainly makes it plausible. It certainly invalidates physical reality as the “source of truth”, so to say. Which makes the explanation that physical reality is a product of consciousness not just plausible, but more likely than the other way around. Again, not a proof, but far from batshit.
I think you're a little confused about what observed means and what it does.
When unobserved, elementary particles behave like a wave, but they do not stop existing. A wave is still a physical thing. Additionally, observation does not require consciousness. For instance, a building, such as a house, when nobody is looking at it, does not begin to behave like a wave. It's still a physical building. Therefore, observation is a bit of a misnomer. It really means a complex interaction we don't understand causes particles to behave like a particle and not a wave. It just happens that human observation is one of the possible ways this interaction can take place.
An unobserved black hole will still feed, an unobserved house is still a house.
To be clear, I'm not insulting you or your idea like the other dude, but I wanted to clear that up.
Thanks, that seems a fair approach, although it doesn’t have me entirely convinced yet. Can you explain what the physical form of a wave function is? Because it’s not like a wave, such as waves in the sea. It’s really a wave function, an abstract representation of probabilities which in my understanding does not have any physical representation.
You say the building does not start acting like a wave, and you’re right, that would be silly. But it does enter into a superposition where the building can be either collapsed or not. Like Schreudinger’s cat, which can be dead or alive, and will be in a superposition of both until observation happens again. And yes, the probabilities of this superposition are indeed expressed through the wave function, even though there is no physical wave.
It’s true observation does not require consciousness. But until we know what does constitute observation, I believe consciousness provides a plausible explanation.
A building does not actually enter a superposition when unobserved, nor does Schrodinger's cat. The point of that metaphor was to demonstrate, through humor, the difference between quantum objects and non-quantum objects, by pointing out how ridiculous it would be to think a cat could enter a superposition like a particle. In fact, one of the great mysteries of physics right now is why only quantum objects have that property, and in order to figure that out we have to figure out what interaction "observation" actually is.
Additionally, we can observe the effects of waves quite clearly. We can observe how they interact with things, how they interfere with each other, etc. It is only attempting to view the particle itself that causes it to collapse and become a particle and not a wave. We can view, for instance, the interference pattern of photons of light, behaving like a wave. This proves that the wave is in fact real, because we can see the effects of it. It's only if we try to observe the paths of the individual photons that the pattern changes. We didn't make the photons real, we could already see they were real by their effects on reality. We just collapsed the function, forcing them to take a single path.
This does not stroke with my understanding of quantum physics. As far as we know there is no clear distinction between “quantum objects” vs “non-quantum objects”. The double slit experiment has been reproduced with molecules as large as 114 atoms, and there seems no reason to believe that would be the upper limit: https://www.livescience.com/19268-quantum-double-slit-experiment-largest-molecules.html
The only part that’s proven is the interference pattern. So yes, we know it acts like a wave in that particular sense. But that’s not the same thing as saying it is a wave in the physical sense. A wave in the classic physical sense doesn’t collapse upon observation. I know it’s real in an abstract sense. I’m just questioning the physical nature of that reality.
There shouldn't be a distinction between quantum and non-quantum objects. That's the mystery. Why can't large objects exhibit quantum properties? Nobody knows, all we know is they don't. We've attempted to figure it out by creating larger and larger objects that still exhibit quantum properties, but we know, at some point, it just stops exhibiting these properties and we don't know why, but it doesn't require an observer to collapse the wave function.
Also, can you define physical for me? It seems we have a misunderstanding here, because I'm defining physical as having a tangible effect on reality. If it wasn't real, it could not interact with reality. It seems you're using a different definition.
Actually, it is. It's the same meaning we've had for waves in physics since the first time someone figured how to plot a 2d graph. Only the medium is a quantum field instead of water, its amplitude is probabilistic instead of height, and instead of time we have some other property of distributions, usually space-time.
So this video is a pretty good explanation of quantum field theory.
This idea is based on a misunderstanding of what Schrödinger actually said. The concept of the cat existing in a superposition state was not meant to be taken literally and is not an example of anything that is currently believed to be true about the physical universe.
No, it's not. The quantum field and the quantum wave exist whether or not you observe it, only the particle behavior changes based on interaction. Note how I specifically used the word "interaction", not "observation", because that's what a quantum physicist means when they say the wave-particle duality depends on the observer. They mean that a wave function collapses once it interacts definitely, not only when a person looks at it.
How so, when the interpretation you're citing is specifically dependant on the mechanics of quantum field fluctuation? How can physical reality not exist when it is physical reality that gives you the means to (badly) justify your hypothesis?
That's pseudoscientific bullshit. Quantum physics absolutely does tell us that there is a real physical world. It's incredibly counterintuitive and impossible to fully describe, but does exist.
Heh, well... I guess that depends on how you define "physical"... if quantum field theory is correct then everything we experience is the product of fluctuations in various fields, including the physical mass of protons, neutrons etc. "Reality" as we experience it might be more of an emergent property, as illusory as the apparent solidity of matter.
Physical reality exists inside consciousness. Consciousness is the thing that can be directly observed.
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.
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.
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.
Why would bits not be conscious?
Consciousness and conscience are not the same thing, this naming is horrible
This just makes it more realistic
Hey, just be glad I changed it from asdf_test_3, okay?
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.
I already know I will never play this game, could you elaborate for me?
Brain scan tossed in a robot makes 2 Simons
And several times throughout the story you are forced into making some "decisions" about how to deal with stale memory registers.
If anyone's interested in a hard sci-fi show about uploading consciousness they should watch the animated series Pantheon. Not only does the technology feel realistic, but the way it's created and used by big tech companies is uncomfortably real.
The show got kinda screwed over on advertising and fell to obscurity because of streaming service fuck ups and region locking, and I can't help but wonder if it's at least partially because of its harsh criticisms of the tech industry.
Just FYI content warning for Pantheon there is a seriously disturbing gore/kill scene that is animated too well in the first season. Anyone who has seen the show knows what scene I am talking about, I found the scene pretty upsetting and I almost didn't finish the show. I am still a little upset that the scene is burned in my memory.
Sounds good. Did it come to a conclusion or get axed mid way?
The series has a very satisfying conclusion.
It's one of the coolest fucking things we watched this last year.
Sold!
Unironically the most important question
Luckily the writers were able to finish it the way they wanted with a second season, and it's fantastic. AMC almost did axe it before the second season released but after it was already finished but fans were able to get them to release it.
Okay so I can't 100% confirm this, but the first season wasn't popular because it was on whatever the fuck AMC+ is. Amazon bought it because of the writer's strike to get something out.
Yes, I just finished watching Pantheon and absolutely loved it!
Totally agree that it deserved more attention. At least it got a proper ending with season 2.
Also, the voice acting talent they got was impressive. Paul Dano was fantastic as one of the leads.
I really thought you were going to mention "Upload" on Prime. Same creator as the office.
That show is garbage
Checking in to see if this show was mentioned. Highly recommend! Well written
Soma is a wonderful game that covers this type of thing. It does make you wonder what consciousness really is... Maybe the ability to perceive and store information, along with retrieving that information, is enough to provide an illusion of consistent self?
Or maybe it's some competely strange system, unkown to science. Who knows?
I don't think anything gave me existential doom quite as much as the ending of that game.
Provide the illusion to whom?
Self? Seemed pretty clear in their comment
I think the definition of consciousness needs to not be solely about abilities or attributes. It needs to account for the active process of consciousness. Like a hair dryer can burn things.. but a fire is things burning. Without the active nature its simply not conscious.
Maybe consciousness is everywhere, and has nothing to do with mechanisms.
What if you do it in a ship of theseus type of way. Like, swapping each part of the brain with an electronic one slowly until there is no brain left.
Wonder if that will work.
If I remember right, the game The Talos Principle calls that the Talos principle
Sounds like the sort of the The Talos Principle would call that
The tv show Pantheon figures it will work, but it will be very disturbing.
Was looking for the Pantheon reference in this thread! Just finished that show and loved it. Of course it takes plenty of liberties for the sake of the storytelling, but still, at least it explores these interesting topics!
Anyone reading this thread, do yourself a favor and check out Pantheon!
Right? Like what if as cells die or degrade instead of being replaced by the body naturally they are replaced by nanites/cybernetics/tech magic. If the process of fully converting took place over the course of 10 years, then I don't see how the subject would even notice.
It's an interesting thing to ponder.
The subject also doesn’t notice if you end their consciousness either.
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 ? 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?
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.
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?
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.
could also indicate ghost or intelligence operative. I don't assume they were going racist with it.
Spook = ghost (aka a soul unhoused a living body)
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.
Welcome to Life
would've made more sense if it was rust
(or is the copy intential here?)
Plottwist: consciousness is : Copy
It's pinned and
!Unpin, and only has private constructors.Uploading is a matter of implementing
CloneIf we're gonna have a dystopian future, then damn it, it's gonna be memory safe.
The semantics in Rust would be completely out of wack. What does ownership mean?
I guess the point of the joke is that consciousness is a shallow value.
Whats the difference between
void fn(Type& var)andvoid fn(Type* var)?Sends original data vs making a copy of data and sending it.
In meme context you'd be just making a copy of your consciousness and putting it in a machine. Whatever reason you're doing it for - escape illness, survive armageddon, nothing changes for you. A copy of you lives on though.
It's not like the post, secont is a pointer.
I mean, just kill the host as soon as the upload is complete. at best you are not conscious during the process and when "you" wake up you are in the cloud. The version of you that awakes gets told that the "transfer" was complete.
Upload is a fun show
I was thinking more along the lines of St. Junipero :D
Future man season 2?
Black Mirror
Oh I know San junipero, just suggesting the plot of season 2 of future man as another similar reference - minds uploaded to “the cloud” and bodies destroyed on upload complete. Haley Joel Osmand is pretty decent as the antagonist of that season.
never watched the show. Is it any good?
Pretty good. Offbeat as all hell. Loses its way a little in season 2 but pulls it back for season 3. Wasn’t generally considered a hit, didn’t make it past season 3.
7.7 on imdb is very solid. I'll give it a go. Thanks for the tip
that's a weird way to spell Pantheon.
I guess you ask for C++. There Type* can be null while Type& can't be null. When it gets compiled Type& is compiled (mostly) to the same machinecode as Type*.
You can pass nullptr in the second example (that is not what OP wrote though, hes second is making a copy).
Thanks, I was Just curious. I knew what * did but I wasn't sure about &
the plot of ::: spoiler spoiler SOMA ::: in a nutshell?
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
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler SOMA :::
Lost the coin flip.
There's also a book with a similar concept. It's not the focus until later in the book though. It's called
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler Ready Player Two :::
Related 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
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.
void teleport(Person person);
I had to turn my phone sideways and go cross-eyed to spot the difference.
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.
That's a weird response to the person who is explaining the post to you.
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
Sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that
Are you sure the roon of today is a reference to yesterday's roon?
everyone watch this clip and tell me what you think
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szzVlQ653as
what if it's year 3000 right now and we're all playing a game?
Intellisense commands you to fix your method
What needs to happen for it to actually work.