In fact, I don't believe that one can experience it at all. Imagine the procedure (for a conscious person): your brain is connected to a computer interface and a copy of your mind is taken. Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to die.

Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it regardless of how many mental copies are made.

I much prefer the idea of human metamorphosis. I want to inject nanorobots into my body which will transform it gradually, cell by cell into an improved synthetic one. In this way, immortality and superhumanity can be achieved without loss of continuity. I imagine the experience would be one of waking up a little better (stronger, smarter, etc.) every morning until the cells are all upgraded.

I don't read enough these days because of chronic eyestrain, but if you are aware of anything dealing with this concept of human metamorphosis, fiction or otherwise, I would appreciate a link. It's something I would like to read about (if it's even been dealt with), someday when I have time (and don't have a headache).

> Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it regardless of how many mental copies are made.

I don't understand how you can put out a statement like that, like it's taken for granted or something. It's far from granted, and I've never heard of something remotely approaching a proof for this type of assertion. To my mind it's the same kind of reasoning which proved we would never fly, nor go to space.

It's an open problem. Please keep it that way until we know more.

We don't have the proper tools to understand consciousness in a scientific way yet (consider the extremely limitations of EEG and MRI) For those interested in this philosophical question, there's an area called Philosophy of Mind [0] which deals with this and related questions.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mind

Even if the cloned memories could be streamed from your brain into a running simulation, allowing a memory of crossing the threshold from the physical world to the digital one to be created in the simulation, the 'patient' will not have this experience. The patient will still have to experience death.

Going further, let's imagine that we want it really, really badly. Let's destroy each neuron immediately after taking it's state and pushing it into the stream, so that the whole process of uploading and death are completely synchronized and nothing of the patient's consciousness remains afterward.

I'm sorry, but I still do not think that the patient will experience being uploaded into a computer. It will only experience having it's brain fried until death. For the clone, the memory might just be glorious, like some Hollywood special effect sequence, but personally I find this wholly unsatisfying.

I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, either. I'm only saying that I suspect some people may have the wrong perspective about it. If you sign up for this procedure, you are not signing up for immortality, but merely to donate a copy of your memories to whomever is running the simulation.

You would be like an organ donor, but instead of saving a life, you'd be feeding your mind to the new Zombie Second Life.

It would not benefit you, but it might benefit someone else.

As for me, I'm a selfish, arrogant bastard with a desire for physical immortality and superhuman capabilities.

>I'm sorry, but I still do not think that the patient will experience being uploaded into a computer.

If the copy/delete process was (perceptually, hence effectively) instantaneous, what is the difference?

Lets say your biological body was going to die, in a day. But you have the option of being perfectly copied into a new biological body now, with the current body being instantly destroyed. Would you take the option? I think I would.

Whats the problem with that? How is it any different than what happens to your body on a day-to-day basis, now, anyway?

I don't see the problem, when we put it in these terms.

We can posit that our "consciousness", as we experience it, resides entirely in our physical bodies, and that exact duplication of some subset of those bodies can create a consciousness exactly the same as ours. So any observer outside our body will be indifferent to whether they deal with the original or the copy.

But unless there is some communication between the two consciousnesses, you will experience the copy as something outside yourself. You won't have its memories after the moment of duplication, and you won't experience continuation. If your body dies, your consciousness dies. So while the world can have endless copies of you, and perhaps each copy feels like you, you still experience mortality. Your consciousness ends with the particular physical construct sustaining it.

At least, in the posited model.

The gholas of Dune are aware of this, and don't imagine themselves immortal though they know copies of themselves will be made after their departure.

They scan you, break you down, then transmit and create a new you. Now if you re-order this a little. Scan, transmit, create and then break down the original. There are two of you, then the original is killed. This shows that during the original process the first is scanned and killed, then a new person created. This is exactly how mind uploading would work in terms of continuity for the person being uploaded. (It's also why I would never ever use a teleporter.)

This is exactly what mind uploading is, they scan you and upload you. Creating a new you. Then you die and the other you lives on. This is very clearly shown if you scanned and activated the copy before the first person died. Are you trying to imply that you would suddenly, as a single entity, be experiencing two perspectives at once? Because that just wouldn't be possible.

It is technically immortality for your memories, but not the specific physical instance of you.

Or how is it different that going into sleep and waking up?

Anesthesia, then, or fainting. You cannot wake up from loud noises, and you have no consciousness.

One can also image a transfer process that is just like what naturally happens with regular body cells changing every 7 years or so.

E.g your brain is slowly, over a period of years, replaced cell by cell with new compatible neurons. One by one, your old neurons are replaced with the new, designed ones.

Those can read the state of the neuron they exchange AND exchange signals with your regular neurons, so before and after one is replaced, your brain is still functioning normally. No "power off" phase.

How about that?

However this is completely different from the concept of mind uploading where your brain is scanned and simulated separately.

This is the old materialist vs idealist, monoist, dualist etc. debate in the philosophy of mind. It isn't as much of a slam dunk as you think it may be, and the gulf in opinion is broad and branches out into many tributaries.

Materialism is the belief that everything in the world, including mind, was material, but that has progressed into physicalism since late nineteenth century physics showed that not every force is made up of matter.

I used to be very interested in this topic and leaned towards the idealist argument of mind being made up of more than material, but I lost interest as the debate on both sides tends to spiral and involve religion and spirituality. But I still tend to believe that if we completely cloned a brain materially, we would still not have a mind, that it would be missing something.

My own conclusion is that we simply do not know, and that to me is more interesting than knowing as the pursuit is more rewarding than the end goal. There will always be open and unresolved questions in science and philosophy. We have yet to explain seemingly more simple phenomena such as gravity, so explaining the mind (or indeed altering it or cloning it) seems so far out of reach.

For people who find these things interesting, I recommend checking out the so called hard problem of consciousness

James Trefil, physicist - so they aren't all dopey philosophers ;) - notes that "it is the only major question in the sciences that we don't even know how to ask."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

Creating a copy is like having a Siamese twin you didn't know about, because it was sharing 100% of your body and mind. But with the copy you are split apart for the first time.

If you are being uploaded at the time of the split, then one of you experiences the seamless first-person transformation into digital form. The other you stays biologic and dies, immediately or eventually depending on the procedure.

The irresistible urge is to mope that "you" are the biologic one, the one that dies. But this isn't true, you really are both. The one that became digital is you in every sense, it woke up in your shoes, it took your date to the prom, it has your personality, it will make the decision you would make going forward.

If you think the copy is inferior or inconsequential by virtue of not being the original, then consider what if we right now are all copies? Would our lives and first-person experiences be less genuine and less valuable if it was revealed there the true original versions of us existed elsewhere? In an upload scenario the copy is you.

That said, I wouldn't get excited about it. Uploading is a bald afterlife myth with the same capacity to beguile as the religious versions. Better to focus on the here and now.

The reason your copy is equally you vs. Warren Buffet is that your copy shared every molecule in your body and every thought in your head for your entire life up until the moment of splitting off.

Assume you do a regular (or even automatic and continuous) sync between the copies. Which copy would you prefer survived, if one of them were to die?

This of course sounds like a contradiction, both are you and both are individuals? That's because our language and concepts just don't have the muscle for this situation. "Both are you" is short-hand since the wold "you" becomes ill-defined or at least radically transformed. Consider Hofstadter's "twin world" concept from his "I am a Strange Loop" for how a single "individual" could really be made up of multiple individuals.

From an objective point of a view it's much better if the digital version survives, because we're assuming the biological original has a shorter life span.

On the other hand, I'm not so sure that the digital version is preferrable, there are lots of maladies that would be trivial on digital versions, for example destroying the being, controlling it and altering in any way. All that stuff is (so far) harder on the biological world.

(PS: Thanks for the Hofstadter pointer, I stopped following him at The Mind's I)

Lack of continuous experience of an event does not mean you died, it is merely memory loss.

Assuming the very reasonable theory that consciousness is classical and emergent from the network structure and interactions of neurons and glia then it should be possible to encode this consciousness on a turing machine. If we go a step further and replace certain collections of simulated cells with black boxes that behave the same way given an isomorphic set of inputs then we can have consciousness even more cheaply.

Your idea is not necessarily more grounded. Assumptions you make are: the substrate does not matter as long as it is not digital, you assume the replacement material will not itself have effects that result in vastly divergent actions in the long run. Yet the perturbations a neuron suffers will differ from those of nanodiamodons, will this be significant? You also take for granted the new replacement brain will not allow a very large viewpoint shift due to the new complexities and speeds of thought possible. That some invariance of self remains from morphism to morphism. That there is more resemblance between you and the the final being than you and a lemur like ancestor.

It is likely that the beings of the future will have far more sophisticated definitions of self and identity.

I personally think that physical bodies will give way to digital minds and its only a matter of time. Whether linear time or log time I can't say. But physical bodies are resource hogs. Progress is energy intensive and so is ever more complex thinking. Imagine a being whose memory is so dense that its thoughts have a gravitational pull of their own and its mind risks collapsing into a blackhole... Eventually theres going to be a lot of pressure to compress thinking beings and squeeze as much thinking capacity from matter as efficiently as possible.

Here is my point: the original human will not experience continuity, therefore it's instinct for self-preservation will not be satisfied. The best it can hope for is to take comfort in knowing that a copy will survive. Personally, this does not comfort me.

I don't doubt the possibility of a very high fidelity copy and supporting simulation, for all intents and purposes. I also think there may be sound reasons to pursue it. But I don't think it will benefit those who are copied, beyond any positive thoughts and feelings it may give them before they die.

Being selfish and programmed for self-preservation, I desire physical immortality instead. I have no interest in donating a copy of my memories to a simulation project.

I hope this clears it up; my interest is quickly waning, and I have work to do.

The existence of a copy does not make the original person to resucitate or otherwise keep perceiving and thinking.

To express it in a bad analogy: you can have a bit by bit backup copy of a harddrive, but when a power surge burns the CPU and the disk, you have to throw both away. You can buy a new CPU and place the backup, but the hardware is different, there is a shutdown moment, and when you power back, the continuity is lost, it's a different entity what gets booted up.

To preserve the consciousness of a person, between the "hardware change" I see no other option to the existence of something like a central repository of consciousness outside both the body and the computer hosting the simulation that gets automatically attached to a particular set of memories/perceptions/experiences (and whatever else defines a consciousness), so when you die, it stores your consciousness and when the simulation is booted up, the continuity is triggered. I find that far fetched.

I don't think we can agree on that. There certainly are many claims of consciousness existing beyond the human body. For example, see a "Unified Field" of consciousness.

> I mean, you don't believe that human consciousness somehow survives the body after brain death, do you?

Literally billions of people believe it does (see: pretty much all major religions). Maybe human consciousness doesn't survive brain death, but some other form of consciousness does?

Think of a stroke patient. Often stroke patients lose their memories / personality temporarily, but then regain it some time later. The injured portion of the brain heals in some respect, but the memories/neural functions of the injured area often move / reorganize to a different location in the brain (which is why sometimes a stroke patient can feel sensation in say their hand when someone touches their face).

I think this comes to show that our consciousness/memories/etc are not necessarily tied to a specific source of physical matter, as even the brain can reorganize the "coded" functions to different areas inside it.

What I can't imagine is how you, the person sitting in front of the computer will somehow wake up in the computer. I can only see copies waking up. Even if you are dead. For the people who love you, having a copy would be great, but you will still be dead.

(Obvious spoilers for the movie)

In the movie Arnold is cloned, wakes up later, and goes about to find out what's going on. At one point he finds out HE is the clone! Back to our discussion. From the point of view of the Copy, the procedure was successful - the consciousnesses was transferred to the machine and the copy continues existence. From his POV he does wake up in the computer after the procedur. For you, though, it's a copy that wakes up. Perhaps your brain is destroyed during the upload process and you stop to exist. For the copy you (that is, him) continue to exist and avoid brain death. If a scientist asks you, "Was the upload successful?", you (the original) will answer "No". The copy you will answer "Yes".

This particular, uh, delusion, seems similar to the recurrent theme that an "intelligent" enough computer would/could "develop self-conscious" (whatever that is) and start "thinking for itself". Here, we have strong ideas about the properties of "self-consciousness", without, as you say, having a ghost of an idea of what it is.

Just last night I thought about this and went to sleep in despair :>

If someone scans my brain, builds an artificial copy, instantly cuts out my brain and inserts the new one, I clearly die (because I got my brain/me cut out) and my copy lives on. From the outside, I'm the same, but the first me died.

So instead, I get my neurons replaced with artificial ones, one at a time. If I drink a few beers, brain cells die but I'm still conscious. So gradually replacing my neurons one by one should be no problem; there clearly is no loss of continuity, I'm still me.

But what's the difference? Let's assume one neuron is replaced every second. No problem, nice and gradual. What if it's one every millisecond, every picosecond? Should make no difference, because it's still one by one. But, the faster you do it, the more it approaches "instant". And instantly replacing all my brain cells is the same as replacing my whole brain. Thus, I'm dead and my copy lives on...

It should make a difference how long it takes, though.

Assume that consciousness is a physical process. If new neurons take part in this process after the old ones die (so that we have continuity as part of normal "healing"), there must be some time scale over which those neurons become an effective part of the consciousness process.

At minimum, if consciousness is a "network effect", this would be on the order of the latency of inter-neuronal communications. If the cells are doing some processing which forms part of consciousness, the time scale would increase.

To throw out some wild numbers: neuronal latency seems to vary, but I found a number for visual-cortical neurons of about 80 ms. (http://redwood.berkeley.edu/bruno/npb261b/whitney-reading/kr...) And you can't replace more than a few cells at a time (I wonder what fraction?) if you want to avoid impairing consciousness during the process.

(This also doesn't include whatever the time is to make an effective copy of a given neuron and it's state; we're assuming instant perfect copying.)

If you look at the physics the right way, your brain is cut out and a copy inserted billions of times a second already.

There's not much difference at the end, except that you can consider that the second way of doing things will let you still use the old car, only it'll be new.

However, the car of Theseus example allows for a worrisome wrinkle. What if you kept all the old parts during the process you describe, and then after, you re-assembled them? Which car has the superior claim to being identical with the old car? I think it obvious that the reassembled old parts have the superior claim over the car produced by part-by-part substitution of new parts.

Yes, it has all the parts of the old car, and only those pieces, but it was assembled anew from zero.

A more difficult dichotomy would be: what if we exchange parts between two cars until each one is the other one. That's hard to decide.

Or how about we make all the new parts plastic so that no functioning "car" is produced by the gradual part-for-part substitution. We end up with two cars, one an all-plastic car model, and one consisting of all the old parts assembled and functioning. Which has the better claim to being the old car?

Yeah, part exchanges quickly leave me with even less salient intuitions about the proper use of old identity terms than these more "splitting" oriented cases. What should we say if a lion talked and all that.

You get to do both. The concept of "you" changes once there is a copy, see the Ship of Theseus [1]. Each post-you entity has a legitimate claim to being pre-you. The copy woke up that morning, ate your breakfeast, went to the uploading clinic, and went to sleep as a digital being. The copy has perfect continuity. The biological you on the other hand stayed biological and will die.

A gradual replacement doesn't change the fundamentals, the biological you has to die. The gradual replacement just makes for an unusual twilight, its mind commingled with an arising digital being.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

It is the experience of continuity that satisfies my hard-wired desire for self-preservation.

Why is it that we feel like the same person after we wake up from sleep, from anesthesia, or even a prolonged coma? You could go to sleep, have arbitrary operations done to the neurons in your brain while asleep, and presumably will awake into the "same body".

This thought experiment leads me to believe that the most important consideration for mind-uploading is to ensure that the original body dies/is killed before bringing the copy online.

Still, the moment you move its dataset to a new device and deactivate the original, aren't you killing the original?

But if we believe consciousness is some subjective experience that results from the functioning brain or similar physical device, what can we say?

Think of a vinyl record and a digital music player. The vinyl record is playing along when it is stopped suddenly, the digital player is started at exactly the right time to produce no break in the song.

If you insist that you are the record player, then you die, you stopped. If you think that you are the song, it continued without missing a beat. Instead of an abrupt stop you can cross fade the record out and the digital one in over a few minutes. Does this make a difference?

http://eidolon.net/?story=Closer&pagetitle=Closer&se...

Why? Can you explain more? I would believe that you can be a fully functioning human living in a simulated reality if we ever managed to fully simulate the human brain..

However, since our brain modules are so messily coupled I don't know if we can easily "delete" memories and not impact anything else.

Imagine science advances to the point where medical science can replace individual brain cells with perfect robot replicas. These robot cells interact with surrounding cells in exactly the same way as the real ones and can be initialized with the state of the real cell they are replacing. They're small though, so all the real computation work they may need to do is offloaded to a computer (over radio signals perhaps, or whatever.) Perhaps we can even optimize their operation such that communication with other robot cells that may happen to be next to it takes place inside the computers modelling both cells, instead of actually firing off the connection "for real".

Preform this operation once, and few would argue that the mind in question has died, been replicated, ceased to operate and been replaced with another... anything. It's just the same mind.

If you are willing to accept that (and if you're not, we'll just have to disagree), then preform the operation again. And again. And again.

This is what sodiumphosphate was referring to by "metamorphosis", and it does not require dualism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#Human_body

Replacement with the subtly different is interpreted by our minds as "change". You no more "die" when the cells or atoms in your brain are replaced than a river dries up when all the water molecules you could see at one point in time flow away.

"recognizing" it is irrelevant and poorly defined.

Simply assuming it is the case because you want it to be the case is not science, it is religion.

> It is an open question whether there can be actual deterministic physical processes that, in the long run, elude simulation by a Turing machine, and in particular whether any such hypothetical process could usefully be harnessed in the form of a calculating machine (a hypercomputer) that could solve the halting problem for a Turing machine amongst other things. It is also an open question whether any such unknown physical processes are involved in the working of the human brain, and whether humans can solve the halting problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

Being able to solve the halting problem for programs generally seen in real life programming does not imply in the slightest that you can solve the halting problem for arbitrary programs. Can you look at arbitrary Turing machine tapes (large enough to eliminate the possibility that you are simulating it without realizing it of course) and non-algorithmically decide if they will terminate? Can you in fact do anything non-algorithmically? That is in essence what you are suggesting, the non-algorithmic nature of the human mind.

You are of course not the first to suggest a non-algorithmic mind. The likes of Roger Penrose have also suggested similar things (see his The Emperor's New Mind and later Shadows of the Mind). His reputation is enough to give me serious pause, and the fact that he does not seem to be a dualist further inclines me to listen to what he has to say.

If you want to delve further into this subject I suggest you check out Penrose's work, then read the criticism of it from his peers. Penrose has mounted the most qualified defence of the non-algorithmic mind of which I am aware, but even so acceptance of his thesis is rather rare in academia. It is not light subject matter but the general consensus among experts in the fields which he touches is that in order to support his thesis he made numerous errors. In absence of their expertise, I must defer to their assessment of Penrose's work.

Does this halt? Assume all variables are arbitrary precision integers.

/* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_number#Odd_perfect_numb... */

  void searchForOddPerfectNumber() {
    int n = 1, sumOfFactors, factor;

    while (1) {
      sumOfFactors = 0;
      for (factor = 1; factor < n; factor++)
        if (n % factor == 0)
          sumOfFactors += factor;
      if (sumOfFactors == n) break;
      n += 2;
      sumOfFactors = 0;
    }
  }

I take it you would find it very hard to meet your copy, then? If for some reason your copy goes live and you don't die, I bet you two would get into a fight :-).

As it is now, if I'm alive and I meet my exact copy, he'd agree to die ("just do it quickly") until I really die.

And then the copy would become me - it's that simple. Maybe later it'd be possible to download myself into a body again, in which case I would retain all the knowledge that I acquired inside the virtual world.

However, the idea that you still get to die after backup is based on an assumptions that I don't find neither obvious nor true: that the stream of consciousness is fully continuous and never stops. I've recently seen a documentary about a guy who was declared brain dead and yet recovered into being himself again. So it might still be possible to "upload" a dead brain in which case your experience is that of a resurrection which doesn't sound so bad.

Just felt a need to express my experience of camaraderie on the subject.

You could read about the Buddhist concept of impermanence and the five aggregates of being which sounds similar to the idea of a metamorphosis, only not just human but everything changing all the time.

Assume a negative answer. Then, the interesting implicit belief, is that there is something special about body composition. Whereas in physical law, there is nothing unique in principle about the body. So, the laws would have to be wrong or incomplete(fail to include consciousness) in an important way.

How? Well, think of replacing a hard drive under a running process. Compare that to migrating a VM to another machine. In one, the process is truly continuous, it just begins using new hardware; in the other, the process is cloned and the original process killed.

This free Cory Doctorow piece could float your boat: "0wnz0red - Programmers who hack their own bodies don't need exercise and never get sick" http://www.salon.com/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/singleton/

I cant find a free link, but here is a paid e-book, $0.59: http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/b876/Transition-Dreams/Gre...

Writing this I just had a major existential crisis because I realized that at the exact point of divergence there is a point where 'you' are both alive and dead at the same time, Schrodinger's Tomb.

I agree with you in that I think a gradual change is less crisis inducing even though it equals out to the same thing. I think that I'd get a brain backup anyway, just in case.

The argument about a copy being "identical to me but it's not me" is a very natural and intuitive reaction, but it's probably wrong. A very illuminating explanation is http://lesswrong.com/lw/pm/identity_isnt_in_specific_atoms and related posts.

I'll try a personal approach: imagine a country with no computers, no photocopiers, no presses, and a very strict law that forbids making copies of books which is indoctrinated from birth. There is only one copy of each literary creation, guarded in the National Library.

We can imagine that the people of that country have a very hard time to distinguish between "The Lord of the Rings" in an abstract sense and material object #1434 stored in the second floor, section Fantasy. For them LOTR is just that set of paper and ink. Even if someone secretly made a copy, letter by letter, it will be "just a copy", not the "true" LOTR. That's quite obvious to them.

And in a sense that's a bit our current situation with people (not exactly, because books are static and people aren't). We can't scan people-as-information out of people-as-protein-body and store them as people-as-silicon-body, so we mix the concepts. But it's just confusion due to technological limitations.

So in a sense we DO have souls, but it's a mathematical or information-theoretical soul, not a metaphysical one. It's always bound to a material instantation, but that concrete physical manifestation is not the same as the dynamic, interactive information process a person is.

So if technology advances enough we'll be able to copy a person, and it'll make no sense to ask which of them is really "you". Both are.

Imagine I have a magical device with which I can "stop time", or more precisely, stop movement of all particles except mine. In the beginning I am at our right. I stop time, move leisurely to your left and resume time.

What you see is me teleporting from your right to your left. You don't feel "trapped in a body who can't move", because your neurons are also magically frozen. Your consciousness feel continuous, even is you have been "suspended" for a while, because your memories are properly structured. Consciousness is not "something else", it is a property of your memories. (The blog post on lesswrong.com about timeless physics is important to see this point of view, I think, even if you don't buy the theory).

So if my copy is mathematically identical then there is nothing else left. There is no extra consciousness stuff that the "original" has and the "copy" does not.

Sorry, I really can't explain myself better. I'd suggest reading the link provided.

Let's suppose we believe that everything about me can be contained in the physical processes that happen in my body.

Now suppose that we have the ability to digitally simulate those processes perfectly. Since my existence is purely physical, the "sensation of identity" you describe is perfectly captured by this digital simulation, by definition.

Whatever the copy does after that you won't experience and it won't be part of your memories. If you say that's not the case and that you will experience and be aware of what the copy is doing, then you are proposing some sort of metaphysical connection between the two beings, which I find hard to swallow.

I like this definition of identity: "A person's identity is defined as the totality of one's self-construal, in which how one construes oneself in the present expresses the continuity between how one construes oneself as one was in the past and how one construes oneself as one aspires to be in the future"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity_%28philosophy... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_%28social_science%29 http://www.psych-it.com.au/Psychlopedia/article.asp?id=76

What I see you doing is presupposing the "I" and "it" beforehand as if the future clone does not share all your memories and experience. Right now the clone and you are one and the same. Just as you can imagine a copy uploaded to a simulator and ran, it is equally valid for you to imagine blacking out during the brain scan and waking up in a virtual world. Before you undergo the brain scan it would be wise to prepare yourself for possibly waking up as the clone.

The virtual world copy will of course be (just like) me the instant it wakes up, but I (the original) won't experience the virtual world. I don't see how the original could wake up in the virtual world.

It would be an exact copy of your mind. Think about that. All of your experiences, memories, thought-patterns, etc., including all of your presuppositions that you will be the original. You sit there and smugly tell yourself that you will not be the clone. You couldn't possibly wake up as a clone, right? That the clone is going to be this "other" thing over there that has nothing to do with you. Guess what? The clone wakes up having had all of those exact same thoughts and experiences. The clone is you. I wouldn't recommend that anyone in this state of mind go through a cloning process because it would just end up with a confused, depressed and generally fucked up clone.

But this just doesn't consider the fact that in the real world, there was a real original who went to a copying facility and then went home, in the physical world. This person does have the return value of fork() [$] and does not experience the virtual world.

It's in this sense I'm saying I can't imagine going to a copying facility and waking up in a virtual world. I can perfectly imagine a copy doing that, but it won't have my future experiences. In fact, going further, given my beliefs, were "I" to wake up in a virtual world I'd be sure I'm a copy, because I'm certain the original could not wake up in a virtual world.

[$]: As long as we don't get fancy with psychothriller manoeuvres where the original is drugged and the copy has a body clone that returns home to his wife, while everyone tells the real original he's in a virtual world.

I guess my point is just that when you refer to yourself pre-cloning, you have to realize that you're speaking (and thinking) for the copy as well. It's fun to think about. Makes for great sci-fi.

Just imagine that, in the normal course of things, a person at time t is constantly being copied into a slightly different new person at t+dt and then destroyed. There is a causal connection and thus an inheritance of memories, but not single "essence about yourself" being conserved.

With current technology we only have a directed linear graph, like o -> o -> o -> ... . With uploading tech this graph will fork into two paths, but neither of them can claim to be "the original", because there is no such thing.

I mean, maybe this concept of "personal identity" is simply wrong. It's an illusion because currently threads of causality on people are linear, but that's just a technological limitation.

And I don't see how linearity has to do with self-preservation instincts. Maybe you are arguing that once we have several diverging copies the self-preservation instinct will change and be content as long as one copy still survives? I just can't imagine it.

Let's say we can copy me. As in, we make another me (let's call him me* ) that is physically identical to me in every possible way.

I believe your argument is that I will continue to be me, and me* will essentially be a different person. If I die, that's it. me* lives on, but I am not me* , I am me.

The interesting question, which your parent (in the thread) posits an answer to, is what is the actual difference between me and me* ?

If you believe that humans exist entirely within the physical world (as in, there's no mystical/religious/spiritual element to our existence--we're just matter and energy), then me and me* are no different. Suppose we go back to your idea, that we kill me after creating me* . Since I am purely a physical being, I have no way of distinguishing between me and me* . In particular, if you never told me that I am me* , I would have absolutely no way of distinguishing the difference between me and me* .

If by consciousness you mean introspection or self-modeling or something like that then consciousness is definitely real. But it's just a property that some minds have, and that someday will probably be analyzed and replicated in silico.

But if you mean some kind of special conserved "essence" that makes you "you" in addition of your memories... then yes, it's probably just an illusion.

Which is a disturbing thought, I admit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

For people who haven't read it, in the novel there are virtual parties called slow clubs where poor consciousnesses go to meet. Everyone agrees to limit themselves to the processing speed of the slowest (poorest) person there, so that people who can only afford the occasional spare clock cycle can have meaningful human contact.

As someone who is prone to rather obsessive interests (as I suspect many are on HN) I'm increasingly conscious of that fact that I can't directly control what I find interesting.

People get so attached to the idea of free will. What free will? You do what you want, but you have no control over what you want.

"Here lies humanity... Do not resucitate"

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However, before we get to a point where people are being uploaded into a system, we have a lot of legal president to set. The legal rights of the bits that are copied from your consciousness, for one.

Some (rather lame) lingo for the coming pay model of life:

Cheapskate, you're such a trialler

You haven't really lived until you lived with Life TM.

He hasn't upgraded in a long, long time

Do this for me and I'll make you live forever

You gotta commit suicide at least once, the rush beats base jumping hands down, and the white tunnel effect is pure bliss - and it's legal

Well you know, I could sponsor your life subscription if that would help the situation

Pun intended? :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_(science_fiction)

BUT.. are people really so pessimistic about technology and the future that the main thing that comes to mind when they think of digital immortality is.. this?

Your virtual body can be anything you want. You can't die as long as your digital code is backed up somewhere.

If you can't see the bright side of that stuff, there is some kind of psychological issue.

Indeed, if things are just left alone I would not even say the default state is that you'll be in control of your own code. It will be a company that develops this technology first, since the alternative is inconceivable, and they will have their own agenda. There's a lot more possibilities that could emerge than just a happy utopia.

A virtual hell is a nasty place where sinners are copied into post death, for eternity. Sometimes young sinners are given day trips there to straighten them out, before death.

He talk a little about it in this wired interview: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/10/iain-banks/all/1

One might argue that these technologies are so advanced that they will not be developed until the current resource scarcities which govern our lives have been removed, and as such we wouldn't be subject to the same degrading economic pressures.

This makes some sense to me, but maybe I've just been watching too much Star Trek.

For example, if You and Digital You (tm) were alive at the same time, I could put you in one room, and Digital You in another, and smash Digital You without You having any idea. You could live your whole life not knowing if Digital You was "alive."

Whatever your definition of me is, it seems like me dying should have an effect on me.

Is that situation utterly contrived because he destroyed his mind, or are you insisting on a limited definition of self?

(Let's set aside the part where there is mind replicating technology but no snapshots or version control)

Of course digital immortality is inestimably cool. There are so many amazing and obvious positives that we can even imagine on this side of the singularity.

However, if we only think of the positives, without considering the negatives, then we run the risk of stumbling blindly into a dystopia created by the few who did think of the negatives (and how to profit from them), or by optimists who failed to plan for a suboptimal outcome.

From another point of view, fiction about a perfect utopia is boring. You need some imperfection in order to provide the requisite tension to make a story.

You think: "That copy isn't me, ericb!" * dies *

Copy thinks: "Great! I, ericb, just got a new lease on life!"

Here is where you're wrong. You presuppose the "he" and "I" when they are perfectly interchangeable right up until the cloning process. You can't presume that because you're the original now that you will be after the cloning process, because that has a 50% chance of being wrong. Right now, you and the clone are one and the same. Any reasoning you do about "me versus him" before the cloning is shortsighted. You have to reason like this: "If I wake up as the clone, then X. If not, then Y." It's like calling fork() in your code and then writing the code after that to presuppose that you're the parent process without even checking the return code. You don't know that you're the original after the cloning unless you see evidence that you are.

Think of it this way: let's say instead of a brain copy it is a full body copy. You walk into a dark room where you can't see anything. They knock you unconscious, and then you wake up lying next to what appears to be you. How do you know if you're the original? Because you were the original before? Sorry, but no.

It isn't immortality. At most it's another version you create so your friends and family don't have to give you up. Which I can see being pretty motivating... but on the other hand, I can see the friends and family being totally unwilling to have a meaningful relationship with a second, slightly-diverged person after the first one died. And then the copy would be lonely. :-(

How much "like" you would a copy have to be before it caused you ontological distress?

If I don't have access to their mental state, they are not me. I think I am like an instance of an object, and my identity is related to my path through space and time. To be me, they'd have to be standing where I stand, and have stood where I stood.

A 100% copy of the mona lisa is still not the mona lisa--it lacks the history.

This is also why i don't like the idea of a Star Trek style transporter. At what point do you stop being you? I'd much rather stay alive and in one piece thank you. 8)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail

Anyway, secondly I don't understand where all the devil-with-pitchfork stuff comes from in Banks's hells. Why not just have everyone floating in blackness and experiencing the maximum possible amount of pain at all times? To prevent them from becoming catatonic you just keep resetting their brain state to the moment of their death, so they're always feeling the first shock of agony. And it scales fantastically; just copy that small simulation a billion times and run them concurrently.

Of course, there will be some philosophical problems (are two identical concurrent brain simulations really two distinct subjective consciousnesses? If so, what are the implications of error-correcting server memory that store everything twice? And does resetting someone's memory so that the same simulation plays out repeatedly actually cause the person to experience things multiple times, or is it immaterial how many times you replay it?) but that will be of no comfort to you when you wake up in the pain box hell.

I assumed that it was all cultural (note the lowercase c there) - societies would construct, using technology, the Heavens and Hells that their religions had told people already existed.

Other writers have covered the idea that higher powers might use some of their resources tormenting virtual copies of lesser beings - I'm sure this is mentioned as something that some Transcendent Powers do in A Fire Upon the Deep. Not to mention Charlie Stross's excellent A Colder War:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Colder_War

Not that it matters, clones don't have souls, like twins. [0]

[0]: http://www.thinkwithportals.com/comic/#22

sigh damn. Too many ideas, not enough time. Imagine if you could program in your afterlife. Imagine all the projects you could do with infinite amounts of time. Humanity's progress would get another exponential factor attached.

Simulated life will obey very different economics than normal life.

People should check out Robin Hanson's blog for more info: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/04/em-econ-101-talk.html

There's more than enough details to be considered a violation of copyright.

Every time during watching the video that we're jarred out of the 'future', with an unexpected Rejected, first are offered an option but can only choose one with others greyed out, etc, it feels so much like the awful experience we all have using just about anything today.

I mean, even down to the error BEEP jarring you out of the faux-pleasant music. Maybe the video creator didn't have this in mind at all, but just wanted to make it seem 'realistic' - but they got the usability nightmare we live in spot-on!

If this is an after-death experience then it really wouldn't matter if you couldn't remember copyrighted works. But beyond that I don't think copyright holders would care if you remembered their works because you're no longer able to be a customer. Same with the ads. If the service works like it did in Vanilla Sky then advertising is also pointless. Dead people don't buy things again. They pay for the after death experience and that's it.

But otherwise it's cool and interesting. Maybe I'm reading into it too much. Maybe there was no message and it was just a fun joke. Or maybe it wasn't based on vanilla sky. I don't know, I feel bad offering that criticism but while I was watching it that's what popped in my head.

What is not really addressed here, and you're hinting at it, is whether your after-death experience requires working for a living. The premium service mentions a 'subscription' so I assume it does. It's not strictly true that "Dead people don't buy things again." I mean, you might not buy physical clothes again, but you might pay the Life Store for trendy clothing-data that someone has coded for them.

I especially liked the "you can either agree to our Terms of Use or die, your choice."

- digitized people can create value and earn money (programming, ...)

- digitized people can purchase goods (music, ...)