Life In 19x19

this discussion is pretty intense, good that i came around the Off topic section

Joaz Banbeck wrote:Nobody will become immortal overnight. There will be a gradual implementation of life-lengthening technologies. There will be a long intermediate period when some problems are fixable and some are not. So there will be a time when people are being thawed because AIDS is curable with a single pill, while others are being frozen because the've been infected by grey goo 114b which nobody knows how to stop. Those waiting to be frozen, or the friends and relatives of the frozen, will have a strong motivation to see that thawing contracts are honored.

i thought about your counterargument before writing my post and concluded it didn't hurt my reasoning. because once you are dead (by today's mainstream standards) and frozen, your original cause of death is probably not your biggest trouble. i've got a feeling that resurrecting frozen man is genuinely more difficult than cure most issues that might force him to get frozen. i admit that i don't have a scienfitic prove for this, if anyone knows how easy it is to reanimate someone frozen, i would greatly welcome his contribution. in my conception i saw a resurrection like sort of a holy grail in medicine

Joaz Banbeck wrote:Independent of freezing, there is a general motivation of most members of society to see that contracts are honored. Currently, I want to see a dispute between neighbor A and neighbor B handled fairly and according to law, not necessarily because I care about the dispute itself or the parties involved, but because I want a fair opportunity when my turn comes if I should have a dispute with neighbor C.
As people live longer and longer lives, this interest should be greatly magnified, for no longer are we talking about people who want to see fair treatment available in the next several decades, but we will have people who seek a legal/social system that guarantees them fair treatment for multiple millenia.

hmm, yeah, people are good and honest, but i don't know how much i would bet on that. by the way, i wonder what the signed contracts exactly say about time and conditions of thawing the customers. i would be just afraid that it will end like "Hmm, we should thaw the frozen people in our basement.", similar to today's "We shouldn't burn so much fossil fuels." or "Someone should accept the war refugees from XY." (possibly bad examples). i mean - everyone knows it should be done, but no one wants to do it.

in way, this discussion about cryonics is similar to religion. i am an atheist, i know i will lose. someone is religious, he might win or lose (and he believes he will win). with cryonics, i won't get myself frozen, i lose. someone gets himself frozen, he might win or lose (and he hopes he will win). both religion and cryonics are legitimate ways of dealing with the fear of death. just religion cost nothing and cryonics have some scientific basis

i hope i don't write too much nonsense, it is an hour and half after midnight here

I think everyone here is completely preoccupied with physical immortality. I don't expect to run into many of these problems, because I fully expect to upload into some sort of computing substrate. It simply doesn't make sense to stay limited by the computational capacity of 3 pounds of meat.

daniel_the_smith wrote:I know, I just hadn't had my fill of pedantry for the day.

Also, I disagree-- I think the fraction of 4 quadrillion bit numbers that represent valid human brains is still vanishingly small, even if there are billions of possible representations of any individual. 12 billion humans (or however many have ever lived) times 1 billion representations is a huge number, but it's minuscule compared to the *factorial* of two to the 4 quadrillionth, which is so large I don't even know how to estimate it. Also, I think my numbers are orders of magnitude too small, and the strength of my argument scales with the factorial, so...

So. It's easy to believe that the aliens could (by design) hit on the tiny sliver of the space that defines individuals who are identical with you but, so improbable as to be nonsense that they could (by mistake) hit on the sliver that defines individuals?

(Also, to be ultra-pedantic, because it makes absolutely no difference to the thought experiment, we don't necessarily need the starting brain to be a valid human brain.)

daniel_the_smith wrote:Mu-changes are a not-quite-random walk from a starting position. I don't know where it will take me, but I know it won't take me everywhere, and at no time will I wake up thinking I'm Joaz. There are lots of ideas that I'd put an extremely low probability that any future me would come to agree with.

So there is a set of mental states which are the same as you, independent of whether or not there's any shared brain history, but you can't get from one of these states to another state outside this set, because the process by which they change is not quite random. Why don't you just postulate that you are a monad created by a universe-simulation program created by nanites, and you only appear to interact with other substances? (After all, is it more likely that the secondingularity will happen in the future, or that it already happened in the past?)

daniel_the_smith wrote:Also, if you don't accept something like what I described, how do you know you'll be the same person tomorrow?

I might not be! It's extremely unlikely, but perhaps tomorrow morning someone will wake up in my bed who I would not identify with (were I around to identify with anyone anymore). Or phrased less awkwardly; perhaps the person who wakes up in my bed tomorrow won't identify with me. (Although we shouldn't reject out of hand the possibility that only one of us will identify with the other, now should we? It seems to follow immediately from some of the things you've said, Daniel, that you would still identify with Yuggoth-Daniel (because you shared a brain) even if Yuggoth-Daniel didn't identify with you.)

I'm also perfectly happy to let facts which aren't facts about my personality, or even facts about my brain, contribute to identity. My personality could change a great deal tomorrow, and will surely change a great deal in the coming decades, but I would still care about that person the way I care about myself because we share abilities, responsibilities, friends, plans, and so on. A person whose personality is different by the same degree of magnitude but who didn't share those things with me would be much less interesting. (These are facts that are extremely unlikely to change tomorrow, but would certainly change if I was resurrected. For example, maybe my family wasn't saved frozen.)

Remember: these questions all come back to whether I should care enough about resurrected jts to go freeze myself for the same reasons that I currently avoid falling off tall buildings. In the world we live in, it is already the case that a huge number of people do not identify particularly strongly with the people they will become, and a small minority don't identify with these future people at all; we should probably add to that a significant number who wouldn't have identified particularly strongly with their future selves, had they had a more concrete idea of how these future selves would turn out. Not identifying with who you'll be in ten years is distressingly common, but identifying strongly with any body that was historically continuous with your own is equally vicious.

Redundant's reply is symptomatic. Not that I bear any ill-will towards sentient beings that run on "computing substrates", but why would I care very much about one, even if it started out bearing some sort of analogy to me?

Redundant wrote:I think everyone here is completely preoccupied with physical immortality. I don't expect to run into many of these problems, because I fully expect to upload into some sort of computing substrate. It simply doesn't make sense to stay limited by the computational capacity of 3 pounds of meat.

I agree, but at least some people will die (and hopefully be frozen) before that is possible-- I've been talking about those people.



@jts, I don't think I've managed to communicate my position to you, because I don't recognize what you're saying back as being anything like what I thought I was saying. I think I need sleep because your questions aren't even making sense to me, and I'd rather not write something that amounts to, "did you read what I said?"

I will say, it seems we have totally different concepts of what constitutes personal identity: Under my concept, if everyone I knew were to die, I'd still be (a very unhappy) me. But under yours, if everyone you knew died, it seems you would somehow be a different person? For you, personal identity is about a (person, environment) system? I don't think that's the case for me at all.

daniel_the_smith wrote:

jts wrote:

daniel_the_smith wrote:the control group is not doing well at all.

Oh? Compared to whom? I would say we're actually doing pretty dang well, and the mountains we have left to climb are more in quality of life than quantity of life.

Uh, I'm pretty sure you're not currently a member of the control group. ...

BTW, for those who may have missed the significance of this exchange, 'control group' in this context refers to the people who have died, were buried, and are rotting.

Joaz Banbeck wrote:
BTW, for those who may have missed the significance of this exchange, 'control group' in this context refers to the people who have died, were buried, and are rotting.

Right. And a lot of them did pretty well. The ones who did poorly, by and large, had lives that were unhappy, unsuccessful, oppressed, painful, lonely, cruel, and so on, and so forth; I don't think "too short" really ranks that high up there. The ones who did well, on the other hand, were not necessarily the nonagenarians. In a huge number of cases, halving the lifespans of the more fortunate rotters would not have put them in with the unfortunate rotters, and doubling the lifespans of the latter would not have put them in with the former. Or would you disagree?

daniel_the_smith wrote:I will say, it seems we have totally different concepts of what constitutes personal identity: Under my concept, if everyone I knew were to die, I'd still be (a very unhappy) me. But under yours, if everyone you knew died, it seems you would somehow be a different person? For you, personal identity is about a (person, environment) system? I don't think that's the case for me at all.

Yes, I lean towards a (person, environment) system. That's a perfectly fine way of putting it. But you seem to have assumed that I think that if X is a part of someone's identity, then it's a necessary part of their identity, which neither of us thinks. If one friend dies that changes me a tiny bit; if all my friends die that changes me a little more; if everyone I've ever known dies that changes me quite a great deal. And in particular, there's a pXe interaction turn; large changes in the p term can lead to small changes in identity, large changes in the e term can lead to quite small changes in identity, but large changes in both terms simultaneously can lead to quite large changes in identity.

A very short story:

jts wrote:...
A very short story:

Someone introduces me to a fellow named - well, let's call him stj - who he thinks I ought to meet because we bear a striking physical resemblance to one another. Well, we look alike - we spend hours tracing out our family trees trying to figure out if we're related somehow - but we're extremely different, otherwise. One of us is introverted, the other is extroverted; one is empathetic, the other is cruel; one loves tennis, the other hates it; one is hard-working, the other lazy; et cetera, et cetera. Despite our physical similarities, not only is it quite clear that jts is not stj and stj is not jts, I probably don't even like the fellow that much.

Okay, back up. Now imagine there is no stj, but jts believes that he will, over the next year or three, develop all of the personality characteristics that we attributed to stj above. In the previous thought experiment, jts never thought for a moment that stj was himself. But now, he considers that stj will be going to visit jts's family at Christmas, he'll go to jts's job every day, he'll be married to jts's wife and will be raising jts's children; he'll probably even continue to hang out with jts's friends. If jts starts writing a book, stj will be the one who finishes it; if jts sues someone, stj becomes the plaintiff; if jts makes a promise, it will be stj who keeps or breaks it. If jts does something amazing, his acquaintances respect stj for it; if stj does something amazing, on the other hand, they'll all tell each other that they always knew jts had it in him. ------- And in light of these considerations, jts might be happy to treat stj as himself, whereas in the world where he simply met stj, and he shared neither the personal nor the environmental features with stj, he probably would not.

I think this may give you a flavor of why you might think the "environment," as you put it, should be taken into account when considering who is the same person as whom.

The two versions of stj are different in one crucial respect: the second one remembers being jts, the first does not. And, if one accepts that memory is identity, the second one is jts, the first one is not.

I recall a friend of mine telling me a rather short but poignent story. He said, "I'm seventy five years old, and I wake up with a different woman every morning!" It was his best attempt to cope with the fact that his wife of 55 years has severe Alzhiemers.

I wonder if identity can be treated as a universal attribute of a person. What if it is not? In other words, I may have my own sense of identity, which is perceived differently from how others interpret my identity. This seems consistent with the idea that memory can be associated with identity. However, if a person changes quite a bit, to themselves, they might be the same person, whereas to an external observer, they might be somebody different.

jts wrote:

Joaz Banbeck wrote:BTW, for those who may have missed the significance of this exchange, 'control group' in this context refers to the people who have died, were buried, and are rotting.

Right. And a lot of them did pretty well. The ones who did poorly, by and large, had lives that were unhappy, unsuccessful, oppressed, painful, lonely, cruel, and so on, and so forth; I don't think "too short" really ranks that high up there. The ones who did well, on the other hand, were not necessarily the nonagenarians. In a huge number of cases, halving the lifespans of the more fortunate rotters would not have put them in with the unfortunate rotters, and doubling the lifespans of the latter would not have put them in with the former. Or would you disagree?

No. "Disagree" might not be the right word, but I have a completely different perspective. None of them exist anymore. Whether they did "well" or not in life, death ended them all without regard or pity. The only reason we're ok with this is because nature is not a person you can prosecute in a court of law for murder.

Let me state this another way. There are various systems of morality, but nearly all of them include the idea that it's wrong to end the life of another. It's even wrong to do nothing and allow someone to die. Nearly all of our medical advances amount to, "No, nature, you will no longer kill us this way." The limit of this process is, "Nature, you will not kill us at all. We, ourselves, will decide what 'enough' life is for us." I'd prefer to see the limit of that process without being frozen, but I'd like to see it having been frozen if the alternative is not seeing it at all. (bold because I think that sums up my thoughts on the whole subject.)

jts wrote:Yes, I lean towards a (person, environment) system. That's a perfectly fine way of putting it. But you seem to have assumed that I think that if X is a part of someone's identity, then it's a necessary part of their identity, which neither of us thinks. If one friend dies that changes me a tiny bit; if all my friends die that changes me a little more; if everyone I've ever known dies that changes me quite a great deal. And in particular, there's a pXe interaction turn; large changes in the p term can lead to small changes in identity, large changes in the e term can lead to quite small changes in identity, but large changes in both terms simultaneously can lead to quite large changes in identity.

So if personal identity is a function of time (perid(t)), you're saying that perid(t+1) = perid(t) + (environmental effects at time t) + (other effects)? ...because that's exactly what I was trying to express earlier; mu-change = max((environmental effects at any time) + (other effects)). And actually, under this model, your personal identity is slowly changed by the environment, but is not dependent on the environment.

jts wrote:A very short story:

Someone introduces me to a fellow named - well, let's call him stj - who he thinks I ought to meet because we bear a striking physical resemblance to one another. Well, we look alike - we spend hours tracing out our family trees trying to figure out if we're related somehow - but we're extremely different, otherwise. One of us is introverted, the other is extroverted; one is empathetic, the other is cruel; one loves tennis, the other hates it; one is hard-working, the other lazy; et cetera, et cetera. Despite our physical similarities, not only is it quite clear that jts is not stj and stj is not jts, I probably don't even like the fellow that much.

Okay, back up. Now imagine there is no stj, but jts believes that he will, over the next year or three, develop all of the personality characteristics that we attributed to stj above. In the previous thought experiment, jts never thought for a moment that stj was himself. But now, he considers that stj will be going to visit jts's family at Christmas, he'll go to jts's job every day, he'll be married to jts's wife and will be raising jts's children; he'll probably even continue to hang out with jts's friends. If jts starts writing a book, stj will be the one who finishes it; if jts sues someone, stj becomes the plaintiff; if jts makes a promise, it will be stj who keeps or breaks it. If jts does something amazing, his acquaintances respect stj for it; if stj does something amazing, on the other hand, they'll all tell each other that they always knew jts had it in him. ------- And in light of these considerations, jts might be happy to treat stj as himself, whereas in the world where he simply met stj, and he shared neither the personal nor the environmental features with stj, he probably would not.

I think this may give you a flavor of why you might think the "environment," as you put it, should be taken into account when considering who is the same person as whom.

if jts' brain were replaced by aliens with another, unrelated brain, I would not consider the resulting stj to be the same person, even though it would take people quite a while to figure it out. If jts had a stroke which caused this, I would regard it a tragedy but the individual would still be jts. If this was a natural development of jts' personal identity, of course I would, too.

Actually, a stroke may exceed a mu-change. In the case of a stroke, perhaps I think that the individual is 99% jts. (an unrelated brain transplant definitely exceeds a mu-change and, given that brain space is so large, probably shares on the order of < .01% of the brain state with jts)

A stroke is a good example for the other thing, too: A stroke would corrupt/destroy some amount of my brain state, but it could never turn me into Joaz, or any other individual. Valid brain states are so few and far between that any random external change is likely to be a detriment; a large enough change (say, on the order of 10 simultaneous strokes) will move you out of the current individual's brain state, but you don't get a new individual, you get a vegetable. That's why, if you wake up tomorrow in stj's old body, you would look for a cause; that doesn't just happen randomly.

daniel_the_smith wrote:...
Let me state this another way. There are various systems of morality, but nearly all of them include the idea that it's wrong to end the life of another. It's even wrong to do nothing and allow someone to die. ...

I agree with some of the things that you are saying, but I think that, under a number of systems of morality, some might be OK with allowing individuals to die under certain circumstances.

An example of this might be if someone is very ill, and the family must decide whether they should continue to allow for the person to live. Perhaps even more of a controversial topic is the idea of abortion. And even in some cases, someone may be suffering, and the idea of ending their life may seem more "moral" than trying to preserve their suffering.

I think that many people are often in favor of preserving life, but I can't say that it's always black and white matter.

Kirby wrote:

daniel_the_smith wrote:...
Let me state this another way. There are various systems of morality, but nearly all of them include the idea that it's wrong to end the life of another. It's even wrong to do nothing and allow someone to die. ...

I agree with some of the things that you are saying, but I think that, under a number of systems of morality, some might be OK with allowing individuals to die under certain circumstances.

An example of this might be if someone is very ill, and the family must decide whether they should continue to allow for the person to live. Perhaps even more of a controversial topic is the idea of abortion. And even in some cases, someone may be suffering, and the idea of ending their life may seem more "moral" than trying to preserve their suffering.

I think that many people are often in favor of preserving life, but I can't say that it's always black and white matter.

Yes, we have those problems currently, and I agree with what you've said, but this is mostly an artifact of the poor quality of modern medicine. Right now, if you have a cancer that will kill you in a month, modern medicine might give you 5 more to live, with a severely reduced quality of life. I can understand people choosing either way in that case.

However, if we had a pill that instantly cured the cancer and caused no or little suffering, I don't think many people would have a moral dilemma before taking it.

To state it another way, modern medicine currently has lots of side effects along with its cures. As we get better at curing people and the side effects go away, so will the sorts of dilemmas you're referring to. In the interim, I agree with you.

daniel_the_smith wrote:I agree with some of the things that you are saying, but I think that, under a number of systems of morality, some might be OK with allowing individuals to die under certain circumstances.

Not wishing to go OT but It's your turn on OGS..

daniel_the_smith wrote:

Kirby wrote:

daniel_the_smith wrote:...
Let me state this another way. There are various systems of morality, but nearly all of them include the idea that it's wrong to end the life of another. It's even wrong to do nothing and allow someone to die. ...

I agree with some of the things that you are saying, but I think that, under a number of systems of morality, some might be OK with allowing individuals to die under certain circumstances.

An example of this might be if someone is very ill, and the family must decide whether they should continue to allow for the person to live. Perhaps even more of a controversial topic is the idea of abortion. And even in some cases, someone may be suffering, and the idea of ending their life may seem more "moral" than trying to preserve their suffering.

I think that many people are often in favor of preserving life, but I can't say that it's always black and white matter.

Yes, we have those problems currently, and I agree with what you've said, but this is mostly an artifact of the poor quality of modern medicine. Right now, if you have a cancer that will kill you in a month, modern medicine might give you 5 more to live, with a severely reduced quality of life. I can understand people choosing either way in that case.

However, if we had a pill that instantly cured the cancer and caused no or little suffering, I don't think many people would have a moral dilemma before taking it.

To state it another way, modern medicine currently has lots of side effects along with its cures. As we get better at curing people and the side effects go away, so will the sorts of dilemmas you're referring to. In the interim, I agree with you.

Sure. I would certainly be happy if modern medicine let me live forever without suffering. Hahaha...

It clicked for me this morning that Steve Jobs' famous Stanford commencement address is relevant here.

Here is the video: http://www.businessinsider.com/do-what- ... ne-2011-10

Here is the full text: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-full ... ch-2011-10

The relevant quote:

Steve Jobs wrote:No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

I continue to be astonished at the rationalizations by which people manage to call the worst bug in the universe a feature. In theory, I know it's an easy to explain phenomenon, but that doesn't reduce the astonishment I feel.

I was rather hoping Mr. Jobs would be signed up for cryonics; from this it sounds like he wouldn't, but sometimes people aren't consistent. The cost certainly wouldn't have been an issue for him.

I much prefer another quote I heard recently:

Syrio Forel wrote:There is only one God, and his name is death. And there is only one thing we say to death: Not today.

EDIT: ...and I note this quote already appeared in the thread: viewtopic.php?p=70572#p70572