Brain mapping

That assumes awareness during the process, or awareness during death, which there is no guarantee of.

I consider it a matter of perspective. The copy is not you because, from your perspective, you're still in your organic body. If I died, I wouldn't want my loved ones treating the copy's existence as my own continued existence. The copy would initially believe it was you, but it would either realize that it is a second person or go into denial. I would still consider it a person, because it would have all the same emotions and thoughts as one.

This is from the perspective of someone who does not believe in an afterlife or a "soul", to be clear.

edited 10th May '12 7:15:00 AM by RTaco

I would rather say that making a copy generates two "instances" of you, one in your physical body and one in some sort of simulated environment. Then by interacting with their respective environments, the two copies diverge, and become two different individuals — both of whom have the same right of claiming your previous history as "their own", but who are not the same person anymore.

But if your body was destroyed, and at the same time your configuration state was recorded with sufficient precision, and then — not necessarily immediately after, that really doesn't matter — they started running the simulation of you from your last state, then I think that the simulation would be you.

It's really no different from pausing a program, saving its state, then moving to another computer and starting again from the same point.

assuming it worked as intended, it would have all the memories of you, and might even believe itself to be you, because from its perspective nothing much would have changed.

YOU however would have essentially committed suicide-by-elective-brain-deactivation.

What is this ME who would have committed suicide? It is clear that it is not the collection of my atoms, since that changes during my life; and it cannot be my continuous flow of consciousness either, since that can get interrupted temporarily by coma (or even by non-REM sleep) without that posing any problem from the continuation of my identity.

The only way in which I can make any sense of the concept of ME is by assuming that it is some property of the configuration of my mind and my body, one that evolves through time; and then, if the simulation takes my "last save state" and continues from there, I am the simulation.

edited 10th May '12 7:32:10 AM by Carciofus

I imagine your continuous flow of consciousnesses is what they're referring to. Yes, that would technically mean 'you' may be dieing every time you enter NREM sleep, although you can apparently still dream during NREM sleep, so its kind of up in the air, for me at least.

Also, avoiding the whole "suicide by uploading your mind" thing is fairly trivial.

Step 1: Exchange your organic brain for a machine one (piece by piece, if you wish to be sure its actually 'you' that's being transferred).

Step 2: Spread (not upload, spread, as in connecting your machine mind with another computer) your consciousness onto a computer, therefore creating a sort of mini-Hive Mind.

Step 3: Deactivate/turn off your physical body (personally, I'd prefer to keep operating my body, but whatever, to each is their own).

You'll notice that your 'continuity of consciousness' is kept throughout the process. Its a bit more difficult than some people are willing to put up with, admittedly, but it can still be done.

Hmmm: still doesn't address possible organ-memory. (Note, I say "possible".)

The heart and very definitely the spinal chord at least has some play in the whole central nervous system's wiring. Copying just the brain and running the resulting simulated personalties (ye gads, that sounds close to "slaves" in my head) might go some way towards clearing up the degree of interconnectivity. But, I'd bet it'd prove some to be rather vital.

So... have carefully manufactured spinal chords on stand-by, eh?

And, yeah: the endocrine system cannot be ruled out. Just having a snap-shot scan would probably not indicate exactly how the brain reacts under different neurochemical conditions, as each individual's responses vary slightly even down to the individual synapse-level. It all depends on how sensitive various dendrites are to neurochemical bonds. And, that can depend on genetics. Amongst other factors. Unless you can factor in protein bonds, you're stymied when it comes to duplicating accurate thought and memory processes.

You might get an intelligence based on a specific person, but it wouldn't actually represent them for very long: no messy chemical-trap of a body to go with.

So: any brain-scan would, to me, only be yet another identity-proving gimmick, nothing more. Thankfully.

edited 10th May '12 12:38:45 PM by Euodiachloris

Unless the digital copy also had a digital simulation of the endocrine system. Given how complicated the brain itself is, that's not exactly a huge step past full brain mapping.

In short: to get a decent copy of a personality... you'd more than likely have to digitally map every system they have. And, it still would pretty much be a snap-shot from when the scan was taken.

I still fail to see why the continuity of the flow of consciousness is necessary to preserve identity. I mean, the neurons run at about 200Hz — two hundred operations per second. It's all a discrete process anyway.

That's the way I'd look at it. It'd be an exceedingly similar twin that I wouldn't have any right to be a dick to, but it wouldn't be me.

Well, imagine that a perfect duplicate of you is created. Now somebody turns to you and tells you that they're going to kill you against your will, even though it will be via a painless method. Your loved ones will never find out that you died. I don't know about you, but I certainly would not consider that equivalent to my own continued existence.

edited 10th May '12 4:21:09 PM by RTaco

Well, my instincts are geared towards the preservation of the current instance of myself; but this is an instinctual reaction, nothing more.

In that scenario, the only problem is that if the duplicate is created while I still exist, I and him would immediately start growing different because of different experiential data and so on, quickly becoming two different persons — I'm not sure about how quickly, but probably very much so.

If you changed the order of the things — if I were killed, then my brain was mapped and simulated starting from its last state — then this would not be issue, and, I think, the simulation would truly be me. By the way, that the fact that one can run more than one simulation is not a problem: if someone ran 100 simulations of me, they would clearly grow to become distinct people — but all of them could make the claim that they have been me in the past. And they would all be right.

All of this is just a thought experiment, of course: the technology is a long way away from this.

edited 10th May '12 11:55:35 PM by Carciofus