They probably shouldn't, what unique value does anyone bring? Which is also why I am not even going to entertain the idea in earnest. This is just some creative rephrasing of the countless books out about being the best performer, the rockstar, the person to aspire to be.
BORING!
The work I do is appreciated by those around me. It isn't world changing, it doesn't need to be. I am happy doing my work, other people are happy with the work I do. When I am done with work I am done with work and do the mediocore stuff that also makes me happy. When the time comes, I'll shut down and that will be enough. Thank you very much.
Before commenting you should read the article. It very explicitly makes it an economic value question. Which is the context in which I wrote my answer.
I did read the article, the author's point is obvious, there is no incentive to boot up a 1000 year old brain. My point is that I think the author missed the family connection.
>1000 years pass. Everyone that ever knew, loved or cared about you die.
Doesn't matter if your descendants never knew you, they still might want you around. I personally would want to boot up my ancestors going back 1000 years, and I think a lot of people would. Purely for filial affinity reasons. And the person that you boot up might want you to boot up THEIR parents and so on.
Beyond curiosity and research purposes, it's obviously not useful to boot up a 1000 year old person and try to educate them to be competent in a future. But I think the author just glossed over the fact that there might be a physical link (genes, family, etc) between you and certain people living 1000 years from now.
Actually it seems fairly likely to me that at least one of your descendants will want to boot you up just based on the sheer number of descendants you end up having factoring in exponential growth of offspring.
Frame it this way: if one of your descendants has a 1% chance of wanting to bring you back and talk to you and see what you're like and you have thousands of descendants, you have a fairly good chance of being brought back at least for some period of time.
But which one of your ancestors do you boot up? Over 1000 years, fanout at 2.6 kids per couple is significant as that's easily going to be more than 25 generations.
No human being would exist in the scenario described in my opinion.
The scenario pre-supposes that humans would need to contribute some kind of value in order to justify their existence. I personally doubt any human being would be able to generate enough meaningful value that would be enough to justify the operating expense of their existence. Computing resources that could be used running human.exe, would almost certainly be better used to run some other program. So in a such a world, no human brain would be booted up, it would be entirely populated by other programs that are busy contributing whatever value the mis-aligned system requires.
Once we dispense of the assumption that a human would need to justify their existence outweigh the cost, we can more easily answer the original question. Humans would clearly have some right to exist in this scenario and we just need to make sure that it extends to humans that are already dead but sufficiently scanned to be recreated.
Yep, the answer to why would anyone boot you up is because they want to be booted up in the future too. Maintaining a culture where everyone gets booted is the easiest way to do that.
Or worse... in a world of such advanced technologies, the reason for booting people up isn't going to be for technical knowledge of any sort. And 1000 years of art and music will have also gone by.
So people might be booted up as toys for children.
> Humans would clearly have some right to exist in this scenario and we just need to make sure that it extends to humans that are already dead but sufficiently scanned to be recreated.
So it sounds like we might be stuck toiling away to fund their social security for an eternity.
I read a sci-fi book about this a while back. The protagonist's wife dies of some malady and so he has her cryogenically frozen. He then wants to freeze himself and have himself thawed once her malady could be cured, but realizes no one would ever wake him as-is. So he pivots his career into interviewing pop culture folk from all over the globe and publishes the interviews.
Eventually some rich guy thaws him out so he can learn more about his interviews and he goes on from there trying to cure-and-revive his wife.
IIRC he keeps freezing and thawing himself throughout millennia... can't recall the name of it though! Arg.
Lots of funny assumption every time this comes up. You seriously think there's going to be skills that you can learn to be economically useful in a future society where you can boot up 10000x brain models at a whim? Or more importantly, a single upscaled model 10000x the size?
Nobody is going to have any practical use for your brain. The only reason you'd be brought back is if we build and maintain a society that values human life enough to breathe it back into your decrepit, worthless neurons.
There's really no reason to boot up anyone. Even look at population levels - there's marginal return for adding additonal people as is. In fact, it's probably better to boot up a robot to so some sort of work than to boot up any average person, as its needs and resources would be lower.
Another point is that even if you did want to prepare, eg by learning an old form of the likely language--you wouldn't be able to speak it, but you'd be better-equipped--you wouldn't know which one. A thousand years ago, Google suggests (ok, actually Quora, but I couldn't find better numbers) there were c.2 million speakers, out of a total population of at least 200 million - in other words, all languages with over 1 percent of the population, and possibly (taking a higher estimate) with as little as 0.5 percent of the population speaking it, criteria met (former) by Chinese, Spanish, English, Arabic, Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Vietnamese, French, Portuguese, Indonesian, German, Marathi, Telugu, Turkish, Hausa, Tamil, Swahili, Nigerian Pidgin, Tagalog, Punjabi, Korean, and Javanese, and, for the latter, in addition to all of the languages of the former, Amharic, Bhojpuri, Burmese, Gujarati, Italian, Farsi, Kannada, Lingala, Malayalam, Thai and Yoruba.
You can't even rely on languages being somewhat similar (French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian are close enough that, given the amount of change, you probably can get away with learning just one of them; if you were really reductionist you could take one Indo-European language, one Turkic language, etc). Even being maximally reductive, the number of languages you need to learn is still 9, 10 if you go by the upper estimates (the Tai-Kadai family, represented by Thai, being optional). That's a lot, especially given that this metric lumps languages as separate as English, Bengali, and Farsi together, or Hausa, Arabic, and Amharic (and Maltese, for what it's worth). And that's just to have a decent shot at understanding a thousand-year-old version of the lingua franca!
The real real question is: "Do you want to live forever as a program that any pimple-faced kid can run, poke and debug for fun?"
We're used to have our mind as an inviolable private resource, not something that can be copy-pasted, edited and experimented freely with. Your last instance went insane in an interesting way? Let's keep it and run another. Make them interact for extra amusement.
We aren't teenagers smoking weed anymore. I hope we can be better than that.
And can we at least look at other comments before responding? I'm not going to reply to 30 copies. I know there's collisions but this argument is one I think you can assume most people are aware of. Snape kills Dumbledoor kinda thing. Book and movies have been out for so long it's not a spoiler.
To the version that gets booted up it is a continuation of your experiences though. If we start drawing lines between a perfect copy of your thoughts, brain and whatever makes you think and act like you, taken at for example the moment of death that says that's somehow not you. A lot of normal things like cell replacement and unconscious periods or other things that change your mind like brain damage look very similar to the death and digital copy divide.
I think you're fighting to make these things look more similar than they are.
In the case of a copy or upload, there is a clear disjoint process. Both entities can exist at the same time. For both of them to be "you", "you" have to be simultaneously experiencing both experiences (that doesn't sound very fun...)
As for the sleep/unconscious/etc stuff. I think people should read into this more before bringing them up. There's a lot more going on than a discrete "on" and "off" state. Brain activity does not cease. There are definitely cases where brain activity ,,appears,, to cease, but that is a distinctly different phenomena and is the result of precision of measuring devices. This stuff fits more under the Ship of Theseus argument though.
The idea of essential immortality or at least a version of you getting immortality (as far as the version that conceivably gets booted up is concerned it worked, it's the reconstructed body that came out the other end of the teleporter not the one killed and disassembled down to the atoms in the Star Trek teleporter thought experiment, also featured somewhat differently in The Prestige). Loads of people are afraid of death or think they're important/special enough that they deserve or are interesting enough to keep around forever.
I have a deep fear of death. I don't find it reassuring to think that there might be a copy of me running around. I'm not so vain to think that my consciousness is of value outside myself, I just know that it is of value to me because that's the only place I exist. It seems strictly an exercise in ego.
I don't think it's a universal thought by far but it's not uncommon, before the theoretical tech existed for uploads the niche for providing a balm to people's fear of death was monopolized by religion. Not everyone went to it for that but it is a common component of why people turn to religion.
Also to the upload they're not a copy they're in continuity with your experience just in a different place. To borrow a metaphor from The Prestige, they're the one that stepped out of the box, the one that goes on living and gets the reward of that and of continued qualia.
Finally if we start throwing around labels about uploads taken right at your last living thought and squirting that onto a cloud and call that separate we get into some sticky philosophical quagmires about brain damage, comas, the continuous replacement churn of all the cells in our body, etc that make defining You as you tricky.
I think this isn't as complicated as you're making it out to be. If I take a digital copy and then create it in the cloud, that's not me. We could create 3 digital copies all at once. Clearly, those aren't all me. I'm not a gestalt, those are three individual entities who are having different, even if similar, experiences.
Same with a clone of me. Not me. Similar, sure, but not me. How do I know that? Because the real me could stand beside it.
Me with brain damage? After some brain cell replacement? I'm changed as a person, sure, but there's a difference between change and duplicating. It's seem like you're saying that the answer to the Ship of Theseus is "yes" in every scenario, and I don't follow that.
And this is all immaterial - like I said, the me I really care about is going to one day be rotting in the ground, and that's the only real continuity of consciousnesses I care about. The digital copy may be thankful for being alive, and it may very well think of itself as me, it only makes sense being based upon the same experiences, but they aren't the same thing.
You can make clear before you die — e.g. in your will — that you don’t want your brain scanned like this, and certainly don’t want to pay for it. So you take the choice out of their hands.
Why should we want to pay for our brains to be scanned like this?
* Some people will use cryonics services that set aside and invest money in order to pay for reviving people, so specific resources could be available for reviving those people
* Future people may be curious for archaeological and historical purposes (I'd certainly like to be able to interview that medieval stonemason!)
* Future people might see it as a form of charity (a way of voluntarily helping helpless people)
Of course these are all assuming a future in which a revival technology exists and is meaningfully applicable to people whose brains were preserved in the present day.
If these +1000 humans remain similar to us, then I imagine they will resurrect people for much the same reasons we would do so now, if we could:
- Proof: At first, dead people will be resurrected just to prove that it can be done.
- Research: The dead person was a witness to / participant in a historically significant event about which historians want to learn more. Or is a semi-random choice for learning about life at a particular time and place.
- Fame: The dead person is a historically significant figure and people want to meet them / profit from them.
- Connection to a living person: The dead person is identified as a direct ancestor of someone alive and they are curious to meet them, or they feel a responsibility to bring them back.
- Connection to the resurrected: Resurrected people will want to bring back their family and friends, and may push those in control to make this happen.
- Ethics: Some people and cultures may come to think they have a moral obligation to resurrect as many people as possible.
- Just because: Someone with the means to thought it would be cool to bring a random person back and see their reaction.
Why do people think that version is "you". Or rather "me". Even if it is indistinguishable to an outside observer, it's not "you".
The way easy to verify this is remove the death condition. Do you think you are suddenly experiencing both realities? The computer version can clone itself too. It need not experience the realities simultaneously and almost certainly won't. Though that isn't to say it couldn't recombine the knowledge (or even upload to the human). But none of that is "you".
But to the article I'm sure random people would be booted back up. Though I'm pretty sure if it's an accurate representation of me it wouldn't want to exist as just a tool for historians (to proxy interviewing people of the past). So maybe by careful booting "me" back up
>Why do people think that version is "you". Or rather "me"
Why do you think the consciousness that wakes in your body is the one that fell asleep the night before? Because it can access the same memories and is stuck in the same tube of meat?
>Though I'm pretty sure if it's an accurate representation of me it wouldn't want to exist as just a tool
Either answer to that question does not make mine any less true.
But still, that question isn't relevant. There's a continuous process. If you want to make the ship of Theseus, sure. But an upload or clone is certainly distinct.
I'm aware of no process by which I would have been destroyed and recreated in my sleep, and I actually take my memories and meat tube to be rather strong evidence, so I take the simpler assumption that I persisted. If I receive evidence to the contrary, I'll reevaluate.
In this scenario, we've already posited that I've been destroyed and recreated. So I don't think these are comparable.
> In this scenario, we've already posited that I've been destroyed and recreated. So I don't think these are comparable.
Thank you. I do not understand why people cannot distinguish this critical factor.
There are other critical factors that need to be considered in these discussions :
- Can multiple entities exist simultaneously? (maybe not in an example, but under the conditions of a scenario)
- Does destruction occur? How do we define destruction?
- Are we teenagers smoking weed commenting on HN or have we read philosophy, understand the No Cloning Theorem[0], continuity, formal logic[1], and other such things?
> I'm aware of no process by which I would have been destroyed and recreated in my sleep
Again, thank you. I think people forget how proofs work. Maybe because the confusion between "the absence of proof is not proof of absence" and "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"? I know that the Von Neuman's Elephant[2] is well known, but it appears that the reasoning for it is not so much (as well as a common misunderstanding of Occam's Razor). Since it is actually about how experimental or empirical evidence for things is weak and far from proof of such processes (though it is not lack of evidence either).
I am just a program that runs on my meat computer. Upload me to a computer and I am still me just running on a silicon computer. So if you upload me and my meat computer is still running, unless I have a soul somewhere that I don't know about, they would both be me. I wouldn't experience both realities simultaneously, there would just be two of me.
You've made a leap in logic by not breaking down the steps enough and assuming positions I hold.
I'm not contesting that you're a meat computer (I actually believe this since I don't believe in magic). I also don't believe in a soul, except in the figurative sense (e.g. "this music is lacking soul").
> wouldn't experience both realities simultaneously, there would just be two of me.
By saying this you unknowingly agree with me. Carefully reread what I wrote reconsidering your assumptions.
Specifically this part
>> Why do people think that version is "you". Or rather "me". Even if it is indistinguishable to an outside observer, it's not "you".
Take a program that has memory and responds to inputs and copy it onto a disk drive. It is not running so not responding. Now install it onto another computer which isn't connected to first. Are these the same programs? Yes.
Now assume the program is self modifying. Is it still yes?
The people who will most likely want to boot you up are people related to you.
i.e. your descendants.
I would personally love to boot up all my ancestors, going as far back as I could reasonably afford. China has a long tradition of "filial piety" and I there is a little bit of this inclination in everyone.
Also I could easily see a type of "chain effect" where each generation wants to keep its parents around as long as possible. For example: I want to boot up my dead mom because I love my mom, my mom wants me to boot up her mom because she loves her mom, and on and on. As long as humans keep their affinity for their family I can see a desire to boot up minds.
It's similar to the desire that most people have to see their grandkids grow up. Most people want to keep as many members of their direct lineage in their life as they can.
That makes me think of A World out of Time by Larry Niven: Rich guy with cancer frozen in 1970, and revived in 2190... Except revived/transplanted minds have no human rights, so he has to prove he'll be worth keeping alive as a disposable pilot for an exploration ship.
Perhaps after social media has destroyed our collective minds it might be a good idea to boot up some old timers to rebuild civilization. A bit like a save state - in case progress accidently goes in the wrong direction.
These days it appears that Ideocracy was optimistic with the 500 year timeline and we'll get to the dysfunctional civilization much sooner and without the sci-fi advances that would make life confrontable. Of course without that sci-fi science there would be no way to boot people up so the point is moot.
My first thought on the matter would be novelty. If the consciousnesses of the future sufficiently valued novelty, and if the contents of a brain scan were considered a high-value source of potential novelty, then I can imagine there might be some market for it.
But that requires a few massive assumptions including that the kind of novelty that is desirable to a future might be found in the brains of individuals from today and that such novelty could not be generated in some other cheaper manner.
Brains are inherently chemical, and chemistry is just very abstracted quantum mechanics. Technically physical processors also hold quantum state, but we build them in a way that the abstracted state of 0s and 1s is portable. Brains didn't evolve such a requirement, and various quantum states maybe indirectly observable at the thought level.
There's also The Prestige which comes at it from an angle kind of like Soma but with a 'flawed' teleporter.
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow also has a big theme of digital simulations with the added twist that you may have to have your cognition altered to not freak out about being in a simulation and some weird moral implications that has about using uploaded humans.
Fall, or Dodge in Hell by Neil Stephenson also does a lot with the idea of simulated minds and even the kind of brain scan booting directly related to this article. It even puts a funny bow on the whole Baroque Cycle/Cryptonomicon semi shared universe with an appearance and story for the mysterious Enoch Root.
I think others in this thread gave a few compelling answers to the "why". Another interesting, to me, follow-up question is: how do you stay "booted" after the first boot? Conversely, how do you make sure you are never booted it the first place?
I'd assume they would boot up some outstanding people who died in their prime, like the next Ramanujan, or the next Mozart to see what else they could have made if their life span was longer. Assuming curiosity, opportunity and wonder still exists.
Because it’s a copy of you and you’ll stay dead either way, so there’s no moral or altruistic reason to boot up a copy.
To the article’s premise where this technology constitutes resurrection, I’m not convinced that a post-neural-cloning society in the year 3000 would lack the automated resource access to flip the question to “why not?”
We’re already seeing population growth slowing or reversing in populations with mere modern levels of abundance, and we don’t even have The Good Matrix yet! And that’s basically paired with the tech that enables digital mind clones - fully digital interfaces between mind and sensory data / bodily functions, so you can make a virtual world to exist in instead of wiring up a bunch of prosthetics. So you won’t need any non-fungible material resources to satisfy your every material desire.
Atoms have no identity. There is no concept of a "copy" of you. You only exist as a fleeting configuration of particles that's already distinct to the you remember from yesterday. If they boot you up, you'll be yourself in the same way in which you'll be yourself tomorrow.
What happens when two copies of the same person are made?
What is the minimum divergence between these “fleeting configurations” before the copy stops being a copy and is someone else? What is the minimum convergence before I become you?
Is it “you” if it’s a copy of your orientation 20 years ago instead of your last actual configuration?
I aim to live my life such that there is 0 reason to "boot me back up". All knowledge and intuition I have should be written down or otherwise conferred.
In 1000 years, computing is going to be absurdly, magically, mythically cheap.
If we're still in a position where the cost of booting someone up is a constraint, it's probably not a future you want to participate in.
If progress continues, laws will be developed to mandate minimum compute resources available for simulants, like a basic right to life for biological people.
The basic premise of the article, "Given that running a brain scan still costs money in 1000 years, why should anyone bring you back from the dead? Why should anyone boot you up?"
The answer is, something has gone awfully wrong. Understanding cognition and the architecture of human minds has several parallel tracks, some of which should result in what amounts to brute-forcing the problem. It's not unreasonable to expect several of those tracks to converge on a solution within the next 5 decades - breakthroughs could significantly speed up that timeline, and molecular scale imaging is being pursued for many reasons beyond brain science.
This is a bit like asking "what if we only have ICE cars in 1000 years?"
Technology - especially compute - is on a persistent trajectory, and within 150-200 years, the atomic wizards and tamers of rock lightning should have us to about the halfway point of the Landauer limit, in terms of compute efficiency. It's hard to imagine things will come to a screeching halt, and we'll just live with early 2020s chip technology, give or take, for the rest of human history. We could even optimistically hope that we'd have overcome our collective nimbyist anti-nuclear idiocy and were on totally renewable and nuclear energy, with a thriving, nascent spaceborne civilization working out in the solar system.
You'd fire people up because you could - because there will be people who just like to explore the old stuff, because unless something goes wrong, treating brain scan simulants is the moral and humane thing to do. Boredom, curiousity, legislative mandate, slave labor to populate your torment nexus, friends to hang out with in your virtual paradise - there are as many reasons as there are humans. Imagine the heists and treasure hunting possibilities... just spin up the bank CEO and get his passwords and knowledge of the system, or spin up the space pirate for the coordinates of the golden asteroid.
I think a better question would be "since it cost time and effort to scan a brain, and this person underwent the procedure willingly, isn't the only moral answer to boot them up?" By the time it becomes a meaningful question, the operational overhead should be trivial. Strange things will come up, like how many copies you're allowed to run, globally and locally, what and how you are to contribute back to society, if at all, what the rights and responsibilities and citizenship and political valence, and all those things. I can't fathom a future where it's ever a matter of "hey, there's a 1000 year old copy of a person here, but nah, we're so bored and jaded, why even bother."
All of these are based on an article of faith that we'll keep pushing when we're already falling behind Moore's law and pushing towards sci-fi level thinking dust. There's an alternative path that's far less optimistic where it's still expensive but doable and there are places booting people up under horrible simulated conditions either for fun or for weird edge case tasks where sub sapient algorithms just don't get the job done.
I would not take universal personhood protections for uploaded minds for granted for example and the more universally accessible the ability to run an upload is the more likely it is some version of you will wind up in some religious nut's hell simulation just for violating some arcane rule you never heard of.
BORING!
The work I do is appreciated by those around me. It isn't world changing, it doesn't need to be. I am happy doing my work, other people are happy with the work I do. When I am done with work I am done with work and do the mediocore stuff that also makes me happy. When the time comes, I'll shut down and that will be enough. Thank you very much.