cryogenics, corpsicles and mind uploads: a discussion "reincarnation" in Science Fiction

[tinkerdan]

Look at identical twins are they each an I; when brought up together they share a lot of things including experiences so do they share an I or are they a we or just a wee bit of two eyes.

It's been shown that some identical twins separated at birth have shared some common quirks. Does this argue that they share the same I or perhaps that there might be something to racial memory that gets passed on to the young.

And think about racial memory perhaps that's how we are supposed to be immortal; our children share the memory that makes us us and they carry on the greater us; so long as we have children. We already have immortality just not the capacity to enjoy it the way we'd want to. Which is fine, because it might be unsettling if every time your children look in the mirror they find you staring out at them or worse yet your great great great grand-something staring at them; then the whole lot of you might just go stark raving mad.

 

[JaimeRetief]

Look at identical twins are they each an I; when brought up together they share a lot of things including experiences so do they share an I or are they a we or just a wee bit of two eyes.

It's been shown that some identical twins separated at birth have shared some common quirks. Does this argue that they share the same I or perhaps that there might be something to racial memory that gets passed on to the young.

And think about racial memory perhaps that's how we are supposed to be immortal; our children share the memory that makes us us and they carry on the greater us; so long as we have children. We already have immortality just not the capacity to enjoy it the way we'd want to. Which is fine, because it might be unsettling if every time your children look in the mirror they find you staring out at them or worse yet your great great great grand-something staring at them; then the whole lot of you might just go stark raving mad.

You are thinking about physical, not logical, equality.
The twins are similar physically, but logically they are not, the exact opposite would be true for an upload or a personality copy.

 

[tinkerdan]

Not at all I'm talking about the things they like the things they do the way they think the words they speak the way the finish each others sentences and the experiences that they have had more often overlap as not because they are with each other most of the time.

I'm talking about food preferences and book preferences movie preferences and even clothing preferences though that on might just come of sharing dressers or closets.

And they are duplicates and they started with the same brain patterns to begin with and develop concurrently.

 

[psikeyhackr]

Oh, and what am "I" then, every second I live changes my current state to some degree, is my teenage self dead when compared to my current self, I have assimilated a lot of data between now and then, and my views on life, the universe and everything have shifted cionsiderably.
If a copy is perfect, then is it still a copy?

But if 1,000 copies are made are all of them YOU? If you want to regard all of them as YOU that is your business. If everybody else chooses to regard none of them as YOU that is their business.

Metaphysical debates are not hard science fiction.

psik

 

[SilentRoamer]

With regards to multiple copies. Hamilton has some err, shall we say interesting, sexual social commentary on multiple personas. Re-life is a common theme in Hamiltons Commonwealth Saga through the use of renewals (like surgery just you come out younger). I found some of Hamiltons exploration of the effects of immortality very interesting.

I also think the relationship between the Esks and the main Justices in Ann Leckies Ancillary Justice is worth a mention. I thought the consciousness and relationships in the series were far more interesting than the gender analysis.

 

[JaimeRetief]

But if 1,000 copies are made are all of them YOU? If you want to regard all of them as YOU that is your business. If everybody else chooses to regard none of them as YOU that is their business.

Metaphysical debates are not hard science fiction.

psik

Neither are your counter-arguments, If you do believe that there is something special inside humans that makes them them that is your business. For me an immortal digital copy is a good enough form of immortality.

 

[JaimeRetief]

With regards to multiple copies. Hamilton has some err, shall we say interesting, sexual social commentary on multiple personas. Re-life is a common theme in Hamiltons Commonwealth Saga through the use of renewals (like surgery just you come out younger). I found some of Hamiltons exploration of the effects of immortality very interesting.

I could not get past Hamilton's excessive and clichéd world-building to finish even one of his books halfway.
David Webber's oversized world-building was actually tolerable by comparison.

And besides, what I saw was never new, I could always remember at least two r three other books or short stories here gimmick X was used better.

I also think the relationship between the Esks and the main Justices in Ann Leckies Ancillary Justice is worth a mention. I thought the consciousness and relationships in the series were far more interesting than the gender analysis.

I never finished that book either, horrid pacing and stale world building and characterization with no real originality to them.
Was the relationship per any chance similar to the process of forking and execing?
Because even that has been done already, and there are numerous examples of it, Sawyer had an entire book dealing modified digtal clones, and writers from Stephen Baxter to Jack McDevitt have utilized the concept of partial personality simulations o be used for things like messaging.

 

[SilentRoamer]

Yeah a lot of people just don't get on with Hamilton, I really enjoy the worldbuilding element which probably helps me I have even read "A confederation Handbook" which is just a book about the worldbuilding. Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment.

In Ancillary Justice the premise is that the ships (Justices) are huge AI units that have crew called (Esks) the Esks are physically human but with an AI controlling their actions (the original consciousness being irrevocably removed - or so it is explained). I would hope that Leckie explores this further as I suspect the original consciousness may still be present and a new personality emerges.

I did enjoy this as an exploration of consciousness. If you could put an AI in a physical body is it even AI anymore? I mean obviously the intelligence started as artificial but now is actually physical. Anyway I found this much more interesting than the non use of gendered pronouns.

I have not read a number of the references you have made - I am working my way through some SFF "classics" this year.

 

[JaimeRetief]

Yeah a lot of people just don't get on with Hamilton, I really enjoy the worldbuilding element which probably helps me I have even read "A confederation Handbook" which is just a book about the worldbuilding. Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment.

The man could write less and focus more on plot and ideas instead of worldbuilding,although then it will be harder to stretch out the story, produce more books and various derivatives, like this handbookyou mentioned, all of which will probably cut into profits.

In Ancillary Justice the premise is that the ships (Justices) are huge AI units that have crew called (Esks) the Esks are physically human but with an AI controlling their actions (the original consciousness being irrevocably removed - or so it is explained). I would hope that Leckie explores this further as I suspect the original consciousness may still be present and a new personality emerges.

I did enjoy this as an exploration of consciousness. If you could put an AI in a physical body is it even AI anymore? I mean obviously the intelligence started as artificial but now is actually physical. Anyway I found this much more interesting than the non use of gendered pronouns.

Oh, so it is like Andromeda(with a super A.I. controlling the ship.) and Lexx(where the "robots" were actually human corpses with A.Is controlling them)

I have not read a number of the references you have made - I am working my way through some SFF "classics" this year.

Hardly classics, you'd do better to read some of the true classics of the genre, like Cordwainer Smith and Clifford D.Simak.
Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov are good choices too.
If you like the concept of a spaceship with a controlling consciousness there are plenty of examples, from Anne McCaffrey's brainship books to the game System Shock.

There was even one juvenile Strugatski book about space pirates harvesting sentient brains so as to turn them into ship computers.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

... the Esks are physically human but with an AI controlling their actions (the original consciousness being irrevocably removed - or so it is explained). I would hope that Leckie explores this further as I suspect the original consciousness may still be present and a new personality emerges.

"being irrevocably removed" ? Oh dear oh dear, here we go again with authors doing "consciousness is a thing" type arguments... I'm going to have to read this book in order to fully reply!

I did enjoy this as an exploration of consciousness. If you could put an AI in a physical body is it even AI anymore? I mean obviously the intelligence started as artificial but now is actually physical.

A conscious intelligence is its body. There's no separate thing inside, nor is there any part of any human consciousness that can be dealt with in any way outside of a conscious, bodily existence. Hence, no uploading of memories and a thousand other daft cliches. So you don't 'put an AI in a physical body', or if you could, it would have had to have had a different body previously in order to be sentient.

 

[JaimeRetief]

A conscious intelligence is its body. There's no separate thing inside, nor is there any part of any human consciousness that can be dealt with in any way outside of a conscious, bodily existence. Hence, no uploading of memories and a thousand other daft cliches. So you don't 'put an AI in a physical body', or if you could, it would have had to have had a different body previously in order to be sentient.

A consciousness is, n my personal opinion at least, a combination of "raw" data in the form of memories, processed data in the form of conclusions and thougths derived from the raw data, and the purely physical aspects of that data processing determined by xhemical ctivity in the physical organism.
An A.I. would be like a fish out of water in a human body, since it would lack any real experience in dealing with life as an organic and at the jercy of various hormones and other factors of biological existence.

For any A.I life as a human would probably be, as Hobbes put it, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
A downgrade.

 

[SilentRoamer]

The man could write less and focus more on plot and ideas instead of worldbuilding,although then it will be harder to stretch out the story, produce more books and various derivatives, like this handbookyou mentioned, all of which will probably cut into profits.

Oh, so it is like Andromeda(with a super A.I. controlling the ship.) and Lexx(where the "robots" were actually human corpses with A.Is controlling them)


Hardly classics, you'd do better to read some of the true classics of the genre, like Cordwainer Smith and Clifford D.Simak.
Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov are good choices too.
If you like the concept of a spaceship with a controlling consciousness there are plenty of examples, from Anne McCaffrey's brainship books to the game System Shock.

There was even one juvenile Strugatski book about space pirates harvesting sentient brains so as to turn them into ship computers.

Yeah similar to Lexx except there would be lots of Kai who all shared memories in a weird sort of way. I found the element of shared memory and mind uploading to be interesting.

I wasn't referring to Leckie or Hamilton when I referenced classics. I have read some H. G. Wells, Alfred Bester, Daniel Keyes and Olaf Stapledon this year.

"being irrevocably removed" ? Oh dear oh dear, here we go again with authors doing "consciousness is a thing" type arguments... I'm going to have to read this book in order to fully reply!



A conscious intelligence is its body. There's no separate thing inside, nor is there any part of any human consciousness that can be dealt with in any way outside of a conscious, bodily existence. Hence, no uploading of memories and a thousand other daft cliches. So you don't 'put an AI in a physical body', or if you could, it would have had to have had a different body previously in order to be sentient.

Nothing is ever possible until it is done for the first time though. I am not saying this is possible only that I don't think you can say with certainty that it is impossible. You may be involved in fields of study that give you particular insight and I will grant not all opinions are equal.

I suspect that the original consciousness of the sentient human is still part of the Esk consciousness and is just suppressed, like creating multiple personalities.

A consciousness is, n my personal opinion at least, a combination of "raw" data in the form of memories, processed data in the form of conclusions and thougths derived from the raw data, and the purely physical aspects of that data processing determined by xhemical ctivity in the physical organism.
An A.I. would be like a fish out of water in a human body, since it would lack any real experience in dealing with life as an organic and at the jercy of various hormones and other factors of biological existence.

For any A.I life as a human would probably be, as Hobbes put it, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
A downgrade.

Yeah the Esks (at least the one Esk PoV we have seen) seem to struggle greatly with consciousness when separated from the controlling AI.

I would argue that with sufficiently advanced virtualisation you could effectivey "grow" an AI inside a virtual physical simulacrum prior to loading this to a new shell.

There is an interesting punishment for a race called the Shoal in Gary Gibsons Shoal Sequence where the Shoal (as a fish entity) is put in a human body/other body as punishment and the physical sensation change sends them mad most of the time.

Thanks for the replies.

 

[JaimeRetief]

Yeah similar to Lexx except there would be lots of Kai who all shared memories in a weird sort of way. I found the element of shared memory and mind uploading to be interesting.

Kai, I was thinking about 790
Only connected to a mainframe, like a dumb terminal.

Yeah the Esks (at least the one Esk PoV we have seen) seem to struggle greatly with consciousness when separated from the controlling AI.

I would argue that with sufficiently advanced virtualisation you could effectivey "grow" an AI inside a virtual physical simulacrum prior to loading this to a new shell.

There is an interesting punishment for a race called the Shoal in Gary Gibsons Shoal Sequence where the Shoal (as a fish entity) is put in a human body/other body as punishment and the physical sensation change sends them mad most of the time.

Thanks for the replies.

Having an A.I. with a human or better level of intelligence and "shoehorning" it into a human corpse is wasteful and quite idiotic.
If you "grow" a virtual human with the specific purpose of doing so it will be even worse, at the moment the only things our robots lack are decent power supplies and enough intelligence and adaptability to climb stairs, with a human-level A.I. the second should not be a problem.

The more I learn about that book that happier I am that I dropped it.

 

[psikeyhackr]

I also think the relationship between the Esks and the main Justices in Ann Leckies Ancillary Justice is worth a mention. I thought the consciousness and relationships in the series were far more interesting than the gender analysis.

I suppose the technology imagined in Ancillary Justice makes another form of immortality possible. Suppose a person linked with a newly created AI at age 30. They would then form a combined personality mostly derived from the living person. Then at age 50 a clone is made of the person and the mind of the baby linked to the AI. A triple personality would form with the child regarding this as normal. The old person would eventually die of old age. The AI would be truly immortal but the live individual would give the "person" a living body, so this process could be repeated generations.

psik

 

[Stephen Palmer]

The hidden assumption above is still that "consciousness" or "personality" or whatever you want to call it is something that can be separated - even abstractly - from everything else. It can't be. What, for instance, does "linked" mean? Your own sensory input goes to one place only; your brain. It can't be re-wired somewhere else like electric wires can be. Everything animal is one, indissoluble thing. In fact, it has to be indissoluble for consciousness to evolve. The moment there is direct contact between entities as you're suggesting - as opposed to the indirect contact throughout the animal kingdom - you can't have consciousness, since there's no need to model others of the same species in your mind.

 

[tinkerdan]

There is a potential for difference between animal consciousness and the consciousness of man that falls into the area of your argument that makes your conclusions seem quite dicey to me.

What I mean is that until we can talk to animals we have no idea how far along their consciousness goes.

Awareness: the state or ability to perceive, to feel, or to be conscious of events, objects, or sensory patterns. In this level of consciousness, sense data can be confirmed by an observer without necessarily implying understanding. More broadly, it is the state or quality of being aware of something. In biological psychology, awareness is defined as a human's or an animal's perception and cognitive reaction to a condition or event.

Self-awareness: the capacity for introspection and the ability to reconcile oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals.

Self-consciousness: an acute sense of self-awareness. It is a preoccupation with oneself, as opposed to the philosophical state of self-awareness, which is the awareness that one exists as an individual being; although some writers use both terms interchangeably or synonymously.

Sentience: the ability to be aware (feel, perceive, or be conscious) of one's surroundings or to have subjective experiences. Sentience is a minimalistic way of defining consciousness, which is otherwise commonly used to collectively describe sentience plus other characteristics of the mind.

Sapience: often defined as wisdom, or the ability of an organism or entity to act with appropriate judgment, a mental faculty which is a component of intelligence or alternatively may be considered an additional faculty, apart from intelligence, with its own properties.

Still none of the haziness from above would exclude the link any more that the transference of information through communication does not cause us suddenly to be dissoluble.

Nor does the exchange of idea or even the ability for such exchange to alter our perception threaten to break us apart, though it can change us to be more like minded.

Unless all Animal consciousness is exactly the same as we are, which we presently do not know, then there might be elements that contribute to our consciousness that fall outside the simple animal consciousness that makes us the animal part that is human. So there is an indissoluble element that starts at childhood but is built onto by other parts of consciousness that we yet have to determine exist in all other animals. So the bottom line is that we don't know that that part that has made us aware may or may not be indissoluble in comparison to all other animals until we determine that they experience all the same levels of consciousness that we do.

It's too soon to tell.

 

[psikeyhackr]

The hidden assumption above is still that "consciousness" or "personality" or whatever you want to call it is something that can be separated - even abstractly - from everything else. It can't be. What, for instance, does "linked" mean? Your own sensory input goes to one place only; your brain. It can't be re-wired somewhere else like electric wires can be. Everything animal is one, indissoluble thing. In fact, it has to be indissoluble for consciousness to evolve. The moment there is direct contact between entities as you're suggesting - as opposed to the indirect contact throughout the animal kingdom - you can't have consciousness, since there's no need to model others of the same species in your mind.

I did say "imagined" in Ancillary Justice. In the story the ancillaries could see through each others eyes. Leckie did not go into any detail about how this was done. But apparently there was still some differences in the personalities of the ancillaries though in this story they were all dominated by the AI. I am suggesting that each living body would have its own consciousness but because of the links through the AI the personalities would become very similar to the very first human linked to the blank AI. Whether or not the AI would have a consciousness is an irrelevant metaphysical issue to me.

psik

 

[JaimeRetief]

The hidden assumption above is still that "consciousness" or "personality" or whatever you want to call it is something that can be separated - even abstractly - from everything else. It can't be. What, for instance, does "linked" mean? Your own sensory input goes to one place only; your brain. It can't be re-wired somewhere else like electric wires can be. Everything animal is one, indissoluble thing. In fact, it has to be indissoluble for consciousness to evolve. The moment there is direct contact between entities as you're suggesting - as opposed to the indirect contact throughout the animal kingdom - you can't have consciousness, since there's no need to model others of the same species in your mind.

A physical server can be converted to a virtual machine and it can even "run" on different hardware from what the physical machine once used, a number of science fiction writers have done the same with the human consciousness, and something that will happen in real life at some point.

 

[SilentRoamer]

If we can integrate an artificial limb into a humans body and have this controlled by the brain then surely this goes towards some argument that artificiality is at least plausible.

As JaimeRetief states P2V (Physical to virtual) is something already pretty common in the IT field, my phone for example can emulate the hardware of a number of older devices. Now I understand this is not completely analogous but does hold some common truths.

In Ancillary Justice or any other SFF is it so hard to imagine a way to duplicate or remove the issue of a physical brain? All of this is essentially chemical transmission and electrical wiring, is there anything that makes consciousness more than the physical hardware it sits on - I would argue not and that consciousness is entirely quantifiable - I am by no means an expert though.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

All the SF ideas and themes mentioned above are essentially thought experiments, and they certainly have their uses. But you have to be careful with thought experiments. Maxwell's Demon is an example of a thought experiment that initially seems impossible to argue against, until you realise the hidden assumption (in this case about the demon itself) that underlies the thought experiment. Once you see that, the thought experiment becomes something that can't exist in the real world. We do learn a lot from such exercises, of course.

In my opinion, the hidden assumption in much of this thread is a kind of separability between the brain and the activity of the brain, however you want to define that activity (as tinkerdan has above). Although it's true to say that the brain is essentially chemicals and wiring, controlling an artificial limb by the brain is not an example of direct connection. The brain is interfacing with the limb across a boundary. The model of the world it represents is altered, but not "melded with" - and, just as important, that model understands that the artificial limb is artificial.

I do think we have to be extremely careful with the computer/software/hardware analogies so frequently used in these discussions. To say that consciousness is software running on the hardware of the brain is in my opinion utterly off the mark. An analogy would be: time, e.g. the notions of minutes or hours, is the software running off the hardware of a wristwatch, but "time" is not an entity that is conscious, as we are. Consciousness is an emergent property that cannot be predicted from pre-existing individual components. We are conscious because the models of reality (minds) we use to survive also include other human beings, who we understand through the process of understanding, and indeed experiencing, ourselves.