
The Importance of Surviving 40 more years - ypeterholmes
http://www.lettersfrompeter.com/theory-human-lifespan/
======
greeneggs
Forty years is incredibly optimistic. But beyond that issue, I don't see how
transferring my brain to a computer does anything for me. I don't want a copy
of me to live forever, I want to live forever _myself_. Copying my brain won't
copy my conscious self. (It can't; after all, if you can make one copy then
you can make ten copies.)

~~~
jaggederest
Ship of Theseus argument applies here - done gradually enough there's no
perceptual difference between a brain running in a computer and on a
biological substrate. You 'die' in that sense every time you lose conciousness
- a different you wakes up.

I think we have a much better chance of extending human life biologically in
the next 40 years than we do running the brain in software. 100TB for a brain
map is extremely optimistic - that's assuming a byte per connection, and I bet
it's a lot higher than that.

Like effective fusion power, it's always 50 years away, unfortunately.

~~~
tluyben2
Another instance of me is not me; everyone will think it's me (I will think so
too, however I see a nice psychological Philip K Dickian mess coming up with
you thinking the rest of your life that you are not you) but it's not. I
wouldn't really care at all for that kind of 'immortality'.

I don't remember which sci-fi book it was, but I read that book (or story) a
long time ago where the brain itself was, in a flash (no losing
consciousness), turned into a kind of 'plastic'; literally every part, so you
are you and after that nano machines would create the new cells, destroy
others and create connections from that plastic mimicking the exact way the
brain works. Give me one of those.

~~~
k__
I think the point here is, that even the you from "now" and the you from "a
moment ago" aren't the same. Consciousness is an illusion.

~~~
tluyben2
But like someone else already said; it doesn't solve the dumping of the brain
and the feeling of self. Copy the brain onto a different substrate (I have no
problem seeing that as a real possibility) but after you did that the two
'you's (one human, one something else) look at each other and only 1 is you.
There is no magic 'soul' or whatever flying over during the transfer taking
the self with it. The clone you won't believe it's you as he/she is aware of
the procedure. And the original you will die as every human always did before.

Maybe someone has some good articles about this, but I have a feeling they
mean to slowly (for the definition of slow applicable here) replace tissue in
the brain so you gradually turn 'silicon' (or whatever it may be) and 'hope'
that it mimics every cell close enough and slow enough so that you will remain
you after the transition? In which there will never be 2 'you's in this
process, however it will be possible to clone/backup your brain after the
process? I'm concerned with the 'hope' of it being like this and it would be
very optimistic to think we can reach this kind of understanding of the brain
within 40 years imho.

~~~
Houshalter
>but after you did that the two 'you's (one human, one something else) look at
each other and only 1 is you.

Why? A copy of me IS me.

>There is no magic 'soul' or whatever flying over during the transfer taking
the self with it.

The information in your brain IS your soul, basically. What else defines "you"
if not that?

>Another instance of me is not me; everyone will think it's me (I will think
so too, however I see a nice psychological Philip K Dickian mess coming up
with you thinking the rest of your life that you are not you) but it's not. I
wouldn't really care at all for that kind of 'immortality'.

I can not understand this preference, it just makes no sense to me. As long as
one copy of me lives on that is all that matters. It doesn't matter _which_
copy. The specific atoms that make me up don't matter. Why would it matter if
I live on being made up of one set of atoms or another?

~~~
tluyben2
I don't think I agree with you; you are doing a magical movement of 'self'
here. Even a sharing of 'self' in your first example. If there is 2 copies of
you then 1 of you is you, the other is not. The thought experiment is very
simple; sit yourself in a chamber with a glass mirror; your side says
'original' the other side says 'copy'. You are aware you will be copied in 1
second. The other you appears on the 'copy' side of the mirror. The original
(you) now _knows_ that the copy is the copy as he saw this process. And the
copy knows he's the copy as he always is aware of the process the same you
are.

So you are talking either in a way where the 'self' is shared (both think they
are the original even though that contradicts their own knowledge) or you
don't care if you die as long as a clone of you lives on (but then you _will_
die; for you as the original 'self' it's lights-out). The latter is not
immortality to me, at least no more than having kids (which is actually a big
reason many people have kids) and the first makes no logical sense.

~~~
Houshalter
Your thought experiment doesn't really prove anything except that you can have
two identical beings in the same room and they can be aware they are made of
different atoms. But they are still the same person.

Perhaps you are hung up over the fact they diverge by a few seconds of
experience? I would trade losing some memories for immortality. People take
drugs or suffer from brain damage which has similar effects and I don't
consider them "dead". In any case making a copy of the person is likely to be
a destructive process, so that isn't even an issue (there's no reason to keep
your physical brain after you upload it to a computer.)

Making a copy of the person isn't any different than if I just took the person
and replaced all the atoms in their brain instantly with different ones. Hell
this could be happening to you every second and you would have no idea. (In
our universe, at least, it isn't even possible, since atoms are all identical
and don't have little tags saying "atom 1250". I'm just trying to give an idea
why basing your identity on a physical object makes no sense.)

If you don't consider your experiences and brain state to be you, and you
don't consider the physical object of your brain to be you, then I have no
idea how you define personal identity.

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/pm/identity_isnt_in_specific_atoms/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/pm/identity_isnt_in_specific_atoms/)

------
codeboost
What's wrong with dying ? I mean, obviously people want to live longer for
some (mostly selfish) reasons, but isn't dying part of the 'living' deal ?

Dying is similar to being born - your whole universe changed when you
transitioned from womb to this world and the same happens when you die. In
other words, they have cookies and chocolate there :).

The whole deal about spirituality is that one discovers that we are in fact
immortal and that this life is a step of an infinity of other steps, before
this life and after.

The other thing one realizes is that each individual is actually a facet of an
infinite whole (some call this God, but it is actually You), or in other words
- We are all One.

That's what all the religions and mystics have been telling us for millenia.

~~~
ux-app
> _" What's wrong with dying"_

It's such a terrible waste. All that knowledge accumulated over years of
life... gone. We don't know what the species is capable of if we could double
or triple human life span. What if we could indefinitely extend the most
productive years? Where might we be if we could have given Einstein the chance
to live hundreds of years with his mind and body in prime condition?

> _" same happens when you die. In other words, they have cookies and
> chocolate there"_

wouldn't it be great if that were the case? Unfortunately there is exactly
zero proof of any kind that this is so.

> _" each individual is actually a facet of an infinite whole, in other words
> - We are all One"_

This sentence is completely free of information.

> _" That's what all the religions and mystics have been telling us for
> millenia."_

Religions and mystics have been exploiting the normal human fear of death for
millennia. Science might one day give us the keys to finally dodge that
inevitable final bullet.

~~~
codeboost
>Unfortunately there is exactly zero proof of any kind that this is so

Oh but there is for those who seek it!

One kind of proof is called dimethyltryptamine. It lasts for 10 minutes, but
when you come back, you might have a radically different view on these
matters.

Other psychedelics, like LSD, also offer a different perspective on life and
death and there are also different kinds of spiritual work one can do -
meditation, holotropic breathing or living life in nature. They all help you
realise just how fragile and transitory life is in nature and that that is a
good thing.

>Religions and mystics have been exploiting the normal human fear of death

Isn't science (or rather scientists) driven by the same fear ? Isn't the
knowledge that we're going to die a factor in making us go out and do stuff to
survive ?

Wouldn't immortality lead to a state where we'd have to invent a simluation of
mortal life in order to actually feel alive ?

How can one tell that this life isn't such a simulation ?

------
JacobAldridge
Good article series on the limitations of mice as research animals -
[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_t...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html)

I also came here to say what greeneggs already stated about the digital brain
- _I_ want to live forever, not have a copy of my brilliance survive for
future generations (though I'm sure they'd be grateful).

------
wbhart
The human brain is designed to live inside an innervated body. It receives
constant updates on how the body is doing, and unconscious processes, some of
them chemical, control every aspect of our internal life, from homeostasis, to
the perception of time, to breathing, mood and muscle tone. Upset one part of
that balance and the brain goes into blind panic. Although the brain also has
electrical activity, it is not just a sophisticated computer program running
on a general purpose computer. For one thing, the hardware is unique in every
individual! Secondly, what makes you you? And what is consciousness? We have
no idea. Perhaps it is not possible to reconstruct the real you, rather than
an emulation of you, without copying the exact quantum states of the atoms in
your body. But this may require complete destruction of the old you and
construction of an identical quantum copy elsewhere (teleportation), which is
hardly an electronic download of "data" into a computer. You might be able to
extract your memories and store them in a Von Neumann architecture, but the
rest is a pipe dream.

~~~
alexandros
Still beats dying.

~~~
tluyben2
Might not do. There have been experiments with people with mental issues or
just general experiments abusing or cutting nerve endings in different ways
and a lot of the more radical ones (like this would be, at least for the first
1000s of subjects) end up in insanity. And you would rather be dead I think.

------
011011100
"Once the brain is understood well enough to be modeled digitally, it stands
to reason that the complete set of data representing an individual person (at
a particular state of time) could be copied or transferred just like saving a
file."

What exactly are you going to save to that file? Positions of molecules?
States of atoms?

Oh, so we're assuming we can abstract away from the physical system? Either we
abstract or we save everything. Well, what's everything? Or can the
abstraction be "good enough"?

~~~
Udo
It's scientifically certain that we _can_ abstract away from the physical
system. In fact, we're already doing that today. We run simulations of
molecular interactions all the time. We can even "do" a cortical column in
incredible detail.

The problem is not that we don't know whether it's possible. There are two
issues concerning this development: we need to know what the right
detail/abstraction level is for simulating a mind, and once we do we need to
actually get that information. Doing the simulation itself is comparatively
easy, though certainly not trivial.

 _> What exactly are you going to save to that file? Positions of molecules?
States of atoms?_

To be useful, it can't be just a file, it needs to be a database that can be
executed. Positions of molecules seems to be the right detail level according
to our current understanding. That includes the spatial configuration of
proteins and their exact position in relation to another. But there might not
be that many unique molecules to store, just a few thousand maybe.

An interesting question then becomes how can we abstract these scans even
further and still be able to have a high fidelity mind simulation?

~~~
011011100
We can abstract however we like whatever we like. The point is: will the
abstraction accurately represent the original physical system? And how do we
know? We run simulations of molecular interactions. So what?

~~~
Houshalter
Why wouldn't it? It wouldn't be _exactly_ the same, but the important
information is there. Does it matter if it's slightly off?

Consider that your real brain is influenced by tons of random factors and
meaningless information. If a protein drifts to a slightly different location
maybe it could slightly affect the output of that neuron. But if just assume
that it is where it is supposed to be for the purposes of the simulation, it
should be fine.

It's not like something like that encodes any important information or has
anything to do with the algorithm that your brain is running.

~~~
011011100
The points are

1\. We're limited by our own models of physics. We can only record what we
know about. That's a pretty significant issue when you're _trying to simulate
physics_.

2\. In physics, we can run an experiment over and over again so as to refine
our model. We isolate systems and _try_ to study simple interactions. When you
study gases, for example, I think you will find that things are modeled
statistically. We record details to the extent that they help with our model.

What I'm wondering is how we would do this with biological systems. Can you
run the "experiment" over and over to try and understand the "right way" this
biological system was supposed to behave? Is there a "right" biological
system? How do you know what the relevant biological (sub)systems are? How do
you identify what's important? How do you abstract? What's a "good enough"
replica?

What I'm trying to get at is that I don't think there is a good layer of
abstraction for biological systems. I think the physics is the only good layer
of abstractions. But...

3\. If we had to record states of molecules, for example, then making a
digital copy of everyone seems really not feasible. It doesn't seem feasible
because of memory or computation.

~~~
Houshalter
I think you could abstract to the individual neurons or maybe the different
parts of the neuron. It doesn't matter that you don't have an _exact_ physical
simulation of every atom.

------
fred02
I find the simple-minded dogmatism that the mind = brain hugely amusing. The
fact is that right now science has absolutely no idea how consciousness works.
There is no proof that reductionist materialism can explain how a mind arises
from bunchs of neurons. And yet some believe without proof.

~~~
Houshalter
Are you suggesting that intelligence _can 't_ be explained by neurons or
physics as we know them? Seriously?

~~~
fred02
Yes, seriously! Look into the work of the philospher David Chambers. His
position is called non-reductive functionalism. Instead of saying "the brain
causes consciousness", he would say "it is not ONLY the brain that causes
consciousness".[1]

In other words "consciousness is a fundamental property ontologically
autonomous of any known (or even possible) physical properties" of the
physical universe. [2]

I am amused by discussions like these where simplistic functionalist arguments
[3] are taken as being proven. The whole area of consciousness is still side
open, _none_ of our current theories are adequate and it is simply wrong to
assume that consciousness can be explained away.

[1] -
[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/may/15/conscio...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/may/15/consciousness-
and-the-philosophers-an-exchange/)

[2] -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers)

[3] -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_%28philosophy_of_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_%28philosophy_of_mind%29)

~~~
Houshalter
I am very confident that the human brain is responsible for all human
behavior. That's the simplest explanation by far.

You'd have to explain a completely new and different set of physics that no
one has observed before, and explain how and _why_ evolution found it and took
advantage of it (and yet no one has ever observed it before), and how it
interacts with the body, etc.

It just makes absolutely no sense.

------
TausAmmer
That would be extremely boring to live endlessly. Farewell services must be
introduced, exciting ways to go "events". :)

then you wake up as a yourself from copy

Would you be more afraid to loose it? Right now you will die anyway, we accept
that(some more, some less). Some build fear based communities around death.

Would everyone regress in preserving "life" instead of being bold and
exploring where no man would go. What gives if I get deadly radiation
poisoning, I might discover something. What gives if I drown in my new
innovative diving gear, this shit is revolutionary.

I rather do nothing on that sort if I can live forever, I will be as safe as
possible, taking no risks?

But, there is saying about crossing bridge when one gets there.

------
lcedp
This reminds me of 1900-1950 prognoses that by 2000 we should all have flying
cars and apple growing on Mars. These prognoses were inspired by rapid
advancements of the technologies of that time. Instead electronics happened
which was not imagined or at least underestimated.

Nowadays prognoses are inspired by current advancements but let's just spell
out the one thing we can be pretty sure about - we have no idea what the next
big thing is.

------
eps
This is all great, but where does the number of 40 come from? After all
Kurzweil said it'd be in 20-25 years and he's got more street cred :)

~~~
tluyben2
Kurzweill is 65, so he has 20-25 years to live probably in the currently
system; figures he would say 20-25 years. The blog owner probably thinks he
has 40-50 years more to live so is gunning for 40 years. I remember Larry
Ellison mentioning 20 years for such a revolution in a speech some years ago.
People are less likely to say 'in 100 years' if they won't make that
themselves. 1000 years is easier to talk about than 'just' after you're dead
yourself, but what would be the fun in saying 'in 1000 years' ; no-one would
listen.

------
pmiller2
I'm a little skeptical of this whole mind uploading business. How do we really
know consciousness isn't in the brain, anyway? I prefer to achieve immortality
by not dying, like Woody Allen.

~~~
jferguson
Consciousness is in the brain; the idea here is to simulate the brain,
resulting in the mind.

