This is a dilemma I've been talking about with a couple of my friends and I'd really like to see other people's opinion on this issue. Those who have played Tales from the Borderlands may notice a similarity to AI Jack here - it is, admittedly, a philosophical-ish dilemma based on that concept.
Imagine the following scenario:
You are chosen to be a potential test subject for a new type of technology. Its creators claim to have defictionalized mind uploading. Your brain would be mapped and, for lack of a better vocabulary, its contents would be uploaded into a machine.
However, there is a catch.
You have no guarantee that it will work as advertised.
The end result is the creation of an entity inside a machine. The thing is, it may or may not be you. It may be an AI which is absolutely convinced and insistent that it is you. It may be you, as in the human being whose mind has been transported into a mechanical vessel. There is absolutely no way to tell what will the end result truly be.
If the technology works, you will effectively become immortal. Everything that makes you you will persist for far longer than your physical body would.
If the technology does not work though, you will be killed in a process you voluntarily signed up for, and the world will obtain a being that is basically your imposter.
Would you accept the offer or would you decline it?
nah, i'll let some other guy be the guinea pig.
Also even if it "works" and translates your minds contents to the machine, the question of consciousness is nowhere near answered, so I'll just assume that even then it's death.
I don't see any way there's a chance of my consciousness following over in the transfer, so if I die in the process, it's kind of a no-go. Even if it goes over perfectly, I can see it at best being a perfect mechanical clone, not a 'switch' from being human to machine. Now if we go by Soma-rules and say it's simply a 'backup' and you get to live your life as always from there on out , I'm all in. Go make a robot-army of mes, as long as I get to live my boring-ass life.
with the risk in mind I think I'd only consider this if I were terminally ill.
No matter what you do, unless you actually transplant the brain or you slowly and sequentially replace brain matter with cybernetic parts to maintain continuity of conciousness, uploading your brain will always result in a new you but there's no coin flip. You're not the uploaded personality. Still, I would do it so part of me could go on.
They would probably delete me pretty quickly, as it would probably go something like this
http://puu.sh/AyD4H.png
If I die, what's the point?
If I didn't die though, I'd go for it. Clone me would appreciate it.
There's basically no way it's going to actually be 'you', because if you don't die during the process, you're going to have both existing at the same time, clearly demonstrating that they're separate entities. Although if you do die, it probably won't make a difference in practice. After all, our bodies are replaced with new material all the time, and our minds change over time too. I would do it if I was near death anyway.
Also, obligatory side note; play SOMA, it's great.
The only way people can obtain my personal information is if I share it online with a site that then shares it with others without me knowing, if I upload my mind to something, whoever that something belongs to will have access to ALL the information in my brain, and you fucking know they'd be selling that shit.
Debated this tons personally. Given all technology works as intended, consciousness still couldn't be transferred - only copied/cloned. You could maybe make a copy and it would retain your knowledge but your new self still wouldn't be "you". Repeating this though you could maybe live "forever" as the same person just a different new consciousness would be formed upon each death.
With some future nanotech, slowly replacing each bit of the brain with replacement cybernetic copy cells/ect could possibly retain your consciousness and still be electronic. Even then, if you are some theoretical robo-brain guy now and then slowly replaced all your limbs with robotic augmentations like Adam Jensen or the Terminator, (completely ditching your original organic body, while still retaining consciousness) you would still run into the copy/clone issue. Because if your theoretical robo-brain was destroyed, regardless of you having a copy of that robo-brain, your original consciousness will still be lost forever.
This was something one of my friends talked about in his approach. The closer you are to death, the more appealing it sounds to undergo the upload, since you would die in either case, but one of them guarantees that you'll leave behind a larger legacy (the reasoning being that people fade out of memory within three or four generations, but living on in a machine would stop the forgettance to some degree).
yes. My clones deserve to rule the world, and by some quantum quirk my conciousness transfers over, great!
This has always bothered me if teleportation becomes available. There's no guarantee it's you on the other end if you are deconstructed on one side and reconstructed on the other, it's just a mirror copy.
The worst part is if it comes available, would we even be able to find out?
Reminds me of the quandary of consciousness as a whole, as in ‘when you sleep/are rendered unconscious, your conscious self “dies” and when you wake up, a new consciousness is created and their old memories are uploaded to them.’(censored in case you don’t want this potentially forbidden knowledge in your head)
Like, maybe it’ll work that way too? That doesn’t bother me I guess, cause it feels like I’m always the pilot anyway. I just hope to stick around long enough for cat girls to be real.
fortunately modern medicine has sort of invalidated this as one's brain never completely shuts down until they're totally dead, so while we don't know if we're like an old arcade machine where the scores are blanked if the lights go out, we do know that when we go to sleep or are put under for surgery our brains remain quite active
Cool, good to know!
Also, eat shit Wolfenstein: The New Order, specifically Tekla. That shit bugged me for days.
eh, i'd do it. even if i died, hopefully it'd provide useful data so they can improve the technology to make it work better, which would then benefit the people that would actually need something like this
Heeeeellllloooooo SOMA welcome back to my train of thought.
The answer is no.
However I will trust brain transplant.
That's a whole lot of porn. Are they sure they can handle it?
Mind uploading? No. taking a periodical nanobot treatment that cuts out small amounts of neurons and replaces them with nanobots to get around the whole ship of Theseus instant death problem? yes. Slight memory loss if done correctly otherwise your the exact same person its just your brain would run on electrons instead of blood and chemicals and at that point why bother with the body.
There, I broke all the rational anti mind uploading arguments.
Gotta love that you assume mind upload won't work but nanobots will, despite both being equally fictional and speculative.
Why is it so damn hard? Just put the brain in a jar and bam! You've got immortality.
Obviously you'll need some blood transferry bits to keep the ol' noggin running but other than that, we good.
But if you know that it's a transfer beforehand, then the machine mind will be aware that it is a 'replication' and has been through a transfer.
they both work its just we have nanobots now
That makes me wonder: as a mind machine/brain clone, can you still become aroused? Can I bust mighty fat data packets?
Personally I don't think I'd do it, even if it was reasonably safe to do so without unknowingly committing suicide. Biological bodies are necessary for enjoying most things in life, including but not limited to pizza, beer and napping. Being a mind trapped inside a computer could become incredibly boring and depressing very quickly. Even if you had a robotic body it would still rule out a lot of little things that most of us enjoy doing.
Now if this computer could provide a simulation of some sort where you could still enjoy....life things....I might consider it.
You guys should play SOMA, it digs into this kind of question.
I'd be a happy test subject for it.
I won't lie this is the first time I've heard of that concept, its' really cool / panic attack inducing. However improbable.
I'm not quite seeing the logic in this argument though. You seem to be attributing memories directly to the entity of consciousness as it is described here. You don't need to wipe a hard drive or motherboard to change a CPU, which I think is the best analogy to make for this. If a CPU burned out quickly, having another readily available to swap over in sleep would be logical, no memory lost, no motor function lost, just a quick swap and suddenly you have a new pilot who is non the wiser.
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