From: Jacques Du Pasquier (jacques@dtext.com)
Date: Wed Dec 19 2001 - 11:24:39 MST
Smigrodzki, Rafal wrote (17.12.2001/16:02) :
> Suppose a scientist analyzes your body, and makes two identical
> copies, Rafal #2 and Rafal #3, while you are re-named Rafal #1.
> Suppose he is very evil (« science sans conscience », you know), has a
> gun and tells you « I will now kill, either you Rafal #1, or the two
> others #2 and #3 ; you choose. » What will you choose ?
>
> The position you just stated seems to imply you must choose to be
> killed ; while I rather think you will choose to survive and have the
> two copies killed.
>
> ### Maybe you will find it hard to believe me, but I would prefer to be
> killed rather than to have both of my copies killed - assuming that the
> copies would be set free, they would have a better chance of avenging my
> death (by working together) than me alone. Lee Corbin, who used to post
> here, asked the list the same question (in a slightly different thought
> experiment), and I was one of only 3 persons who gave this answer. And I
> really gave some thought to trying to imagine my emotional state in the
> situation you describe, always with the same results.
You guessed it : I find it hard to believe ; and I suspect that
something unessential in this setup accounts for your imagined
emotional state.
So to make my point even harder to escape, suppose that it starts like
above, except that you are free, all the three of you, and #2 and #3,
for some reason unknown to you, are trying to kill you. Suppose the
only way to avoid being killed is to kill them. What will you do ?
> Should we imagine that ? Should we keep the parallelism and imagine
> mutations arising in the copies, so that the desire to be copied
> becomes more and more natural, and people in the end become MAINLY
> concerned with self-copy as we have long been with procreation ? How
> do you see a future with this technology available ? (this is by the
> way, not as an objection to your position of course)
>
> ### The basic feature which will shape the future will be the ability of
> entities to survive under the prevalent circumstances - this is no different
> from the way the world has been ever since its beginning.
>
> Unbridled growth is under some circumstances a good strategy - e.g bacteria
> in a rich broth. In other circumstances it becomes self-destructive - koala
> bears on some small islands off the coast of Australia multiply until they
> devour all the eukalyptus trees and cause the death of all of them. In a
> society there have to be very stringent limits on growth of its components,
> and the more complex the society, the more stringent the control (the
> highest level of control is needed in organisms like our bodies, or else
> cancers develop).
>
> Personally I would not see unlimited copying as an end in itself, instead it
> is a means of prolonging survival. The number of copies should be large
> enough to prevent all of them being killed in one accident
This is just the way I see it. However, I don't find it very
consistent with what you previously said, ie having thousands of you,
and employers being able of hiring a bunch of you for some tasks, etc.
Maybe you got carried away by the fun of the thought ? :-)
> but not too large
> to strain the available resources or dangerously reduce mental diversity.
As you know such considerations are useless on a personal scale : if
you do restrain yourself in order not to reduce mental diversity, you
will simply be outnumbered by someone who will not restrain himself.
(see below for social control)
> Presumably, once copying becomes possible, the society will have to develop
> ways of controlling it - otherwise one entity could spawn to displace all
> other entities. Such an uncontrolled replicator would be dangerous to all
> other entities and the society would need to destroy vis or render vis
> incapable of copying verself. On the other hand, replicators with good
> mechanisms for limiting growth might be very useful for the society as a
> whole - e.g by providing standardized professional services without the need
> for laborious learning and monitoring.
The social control of autocopy (self-copy) seems to be 1) practically
impossible 2) contrary to freedom and self ownership. (Of course, in
the limits of respecting others, that is, not disassembling them to
assemble more copies of you.)
So it would seem that if autocopy becomes feasible and nanotech
efficiency happens as expected, we will have such an evolution. While
autocopy is not a goal in itself for you, the world will quietly fill
with mutants for whom it is. With an open world (space) this might be
OK after all.
Our evolution-inherited taste for variety might somehow auto-regulate
this as we won't enjoy living with autocopies.
If the value system is changed, then the regulation might come, in the
presence of big challenges, from intrinsic inferiority of lack of
variety, which is why we inherited taste for variety in the first
place.
> This I find very weird indeed, Rafal.
>
> The brain emerged and evolved to coordinate the body. For you to
> identify now with your information processing ability seems
> problematic to me, and I suspect you are victim of an illusion there :
> you identify on a conceptual level to this, but this may be because
> you neglect other aspects of yourself that you would quickly miss. (to
> say the least)
>
> ### Our arms initially evolved to help our ancestors crawl out of the ocean.
> Now they are used to transmit information about the mind's difficulties with
> understanding itself, as in typing emails.
This is not very different from crawling.
> Sometimes the tail starts wagging
> the dog. It happens again and again that structures and processes are
> diverted to different uses in the course of evolution.
In all these cases, something was reinterpreted by the whole body to
serve the purposes of the body. This is just like using a kitchen
knife to defend yourself against an intruder.
What's different here is : that around which everything revolved (the
body), and was the foundation of all goals and values, is suppressed.
What emerged as a better control mechanism is detached from what it
controls, and imagined to pursue a life of its own.
It's like the people in the control tower saying : ok, all these
planes are nice, but sometimes there are crashes, hijacking, etc. --
wouldn'it be nicer if we get rid of the planes ? What we really are is
not the planes. We are the Tower. Let's exist as a tower, without the
burden of the planes.
> Once the apeman stopped knuckle-walking, it became possible to neglect this
> use of the the forelegs and new uses could develop. I do think that I will
> discard some parts of my mind which might no longer be useful to a copied or
> disembodied sentience. Soon we will be able to switch off and modify parts
> of our brains, see how the whole works in practice, and then revert to the
> initial design (if we miss what we got rid of) or try new changes,
You may underestimate the hopelesness in which you will be to make any
such choice.
You orient yourself on evolution-given affective clues. Won't you be
lost when you start changing yourself ? People cannot even control
their lifes if they take little drugs, so that they quickly consider
it an error and make cures to stop. Any change like the ones you
propose will be many times more drastic than any drugs. It will
totally mess with your million years super-sound stratified
organization, and you will have no clue how to regain equilibrium,
unless by getting back to normal.
What I rather expect (now) -- and that's the way I understand
transhumanism -- is a continuation of our evolution. We won't recreate
ourselves arbitrarily, we will keep pursuing our values by new means,
because this is the meaning of our lifes, out of which we would get
lost, loosing interest in ourselves.
The modification of our goals is something we have yet to think about
in a serious way : for on what base could we choose our goals, except
on the existing evolution-given ones ?
I think it is important to acknowledge how deeply we are rooted in
this, and not be deceived by superficial self images.
> How come does one get to the stage of an animal with a centralized
> nervous system to help him to adapt to a stage where the animal IS the
> centralized nervous system.
>
> ### I guess you need to make the CVS portable - adaptable to functioning in
> many bodies, perhaps wirelessly networked. This will be a whole new science
> of "autopsychoengineering".
We already do something like that when we drive a car, for example.
However, we only drive cars for seconding our body's goals, or for fun.
I am not the car-animal I become when driving. I am the Jacques-animal
(*roar*).
> Does "centralized nervous system" even
> mean anything outside of a body ?
>
> ### If you mean existence without a material substrate, then it doesn't (at
> least I think so). If you mean existence without direct access to physical
> manipulators, then yes - it means the ability to analyze and integrate
> available information and produce more or less useful thoughts.
They might be useful to others, but not to you if you have no physical
manipulators. You may function as a brain slave. (for a few days,
after which your creativity falls to zero as you loose interest in
yourself)
I am aware that much of our mental lifes is not directly linked to
behaviour, like listening to music or reflecting about "minds without
bodies". But I suspect it is essentially though indirectly linked to
it all the same.
> Beautifully
> explored by Greg Egan in "Diaspora".
It's a shame I have that SF allergy.
Should I remove it in my remake ?
The trouble is, I don't see it as a handicap, it is there for some
reason, it has a meaning in my development, linked to my appreciation
of literature. So I don't want to remove it more than I want to
program into myself interest for things I am not interested in. It
would be meaningless.
This illustrates my point : I am willing to replace my deffective
(from my current point of view) parts, to augment myself, to
complement myself in order to reach the goals that make sense to me. I
want to get rid of toothache (and of the need of brushing them,
too !), and other similar pains, I don't want to die and I want to
keep developing indefinitely along the lines of my desires and
interests, possibly accelerating the pace of development.
But I am far from being ready to recreate myself arbitrarily like God
is thought by Christian to have created man.
Maybe THIS could be what we should discuss / think about. But it is
probably very difficult.
Goals were brought by evolution, and all our talks revolve around them,
starting with the will to avoid death. It is our passive animation by
goals that provides meaning to our lifes.
> Is it any use at all ?
>
> ### Use for whom? For the CNS itself - yes, as long as it wants to live. For
> others - yes, as long as it produces useful thoughts.
It's funny that you really identify to your CNS.
The very concept of the CNS to want something appears deffective to
me. People want things in a sophisticated way partly implemented by
their CNS. CNS doesn't want anything. WANTING is something people are
regarded as doing, not CNS.
> What will you
> DO ?
>
> ### Learn. Learn how learn more. Recursively self-enhance. Hog as much
> computational and physical resources as I can ethically gain access to.
> Listen to music. Return to my body for a nostalgic natural experience
> sometimes. The list is infinite.
It's funny that one thing you list, as sample of the "infinite list" of
what you will do when you are a mind without a body, is returning to
your body.
I think you should question your self-identification to your CNS. I
submit to you that you are given to yourself by introspection as
something wich is only a superficial part of yourself, and that your
identification to your CNS is a "physicalization" of this.
If your wife/girlfriend tells you she loves you, you may make a
spectral analysis of the voice sample in which she said that and think
that this is the actual shape of your happiness ; but you would be
misled.
> ----
>
> Will you program into yourself goals not linked with your body ?
> Based on what ?
>
> ### I don't know the details now but I would imagine that the quest for
> knowledge, power, and beauty will play an important role.
You never "know the details" when you build something on
introspection.
> You're not a "dualist", thinking that you really are a soul
> trapped in a body ? « Soma sèma » [the body is a grave] ? Back to
> Descartes, or in fact Plato ?
>
> ### God forbid, no! ;-/
>
> I am moderately comfortable in my body as it is now but I do see its
> limitations and I want to transcend them (that's why I am posting on a
> Transhumanist list).
I share this view and desire, and this is why I'm here, too.
> The very phrase "an embodiement of me" that you use in your message
> seems wrong to me, it is the kind of fallacy made by people believing
> in reincarnation.
>
> ### It is a fallacy only if you believe in an immaterial entity hovering
> above your brain and magically keeping it conscious.
You may swear you are not a dualist, you may know many details about
the brain as a neurologist -- and still think like Descartes, which, I
have to say, I think you do ! (Descartes was not a fool, by the way,
he was a genius)
> I believe that the
> subjective experience of being conscious is a natural effect of certain
> information processing tasks in my brain, and if the same tasks are
> materially analyzed and implemented in another brain, the subjective effect
> will be the same.
I used to think that way, but I wouldn't phrase things that way anymore.
Not because I think that there is something MORE to the mind than the
material body.
But because I think that the core of what we call consciousness is
simply the perception that a body has of himself.
By body I don't mean flesh necessarily ; when you run a program the
computer is the body. (no real program running without computer ; the
computer program outside of any body is an abstraction, just like
another text)
To get an idea of what it feels to be a computer running a certain
program, you'll have to ask the computer. You probably won't make a
lot of sense of what he tells you, as we understand each other because
we suppose we feel the same. And if you have taken the responsability
of defining most of his concepts, it will be even less useful to ask
him.
> You are a body (with information processing
> abilities among others), not something embodied. You are given to
> yourself, in introspection, as a mind. But that is not what you
> actually are. This mind is just a useful illusion to help the body
> take care of itself.
>
> ### Is your own conscious self an illusion?? This statement really baffles
> me - I find it inconceivable that one could doubt one's own existence (if
> the word illusion is used here in the usual meaning - something that is not
> real, does not exist). The mind for me is the one thing that I cannot deny,
> under any circumstances, while I could imagine my body as nothing more than
> a few mathematical equations in a simulator.
Isn't it funny (again, sorry) that you seem to reproduce the own words
of Descartes ? :-)
What I meant to say is not that your existence is an illusion. The
illusion is that you are the way you perceive yourself by
introspection.
Remember that your cognitive apparatus evolved to augment your
fitness, and, to that end, to allow you to keep track of what happens
in the surrounding world and make good decisions. Not to do
neurosciences through introspection.
This is why I said that the fact that you are your mind is an illusion
of introspection (from latin roots deceptively meaning : looking into
oneself).
> ----
> You cannot separate it from the body it is part
> of.
>
> ### Not yet.
I think you can NEVER separate the mind from the body it is "in" (to
use your phrasing), for the simple reason that a mind without a body
is an abstraction, like a text without an edition.
You may identify to this abstraction in the sense that you clearly do
not identify to some other parts of your body. For example, whether
your nails are long or short does not affect what you essentially are.
But from there you should not jump to the idea that you can exist
without a body, or simply that you are something else than a body. You
are not ; which doesn't mean that you cannot transform your body in
any imaginable way, nor make copies of yourself that share some or
even all of your essential properties.
Suppose there is only one car in the world, and you are this car. Take
all the other cars that you know as possible non essential variations
on the car that you are. Obviously you can have your lights replaced
by more powerful ones, that won't affect what you essentially are. SO
you can try to focus on what you essentially are.
But now try to make sense of sentences uttered by the car like "Soon,
I will set free from the car I am in."
> Some more thoughts :
>
> I don't believe in continuity of consciousness being a condition for
> individual survival, because I don't believe in continuity of
> consciousness at all. Wheter you have taken 250 micrograms of Propofol
> per minute or not seems irrelevant to me. Continuity is a fable for
> everyday people, too. At each moment we have the ability of recalling
> who we are, and this is what produces this notion of continuity, but
> it is an illusion. It is a bit the same illusion you have with the
> visual field : you think you see much more than you actually do,
> simply because when you want to check that you see something in your
> peripheral visual field, then you look at it and you see it, and so
> you never get conscious of any hole in the visual field (in the same
> way as you are able to recall what's your name, where you live, what
> you do for a living, etc.) You need an experimental setup to
> indirectly realize that there really are holes in you visual field.
> You can never SEE the holes. (an absence of perception doesn't produce
> the perception of an absence)
>
>
> ### You actually touched on a very large and complex set of questions here.
> Our subjective feeling of a unitary personality is dependent on a large
> number of separate processes being coordinated. Signals propagate from
> visual cortex to the amygdala to be analyzed for emotionally laden content
> (as in the sight of a snake ready to bite), other signals go to parietal
> cortex to build and update a system of spatial maps (body-centered,
> eye-centered, observed-independent, and many others).
>
> These data can be used for various motor responses, sometimes initiated with
> only parts of our mind fully updated - as in the startle response to the
> snake. Other responses involve the frontal cortex - as in the inreased
> apportionment of computational resources if a puzzle or an IQ test are
> analyzed.
>
> It's a marvel that under most circumstances we have the feeling of all our
> reactions smoothly evolving in synchronization with others. This is not an
> illusion - it is a real neural network gathering data from it's subnetworks.
> Only the naive conceptualization of this reality as a "pinpoint",
> indivisible entity, the Cartesian homunculus, is an illusion. Continuity of
> personal experience does exist but it is not what the naive observer might
> think.
Our cognitive apparatus is here to give us the
continuity/discontinuity of that which we perceive -- not of our
perception.
So I wouldn't say "Continuity of personal experience does exist". That
which exist is the continuity of what we experience (be it oneself or
something else), not of the experience itself. I you turn around an
object and look at it, and the object is standing still, then you will
experience no discontinuity because your cognitive system serves to
report what happens in the world. But in the meantime, your perception
itself is all but continuous. Your perception of continuity results
from a discontinuous perception, which is possible because perception
is not something like a film you would be watching ; it IS "watching".
It's exactly the same for the continuity of "self-consciousness". What
makes it feel "continous" is that no discontinuity is "reported" to
you as such by your self-cognitive apparatus. So it's really hopeless
to take this as a criterion for personality survival (and we agree on
this, if not for the same reason).
> ### Looks like we are not so far from each other after all. Good.
We converge insofar as we both like the idea of the Jacques / Rafal-adventure
going on, even if we are, as a singular body, to die.
We diverge insofar as you conflate this with your own survival, while
I keep them distinct.
The possibility of abstracting some aspect of you as essential exists
(though it is a bit arbitrary) ; but thinking that this abstraction is
you seems an error to me, an error for which there is a psychological
explanation (the illusion of introspection), so that, while I do not
want to force you to believe anything, I question the fact that, once
you clear your mind about it, you will still believe it.
My goal here is not to show that what people dream of is impossible. I
come here with my own dreams, too. I just want to check dreams for
soundness because even more than dreaming dreams I like to realize
them. :-)
Best
Jacques
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