
What a Digital Afterlife Might Be Like - diodorus
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/07/what-a-digital-afterlife-would-be-like/491105/?single_page=true
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danellis
If you copy your brain digitally and let that run while you yourself die,
there's no benefit to yourself. You still die. You don't get to experience
longevity. What would live on is a copy of yourself that believes itself to be
the same person as you were. Your yourself would have no continuity of
thought.

What would be needed is some way of merging yourself with a digital replica of
your brain while you're still alive. I can't even begin to imagine what that
would be like.

~~~
grondilu
One version dies, the other lives on. The problem is that many people think
only the one that dies deserved to be called "you".

To me a copy that "believes it is the same person as you were" is as good as
it gets. How would you tell the difference?

Every morning when I wake up I am who I am because I believe so. If someone
had scanned me last night while I was asleep and created a digital copy of my
mind in a virtual, identical world, I wouldn't know. And if I was told someone
was there and was capable of doing it, I could not even be sure he did not
(seems like the same assertion, but it's not quite).

People who say "it's just a copy" are suggesting there is a difference between
two things they have absolutely no way to tell apart, not even in a thought
experiment.

They're chasing ghosts.

~~~
zyxley
> The problem is that many people think only the one that dies deserved to be
> called "you".

I see this as "well, yes, obviously, because there's no continuity of identity
between the two".

If I die and a perfect copy lives on, the copy is well-suited to preserve my
legacy, but it's still not me.

~~~
sparky_z
What do you think "you" are exactly?

* Are you a specific arrangement of atoms. If so, then you are constantly dying and being reborn.

* Are you a specific arrangement of neurons? If so you die and are reborn every time a memory is created or a brain cell dies.

* Are you an uninterrupted process of consciousness that evolves from one state to another? If so, you die and are reborn every time you fall asleep.

* Are you your soul? Give me a rigorous definition of soul.

Here's a question: What if, instead of a digital copy, an exact physical copy
of your body and brain was constructed (down to the subatomic level) and then
I woke you both up at once. Is one of you you and the other not? What if I
didn't tell you which one was which?

"Identity" is a human abstraction, not a fundamental physical quality. We're
examining hypothetical areas where that abstraction leaks.

~~~
netsharc
I am currently replying to you. My eyes see my phone screen, my hands feel the
phone vibrating, my brain is thinking about the words to type. If I go into a
red box that makes a copy of me and puts him in a blue box, and we are
awakened, my brain would say "According to my sense of sight, I'm in a red
box.". There is another person in a blue box, which objectively is me as well,
but subjectively..?

If I go to bed and my copy goes out to party, I can't say I experienced a
party. Friends can say netsharc experienced a party, since the copy will
behave 100% like me. If they ask "is that really you?", my copy will believe
he is, he has my/his memory, etc... even if he asks himself if he is me, he
will say yes. But I still would have missed the party!

Another theory asks you to consider this scenario: every week/month, they
replace 1% of your brain with its equivalent, identically functioning
electronic part. After 1 week, your brain is 99% biological and 1% electronic.
Surely you'll still feel like the normal you. What happens after 100 weeks?
And what will happen if the data in that electronic brain is uploaded to the
cloud/a robot? Or copied to another e-brain?

~~~
grondilu
> If I go to bed and my copy goes out to party, I can't say I experienced a
> party.

Your copy can. Her experience is as real as yours, and from her point of view,
everything happened exactly as if her consciousness had been transferred from
the original body to the copy. To me she's just as legitimate as you are to
use the word "I" : both points of view are two different future versions of
what was "you" before the copy was created. I don't privilege any.

------
erikpukinskis
I don't think it will be a brain copying thing. I think we will have implants
that connect us to a cyber body and a cyber neural network. We will come to
rely on that part of our "brain" and we will spend part of our time in that
body.

As we age, we will spend more and more time attending to our cyber half. As it
grows, our flesh half will atrophy. The brain cells will quiet, our muscles
will grow weak.

Eventually our heart will stop, long after we stopped using it for much. What
is left will be purely digital, and to our friends it will seem like nothing
has changed. But it won't be a clone. It will be more like a metamorphosis.
The caterpillar gave way to the butterfly. It didn't die, but its body was
used up and transformed into something else.

I do wonder if it will feel like death. In that moment, when we draw our
attention back to our last remaining brain cells, and our last remaining heart
beats, will our cyborg half really feel like part of us, or will there still
be a sense that the machine within us is Other?

I suspect not. I suspect we will have long since spread our identity across
the divide. But maybe that is a choice we will all have to make. Whether to
see it as death or birth.

~~~
jrussino
If you haven't yet read it, I highly recommend Greg Egan's short story
"Learning to Be Me"
([http://will.tip.dhappy.org/revolution/Technoanarchist/plan/....](http://will.tip.dhappy.org/revolution/Technoanarchist/plan/.../book/by/Greg%20Egan/Learning%20To%20Be%20Me/)),
a story with a similar take on this topic.

~~~
zyxley
That's not really the same idea, though. The parent post is proposing more or
less a ship-of-Theseus approach, while "Learning to Be Me" is more "make a new
ship that's identical to the first one, then quietly destroy the first one and
pretend the second one is a continuation of the first one".

------
grondilu
The thing about the so-called "mind upload" is that it requires a particular
view on concepts such as death and consciousness in order to consider that
those who would undergo it would escape death in some sense, but ironically
such view also implies a certain disregard towards death so that it becomes
much less of a concern than it is for people who do not share this view.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
This idea of a soul that can actually be independent of the body is something
that has been taught for millennia by various religions. It is interesting
when science comes up with a previously religious idea.

Actually, viewing the brain as hardware, and the self/soul as software running
on the brain, makes sense of a lot of theology.

~~~
throwanem
Not really. If destroying the body destroys the soul, it's not a soul, but a
mind.

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kilroy123
Ok so if we can download our brains into some kind of system. Could we speed
up time in there? What if we could live "one day" in a matter of milliseconds?

I imagine a world where we have armies of dead scientists working on tough
problems for us, in a simulation or fake world. They could have hundreds of
years to figure out solutions. Then report back to use in the real world. All
in the matter days.

I could imagine some turmoil in this fake world though. Some would want to die
or leave. Others wouldn't see the point in helping us in the real world.
Fascinating idea.

------
rogerbinns
Tom Scott did an excellent Welcome to the (After)life video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E)

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cicero
I think this interview with Ray Kurzweil[1] does a good job articulating this
question. I know Kurzweil can get way out there, but in this case I think he
makes sense.

1: [https://youtu.be/v3f4pQOHKPA](https://youtu.be/v3f4pQOHKPA)

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jxramos
Wow, completely not what I thought. I thought it was going to be some
commentary on something like a virtual memorial ([http://virtual-
memorials.com/](http://virtual-memorials.com/)) or facebook accounts of the
deceased keeping the memory of someone alive long since they past.

~~~
kilroy123
I thought the same thing. I was very pleased though.

------
mklim
Whedon's "Dollhouse" series was a pretty good take on this topic. The show
opened with the premise that brains could be saved, generated, and overwritten
digitally. The focus of the show was on a company that hired people to upload
their consciousnesses to a drive, and then exist as "dolls" that had their
minds written over with both synthesized and real consciousnesses and rented
out to clients by the hour, as whoever the clients wanted them to be. Did a
good job of exploring the broader implications of the tech from a relatively
narrow application of it. Impressive acting from the main cast as well, each
of the "dolls" had to demonstrate a huge range.

------
yarrel
See William Gibson's "The Winter Market", which deals with these issues in a
still-interesting way -

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter_Market](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter_Market)

------
structorg
Bureaucracy wants to live forever as technocracy. And maybe the ones selling
genetically modified food and intra-flesh GPS want to make it more acceptable.

~~~
throwanem
Consciousness wants to live forever because it can't conceive of a world in
which it doesn't exist - the thought is unthinkable and the idea is
frightening. Brain uploading seems like a solution to that problem, until you
realize there's no reason to assume that the uploaded copy once made is _me_
any more, and any number of excellent reasons to assume it isn't.

~~~
mbfg
How do you know that you are not now, a simulation? In fact, once we have the
technology to produce such a simulation, logically speaking, then, it is an
overwhelming probability that we are a simulation, given that, you have at
most one 'original' creature, and each subsequent creature can (eventually)
create an artificial universe with artificial beings, for some definition of
artificial. Thus you have (n-1)/n chances of being a simulation, which over
time, as n-> infinity, means a certainty.

Even our reasons for thinking we are 'real' are flimsy. We say we have our
senses! We open our eyes and see a blue sky and green grass. We reach down and
touch each individual blade of grass, surely not a simulation.

But even that is bogus. There is no such thing as a blue sky, or green grass.
That's all in your head. It's (at most) just different frequencies of energy.
Same goes for this 'touching' bit. You don't touch anything, you just (again
at most) have energy interactions.

So get used to it, you likely are a simulation.

~~~
jhbadger
I suspect people who believe in the "life is a simulation" have little
experience in running molecular dynamics simulations. Even simulating a
_single_ protein for a few microseconds takes a Linux cluster hours. The size
of a computer that could simulate every protein on earth (let alone every
other type of molecule) would be literally astronomical (as in larger than a
planet; and no, plausible improvements in technology really wouldn't shrink
that by much). Simulations of things like cities work because all the details
of molecules and cells aren't simulated. But we can measure all these things,
so either the simulation we are in is really that detailed, or, more
plausibly, we aren't in a simulation.

~~~
mbfg
how feasible something is, is irrelevant to this post. Ok, not feasible now.
I'll come back in 100,000 years. Is it feasible then? If so then the logic
still holds.

~~~
jhbadger
I'm talking feasibility _ever_. The absolute minimum hardware needed even in
100,000 years to simulate an atom in all its complexity would be more than one
atom. So it would as infeasible as making a map larger than the territory.

------
RockofStrength
If a copy is allowed to live on, the ego will no longer fear oblivion, as
nothing is lost in death.

