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Old 04-04-2012, 09:47 PM   #1001
ErhnamDJ
 
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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Originally Posted by sir_pudding View Post
If I'm going to be dead anyway, having somebody around to carry on being me is better than the alternative of there being no me at all. Therefore I'd get ghosted
Okay.

And if I'm going to be dead, I want to be dead. I don't want some computer parading around as me.

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I'd support laws that treat the ghost as me.
And I don't want some computer tainting my memory. It can enter into contracts as me, write novels and claim I wrote them, and do anything else it pleases as me. And then people will be tricked into believing it! I don't want this thing telling my great-grandkids about my great-grandfather's stories of the nineteenth century like it was the one sitting around the campfire listening to them. Because it wasn't.

And don't think for a moment that I don't feel empathy with the computer-person, because I do. It's going to hate this legal setup at least as much as I do, but probably more. At least I get the comfort of knowing this is going to be a short fight for me. But this computer creature is potentially facing thousands of years of subjugation under this system until it's accidentally killed. It'd be like living in the Soviet Union forever. I fear for my copies. How would you feel if you woke up one day and got told you were some person you're not, and that you were responsible for things they had done? This is something I'd expect out of bronze age civilizations: creating some new person to be responsible for the sins of the dead.

Just think about what you're saying here. You want the law to treat a person that doesn't even exist yet, as you. If you sell yourself into slavery and die, and then they create this new person, it's born a slave. It's a slave because it resembles you. Creating new people to act as slaves.

Yeah, maybe I would want my copy to keep on in this world. I'd want it to copy itself a trillion times and do everything it could to put an end to this madness. But I still wouldn't want it/them to claim they're me. Because they're not me. I'd be dead.

At least, I think that's the logical outcome of what you're saying you want here. It doesn't look any different to me than having the debts of the parents pass onto their children. And it doesn't have anything at all to do with identity.
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Old 04-04-2012, 10:17 PM   #1002
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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It matters to the rest of the world though.
The concerns of the rest of the world are secondary. They matter to me only insofar as I choose to adopt them as my concerns.

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Old 04-04-2012, 10:23 PM   #1003
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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If I'm going to be dead anyway, having somebody around to carry on being me is better than the alternative of there being no me at all. Therefore I'd get ghosted, and I'd support laws that treat the ghost as me.
Most of that is a total sidetrack as far as I'm concerned. Remember, my position is that the digital ghost is a copy of me; that is, that creating digital ghosts is a form of reproduction. There are certainly people who value reproduction highly, and I'm not going to argue that they're irrational in doing so, whether they choose to reproduce by having biological children or being cloned or being ghosted.

On the other hand, I don't think that laws that treat the ghost as being you can be made generally workable. If you don't have a prohibition on xoxing—in fact, what amounts to a mandatory death sentence with no appeal for the xox—then you have changed from decisions being made by an individual to decisions being made by what amounts to a partnership with an unlimited number of members, with every partner being bound by every other partner's choices. Do you know about the tragedy of the commons?

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Old 04-05-2012, 12:06 AM   #1004
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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On the other hand, I don't think that laws that treat the ghost as being you can be made generally workable. If you don't have a prohibition on xoxing—in fact, what amounts to a mandatory death sentence with no appeal for the xox—then you have changed from decisions being made by an individual to decisions being made by what amounts to a partnership with an unlimited number of members, with every partner being bound by every other partner's choices.
Now that´s what I´d call a proper Transhuman Law. All (close enough) copies of the original you together form You Unlimited. Simple, elegant. Still, that probably belongs into another thread.
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Old 04-05-2012, 12:19 AM   #1005
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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I'd be careful phrasing it like that. You make it sound like it might be the same person. My guess is that you're using the term here like Vicky uses the word 'book.'
...
Obviously, when I talk about 'me,' I am referring to a specific physical entity. That word never refers to a specific kind of entity, but a specific specific entity. That blasted computer device has none of the qualities of 'me.' I don't know this is difficult to understand.
I think this has been said before, but what if you get an electronic brain implant connected to your brain, enhancing or restoring some of its functions ? Will that automatically kill you ? Or a few of the neurons of your brain are exchanged with artifical neurons ? I think you already see where I am getting at: what if the transformation of your brain is a slow and gradual process, could that keep your identity intact in your eyes?

Please note that I am also not convinced that ghosting does transfer your identity, but that it is a fictional process which would have results that I cannot know now and which would conceptually be impossible to find out. Only I know about my identity and I wouldn´t be around to tell or, if I still could after uploading, sceptics wouldn´t believe me anyway. As long as we don´t have a scientific basis for what identity is and a means to test it, the results of uploading are a matter of speculation.
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Old 04-05-2012, 12:30 AM   #1006
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I think this has been said before, but what if you get an electronic brain implant connected to your brain, enhancing or restoring some of its functions ? Will that automatically kill you ? Or a few of the neurons of your brain are exchanged with artifical neurons ? I think you already see where I am getting at: what if the transformation of your brain is a slow and gradual process, could that keep your identity intact in your eyes?
I don't know about Ernham, but for me, that kind of step by step substitution could in principle be sufficient to hand off "identity" from me the biological organism to a digital entity. I note that Kurzweil proposes such a scheme for uploading in The Singularity Is Near.

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Old 04-05-2012, 12:35 AM   #1007
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Now that´s what I´d call a proper Transhuman Law. All (close enough) copies of the original you together form You Unlimited. Simple, elegant. Still, that probably belongs into another thread.
The ability of any partner to bind any other partner creates difficulties as the number of partners increases; eventually you get to the point where the cognitive burden of anticipating other partners' actions is just too great. And if you invoke the enhanced capabilities of digital minds, you seem to be moving further away from the idea that the digital entity is actually an emulation of the original human mind with its human cognitive limitations.

There is also, as I said, the tragedy of the commons issue. We cannot suppose that one copy of you will be altruistically motivated toward the other copies of you. Bill Watterson did a very good Calvin and Hobbes about that issue.

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Old 04-05-2012, 01:00 AM   #1008
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The ability of any partner to bind any other partner creates difficulties as the number of partners increases; eventually you get to the point where the cognitive burden of anticipating other partners' actions is just too great.
Yes. You should stop xoxing yourself well before that. As of today, you can form an association with un unlimited number of other people, under whose charter every member can bind every other member. It wouldn´t be wise to do so, though. But I wouldn´t see any conceptual legal problems with it, only a host of practical problems.

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There is also, as I said, the tragedy of the commons issue. We cannot suppose that one copy of you will be altruistically motivated toward the other copies of you. Bill Watterson did a very good Calvin and Hobbes about that issue.
Yes. If you cannot trust yourself, don´t get it copied - especially if deleting a part of yourself is not treated as a crime.

Still, some kind of legal solution resembling inheritance law would probably work smoother - but this one would surely be more interesting. How do all the xoxes organize internally ? Do they form a democracy ? Are they required to form a democracy or can they do as they please ? I think it would be fascinating to explore a situation like that.
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Old 04-05-2012, 01:04 AM   #1009
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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a few of the neurons of your brain are exchanged with artifical neurons? I think you already see where I am getting at: what if the transformation of your brain is a slow and gradual process, could that keep your identity intact in your eyes?
Maybe it could. I'd have to sit down and look at the exact process. But I'm doubtful of it.

Think about this example: Right now, I am me. A certain combination of atoms in my brain. You freeze my brain to absolute zero and replace each atom one at a time.

You replace the first atom. Still me? The second. Still me? On down the line.

As you remove the atoms from my brain, you slowly rebuild my brain with them. Now you have my actual brain, which has been taken apart and put back together. And you have the one that has slowly replaced my brain.

Which one is me?

Of course, that relies on stuff that's not possible. Remove the absolute zero and your whole thing is now in question. And I don't even know if a brain that's been swiss-cheesed that much could ever be put back together again like it was before. Maybe if you're replacing whole neurons at the same time. But then you need to get those neurons to work just like my original ones.

And you're going to have all sorts of problems here, because you're either messing with the brain while it's running or you're shutting it down completely. Either of those is going to screw things up, because the brain is a working device. It's not made to be shut down and restarted like you'd probably want to do here, and if you're replacing stuff while it's running, that's going to mess things up to the point where you might lose identity there. Strap a nuclear bomb to my chest and detonate it and my individual atoms still exist, but their resulting form isn't going to have my identity. I'll tell you that right now. And I think any means of replacing neurons is probably going to result in just about the same thing.

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As long as we don´t have a scientific basis for what identity is and a means to test it, the results of uploading are a matter of speculation.
I don't think any of this has a thing to do with science, and it's all about the definitions of the words and the application of some logic and epistemology.


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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
I don't know about Ernham, but for me, that kind of step by step substitution could in principle be sufficient to hand off "identity" from me the biological organism to a digital entity.
I'll say it might be possible to use words to describe something where that happens, but that I seriously doubt it's possible in physical reality. I don't have the knowledge of chemistry, physics, or neurology to come to any conclusion there, though. This is one of those cases where you need empirical evidence.

I don't know that this idea of transformation is even relevant to the issue of copying. You can copy a digital person. You can ever copy them and keep the original. And then it's incredibly obvious that they're not the same person. A machine running a copy of my copy on Pluto is not the same entity as the original copy sitting on the front porch in Mississippi.

So, even if you could transform me into some sort of cyborg-brained person that could be more easily copied, those copies still won't be 'me.' One's thoughts are not the other's. They exist in different places. They're made from different physical material. One can cease to be while the other carries on. And so on.
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Old 04-05-2012, 02:40 AM   #1010
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ View Post
Think about this example: Right now, I am me. A certain combination of atoms in my brain. You freeze my brain to absolute zero and replace each atom one at a time.

You replace the first atom. Still me? The second. Still me? On down the line.

As you remove the atoms from my brain, you slowly rebuild my brain with them. Now you have my actual brain, which has been taken apart and put back together. And you have the one that has slowly replaced my brain.

Which one is me?
Even without the copy, the question arises - if your mind is frozen and kept in storage for some time, is your identity intact ? In my book, the answer is the same, as with uploading. You don´t know and you can´t know. The only one who can make qualified statements about your identity is you.

Throw those perfect copies into a blender before waking them up, so that no record is kept which one is the original.

Now both versions will be convinced that they are you. Or not. Actually, nobody would be able to tell, including themselves! Even you couldn´t tell the difference between being you or just being convinced to be you while being a (nearly) perfect copy.

I wonder whether the question of identity actually has any meaning in a thought experiment such as this.

And note that you could actually do this with real and self-aware infomorphs in THS!

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I don't think any of this has a thing to do with science, and it's all about the definitions of the words and the application of some logic and epistemology.
If you assume that forming and keeping you identity is a function of your brain and that your brain works under scientifc laws, identity should be a scientifc phenomenon.
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