From: Emlyn (emlyn@one.net.au)
Date: Wed Dec 06 2000 - 22:57:19 MST
Chucking in my 2 cents...
I like to think of consciousness/identity (the continuous self which we all
cling to, and which we nontheless cannot explain, or even demonstrate the
existence of), as like a whirlpool.
A whirlpool is a thing, which we can name, see, which we can say exists. Yet
it isn't anything, really, except for a part of fluid flow. The fluid is the
substrate, the whirlpool is superposed on it, an epiphenomenon.
If you exactly measured the whirlpool at a point in time, the fluid flows,
the topology, whatever, and constructed a similar stream elsewhere, set up
the fluid flows in exactly the same way, then you should get an exactly
identical whirlpool. Dynamic systems people will cringe - um, we probably
have to assume omniscience/omnipotence to achieve this, but hey, it's the
extro list after all.
Is it the same whirlpool? No. It's a copy. It's history would make it out to
be the same whirlpool; if you ran a (super omniscient) sim of it's flow
backwards, you would infer all the original behaviour of the original
stream, even though the copy never did these things. Actually, if your sim
was good enough, you might infer the copying event, but let's assume it's
not. Why? Because I want to. Hmph.
Why did you do this? Maybe you have a new picotech material which can behave
exactly like water, and you want to move the whirlpool from water to this
Water++. Cool. But copying wont do it; it's not the same whirlpool.
On the other hand, you could release your picotech material into the
original stream, and slowly shut out the water flow. Eventually, the
substrate is Water++, and the whirlpool remains, the same whirlpool in a
different medium.
(warning - metaphor stretched beyond safe limits... please back up your work
and switch topics)
Ok, the analogue to this in consciousness, is the comparison of a copy-style
upload, to a gradual upload.
A copy-style upload takes a snapshot of the brain/body at some point in
time, and uses it as the initial data in a sim. This copy will feel as
though it is the original, teleported into the sim abruptly. Unfortunately,
the original exists also, and feels like nothing happened. It may experience
a lot of fear and then not much of anything, as a lot of the copy upload
scenarios seem to involve doing away with the original.
A gradual, incremental upload, sees the component parts of the physiology
that supports consciousness being replaced gradually (ie: over some amount
of time), by non-biological, and eventually entirely virtual, replacements
which keep all remaining biological material at any point in time running as
if nothing had happened. In a nutshell, this might be replacing neurons by
nanobots, one by one, the nanobots moving their processing from local to
remote (inside some sim maybe). All the while, the subject remains
conscious. The idea is that consciousness, whilst changing substrate, will
retain it's integrity. This is movement, not copying. Hopefully.
Who knows what would happen? Perhaps the original entity's "consciousness"
would imperceptibly slip away, at a level removed from conscious thought,
such that the individual would not notice in time or at all. This seems like
a tree-falling-in-the-forest kind of problem, but perhaps an answer is
warranted.
In any case, I feel that the whirlpool metaphor, and incremental replacement
scenario, are the most palatable to those who believe in the illusion of
consciousness (myself included), and desire to upload, without losing that
most dear to us.
Emlyn
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