News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:'With brain preservation, nobody has to die' by mensetmanusman on Tuesday December 03, 2024 @04:00PM (#42311351)
Every nanosecond the set of atoms constituting you changes, each of those are a different you.
Re:'With brain preservation, nobody has to die' by ruszki on Tuesday December 03, 2024 @04:22PM (#42311634)
Not if “you” is created by emergence.
Re:'With brain preservation, nobody has to die' by smeej on Tuesday December 03, 2024 @04:14PM (#42311525)
There's a difference between "I have changed" and "I have been copied." This seems obvious enough to me that I don't question it, but is it not obvious to everyone?
Re:'With brain preservation, nobody has to die' by mensetmanusman on Tuesday December 03, 2024 @04:21PM (#42311617)
Copies are impossible because every moment is change with bounded but non-zero uncertainty.
Re:'With brain preservation, nobody has to die' by smeej on Tuesday December 03, 2024 @04:24PM (#42311654)
The fact that "you are different" does not mean a "different you" now exists, though. Change of this specific kind is already intrinsically integrated into your existence and identity.
Re:'With brain preservation, nobody has to die' by mensetmanusman on Tuesday December 03, 2024 @04:43PM (#42311880)
Every moment of consciousness is different. It is a different you in that sense. What is the strand that keeps it the same ‘you’?
Re:'With brain preservation, nobody has to die' by Charon77 on Tuesday December 03, 2024 @08:35PM (#42313683)
Honestly I'd like to have my mind copied, but may only be 'simulated' once the current me is dead. From my perspective I'll be dead and there's no changing that, but from the clone's perspective, life just goes on.
Re:'With brain preservation, nobody has to die' by smeej on Wednesday December 04, 2024 @11:48AM (#42319295)
Physical continuity, in the sense that there is no break so significant that at any point one could say, "Before this, smeej0, and after this, smeej1." Unlike the ship of the famous thought experiment, there is and can be no reconstructing of the replaced parts such that smeej0 could ever be reconstituted, so the analogy breaks down in any attempt to apply it to humans.

Change is ssential to human nature. A human exists--and the same human exists--fron fertilization to death. Fertilization is a change before which we can say "not smeej" and after which, "smeej." And death is also a change before which we can say "smeej" and after which, "not smeej." There will be vastly, vastly more cells at death than there were at fertilization (assuming smeej made it out of the womb and to an observable state), and the original fertilized cell will no longer exist, but there is no other point along the existence of smeej in which a change happens of such significance as to alter whether or not the same thing is present.

Re:'With brain preservation, nobody has to die' by jiveturkey on Tuesday December 03, 2024 @04:29PM (#42311718)
true quantum scale copies may be impossible but that resolution may not be necessary to fully copy a person.
Re:'With brain preservation, nobody has to die' by maximus-decimus on Tuesday December 03, 2024 @07:38PM (#42313362)
switching a sesame seed on my burger bun is not the same thing as scanning it and uploading the file to the cloud.
Re:'With brain preservation, nobody has to die' by prometheus76 on Wednesday December 04, 2024 @08:52AM (#42317409)
Because you are more than atoms. You are a pattern. A pattern plays out over time. Like music. Music has a physical component, of course, but music is enjoyable because it's a pattern over time.
Re:'With brain preservation, nobody has to die' by ben_w on Wednesday December 04, 2024 @09:05AM (#42317525)
Which is the "real" Moonlight Sonata: Beethoven's original sheet music, the first performance, the photons carrying some radio broadcast, some physical vinyl or CD master copy, a lossless encoded digital copy?

The thing about a copy, it reproduces that pattern. The question is, how good does a copy need to be to retain the important features? For now, I suspect that any attempt to actually scan a brain would be a cargo-cult copy of a mind… but I don't know that for sure, I'm just going with what I hear from the occasional neuroscientist who bothers to comment on misconceptions in this field.