My Writings on "Bringing Back Dead People" From Imminst.org Forum

Discussion Topic: Bringing Back Dead People?

Posted on: 26-Sep 2007, 11:04 AM

My post: Lets say you undergo cryonics when you die. Since your brain is no longer working, the flow of your conciousness ceases to exist. However we assume that when a person is brought back to life they will probably feel as if no time had passed between their death and resurrection. So authenticity of a person may be entirely subjective. With the computer simulations, a person will have different atoms, but that person will still subjectively be the same to us. To the person being resurrected they will also claim to be the same exact person. They will feel like they never died at all. So it's sort of like cryonics where the original living persons conciousness will have ended, however unlike cryonics all of the resurrected persons atoms would be different. But since atoms are interchangeable this is exactly what happens to ourselves over the course of time anyway."

I recommend due care. It may be that cryonics ressurects zombies. It may be that simulations recreate zombies. Our subjective consciousness seems to persist, in punctuated form, in our current wet brains over a normal life arc, as the matter in the brain is continuously replaced. It seems to survive sleep. But there's no garuntee that it can survive cryonic suspension, "uploading", or simulation. There's no need for overconfidence, except to the degree it optimizes performance to maximize our persistence odds.

I like this comment from Wanderer in this thread: "Don't indulge in daydreaming too much about such things, but allow that sliver of a fraction of a chance that all is not lost to give you more hope and more strength to accomplish what needs to be accomplished today."

My blog:

http://www.hopeanon.typepad.com

26-Sep 2007, 12:54 PM

G Snake: "They may be the same to us, but that's not the goal, if it was the goal, we may as well just create simulations based on our experiences and live within those. The goal should be to bring back the original stream of consciousness."

My response:
Well-written, G Snake. I agree that that's what our goal should be. We apparently maintain that stream through our punctuated wakeful consciousness and through sleep interruptions. There's no garuntee it can be maintained beyond that, although I think some efforts should be devoted to that (and even to post-cremation ressurection) just as strategy diversification and hedging. But I'm glad at least some of us can be mature enough to acknowledge that speculations on cryonics and simulations may be nothing more than opiates. Our best bet, in my opinion, still lies in the conservative approaches of folks like Aubrey de Gray. We may have a shot at keeping these current bodies and brains going, with incrementalized repairs that mirror current gradual biological processes and using the same materials. I question the wisdom in trying to go beyond that in a transhumanist way: it could just create capricious zombies that start of as our rulers and end up our replacements. Once we solve biological aging and smartly minimize existential risk we apparently have hundreds of millions of years before we face challenges so significant we may need to substrate jump our subjective consciousnesses.

Comments

[TGGP]

Why do you believe in zombies?

[Hopefully Anonymous]

This line "it could just create capricious zombies" isn't an expressed belief in zombies. Anyways, I think you're investing too much in the term, which really just points to a limit in the ability of the observer to determine the other entity isn't subjectively conscious. For example, any time you call a friend and have a short conversation with them, only to realize it's a trick of their voicemail message "Hello? ..... ... I'm not here right now,leave a message after the beep!" you've invested moments where you thought you were interacting in real time with a subjective conscious entity, when in fact you weren't. Now it's possible that there was at least transitory subjective conscious experience by the voicemail message, but that seems much less likely that that something with a wet human brain like mine, speaking and saying those words in real time, is experences subjective consciousness. Any zombie extrapolation posits that it's more likely that a phenomenon is like the voicemail message prank than like me, wet brain, human, HA. I think cryonically ressurected humans and humans "uploaded" to a silicon medium are closer in the direction of the voicemail message prank than are SENS maintained humans in the Aubrey de Grey proposed manner. Thus the chance that they might only seem subjectively conscious to me due to the limit on my ability as an observer seems greater to me. That's what I mean when I say they could be "zombies" -nothing more or less than that I could be fooled by them like I could be fooled for a period of time by the voicemail message prank.

[Caledonian]

What functional difference is there between cryogenic subjects who become zombies, and subjects who don't?

What properties do you assert characterize 'consciousness'?

[Hopefully Anonymous]

Caledonian, I don't "assert" anything. This seems to me to be in the school of overstated belief: too much Socrates/Aristotle and not enough Pyrrhos. As for functional difference, the functional difference is whether I, HA will persist as a subjective conscious entity. I don't want a prank phone call with my voice to persist, I don't want a "me" that'll fool people in 2008 but not in 2108 to persist, I want my subjective conscious experience to persist.

[Caledonian]

Caledonian, I don't "assert" anything.

You're 'not asserting' rather vigorously.

the functional difference is whether I, HA will persist as a subjective conscious entity.

That's circular. So the difference between consciousness and the lack thereof is that there's no consciousness in the second state? Brilliant.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

Caledonian, What's the difference between having a brain and not having a brain besides there's no brain in the 2nd state? I think you're mixing up my aspiration to persist with tallying a debating score, or some such thing.

[Caledonian]

Caledonian, What's the difference between having a brain and not having a brain besides there's no brain in the 2nd state?

'Brain' already has a well-defined meaning, and so we can understand what implications its absence would have.

'Consciousness' does not.

If you lack a conceptual definition, you can point to an observed set of phenomena; if you lack an observed set of phenomena, you can refer to a conceptual definition. If you have neither, you can use all the words you like without ever saying a thing.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

So, to hearken back to Pyrrhos, do you step out of the way when a large bus is speeding directly towards you? If not, why not? I do step out of the way, because I want to persiste as a subjective conscious entity, even though when I claim that it seems that bus might end my persistence as a subjective conscious entity I'm -in your words- "us[ing] all the words [I] like without ever saying a thing".

[Caledonian]

You clearly have a functional definition of 'conscious', but you won't share it or make it explicit.

Curious...

[Hopefully Anonymous]

I'm just a human primate in 2008, Caledonian. I wouldn't have been able to explain the difference between the colors red and green in the year 1008 to someone who was colorblind, either. It's possible that you don't experience subjective consciousness any more than a colorblind person experiences the visual difference of red and green hues. Your 24/7 experience may be akin to some people's more limited experience of sleep-talking and sleep-walking, which often doesn't seem to be part of their continuity of wakeful subjective conscious experience.

If so, I understand your doubt about my description of my subjective conscious experience. You yourself may not experience consciousness. Thus we may have a communication problem, much like that existed between colorblind and colorseeing people in the year 1008, that may be not be resolvable until their are improvements in our knowledge and technology.

ps TGGP and Eliezer may fall into that category of people who are not experiencing subjective consciousness either.

I'll try to elaborate more on this theory, which is not meant to fall into the same category as "my psychic powers don't work if they're being observed by non-believers".

[TGGP]

HA, what is it that makes you say you experience "subjective consciousness"? I will not come down one way or the other on whether I experience it, because I don't know what it means. I seem to be in many respects a normal human being though perhaps less aware of many things. Whether a normal human being is conscious, I do not know.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

TGGP, I'm not positting here that a normal human being is conscious. When I say I seem to experience subjective consciousness, I mean that I seem to experience an internal world that's not an exact map of external reality. An internal world that I can't completely communicate or represent (yet) outside of the internal world. An internal world that doesn't seem to exist when I'm sleep-walking, or sleep-talking, even though other people have thought I was conscious at that moment (in a way that's continuous with my memories of being conscious and in my present conscious state).

I would analogize it to a robot, that in part of the robot, had a little screen and speakers with video, audio, other sensory data, and some basic internal commentary playing on it. The little screen and speakers are sealed off in a soundproof, lightproof, container disguised to be undistinguished from the other features and frames of the robot. The robot functions fine when the screen and speakers are turned off, or even removed. Perhaps it's even an optional feature on these robots. But my subjective conscious experience, with it's sights, sounds, feelings, and interactions, may be something like that optional screen and speakers, rather than arising from the functional circuitry that allows me to react to sensory stimuli. After all, I react to complex forms of that stimuli when I sleep walk and sleep talk, but as far as I'm practically aware, my sleep walking and sleep talking aren't part of my subjective conscious experience.

I'll write more about this when I get a chance. I'm curious about experiments done (neuroimaging, others) examining the difference between sleep walkers/talkers and awake walkers/talkers, particularly sleep walkers/talkers good enough to fool observers into thinking they're awake.

[TGGP]

I've never sleep-walked/talked but I have blacked out once from drinking. Maybe I'd have a different perspective if I had your experiences.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

TGGP,
A black out state seems pretty identical to me. Did you end up in a different location at the end of your black out state than the beginning? To move from one location to the other, did it require the sort of complex behavior you normally only engage in when you're not in a black out state (for example, walking)? Would an outside observer, using current technology, have been able to observe you and been able to identify you as being in a black out state as opposed to being in a drunk-but-not-blacked-out state? Your answer to this last question might have to be more speculative.

I'm surprised if this line of inquiry is "silly" to you, from the perspective of what a rational person in 2008 should be concerned about regarding maximizing their odds of success cryonic reanimation and/or uploading. But if it continues to seem silly to you, I'm still interested in knowing why.

[TGGP]

The last thing I remember was downing another vodka shot. In between that time I apparently walked back to my room with the others and was talking coherently. However, they were drunk as well and might not have noticed how incoherent my speech was. By the time my roommate found me I had lost consciousness and vomited everywhere. When I woke up I had already been in the hospital for some time. Everything between waking up and the vodka shots I was merely told about and do not remember. I would not think of the experience as being without consciousness, but rather simply one I did not remember later. I don't know much about how blackouts work to say for sure though.

I haven't given much thought to cryonics or uploading. I am a bit cautious about the latter, because it involves the loss of a physical body and I would assume would result in different experiences. I'm not worried about a loss of consciousness though, because again it seems a rather meaningless concept. Analogizing to my blackout again, would I expect that cryonics would result in not remembering anything that happened before I was frozen? Or that I will later "regain" consciousness and not remember what happened after I was revived but not conscious? I've never sleep-walked, but I was under the impression that they operate with somewhat impaired faculties (as do drunks). Supposedly it can result in injury. That seems like a real difference, but not one that seems to have much to do with "consciousness".

[Hopefully Anonymous]

TGGP, I think this helps me identify 2 key distinctions between your position and mine, worth exploring further.
1. You seem inclined to equate the best assessments of a moment with asymptotically perfect assessments of whether someone is in a certain state of conscious awareness. For example, that in 2008 we can see some kind of difference between a sleep-walker and a drunk who will in the future black out their memories of a period of time vs. someone who is having a subjective conscious experience that will likely be continuous with their memories 12 hours later, seems enough for you to say, the latter will be conscious the same way as a person revived from cryonics -there's not a concern the cryonics person may be like the former (sleep-walkers/blacked out drunks).
2. You believe that a blacked out drunk is having the same conscious experience as someone who isn't drunk and will remember their memories 12 hours later, and that it's just that the blacked out drunk won't remember that experience. That could be true (I would think there has to be some good scientific literature on this), but until we or a third party introduces the best science on this, it doesn't seem less likely to me that the black out drunk didn't have the same conscious experiences in the first place.

Overall, I don't think you've honestly grappled with the concept of discernment technology yet. You haven't really addressed the gap between being fooled into thinking something is conscious (prank phone voicemall) and something actually having a conscious experience continuous its past conscious experience.

I think the most honest assessment (which people resist because they like materialist vs. soul-ist dialecticts, and because it's not very alpha to say "we don't know yet") is that we don't know, and it might be a very hard problem, how subjectively, solipstically unique stream of consciousnesses may persist or not persist. Beyond how it apparently works in the normal life arc of a normal human, there seems to be a big question mark, analogous to some of the other question marks Eliezer Yudkowsky mentioned in his recent post (how exactly proteins fold, etc.). It's not antimaterialist to acknowledge that, any more than it's not antimaterialist to say that the best answer to what preceeded the bing bang is "we don't know yet". It seems to me to be a bit dishonest to say "there's no such thing as this subjective conscious experience" just as it seems a bit dishonest to say "there's no such thing as before the big bang, because there was no time before the big bang". That may be true, but I don't think the evidence supports that, as much as it supports saying "we don't know what's going on here yet".

The difference between understanding what's going on with the subjective conscious experience (if there is one- it seems to me there is) and understanding what (if anything) preceeded the big bang, is that those of us who want to persist may be big near term stakeholders in figuring out the subjective conscious experience thing better.

[TGGP]

there's not a concern the cryonics person may be like the former (sleep-walkers/blacked out drunks).
I really don't know much about cryonics. It's entirely possible that the person with cryonics will have the experiences I listed, but I don't have any reason in particular to believe they will. So I would have a higher subjective probability those will occur for a cryonics subject vs non-cryonics subject, but given the large possibility space of effects of cryonics I have no clue about I'm not going to concentrate much there. I continued to refer to the specific examples I mentioned rather than "consciousness" in following with the taboo-game because I can at least think about them as if they meant something.

You believe that a blacked out drunk is having the same conscious experience as someone who isn't drunk and will remember their memories 12 hours later, and that it's just that the blacked out drunk won't remember that experience
It does seem the simplest explanation to me. Extend the period of blacking out from 12 hours to a lifetime, and what is the difference between the drunk and non-drunk? None that I know of.

it doesn't seem less likely to me that the black out drunk didn't have the same conscious experiences in the first place
Less likely than what?

Overall, I don't think you've honestly grappled with the concept of discernment technology yet
Perhaps not, grappling sounds like it involves more skin than I've got in the game.

You haven't really addressed the gap between being fooled into thinking something is conscious (prank phone voicemall)
You will grant that the voice I hear on the phone is that of a conscious person. No matter what I am hearing a machine's reproduction of sounds they originally made. The confusion is regarding at which time that sound was created. It is my assumption that the person I am talking to is still at the phone, though they could well have set it down for a while. In your case my assumption is incorrect. A different example might be a case in which they handed the phone to a child that likes to babble but does not understand that people talk through phones. The child is conscious but I am mistaken in believing that it is listening to me and responding.

Funny enough, regarding the Big Bang, I was involved in exactly the dispute you mention now with an anti-materialist. I don't think taking a different tack is inherently anti-materialist, it is just my sketchy impression that Einstein's theories tell us the question is incoherent. Newtonian theory is also materialist but does not have the same relation between time and space.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

TGGP. great response. I'll wait until I'm able to give it the time it deserves to respond fully.

[TGGP]

I should amend "the difference between the drunk and non-drunk" to include "besides the obvious traits of non-blackout drunks".