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I'm interested in this topic, but it seems to me that the entire scientific pursuit of copying the human brain is absurd from start to finish. Any attempt to do
by aw124 7mo ago
I'm interested in this topic, but it seems to me that the entire scientific pursuit of copying the human brain is absurd from start to finish. Any attempt to do so should be met with criminal prosecution and immediate arrest of those involved. Attempting to copy the human brain or human consciousness is one of the biggest mistakes that can be made in the scientific field.
We must preserve three fundamental principles:
* our integrity
* our autonomy
* our uniqueness
These three principles should form the basis of a list of laws worldwide that prohibit cloning or copying human consciousness in any form or format. This principle should be fundamental to any attempts to research or even try to make copies of human consciousness.
Just as human cloning was banned, we should also ban any attempts to interfere with human consciousness or copy it, whether partially or fully. This is immoral, wrong, and contradicts any values that we can call the values of our civilization.
- sedan_baklazhan 7mo agoI wouldn't be surprised if in (n hundreds/thousands years) we find out that copying consciousness if fundamentally impossible (just like it's fundamentally impossible to copy an elementary particle).
- alfiedotwtf 7mo agoElementary particles are suspiciously indistinguishable, so even if you could copy an electron, you wouldn't even be able to tell! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
- bananaflag 7mo agoThey meant this, which refers to copying the state of a particle into another (already existing) particle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem And basically, about consciousness, what they said is true if our brain state fundamentally depends on quantum effects (which I personally don't believe, as I don't think evolution is sophisticated enough to make a quantum computer)
- sedan_baklazhan 7mo ago[flagged]
- bananaflag 7mo agohttps://www.sciencesnail.com/science/the-highly-ordered-nature-of-life-does-not-violate-the-second-law-of-thermodynamics https://www.sciencesnail.com/science/the-highly-ordered-natu...
- sedan_baklazhan 7mo agoThis is a bad explanation (or a non-explanation). 1. Why exactly life is attempting to build complex structures? 2. Why exactly life is evolving from primitive replicative molecules to more complex structures (which molecules on themselves are very complicated?) 3. Why and how did these extremely complicated replicative molecules form at all, from much more simple structures, to begin with?
- ben_w 7mo agoThese are natural outcomes of evolution, you see the same things pop up very easily with simulated evolution* of even non-organic structures. * that is, make a design (by any method including literally randomly), replicate it imperfectly m times, sort by "best" according to some fitness function (which for us is something we like, for nature it's just survival to reproductive age), pick best n, mix and match, repeat
- pdpi 7mo agoThere doesn't need to be a "why?", we just need an absence of a "why not?". Something as simple as the game of life shows you how highly complex emergent behaviour can emerge from incredibly simple rules.
- Dylan16807 7mo agoThe relevant molecules are made of very simple pieces that like to stick to each other and the way they stick influences their neighbors. It's very feasible to stumble into a pattern that spreads, and from there all you need is time and luck for those patterns to mutate into better spreaders, often getting more complicated as they do so in competition with other patterns.
- mpeg 7mo agoI’m not an expert in the subject, but I wonder why you have such a strong view? IMHO if it was even possible to copy the human brain it would answer a lot of questions regarding our integrity, autonomy and uniqueness. Those answers might be uncomfortable, but it feels like that’s not a reason to not pursue it.
- throw_away723 7mo ago> Those answers might be uncomfortable, but it feels like that’s not a reason to not pursue it. My problem with that is it is very likely that it will be misused. A good example of the possible misuses can be seen in the "White Christmas" episode of Black Mirror. It's one of the best episodes, and the one that haunts me the most.
- mpeg 7mo agoI get that, but assuming the technology was possible it would have huge implications for what it means to have consciousness as a whole. Misuse is a worry, but not pursuing it for fear of misuse is deliberately choosing to stay in Plato's cave, I don't know what's worse
- wat10000 7mo agoWould it? There would be no way of knowing whether the upload is conscious or not.
- Filligree 7mo agoThe same is true for biological humans. The moment the first upload exists, they’ll be justified in wondering if the ones made from meat are truly conscious.
- wat10000 7mo agoIndeed. I know at least one other biological human was conscious at some point, because people have this idea of consciousness without me telling them about it. But there's no way of knowing for any specific person.
- echelon 7mo ago> Attempting to copy the human brain or human consciousness is one of the biggest mistakes that can be made in the scientific field. This will be cool, and nobody will be able to stop it anyway. We're all part of a resim right now for all we know. Our operators might be orbiting Gaia-BH3, harvesting the energy while living a billion lives per orbit. Perhaps they embody you. Perhaps you're an NPC. Perhaps this history sim will jump the shark and turn into a zombie hellpacalypse simulator at any moment. You'll have no authority to stop the future from reversing the light cone, replicating you with fidelity down to neurotransmitter flux, and doing whatever they want with you. We have no ability to stop this. Bytes don't have rights. Especially if it's just sampling the past. We're just bugs, as the literature meme says. Speaking of bugs, at least we're not having eggs laid inside our carapaces. Unless the future decides that's our fate for today's resim. I'm just hoping to continue enjoying this chai I'm sipping. If this is real, anyway.
- mrob 7mo agoCrazy that people are downvoting this. Copying a consciousness is about the most extreme violation of bodily autonomy possible. Certainly it should be banned. It's worse than e.g. building nuclear weapons, because there's no possible non-evil use for it. It's far worse than cloning humans because cloning only works on non-conscious embryos.
- philipswood 7mo agoIt might be one of the only reasonable-seeming ways to not die. I can see the appeal.
- lencastre 7mo agowhat a copy of you is not you-you, it’s another you when you die, that’s it, the other you may still be alive but… it’s not you disclaimer: no psychadelics used to write this post
- philipswood 7mo agoAre you sure that guy who wakes up tomorrow after you've gone to sleep is you? Or the one who wakes up after 10,000 sleeps? I'm sure he's going to be quite different... Maybe that dude (the one who woke up after you went to sleep) is another you, but slightly different. And you, you're just gone.
- mrob 7mo agoI cannot be 100% certain that sleep is not fatal. If I had some safe and reliable means of preventing sleep I would take it without hesitation. But it seems plausible that a person could survive sleep because it's a gradual process and one that everybody has a lot of practice doing. However, there are no such mitigating factors with general anesthetics. I will refuse general anesthetics if I am ever in a situation to do so. I believe a combination of muscle relaxants and opioids can serve the same medical purpose, which I do not believe would kill the person.
- 7mo ago
- lxgr 7mo agoGood ideas in principle. Too bad we have absolutely no way of enforcing them against the people running the simulation that hosts our own consciousnesses.