You are mostly the mind (software) that runs on the brain (hardware) in your head; your brain and body are tools supporting your mind. If our civilization doesn’t collapse but instead advances, we will eventually be able to move your mind into artificial hardware, making a “brain emulation”. With an artificial brain and body, you could live an immortal life, a life as vivid and meaningful as your life today, where you never need feel pain, disease, grime, and your body always looks and feels young and beautiful. That person might not be exactly you, but they could (at first) be as similar to you as the 2001 version of you was to you today. I describe this future world of brain emulations in great detail in my book
I have to wonder what cryonics' cryptocurrency obsessives will say when the Biden Administration responds to the Russia/Ukraine crisis by pushing for the outlawing of cryptocurrencies to punish financially Russia's rulers and billionaire oligarchs, and it can get enough other countries to go along with the ban.
Based on some rumors I've heard about Alcor lately, I wonder what living cryonicists are going to do if Alcor eventually sorts through its members' paperwork and decides that many, if not most, of the cryonauts it accepted years and decades earlier are retroactively underfunded. Then it removes their bodies and heads from the dewars to dispose of them with the goal of improving the organization's finances.
Eventually Alcor could wind up with only a few wealthy cryonauts in its custody who way overfunded their cryopreservations.
This would avoid a Chatsworth-style collapse of the organization, since Alcor could still have enough money to pay the bills. But it would betray the trust of all the throwaway cryonauts who joined Alcor in good faith and went into cryopreservation when they needed it at the agreed-upon funding of the time.
I'm asking you for a distinction between waking up the next morning ("dying daily"!), vs. the scan & emulation. You seem to intuitively want there to be a distinction, but you can't point to any concrete difference of importance. (And then you use unjustified emotional language like "little more", again without actually finding a difference.)
What if, instead of a mere 8 hour night, you were in a medical coma for a week -- or a month -- before re-awakening. Would that make a difference? What if, during the coma, you were operated on and had your limbs amputated and replaced with artificial legs and arms? And maybe a heart. Presumably you intuitively think that you're still "you".
The person you are today is not the person you were ten years ago. You have a lot in common with that past person -- but you're not the same.
There is no "soul" that stays fixed for your entire life, that is somehow lost in the scan & emulation. There is a very strong intuition for such a soul, but it is an illusion; it doesn't exist.
I mean cessation as in permanent cessation of that particular subject. If you die and someone later scans your brain and emulates you in a machine, then the subject that was in your body has been extinguished completely. There is now a new subject (or none in a p-zombie scenario?) in the emulation that has access to your memories, but that is of no help to the prior subject in your body, who is no longer. As for sleep, if the subject ("separate consciousness") who goes to sleep is not the same as the one that wakes up , then we are all dying and being replaced daily. Becoming "immortal" via an emulation is little more than a higher-resolution version of immortality through one's written record and legacy.
Well yeah, but given my overwhemingly strong preference for my consciousness not ending, I'm willing to err on the side of "Yes, the ship of Theseus is the same ship" rather than "ego is an illusion serving no purpose other than evolutionary fitness, guess I'm already dead lol"
Those worms are quite different from us but still close enough to be routinely used as model organism for a wide variety of experiments that are relevant to humans.
The fact that the information encoded in their neurons survives liquid nitrogen storage at least shows that no general characteristic of neurons gets in the way.
Sadly, we aren't even close to bringing small mammals from such low temperatures, but we do have experiments with small portions of mouse brain, and they seem to retain learned firing patterns. Still, only with whole organisms we can simply teach them a conduct and see if they remember it.
Liquid helium is useful for physics experiments, especially those involving quantum phenomena, but when it comes to biology liquid nitrogen is good enough for all practical purposes.
For starters, at LN2 temperature the tissue is firmly solid throughout, which isn't true for "frozen" tissue at milder temperatures, where diffusive phenomena still happen in the interstitial space between ice crystals, if any, or in the cryoprotected fluid in general unless it's chilled below the glass transition temperature, some -130ºC.
Then there's the temperature itself, with effects determined by the Arrhenius equation. For instance, one second at 37ºC equals more than 24 million years at liquid nitrogen temperature (-195.8ºC), as you can see in this analysis by Alcor:
Yes, those figures are even more mind-boggling with liquid helium, but it makes no difference for the purpose of cryonics. The relevant timescale is decades at best, quite possibly centuries, millennia at worst, not millions of years.
Mechanical vibrations aren't an issue, either. It's a solid block.
The main long-term source of damage are cosmic rays, but they only become a realistic concern after thousands of years, and the problem can be easily prevented through shielding.
I don't understand why you think it is "much weakened". Don't you have a "cessation of subjective experience" every single night, when you go to sleep? That doesn't seem important to you over decades of normal life. Why do you find it suddenly more important in this example?
I don't object to cryogenics: I have worries about its viability.
I don't much care for experiments on worms: too different from us.
The experiments on mammals so far involve short freezing periods and my worry is exactly that a time factor of 10^4 makes an important difference.
There's a reason we do many experiments at liquid helium temperatures instead of at liquid nitrogen temperature: with liquid nitrogen there is still a lot going on. Liquid nitrogen (or helium) doesn't impose a magical SF stasis field. Things keep changing slowly, not just due to thermal noise, but also due to e.g. mechanical vibrations. Sufficiently slowly? That's an important question to ask, right?
That single cells can survive freezing for weeks or years doesn't help much. We know cells have a lot of mechanisms for coping with damage. But the brain isn't an individual cell and consciousness isn't just individual cells doing their thing: it's those cells doing their thing in concert. And my question is whether we have sufficient evidence that the musicians can pick up where they left or whether they're likely to have lost the melody.
I have a better sense of what you were saying now, thank you. If there is no continuity of the conscious subject from moment to moment, I would think Hanson's case to desire immortality is much weakened - all that would be attained is that a person continues to live unendingly who shares my memories & opinions, rather than a prevention of cessation of my subjective existence (because my subjective existence is already vanishing and being replaced moment by moment)
You're trying to preserve an intuitive sense of "you" that has no basis in reality. There would be 101 "descendents" of the original person, each independent, each legitimately a separate and equally valid "you". They of course would have separate consciousness and separate sensory inputs. Every one of them would be different. No one of them would be any more or less "you" than any other one.
("You" is not a stable thing in time anyway. The "you" who wakes up in the morning is not exactly the same as the "you" that went to sleep last night.)
I don't understand what you're getting at. What if your original body was kept alive but I scanned your brain and created 100 emulations based off of it - would "you" the conscious subject reading this now, the one in the original body, have access to the consciousness and simulated sensory inputs of all the copies? If not, then the copies are not "you".
Answers to those questions about how consciousness and identity work exist in ultimate reality. Which proves there is an ultimate reality which decides whether the "me" that went to sleep the previous night is the same as the "me" that wakes up. There is a fact of the matter which is separate from this world. We can never find the answer in this world, even in principle, because the entire universe might have come into existence ten seconds ago and there is no way we could tell the difference. We can only speculate, what is ultimate reality? But we know it exists, precisely because of the indeterminacy of this question in principle, which is nothing less than proof of an ultimate reality that can't be a simulation either.
It is quite startling for a Robert Anton Wilson fan to read this blog post, as many of Robin's arguments in favor of cryonics are identical to sentences Wilson wrote about 40 years ago.
One of Wilson's best-known books, "Cosmic Trigger 1: The Final Secret of the Illuminati" describes the brutal murder of Wilson's daughter, and his attempt to give her another chance at life by getting her head frozen, with the help of Wilson's friends, who also were interested in cryonics.
I have to wonder what cryonics' cryptocurrency obsessives will say when the Biden Administration responds to the Russia/Ukraine crisis by pushing for the outlawing of cryptocurrencies to punish financially Russia's rulers and billionaire oligarchs, and it can get enough other countries to go along with the ban.
Based on some rumors I've heard about Alcor lately, I wonder what living cryonicists are going to do if Alcor eventually sorts through its members' paperwork and decides that many, if not most, of the cryonauts it accepted years and decades earlier are retroactively underfunded. Then it removes their bodies and heads from the dewars to dispose of them with the goal of improving the organization's finances.
Eventually Alcor could wind up with only a few wealthy cryonauts in its custody who way overfunded their cryopreservations.
This would avoid a Chatsworth-style collapse of the organization, since Alcor could still have enough money to pay the bills. But it would betray the trust of all the throwaway cryonauts who joined Alcor in good faith and went into cryopreservation when they needed it at the agreed-upon funding of the time.
I'm asking you for a distinction between waking up the next morning ("dying daily"!), vs. the scan & emulation. You seem to intuitively want there to be a distinction, but you can't point to any concrete difference of importance. (And then you use unjustified emotional language like "little more", again without actually finding a difference.)
What if, instead of a mere 8 hour night, you were in a medical coma for a week -- or a month -- before re-awakening. Would that make a difference? What if, during the coma, you were operated on and had your limbs amputated and replaced with artificial legs and arms? And maybe a heart. Presumably you intuitively think that you're still "you".
The person you are today is not the person you were ten years ago. You have a lot in common with that past person -- but you're not the same.
There is no "soul" that stays fixed for your entire life, that is somehow lost in the scan & emulation. There is a very strong intuition for such a soul, but it is an illusion; it doesn't exist.
I mean cessation as in permanent cessation of that particular subject. If you die and someone later scans your brain and emulates you in a machine, then the subject that was in your body has been extinguished completely. There is now a new subject (or none in a p-zombie scenario?) in the emulation that has access to your memories, but that is of no help to the prior subject in your body, who is no longer. As for sleep, if the subject ("separate consciousness") who goes to sleep is not the same as the one that wakes up , then we are all dying and being replaced daily. Becoming "immortal" via an emulation is little more than a higher-resolution version of immortality through one's written record and legacy.
Well yeah, but given my overwhemingly strong preference for my consciousness not ending, I'm willing to err on the side of "Yes, the ship of Theseus is the same ship" rather than "ego is an illusion serving no purpose other than evolutionary fitness, guess I'm already dead lol"
Well if your logic bears out it's probably already happening so, might as well not worry about it :)
This is an epistemic hazard, which is part of the reason why you don't see it discussed I think
Those worms are quite different from us but still close enough to be routinely used as model organism for a wide variety of experiments that are relevant to humans.
The fact that the information encoded in their neurons survives liquid nitrogen storage at least shows that no general characteristic of neurons gets in the way.
Sadly, we aren't even close to bringing small mammals from such low temperatures, but we do have experiments with small portions of mouse brain, and they seem to retain learned firing patterns. Still, only with whole organisms we can simply teach them a conduct and see if they remember it.
Liquid helium is useful for physics experiments, especially those involving quantum phenomena, but when it comes to biology liquid nitrogen is good enough for all practical purposes.
For starters, at LN2 temperature the tissue is firmly solid throughout, which isn't true for "frozen" tissue at milder temperatures, where diffusive phenomena still happen in the interstitial space between ice crystals, if any, or in the cryoprotected fluid in general unless it's chilled below the glass transition temperature, some -130ºC.
Then there's the temperature itself, with effects determined by the Arrhenius equation. For instance, one second at 37ºC equals more than 24 million years at liquid nitrogen temperature (-195.8ºC), as you can see in this analysis by Alcor:
https://www.alcor.org/libra...
Yes, those figures are even more mind-boggling with liquid helium, but it makes no difference for the purpose of cryonics. The relevant timescale is decades at best, quite possibly centuries, millennia at worst, not millions of years.
Mechanical vibrations aren't an issue, either. It's a solid block.
The main long-term source of damage are cosmic rays, but they only become a realistic concern after thousands of years, and the problem can be easily prevented through shielding.
I don't understand why you think it is "much weakened". Don't you have a "cessation of subjective experience" every single night, when you go to sleep? That doesn't seem important to you over decades of normal life. Why do you find it suddenly more important in this example?
> There are no chemical reactions at cryogenic temperatures.
There are are, but e.g. 10^6 or even 10^10 less than at room temperatures. Is that sufficiently low if we add 10^4 in time?
> Electrical activity in the brain also halts during general anesthesia
It absolutely does not 'halt'. The patterns associated with conscious experience halt. There's still a lot left.
I don't object to cryogenics: I have worries about its viability.
I don't much care for experiments on worms: too different from us.
The experiments on mammals so far involve short freezing periods and my worry is exactly that a time factor of 10^4 makes an important difference.
There's a reason we do many experiments at liquid helium temperatures instead of at liquid nitrogen temperature: with liquid nitrogen there is still a lot going on. Liquid nitrogen (or helium) doesn't impose a magical SF stasis field. Things keep changing slowly, not just due to thermal noise, but also due to e.g. mechanical vibrations. Sufficiently slowly? That's an important question to ask, right?
That single cells can survive freezing for weeks or years doesn't help much. We know cells have a lot of mechanisms for coping with damage. But the brain isn't an individual cell and consciousness isn't just individual cells doing their thing: it's those cells doing their thing in concert. And my question is whether we have sufficient evidence that the musicians can pick up where they left or whether they're likely to have lost the melody.
Yes, I explicitly mention that situation/condition and ask whether cryogenic freezing for decades isn't quite different.
I have a better sense of what you were saying now, thank you. If there is no continuity of the conscious subject from moment to moment, I would think Hanson's case to desire immortality is much weakened - all that would be attained is that a person continues to live unendingly who shares my memories & opinions, rather than a prevention of cessation of my subjective existence (because my subjective existence is already vanishing and being replaced moment by moment)
You're trying to preserve an intuitive sense of "you" that has no basis in reality. There would be 101 "descendents" of the original person, each independent, each legitimately a separate and equally valid "you". They of course would have separate consciousness and separate sensory inputs. Every one of them would be different. No one of them would be any more or less "you" than any other one.
("You" is not a stable thing in time anyway. The "you" who wakes up in the morning is not exactly the same as the "you" that went to sleep last night.)
I don't understand what you're getting at. What if your original body was kept alive but I scanned your brain and created 100 emulations based off of it - would "you" the conscious subject reading this now, the one in the original body, have access to the consciousness and simulated sensory inputs of all the copies? If not, then the copies are not "you".
Answers to those questions about how consciousness and identity work exist in ultimate reality. Which proves there is an ultimate reality which decides whether the "me" that went to sleep the previous night is the same as the "me" that wakes up. There is a fact of the matter which is separate from this world. We can never find the answer in this world, even in principle, because the entire universe might have come into existence ten seconds ago and there is no way we could tell the difference. We can only speculate, what is ultimate reality? But we know it exists, precisely because of the indeterminacy of this question in principle, which is nothing less than proof of an ultimate reality that can't be a simulation either.
It is quite startling for a Robert Anton Wilson fan to read this blog post, as many of Robin's arguments in favor of cryonics are identical to sentences Wilson wrote about 40 years ago.
One of Wilson's best-known books, "Cosmic Trigger 1: The Final Secret of the Illuminati" describes the brutal murder of Wilson's daughter, and his attempt to give her another chance at life by getting her head frozen, with the help of Wilson's friends, who also were interested in cryonics.