| ▲ | echelon a day ago |
| That's a temporary state. Eventually humans won't die. Consciousness will be uploaded, memories preserved. We aren't that far away from being able to decode thoughts, memories, and the visual cortex from brains. That's going to leap forward quickly. Maybe the future will reverse the light cone and revisit everyone and everything that has ever lived. Maybe we're in their simulation. Maybe the reason we don't see alien AI swarms is because they don't travel in spatial dimensions. All sci-fi conjecture and fantasy, but brain scanning will get good. --- Edit because HN rate limits me: > And then in 10^33 years you'll fight viciously for the last pockets of negentropy. Our physicists claim to have models of how time began and will end. They don't concretely know. With the new observatories, new models are being suggested and old ones discarded. Will Lamda CDM hold? We still have infant eyes. So much lies beyond the limits of our detection. And frankly, projections of the end of the universe are doomer-coded because society is looking for it to be that way. |
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| ▲ | dontwannahearit a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| Oh god, dictators that live forever. Wealth that can be amassed and hoarded across a billion natural lifespans. Orwells boot stamping on a human face for eternity made real. Death is a feature not a bug. |
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| ▲ | pfdietz a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Probably not a realistic view of the future, since those dictators won't need citizens. | | |
| ▲ | 10111001 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > Probably not a realistic view of the future, since those dictators won't need citizens. Oh the dictators will still need citizens, but only to stomp on their human faces forever. | | | |
| ▲ | tyjen a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | What's the point of being a dictator if you cannot actively demonstrate your abuse of power on and in the presence of other people? | | |
| ▲ | Alive-in-2025 a day ago | parent [-] | | Up to now all dictators, oligarchs, billionaires died or more preferably were actively destroyed. |
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| ▲ | echelon 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Death is a feature not a bug. You have fun with that. > dictators that live forever The world is more free than it has ever been, and it's getting better. | | |
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| ▲ | somenameforme a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This doesn't even make any sense. 'Uploading your consciousness' means you are given two tools - a brain scanner and a gun with one bullet. You're still dead. And the chatbot created in your likeness will also inevitably find itself getting wiped as well. Life, and consciousness, is absurd enough (yet certainly real) that I'm fully open to the possibility of further absurdities happening once we die, but I think it's an absolute certainty that we're all going to die. And accepting this is quite important because it rather dramatically influences one's life philosophy. |
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| ▲ | unrented7977 a day ago | parent [-] | | Meat isn't magical. There's nothing supernatural about a brain. It's all clockwork machinery all the way down. A digital copy of a mind is no less alive than your children. They are, after all, nothing more than lossy copies of yourself. | | |
| ▲ | Sohcahtoa82 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | But a digital copy of you isn't you. I find I'm actually happier accepting a little nihilism in my life, knowing that at some point, I will die, and within a couple generations of my death, I will be completely forgotten. This isn't depressing, it's freeing. It means there are no long term expectations of me, so I should I just spend as much time as I can doing the things I enjoy. | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'd agree with the premise, but I had a different conclusion. For me realizing I'm going to die, emphasizes something else. We're on this Earth for an ridiculously brief moment in time. And as you age time only goes by faster and faster. And so to me it emphasized the need to make sure there's another generation of humans to come after us. It led to a bit of an obsession with fertility. That's probably about as realistically close as we'll ever come to being able to transfer your consciousness. But it's even better than just transferring your consciousness because it comes with the added of benefit that the 'new you(s)' have every chance of being even better than you, especially if you pick a good quality partner and raise them well. I don't care if my distant progeny have any idea I ever existed, but I want to give them a chance to exist, and I'll always be some small part of them anyhow. | |
| ▲ | unrented7977 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Distinction without a difference. My consciousness, my sense of self continues uninterrupted. There's no meaningful difference to me. You might care, but your opinion has zero weight on my own opinion of who and what I am. One fudamentally cannot know the mind of another. Your opinion is based on incomplete observation and assumptions. Your insistence that a digital copy isn't me holds as much weight as the assertion that you aren't real because you exist only as text on my screen. | | |
| ▲ | Sohcahtoa82 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > My consciousness, my sense of self continues uninterrupted. That's the part I directly dispute. I don't dispute that a computer could become conscious, but I'm not convinced you could transfer your consciousness to a machine. If a brain scan copied your brain, that would not be the same consciousness that you have now. It would be like having a twin, and twins don't share a consciousness. | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Exactly this. Personally I would dispute a computer becoming conscious, but it's inconsequential to the argument. Even if it does become conscious, that consciousnesses is not you. You haven't transferred anything. You still die, and then have a chatbot in your likeness. For a technical issue I'd also add that this entire thing is becoming increasingly absurd given advances in understanding of human biology. Discoveries like the gut-brain axis emphasize that the concept of brains in a shell is mostly naive. Your body and your brain are completely interdependent to create 'you'. But again I think the objections around consciousness or technical possibility are completely inconsequential (if not also strong arguments in their own right). Even if we accept every single point and desired outcome, you still die. |
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| ▲ | nancyminusone 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I suppose parent comment is addressing the version of you that doesn't wake up inside a computer. If a biological vetsion of you exists, then that version won't be the same instance as the one in the machine. There will be two copies. Machine-you would no doubt be thrilled. How does bio-you cope with not being made immortal? If your answer is "It doesn't matter, throw the original in the trash" is that murder or suicide? |
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| ▲ | pfdietz 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > But a digital copy of you isn't you. I'll go further: a future biological you isn't necessarily you. There's a continuity of being as we grow and age, but that's not enough to assert identity. Identity is a useful (to our genes) mental fiction. |
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| ▲ | pfdietz 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That doesn't mean that uploading is possible. The algorithm implemented in neurons likely depends heavily on specifics of neurons. One could implement something non-biological that would be similar, but similar isn't identical, and identical is what you'd need for uploading to look like "me going into silicon" and not "something that's kind of like what I was is now in silicon". | |
| ▲ | grahamburger a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So why not just have a kid or two? A chatbot that sounds kind of like you did is no more 'you' than your kids are. | |
| ▲ | jacquesm a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Then make a brain without access to other brains or things made by other brains. |
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| ▲ | jacquesm a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I wrote this quite a while ago: https://jacquesmattheij.com/you-will-die-get-used-to-it/ |
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| ▲ | onion2k a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Consciousness will be uploaded, memories preserved. Preserved maybe, but never viewed by anyone. They might as well be gone. |
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| ▲ | bananaflag a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| And then in 10^33 years you'll fight viciously for the last pockets of negentropy. |
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| ▲ | pfdietz a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That sounds sufficiently different from me that it won't be me. If I'm going to identify with some future entity that's very different from me it might as well be something newly arisen, not something having a copy of some of my memories somewhere. I guess those archived memories are the ultimate time capsule. If that becomes common they'll ultimately go the way of all archives. Relevant recent SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/chip |
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| ▲ | nancyminusone a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| But we can already do that now. Your brain can export information that my brain can read. This comment is one way how. If you can read my thoughts directly it might be more detailed but not much different. |
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| ▲ | gatlin a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Consciousness will be uploaded to where, some digital prison that also has resource requirements the same as a biological entity? Since you are leaping into the fire with such confidence I will exhort you with a counter proposal to seek Christ. |
