In reference to your reply below: Whew!! Now I know why we need metaphors. However your explanation is still metaphysical. If symptoms disappear,that does not connote healing. In many cases symptoms disappear after sham surgery at the same frequency as active structural modification. Your comments still refer to unobserved, inferred phenomena.
The west may have reached or surpassed the optimum level of "individuality" vs "collective." Who knows. Certainly the west has had an overwhelming influence by now on the east or other non-western cultures. It seems the creativity that looks to be associated with inidividualtiy has been a major driver of that.
I'd imagine the west will also adopt eastern and other values as time moves forward and as those values seem important. Whether it does or not, the future successful societies will mostly be an amalgam of the best (in a surviving-selection) sense of the cultures of today.
Is your concern because you percieve yourself playing for the western team and so you want to exhort "us" to win faster?
The fear of individual death, the high value we place on our own life, is almost certainly something we evolved to have. That is, our species is descended from those who had this feature, those who didn't have this feature in sufficient strength died off.
I am surprised that some of the rationalist community vaunts this fear of death to a supreme level. If it is just something we have because of genetic selection suitable to our ancestral environment, why organize things like cryonics around amping it to the nth degree. Isn't it more likely, if there are some sort of "meta-values," that we would want to de-emphasize the drives we have that were obviously put there for evolutionary purposes?
An acceptance of cryonics is a sort of touchstone, secret handshake, "yes you have figured it out" thing among a lot of the rationalist community. To me, on the other hand, it seems similar to a bunch of people raised with doses of heroin in their mother's milk, vaunting their acquisition of and dependence on heroin to a supreme level of importance in their rational calculations, because "obviously" rationality should serve volition and I really really REALLY want my next hit.
Meant to share this link in another thread, but I only found it now. About differing fertility between educated and uneducated women in the United States:
Imagine you make a copy of yourself and then get a bump to the head and lose the memories of one week, while the copy retains them. Now there are two beings that look the same, one has one week of memories more, that’s the original, you.
It's not that difficult to figure out what I (as well as most people) mean by "you"/"me". Suppose I let someone make a scan of my brain, and then store the data and create a copy of myself with it, a week later. Now there are two beings that look the same, one has one week of memories more, that's the original, me. If you don't believe that, then how about I, the one with more memories, kill the other being. Did I kill myself? Of course not, I'll live to tell it and witnesses can confirm my memories of the week between the scan and the creation of the copy are true. If the copy kills me then he can still walk the earth and beyond satisfying my ego that wouldn't do much good for my dead corpse.
The point is that you still are not the one controlling the body of the copy.The hidden complexity lies in the personal pronoun "you", which you use as if it were well-defined, while it can, in fact, be defined in various ways. I contend that ordinary biological survival is equivalent to creating future copies, but you can define your own concept of personal identity almost arbitrarily. You can exclude digital copies, or you can exclude revival after brain death (ruling out the usefulness of cryonics), or you can exclude people who live on Mondays. It's arbitrary. I count all my future biological versions, as well as digital versions that aren't transformed to a point of unrecognizability.
No supernatural premise is needed, I could just as well have said being dead would mean me going to oblivion. The point is that you still are not the one controlling the body of the copy.
I don't share your supernatural premises. But more importantly, if several concurrent copies of myself would be created in the future, then from my perspective before the split, I'd all count them equally as me. So assuming an supernatural afterlife as well as a digital reproduction of my connectome, I'd simply have two concurrent future perspectives that would both be me. I find it harder to predict how my future perspectives would see each other, as they exist simultaneously since that doesn't occur in normal life. But I see any future version of me as a copy, even those resulting from the normal biological survival processes. When you eat food, you effectively force it to become a part of a future copy of yours. I include those in my identity concept.
I am not aware of the scanning technologies, and how fast progress in this field could be. But there are multiple advantages over cryonics, including the option to scan people while they are still alive, store their information redundantly to avoid loss, and possibly easier storage due to the completely digital nature of the data. I don't have spare money to invest in this field, but if I were a Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, or anyone with disposable income, this would be a promising field to greatly increase the odds for personal survival. From my layperson's perspective, it seems entirely conceivable that we get the required resolution to save personal identity by 2030 or so.
Apply the "afterlife test". If there is an afterlife from which the dead look upon our world than me being alive means me walking around in this world and me being dead means me being in the afterlife looking down. If a copy is made of my brain after which my brain is destroyed than I'll be looking down at a copy impersonating me, so clearly I'm dead, of course other people may not know I have been replaced with a copy, but I would know.
Why don't cryonics folk focus on innovations in brain scanning technology? It seems that a high-precision scan of the brain is far more promising in preserving the relevant connectome information than physical freezing of the organ, even if no current technology can make sense of the data.
How far away are we from scanning human brains precisely enough to store the person's individuality on digital media, e.g. for later reconstruction?
I don't know what to call this ability, but Robin is the type who can put meaningful, useful insights into a few words. It makes me wonder, why doesn't he get a Twitters account? Wrong in-group signaling? No interest? Whatever.
(Apparently he made one years ago but does not use it.)
How do you want to define "healing"? By any reasonable definition, placebos "work", but inconsistently.
In reference to your reply below: Whew!! Now I know why we need metaphors. However your explanation is still metaphysical. If symptoms disappear,that does not connote healing. In many cases symptoms disappear after sham surgery at the same frequency as active structural modification. Your comments still refer to unobserved, inferred phenomena.
The west may have reached or surpassed the optimum level of "individuality" vs "collective." Who knows. Certainly the west has had an overwhelming influence by now on the east or other non-western cultures. It seems the creativity that looks to be associated with inidividualtiy has been a major driver of that.
I'd imagine the west will also adopt eastern and other values as time moves forward and as those values seem important. Whether it does or not, the future successful societies will mostly be an amalgam of the best (in a surviving-selection) sense of the cultures of today.
Is your concern because you percieve yourself playing for the western team and so you want to exhort "us" to win faster?
The fear of individual death, the high value we place on our own life, is almost certainly something we evolved to have. That is, our species is descended from those who had this feature, those who didn't have this feature in sufficient strength died off.
I am surprised that some of the rationalist community vaunts this fear of death to a supreme level. If it is just something we have because of genetic selection suitable to our ancestral environment, why organize things like cryonics around amping it to the nth degree. Isn't it more likely, if there are some sort of "meta-values," that we would want to de-emphasize the drives we have that were obviously put there for evolutionary purposes?
An acceptance of cryonics is a sort of touchstone, secret handshake, "yes you have figured it out" thing among a lot of the rationalist community. To me, on the other hand, it seems similar to a bunch of people raised with doses of heroin in their mother's milk, vaunting their acquisition of and dependence on heroin to a supreme level of importance in their rational calculations, because "obviously" rationality should serve volition and I really really REALLY want my next hit.
Meant to share this link in another thread, but I only found it now. About differing fertility between educated and uneducated women in the United States:
http://www.feministe.us/blo...
Imagine you make a copy of yourself and then get a bump to the head and lose the memories of one week, while the copy retains them. Now there are two beings that look the same, one has one week of memories more, that’s the original, you.
@Dremora
It's not that difficult to figure out what I (as well as most people) mean by "you"/"me". Suppose I let someone make a scan of my brain, and then store the data and create a copy of myself with it, a week later. Now there are two beings that look the same, one has one week of memories more, that's the original, me. If you don't believe that, then how about I, the one with more memories, kill the other being. Did I kill myself? Of course not, I'll live to tell it and witnesses can confirm my memories of the week between the scan and the creation of the copy are true. If the copy kills me then he can still walk the earth and beyond satisfying my ego that wouldn't do much good for my dead corpse.
The point is that you still are not the one controlling the body of the copy.The hidden complexity lies in the personal pronoun "you", which you use as if it were well-defined, while it can, in fact, be defined in various ways. I contend that ordinary biological survival is equivalent to creating future copies, but you can define your own concept of personal identity almost arbitrarily. You can exclude digital copies, or you can exclude revival after brain death (ruling out the usefulness of cryonics), or you can exclude people who live on Mondays. It's arbitrary. I count all my future biological versions, as well as digital versions that aren't transformed to a point of unrecognizability.
No supernatural premise is needed, I could just as well have said being dead would mean me going to oblivion. The point is that you still are not the one controlling the body of the copy.
I don't share your supernatural premises. But more importantly, if several concurrent copies of myself would be created in the future, then from my perspective before the split, I'd all count them equally as me. So assuming an supernatural afterlife as well as a digital reproduction of my connectome, I'd simply have two concurrent future perspectives that would both be me. I find it harder to predict how my future perspectives would see each other, as they exist simultaneously since that doesn't occur in normal life. But I see any future version of me as a copy, even those resulting from the normal biological survival processes. When you eat food, you effectively force it to become a part of a future copy of yours. I include those in my identity concept.
I am not aware of the scanning technologies, and how fast progress in this field could be. But there are multiple advantages over cryonics, including the option to scan people while they are still alive, store their information redundantly to avoid loss, and possibly easier storage due to the completely digital nature of the data. I don't have spare money to invest in this field, but if I were a Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, or anyone with disposable income, this would be a promising field to greatly increase the odds for personal survival. From my layperson's perspective, it seems entirely conceivable that we get the required resolution to save personal identity by 2030 or so.
@Dremora
Apply the "afterlife test". If there is an afterlife from which the dead look upon our world than me being alive means me walking around in this world and me being dead means me being in the afterlife looking down. If a copy is made of my brain after which my brain is destroyed than I'll be looking down at a copy impersonating me, so clearly I'm dead, of course other people may not know I have been replaced with a copy, but I would know.
This depends on your conception of personal identity. I'd count it.
Because a copy is a copy. It's not immortality when they just make a copy of you and let you die.
Why don't cryonics folk focus on innovations in brain scanning technology? It seems that a high-precision scan of the brain is far more promising in preserving the relevant connectome information than physical freezing of the organ, even if no current technology can make sense of the data.
How far away are we from scanning human brains precisely enough to store the person's individuality on digital media, e.g. for later reconstruction?
I don't know what to call this ability, but Robin is the type who can put meaningful, useful insights into a few words. It makes me wonder, why doesn't he get a Twitters account? Wrong in-group signaling? No interest? Whatever.
There's a defunct parody Hanson, though.