Except that it won’t be identical in every conceivable way.
This new brain would have its own, unique “I”. It’s “I” would not be the same as your “I”.
I agree Shijinn and yet the next two people to post (if I read them correctly) think its fine.
Maybe its some sort of mental leap of faith or something!
I would neither use the transporter you described or back up my mind…
No, it wouldn’t be identical to the brain that got hit by a truck, but it could, chemically and biologically and neuro-electrically be identical. Then we add the Memory RNA and other bits and pieces that make up a brain tape…
Viola!
Wow, I thought I was the only one who followed this line of reasoning. My wife just doesn’t seem to understand what I mean when I say that, from our own perspective, we’re all immortal, even if we have no soul and the mind dies with the brain. (I guess I probably shouldn’t say that, as she’s an SDMB denizen as well and might read this and slay me … but I’ll takes me chances.)
Anyway, as far as I can tell, I’m immortal – the realization of this hit me fully after a couple of experiences with my brain ceasing normal operations. One was when I accidentally overdosed on some bizarre herbal sleeping medication, and another time was when I was anesthetized for surgery. I realized that, when your consciousness shuts down (fully, so you aren’t dreaming or anything), it’s like being in one of Larry Niven’s stasis boxes – time freezes for the duration. I was fully awake and aware one moment, and then wham, fully awake the next – subjectively, no time had passed at all. From then on, I realized that, while I’d rather remain alive, death and the horror of non-being wasn’t as scary as I had previously thought, even if it turned out I had no immortal soul.
And after death, if, at some point in time and space in the lengthy future of the universe, some kindly alien engineer or benevolent neural simulator or random convergence of matter happens to recreate my mental state as it was just before death (preferably being supported by a non-dying brain and body, if it isn’t a simulation) … well, then, I’ll continue with my perception of immortality. And if not, I won’t notice.
Hope that wasn’t too rambling … I really need to get some sleep. 
Yes but that isn’t the same person who was killed.
You could create another person that way while the original was still alive. They wouldn’t have one conciousness in two bodies.
Its two entirely seperate conciousnesses, not one leaping from place to place.
Maybe, and maybe not. This is where things start getting odd, and more philosophy based.
In theory, lets say I go out tonite, and get my brain scan done, and something goes wrong and tomorrow morning when I wake up there’s another me. Biologically we are identical, and the only differences between he and I are the fact that he may have a small ridge of Neural scar tissue that I don’t have, and I have about 10 extra hours worth of memory on him.
Who’s to say, outside of the fact that I was here first, that he has no right to claim that he’s me. In all possible conceivable ways, he is me. He would react to every stimulus the exact same way I would.
Now, when you are speaking of “consciousness”… are you really meaning “soul” and trying not to say so?
Nope I’m not, while I’ll put my cards on the table in the sense that I am religious that factor doesn’t play into this at all.
This is something so fundemental I struggle to understand why other people don’t seem to view it the same way. (thats not a negative statement, the discussion is interesting)
I’m talking about continuity of thought, a backup cannot possibly be the same conciousness that died. Its an identical twin yes, but it isn’t the same person.
(sorry its late, I had a much clearer argument than that but it didn’t come out right)
Edit: Follow on from my above post.
Like the first example.
Person A has a back up made then a few days later is killed by a truck.
The back up is emplaced in a new body and booted up, the person sits up and carries on from the point of when the backup was taken. But this is Person B.
How can Person B have the same line of conciousness as Person A? Its logically impossible.
Just another quick example, you could copy the backup instantly into another blank slate body (which wouldn’t have to be the same as the orginal, if the original was male the new body could be female for example, though thats throwing a whole other spanner in the works) cloned from the orginal, exactly the same in every way.
Suddenly there are two people, in the first instant they’ll be exactly the same but from that moment on they’ll diverge due to different experiences and stimula.
How could they possibly be the same conciousness? They are two entirely different entities.
This came up in a discussion of Star Trek transporters a while back.
I agree with the O.P. Your duplicate is just that: a duplicate. It is not you.
Tristan’s duplicate (in the example above) is, for all practical purposes, indistinguisable from Tristan. But he is clearly a seperate person. If Tristan got hit by a falling meteor the next day, his consciousness would not magically shift to the clone. He would not somehow wake up and find himself alive again, but in the clone’s body.
Basically, backing up your brain would not give you immortality. It would just provide for a passable replacement after you’re dead.
… so basically someone else would have your memories and live as you, a creepy thought.
I totally aggree with diceman and the likes, even if you copy your memories your “self” could not be transferred.
With non destructive copying the answer is simple; you do the copy and transfer while you are asleep/anaethetised.
Additionally, you both wake up in a recovery room you have never seen before.
I am afraid there is no way that you can tell if you are the original, if the copying process is efficient enough.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
You people are deluding yourselves. Never mind who you were yesterday. You aren’t the same person you were a second ago. That person is dead, never to be again.
While I agree that the to “I”'s are objectively separate consciousnesses, the copied set would have no way (unless told) of knowing for sure if it was the original or the copy, and would be functionally (i.e. subjectively) the same.
While this method, is not true immortality, since the true original is destroyed, if the backups are taken on a regular basis and fairly often, or better yet, at the instant of death, it would be effectively the same thing, since the clone would experience the death (or something nearby, timewise) a loss of consciousness then being reborn. It’s about the same to the clone as if it had gone under anesthesia for the duration of time between the backup and the restart.
Your right in that the original doesn’t mystically (or in any other way) transfer itself to the copy at the point of death. But if the copy has no way of knowing its a copy, it’s effectively the same person, subjectively to its own point of view. To the clone it could be made to appear that it survived the death experience, that it blacked out, or that it died but was revived (i.e. that doctors restarted its heart), or any number of other excuses given, and the clone wouldn’t know that it wasn’t the original.
I’ve noticed a couple of posts on this thread arguing along the lines of what is quoted above. The “continuity of thought” argument rings a little hollow to me (no offense!). Even when you are up and around, your conscious experience is not continuous. It certainly seems continous, but this is an illusion. It is in fact full of easily measurable gaps. For a good layman’s overview of the arguments involved, refer to Daniel Dennet’s book Consciousness Explained.
And just to muddy the waters a little further, I have a variation on the scenarios offered previously. Suppose we knock out some poor guy and dump him into an enclosed (and opaque) teleporter that’s, say, several feet across. We fire it up, telling the machine to teleport him a foot or so, but to skip the disintegration part of the teleportation process. We instruct the teleporter to keep no record of the steps taken in the procedure. Then we wait for him (both of him!) to wake up and come out. Now… which one is the original and which one is the copy? It seems to me that they both have an equal claim! They can both say, truthfully, that they remember being conked on the head and waking up awhile later in a little room with another person that looks exactly like them. If the teleportation process is very high-fidelity (and if we’re using for moving loads of people around day after day it had better be) then there is just no way of distinguishing one from the other. Since our sap was knocked out, there is a definite gap in his conscious experience. If we side with the you-die-every-time-you-go-to-sleep argument, then one of our twins is as good as the other. But if what we commonly think of as conscious experience is really full of gaps even when you’re wide awake, thus making “continuity of thought” an invalid test of whether the reconstructed mind really “counts as” the original, then in all the scenarios given so far the duplicated person (or brain, or thought pattern, or what have you) should be on an equal footing with the original.
And as far as losing a chunk of memory goes (if the recording was taken the night before you were hit by that bus, say), I don’t think that invalidates our duplicate’s claim of originality either. People commonly suffer retroactive amnesia after major trauma, and we don’t commonly consider them to be different people after they wake up.
Or am I completely off the wall?
A story that a professor once told me (surely apocryphal and likely unoriginal):
“I went to an auction and one item up for sale was said to be George Washington’s axe. The owner claimed it was genuine, though the handle had been replaced twice and the head once.”
Even if the claim is true, is it really the same axe? Can an item retain its identity even if all of its components are eventually replaced?
It’s my belief (I’ll refrain from claiming it as absolute truth) that reality is a bit simpler than that. There never was an axe. The concept of the ‘axe’ is completly in your mind. Is the paint on the head part of the axe? Is a termite living in the handle part of the axe? If the head is seperated from the handle is it still an axe? These distinctions are all arbitrary and have no measurable difference without establishing prior criteria.
We use classifications (ravens, water, time) and identities (George Bush, Tom Sawyer, The New York Times) because they help us to model a system as a whole and enable us to calculate (think) faster than by examining the system as a whole each time it needs to be considered. I claim such a classification or identity is correct if and only if useful.
Whether or not you consider an exact copy of someone (or yourself) the same as the original depends entirely how you plan to model the copy. If you watched your friend Bob get horifically mangled and eaten by a bear, are you going to invite Bob2 over for dinner the next night (assuming you were going to invite Bob over originally)? Surely in some ways you might accept Bob2 to as equivalent (you probably won’t object to Bob2 living in Bob’s house, assuming such an arangement was ok’d beforehand) but the very fact that there IS an equivalence (Bob = Bob2) indicates on some level you accept that there are two seperate concepts that you’re equating.
I was considering this very question a couple of days ago in regards to a sci-fi comic I’m working on. What really puzzled me, though, was the logistics of trying to copy a complex system (such as the brain) which is changing even as it is being copied.
Realistically, the process of “reading” the brain in order to copy it is going to take some amount of time, even if it’s only a few fractions of a second. During that time, parts of the brain will have changed–neurons will fire, chemicals will be exchanged, and information will be transferred across the brain in one form or another. The result is that the brain that was there at the start of the copying process won’t be the same as the brain at the end of the copying process–so if you started scanning at, say, the forebrain and ended at the occipital lobe, the front and back parts of the brain wouldn’t quite agree with one another. The difference would be minor, but it would be there, and the potential for small discrepancies to wreak havoc on the mind is enormous.
At minimum, the person being copied would have to be rendered unconscious in order to minimize brain activity during the scan. But even then, there would be some brain activity on the subconscious level. We’d need to find some way of halting brain activity altogether without killing the body attatched to the brain…
What is the nature of self?
That is the heart of this issue. It is a timeless question that has been the underlying core isssue of most theological and philosphical debates. Is self simply an illusion? Is it the sum of billions of cells communicating with each other? Is perception of time and space simply a trick? Or is there an “I” which is greater than the sum of all of our parts (what most people would call a soul)? And if there is a soul of some kind - where is it located? Is it tangible? Is it movable? Is it copyable? Is it physical or is it metaphysical (and therefore untouchable)?
The slow replacement scenario is a very interesting one. I am Dj. If I lose my arms tomorrow in a horrible speed boat accident am I still me? What if I replace them with new robot arms? Now, what if I go out the next day and lose my legs in an earthquake related accident. Then I replace them with matching robotic legs. Am I still me? I still have my memory. Few would argue that a person with severed limbs is no longer themself. So how much can you take away from my body before I lose my memories and my abilities? Suppose I go out the next day and get crushed in an elevator accident - losing everything below the neck. If they are able to transplant my head onto Lee Majors body am I me or am I Lee Majors? Now, suppose that I catch a terrible disease that is destroying every cell in my body. As each cell is destroyed it is replaced with a new robotic equivalent. So all of my neurons (and every other cell) are replaced one by one. Is what results still me even if it has none of the original matter that I was composed of? Is it me so long as I have memory?
The nature of self is a great (if not the greatest) puzzle we have ever tried to solve. Neuro-Science is in its relative infancy, but they are making remarkable leaps of understanding daily in that field. These questions may just get answered. Maybe alot sooner than you might expect. The answers, however, may not be what some people want to hear. It could very well be that there is no “I” only an “Us” that allows an illusion of “I” to represent billions and billions of smaller parts. In the quest for immortality we must figure out which physical parts of ourselves must be maintained to perpetuate this (potentially illusionary) self.
There may be no inherant meaning to any part of existance. That meaning which we decide to give it may be the only meaning there is (existentialism - right?). So, even if my self is an illusion, it is an illusion I wish to maintian for quite a while to come. We need to figure out where that self lives so that we can understand what is important to preserve on our quest for immortality. I intend to live forever or die trying, but I will undoubtedly have to reconsider the question of just what makes up “me” if I ever want to accomplish that goal.
I love the above quote. Similarly, I want to live through not dying, not through creating a copy of myself. These questions also get to the heart of free-will and choice. If the self is simply the sum of quantifiable interactions of matter, then it is possible (even likely) that we have no real choice in our interactions. If this is the case, then legal systems need to shift focus from punishment to treatment and containment (something that should arguably be done anyway). If we are able to successfully unravel, define, and describe the mechanations and nature of self, then the reults will most likely transform our entire species. I’m on the edge of my seat with a cryogenic backup plan. Maybe we’ll finish this conversation in a hundred years or so . . .
DaLovin’ Dj
> I’m talking about continuity of thought, a backup cannot possibly
> be the same conciousness that died. Its an identical twin yes,
> but it isn’t the same person.
Technically true. But, it is an identical twin with all the exact same memories and abilities. It is a different conciousness, but it will start off the exact same as the original. From the moment that the twin is “started up”, though, it will take a different path in life than the original would have (or “will” if the original still exists).
If the original is destroyed at the moment that the copy is started up, it will be exactly equivalent to the original not being destroyed and the copy not started.
My view is that your “self” is the current state of your brain and operations upon that state carried out by the brain, viewing the brain as basically a very complex if messy computer. “You” in other words are software (whatever algorithms the brain is using) acting on data (all your memories and current mental state) running on hardware (the brain). I see no particular reason why the harware substrate matters since it does not seem to in other software/hardware systems. For example, an old Atari video game doesn’t behave differently when you run it under an emulator on a PC. An uploaded human mind should work the same way. I would call this the “operational self”. You are the operations your brain is carrying out moment to moment. Replicate the system well enough and the same operations occur and “you” are back alive again.
A lot of recent hard sci-fi deals with these ideas. I highly recommend anything by Greg Egan. He gets into some esoteric maths sometimes though so be warned. I’m reading “Diaspora” now and it’s quite mind blowing. He touches on a lot of these ideas in his work. And of course, Ian M. Banks. I have his “Excession” and will be reading that after Diaspora.
All of this assumes perhaps more importance to the brain as an organ, versus the rest of the nervous system. Taken together, the rest of the nervous system contains at least as much matter as the brain, and certainly the spinal cord has a great role in our animation, if not conciousness.
I posit that without the rest of the nervous system replicated as well as the brain, functionality at least would be lost. E.G. one may be concious, but in a vegetative state, unable to control the attached body.