
The Hayworth-Miller 2019 Debate About Brain Preservation - ogennadi
https://brainslab.wordpress.com/2020/09/11/archiving-the-hayworth-miller-2019-debate-about-brain-preservation/
======
russfink
What if consciousness requires an active synapse loop to be maintained, kind
of like a magnetic field, with little hysteresis eddies etc, but one that if
it loses all power, it disappears forever?

~~~
ogennadi
Hi @russfink. That can't be the case since, as mentioned in the debate, there
are medical procedures [1] where a person's neural activity ceases and the
patients recover their (long-term) memories

[1]
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001346...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0013469489900333)

~~~
ralfd
Hm. The cessation of electrical activity is just that which is measured on
scalp EEG; ie, we can only really be certain that the most superficial layers
of cortex aren't firing and what we are measuring.

~~~
porejide
Very fair point. There are other examples that go beyond DHCA, though, and
point clearly in the same direction. One example is that sometimes people
suffer cardiac arrests and lose consciousness for minutes to hours
10.1016/j.resuscitation.2014.06.015. Coordinated electrical activity stops
after a few minutes following cardiac arrest, but people can (rarely) be
revived with their apparent memories and personality intact.

------
gruez
If a "backup" is made of your brain before you died, and it's restored
afterwards to a new body, wouldn't that new copy be totally disconnected from
the original. The brain in the new body might behave identically to the
original, but the entity (or "soul", for lack of a better word) experiencing
it won't be the original. This is trivially demonstrated by using the same
backup process to make a clone (ie. restoring the backup but not killing the
original). Clearly you won't be having the experiences of both bodies, would
you?

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

~~~
ben_w
If you believe the soul is a separate thing to the body, then it naturally
follows that duplicating the body is merely a cargo-cult version of
immortality.

If you believe that there is no separate thing which is a soul — that all that
we are is just a particular arrangement of matter — then duplicating some
particular arrangement from a backup is like forking from an old git commit:
just because you can label one particular branch “master” doesn’t make it
genuinely special, and any special treatment you give to one branch is merely
your convention.

~~~
gruez
>just because you can label one particular branch “master” doesn’t make it
genuinely special, and any special treatment you give to one branch is merely
your convention.

It does matter, depending on your motivations. If you think the reason for
living is that you're a great person whose continued existence will benefit
society and/or your loved ones, then sure, it doesn't matter as long as the
copy is identical. If you simply want to stay alive and _experience /enjoy_
more of it, then having a bit-for-bit identical copy might not achieve your
goal.

For the latter option, consider the following thought experiment: suppose say
you want to do an enjoyable activity, such as going on a one week vacation,
but you can't afford it. Would you pay 50% of the cost (which you can afford)
so a clone of you go on vacation?

~~~
compscistd
In many respects, I think you already break your stream of consciousness when
you sleep or are knocked out. When a copy of your brain is made, that copy
will experience what all of us do after a good night’s rest in a train: waking
up to an unfamiliar environment, subtly changed by random firing of your
neurons when you were asleep. The “you before sleep” is effectively not the
“you after sleep” because there was a break in the chain.

Thus, there’s no benefit to the “you that didn’t go on vacation”. There was a
benefit to the “you that did go on vacation”.

~~~
gruez
So you acknowledge that in the event of a brain transfer, two versions of your
consciousness will exist, and that the "original" one will be lost, but it's
fine because neither would be able to tell (ie. the original will be "going to
sleep", and the copy will be "waking up")?

~~~
danbmil99
Exactly. I would put forth that you can take it even further, and assume that
every moment In time represents a recreation of your conscious experience of
the past up until the present.

Under that perspective, Consciousness is like the illusion of motion on a
computer monitor. There's some sort of framerate, related to the minimum
period of time in which you can perceive a conscious thought, and the sequence
playing back at a high frequency creates the illusion of continuity.

------
steve_g
Coincidently, I've just been re-reading Neal Stephenson's _Fall_ , which is a
fun story about simulating uploaded minds (or brains, or whatever).

[https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Dodge-Hell-Neal-
Stephenson/dp/00...](https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Dodge-Hell-Neal-
Stephenson/dp/0062458728/)

------
geofft
> _A terminal patient choosing brain preservation with the hope of future
> revival via mind uploading is making the same type of rational judgement
> –faced with the alternative of oblivion I choose to undergo an uncertain
> surgical procedure that has some chance of restoring most of the unique
> memories that I consider to define ‘me’ as an individual. Hopefully this
> makes clear that I am rejecting a ‘magical’ view of the self. An
> individual’s mind is computational and, just like with a laptop, an
> imperfect backup copy is better than complete erasure._

Doesn't this argue against the entire brain preservation enterprise? That is,
without a "magical" view of selfhood, why attempt to preserve a partially
faithful replica of one's self instead of finding other ways to do the things
that you'd want to do in the future once revived?

I don't really back up my laptop in a conventional sense. I do git pushes of
my git clones, I copy some files to rsync.net, I do a lot of work on cloud
services like Google Docs and Trello, etc. A lot of what's on my laptop is
transient. This is nice, because I'm not backing up _a Mac_ ; if I decide to
run Debian or switch to a Chromebook or whatever, I can still achieve my high-
level goal of not losing work without the low-level implementation of
restoring a Mac. And certainly I don't back up servers at work in the
conventional sense, either; most of those "servers" are now just Kubernetes
pods anyway, represented declaratively, and that's a lot better than a backup.

I think in the same sense, I do have a plan for immortality, and that plan is
to change the world for the better while I am alive, now, as conventionally
defined, in lasting ways. I don't really know what I would do if I were
resurrected many centuries in the future. (I would expect at least as much
change in the world as between now and many centuries in the past, and I can't
really imagine even the greatest thinkers or doers or heroes of ages past
productively helping the world today. Should Arthur return from Avalon to save
Britain today, he'd have a lot of trouble recovering the throne in a largely
pro-democratic society, and he'd have no idea what to make of "Brexit.")

Meanwhile, there's quite a bit I can do _today_ to improve the world, to
improve the lives of others, to try to improve by a fraction of a percent the
chances of human society even existing a few centuries hence, etc. My self -
my life and physical conscious existence - is just a tool for accomplishing
whatever goals I have; it's not the goal itself. My laptop is also a tool; if
I can keep doing the work that was on my laptop, I don't need a clone of the
laptop itself.

It seems to me, then, that the only argument _for_ brain preservation - for
attempting to preserve one's "self" into the future and for investing in the
ability to make it happen - is seeing one's self in this "magical" way, in
believing that there's _more_ value in the very fact of one's existence, and
in fact even a partial and inaccurate continuation of that existence - than in
what you do with that existence.

(And it does not save you from having to influence the world and engineer its
future. At the least, as we can see, you have to spend a fair amount of your
life today convincing society that it should develop in a way so that, in the
future, they build the means to restore you.)

~~~
Baeocystin
I'm pretty sure historians from every category would positively salivate over
the prospect of being able to interview an actual person from a few hundred
years ago. And it isn't like they'd stop being interested at just one.

And in terms of work one can do to improve the world- the tools available
today amplify the work someone can do by orders of magnitude compared to
centuries past, particularly mental work. I see no reason to think this trend
won't continue. Who is to say that, given enough time and development, a
society of the future might have an entire pathway for the freshly-revived to
go back to school, so to speak, and become able to do things those of us now
can only dream of?

~~~
geofft
The first one is a good point, although it doesn't quite sound to me like the
folks advocating for preservation are doing so with the intention of being
valuable to future generations _for the interests of those generations_. If
they were, then they'd get themselves comfortable with being revived multiple
times (either re-preserved or terminated and re-cloned, whatever's easiest to
future society) and would prefer to be revived as far in the future as
possible, and they'd accomplish what they intend during this life. But most of
the motivation I see around this seems to be focused around trampling down
death by cryopreservation and continuing to live your life in the future.

You could also imagine that, in a future where we are close to being able to
revive human brains, we can just _query_ human brains via simulation without
bringing them back to life. The ethics of that are different, but - at least
with consent from the person while they were be alive - it doesn't seem
obviously wrong.

Re work improving the world - why do we imagine that someone from the present
would be more effective at using those tools than someone from the future?
Again, take the example of Arthur: if he returned, what would he do? What
would you have him do? Or if even Isaac Newton were to return, would he be
able to keep up with the brightest minds of the present generation of students
who all took calculus in high school? I'm not doubting that he'd still be a
sharp thinker, but would he be doing anything groundbreaking and world-
changing like he did in his natural life, or would he "just" interview well at
FAANG?

I'm not disputing that both of them would do things beyond _their own_ wildest
dreams during their lifetimes. Honestly, I think Arthur would have a lot of
fun being in the House of Lords (which is probably where they'd put him) and
Newton would get a blast out of being an entry-level engineer at FAANG. I'm
disputing that they would do anything beyond what the natural-born of today
would do, and that unless you have a sentimental correlation between your
revived self and your old self, there's not really a point in one more average
or even above-average person existing in the future.

~~~
Baeocystin
>The first one is a good point, although it doesn't quite sound to me like the
folks advocating for preservation are doing so with the intention of being
valuable to future generations for the interests of those generations.

They probably aren't. But that isn't incompatible with both them desiring to
continue to live and them contributing to whatever society they are reborn in
to. After all, people today are primarily concerned with their own lives first
and foremost, yet we manage to work together to build societies just the same.

>why do we imagine that someone from the present would be more effective at
using those tools than someone from the future?

Diversity of thought. That doesn't mean that revived-person-x is going to be
better at any particular productive activity than someone who was born in to
the future in question. But simply by being from a different era, I like to
think that there is potential to be able to contribute meaningful value. Or,
put another way, while it is true that the world benefits greatly from those
who are the best of the best, it is also true that there is a place for a
large number of competent but not exceptional people to do the bulk of the
work, and that their lives have positive value, too.

~~~
geofft
Would it not be more feasible, more robust, and more effective to ensure
diversity of thought for the future by building mechanisms into society to
sustain them on their own (e.g., value and uphold communities that take both
strongly positive and strongly negative views towards modernity) instead of
relying on developing the technical ability to unfreeze people from the past
and then promptly putting them to work in average jobs?

(It seems _silly_ , leaving aside the ethics of it, that we may find ourselves
in the position of wishing we had the "diversity of thought" of peoples that
we had long since either wiped out or pushed to assimilate into what's rapidly
becoming a single global dominant culture.)

I mean, it rather sounds like we have changed the pitch from "If you desire,
you can avoid death" (and the specific form of "If you have a terminal disease
at a young age, we can freeze you until the disease can be cured, so you can
live out the rest of your life") to "It is good for society that we build
mechanisms to clone large numbers of people from the past into the present to
lead average lives," which at the very least is a whole different ethics
ballgame.

For one, there's the question of what happens if turns out that we can clone
people from the past, en masse, even without them having been prepared
specially. (Perhaps certain types of embalming cause enough stability in brain
structure. Perhaps we can revive people who froze to death, like the hundreds
on Mount Everest or similar mountains.) Going back to the idea that we only
need a partial restoration and that there's no magical "self," is it ethical
to clone them, if it is helpful to present society? Is it ethical to clone
_parts_ of them, if that's a technology we develop and it's beneficial?

Also, it seems pretty unlikely that humankind is on its path to having a
vastly lower population than we do today, and we have yet to be assured that
we will be able to colonize other planets. Lives have value, but when we have
reached the capacity of Earth, how do we weight the potential value of cloning
millions of people rom the past?

------
gwern
What an extraordinary pain to read. This really demonstrates why Twitter is
awful for debates. This can be made readable, but you'd have to rewrite the
entire thing, more or less, to pull out the individual points, consolidate
broken up thoughts, and create consistent formatting per author so you can
follow it instead of being a sea of text with occasional implicit author
switching.

(It also demonstrates why you shouldn't have light-gray text on gray
background, pale green links, and dashed underline links.)

~~~
porejide
I apologize and wish I could have presented it better. I first compiled this
in 2019 and had been planning to summarize it more. Alas, I recently realized
that I wouldn't have the energy for that and that I should simply publish as
is.

I'm surprised that people care at all, but perhaps I underestimate how many
are as interested in the content as I am.

Regarding the formatting, I will try to update the background to something
more readable using wordpress, although I obviously lack your skills in this
area. In the meantime, you're free to copy it onto your website or elsewhere.

~~~
aperrien
I've learned several new things from this conversation. Thank you for saving
it.

