I live in South Africa. We don’t, as far as I know, have a cryonics facility comparable to, say, Alcor.
What are my options apart from “emigrate and live next to a cryonics facility”?
Also, I’m not sure if I’m misremembering, but I think it was Eliezer that said cryonics isn’t really a viable option without an AI powerful enough to reverse the inevitable damage. Here’s my second question, with said AI powerful enough to reverse the damage and recreate you, why would cryonics be a necessary step? Wouldn’t alternative solutions also be viable? For example, brain scans while alive and then something like the Visible Human Project (body sliced into cross sections) coupled with a copy of your genome. This could perhaps also be supplemented by a daily journal. Surely a powerful enough AI would be able to recreate the human that created those writings using the information provided?
For example, brain scans while alive and then something like the Visible Human Project (body sliced into cross sections) coupled with a copy of your genome. This could perhaps also be supplemented by a daily journal. Surely a powerful enough AI would be able to recreate the human that created those writings using the information provided?
Cryonics is an ambulance ride through an earthquake zone to the nearest revival facility, The distance is measured in years rather than miles, and the earthquake is the chances of history. The better the preservation, the lower the technology required to revive you, and the sooner you will reach a facility that can do it.
A “powerful enough” AI isn’t magic: it cannot recover information that no longer exists. We currently don’t know what must be preserved and what is redundant, beyond just “keep the brain, the rest of the body can probably be discarded, but we’ll freeze it as well at extra cost if you want.”
On a present-day level, the feted accomplishments of Deep Learning suggest to me that setting such algorithms to munch over a person’s highly documented life might be enough to enable a more or less plausible simulation of them after death. Plausible enough at least to be offered as a comfort to the bereaved. A market opportunity! Also, fuel for a debate on whether these simulations are people.
Can you recommend an article about what is the difference between the simulation of a person vs. “really” reviving a person? Primarily from the angle of: why should I or anyone would consider someone in the future making a plausible simulation of us is good for “us” ? I am really confused about the identity of a person i.e. when is a simulation is really “me” in the sense of me having a self-interest about that situation. I am heavily influenced by Buddhist ideas saying such an identity does not exist, is illusionary. I currently think the closest thing to this is memories, if I exist at all, I exist as something that remembers what happened to this illusion-me. I see this as a difficult philosophical problem and don’t know how to relate to it.
Can you recommend an article about what is the difference between the simulation of a person vs. “really” reviving a person? … I see this as a difficult philosophical problem and don’t know how to relate to it.
Same here. My own attitude is that we do not currently have software for which the question of it being any more conscious than a rock arises, nor any route to making such software. Therefore I am not going to worry about it. While it may be interesting for philosophers, I relate to the problem by ignoring it, or engaging in it no further than as an idle recreation.
I view it from a practical viewpoint: Even if you believe the Buddhist view, that the self is an illusion etc. you still feel like you have a self for >95% of the time (i.e. whenever you’re not meditating). When you wake up in the morning you feel like you are the same person that went to sleep the evening before. On the other hand, a clone of you would not feel like it is you anymore than one identical twin feels it is the other. So ideally people in the future should create a person/simulation that feels like it went to sleep and woke up again when it “should” have died.
Problems arise mainly when you hit something that only partially feels like it is the same person. I’d say there is still a considerable range of possible people that are sufficiently similar that we say it is the same person, since there is also considerable variation in the normal functioning of human brains.
E.g.:
Human memory is quite inaccurate. Different people with only slightly different memories could be said to be the same people. This may actually go quite far, if we consider the effects of Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of amnesia.
Being heavily intoxicated can to an extent feel like being a different person. Personality and habit changes over the course of your life can make you a different person, we still say it is the same person.
I wonder whether it is possible to find some sort of “core” personality/traits/memories, such that we can say as long as it remains unchanged it is the same person. I suspect there isn’t, as it seems to be a gradient instead of a binary classification.
setting such algorithms to munch over a person’s highly documented life might be enough to enable a more or less plausible simulation of them after death.
You might be able to reconstruct the person’s public face, but will have major problems with his private life.
By “highly documented” I had in mind not just the ordinary documentation that prominent public figures get, but someone who has deliberately taken steps to exhaustively record as much as they can, public and private.
I remain sceptical. External observation (something on the life cam lines) still cannot distinguish an hour of thinking about the stars’ main sequence from an hour of thinking about cosplay lolis. And diaries have the big problem of self-reflection… not being entirely accurate.
I take it our hypothetical system would not simply assume that diaries are accurate records; they would (so to speak) ask the question “how likely is it that any given person would write this diary entry?” which is not at all the same as the question “how well does this diary entry, taken at face value, match the actual life of this person?”.
This raises the question: Is it possible to deduce the correct person without creating conscious simulations of possibly very many people, which raises ethical questions.
I think you’re taking the suggestion a bit more seriously than I intended it. The commercial opportunity only needs the simulation to be good enough to tug at the heartstrings of those who knew the subject. Pictures and mementos are treasured; this would be a step beyond those, a living memorial that you could have a conversation with. It wouldn’t work for LessWrongers though. They’d spend all their time trying to break it.
It wouldn’t work for LessWrongers though. They’d spend all their time trying to break it.
LOL, certainly a fair point :-)
The problem for your commercial opportunity is the uncanny valley, though. Also, people tend to me more interested in virtual girlfriends than in virtual grandpas :-/
A “powerful enough” AI isn’t magic: it cannot recover information that no longer exists
Technically, it can of course—through inference. Any information we have recovered about our history—history itself—is all inference used to recover lost information.
Even with successful cryonics, you still end up with a probability distribution over the person’s brain wiring matrix—it just has much lower variance, requiring less inference/guesswork to get a ‘successful’ result (however one defines that).
Agreed with your last paragraph that crossing the uncanny valley will be difficult and there is much room for public backlash. It’s so closely related to AI tech that one mostly implies the other.
A “powerful enough” AI isn’t magic: it cannot recover information that no longer exists
Technically, it can of course—through inference.
Sounds like Hollywood image enhancement, where a few blurry pixels are magically transformed into a pin-sharp glossy magazine photograph.
I could point out that if you can infer the information, then by definition it still exists, but the real point here is just how powerful an AI can be and what inferences are possible. Let’s say that yesterday I rolled a dice ten times without looking at the result. Can a “powerful enough” AI infer the numbers rolled? Is the best-fit reconstruction of someone’s mind, given an atom-by-atom scan a century from now of a body frozen by Alcor today, good enough to be a mind?
I could point out that if you can infer the information, then by definition it still exists,
This is not real?y true.
When typing the above sentence, I removed a letter and replaced it with a ?. You can probably infer what the originally intended letter was, thus using inference to recover information that did not exist anywhere in your physical locality.
But yes this is a terminology/technicality, and agreed that
the real point here is just how powerful an AI can be and what inferences are possible
Let’s say that yesterday I rolled a dice ten times without looking at the result. Can a “powerful enough” AI infer the numbers rolled?
Yes and no. A powerful enough AI in the future can recreate many historical path samples (ala monte carlo sim) through our multiverse.
Of course, if the information was just erased and didn’t effect anything, then it doesn’t matter. It literally can’t matter, so the AI doesn’t even need to infer/resolve that part of space-time—any specific choice for the die roll is equally as good, as is an unresolved superposition . There may be a connection here to delayed choice quantum eraser experiments.
Is the best-fit reconstruction of someone’s mind, given an atom-by-atom scan a century from now of a body frozen by Alcor today, good enough to be a mind?
I imagine that will completely depend on the details of their death, the delay, and the particular tech used by Alcor at the time they were frozen.
That being said, in a century powerful SI seems quite possible/likely. There are huge economies of scale involved in simulations. It is enormously less expensive—in terms of per human reconstruction cost—to do a historical simulation/reconstruction for all of the earth’s inhabitants at once.
The SI would use DNA (christendom has done a great job over the millenia at preserving an enormous amount of DNA), historical records, all of the web data from our time that survives, and of course all of the alcore data. It could have the equivalents of billions of historians working out the day by day details of each person’s lives before constructing more detailed sims, etc etc. It would be the grand megaengineering project of the future, not some small scale endevour.
With regard to your first question, you could also
A) plan to move to a hospice near a facility when you are near to death
and/or
B) arrange for standby to transfer you after legal death.
Of course, there are many trade-offs involved with either. In my estimation, the most useful thing would be for you to get engaged in a local community and try to push forward on basic research and logistical issues involved, although obviously that is not an easy task.
I live in South Africa. We don’t, as far as I know, have a cryonics facility comparable to, say, Alcor.
What are my options apart from “emigrate and live next to a cryonics facility”?
Also, I’m not sure if I’m misremembering, but I think it was Eliezer that said cryonics isn’t really a viable option without an AI powerful enough to reverse the inevitable damage. Here’s my second question, with said AI powerful enough to reverse the damage and recreate you, why would cryonics be a necessary step? Wouldn’t alternative solutions also be viable? For example, brain scans while alive and then something like the Visible Human Project (body sliced into cross sections) coupled with a copy of your genome. This could perhaps also be supplemented by a daily journal. Surely a powerful enough AI would be able to recreate the human that created those writings using the information provided?
Is it a completely stupid idea?
You could start a cryonics facility in South Africa.
It’s full of people who can afford to take out a life insurance in the hundreds of thousands of USD range to a cryo facility. /sarcasm
Actually, yes.
EDIT: At least, adjusting the cost for how much a USD gets you in South Africa.
Cryonics is an ambulance ride through an earthquake zone to the nearest revival facility, The distance is measured in years rather than miles, and the earthquake is the chances of history. The better the preservation, the lower the technology required to revive you, and the sooner you will reach a facility that can do it.
A “powerful enough” AI isn’t magic: it cannot recover information that no longer exists. We currently don’t know what must be preserved and what is redundant, beyond just “keep the brain, the rest of the body can probably be discarded, but we’ll freeze it as well at extra cost if you want.”
On a present-day level, the feted accomplishments of Deep Learning suggest to me that setting such algorithms to munch over a person’s highly documented life might be enough to enable a more or less plausible simulation of them after death. Plausible enough at least to be offered as a comfort to the bereaved. A market opportunity! Also, fuel for a debate on whether these simulations are people.
Can you recommend an article about what is the difference between the simulation of a person vs. “really” reviving a person? Primarily from the angle of: why should I or anyone would consider someone in the future making a plausible simulation of us is good for “us” ? I am really confused about the identity of a person i.e. when is a simulation is really “me” in the sense of me having a self-interest about that situation. I am heavily influenced by Buddhist ideas saying such an identity does not exist, is illusionary. I currently think the closest thing to this is memories, if I exist at all, I exist as something that remembers what happened to this illusion-me. I see this as a difficult philosophical problem and don’t know how to relate to it.
Same here. My own attitude is that we do not currently have software for which the question of it being any more conscious than a rock arises, nor any route to making such software. Therefore I am not going to worry about it. While it may be interesting for philosophers, I relate to the problem by ignoring it, or engaging in it no further than as an idle recreation.
I view it from a practical viewpoint: Even if you believe the Buddhist view, that the self is an illusion etc. you still feel like you have a self for >95% of the time (i.e. whenever you’re not meditating). When you wake up in the morning you feel like you are the same person that went to sleep the evening before. On the other hand, a clone of you would not feel like it is you anymore than one identical twin feels it is the other. So ideally people in the future should create a person/simulation that feels like it went to sleep and woke up again when it “should” have died.
Problems arise mainly when you hit something that only partially feels like it is the same person. I’d say there is still a considerable range of possible people that are sufficiently similar that we say it is the same person, since there is also considerable variation in the normal functioning of human brains.
E.g.:
Human memory is quite inaccurate. Different people with only slightly different memories could be said to be the same people. This may actually go quite far, if we consider the effects of Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of amnesia.
Being heavily intoxicated can to an extent feel like being a different person. Personality and habit changes over the course of your life can make you a different person, we still say it is the same person.
I wonder whether it is possible to find some sort of “core” personality/traits/memories, such that we can say as long as it remains unchanged it is the same person. I suspect there isn’t, as it seems to be a gradient instead of a binary classification.
This is a widely discussed topic. See, eg, here: http://mindclones.blogspot.com/?m=1
You might be able to reconstruct the person’s public face, but will have major problems with his private life.
By “highly documented” I had in mind not just the ordinary documentation that prominent public figures get, but someone who has deliberately taken steps to exhaustively record as much as they can, public and private.
I remain sceptical. External observation (something on the life cam lines) still cannot distinguish an hour of thinking about the stars’ main sequence from an hour of thinking about cosplay lolis. And diaries have the big problem of self-reflection… not being entirely accurate.
I take it our hypothetical system would not simply assume that diaries are accurate records; they would (so to speak) ask the question “how likely is it that any given person would write this diary entry?” which is not at all the same as the question “how well does this diary entry, taken at face value, match the actual life of this person?”.
This raises the question: Is it possible to deduce the correct person without creating conscious simulations of possibly very many people, which raises ethical questions.
I think you’re taking the suggestion a bit more seriously than I intended it. The commercial opportunity only needs the simulation to be good enough to tug at the heartstrings of those who knew the subject. Pictures and mementos are treasured; this would be a step beyond those, a living memorial that you could have a conversation with. It wouldn’t work for LessWrongers though. They’d spend all their time trying to break it.
LOL, certainly a fair point :-)
The problem for your commercial opportunity is the uncanny valley, though. Also, people tend to me more interested in virtual girlfriends than in virtual grandpas :-/
Technically, it can of course—through inference. Any information we have recovered about our history—history itself—is all inference used to recover lost information.
Even with successful cryonics, you still end up with a probability distribution over the person’s brain wiring matrix—it just has much lower variance, requiring less inference/guesswork to get a ‘successful’ result (however one defines that).
Agreed with your last paragraph that crossing the uncanny valley will be difficult and there is much room for public backlash. It’s so closely related to AI tech that one mostly implies the other.
Sounds like Hollywood image enhancement, where a few blurry pixels are magically transformed into a pin-sharp glossy magazine photograph.
I could point out that if you can infer the information, then by definition it still exists, but the real point here is just how powerful an AI can be and what inferences are possible. Let’s say that yesterday I rolled a dice ten times without looking at the result. Can a “powerful enough” AI infer the numbers rolled? Is the best-fit reconstruction of someone’s mind, given an atom-by-atom scan a century from now of a body frozen by Alcor today, good enough to be a mind?
This is not real?y true.
When typing the above sentence, I removed a letter and replaced it with a ?. You can probably infer what the originally intended letter was, thus using inference to recover information that did not exist anywhere in your physical locality.
But yes this is a terminology/technicality, and agreed that
Yes and no. A powerful enough AI in the future can recreate many historical path samples (ala monte carlo sim) through our multiverse.
Of course, if the information was just erased and didn’t effect anything, then it doesn’t matter. It literally can’t matter, so the AI doesn’t even need to infer/resolve that part of space-time—any specific choice for the die roll is equally as good, as is an unresolved superposition . There may be a connection here to delayed choice quantum eraser experiments.
I imagine that will completely depend on the details of their death, the delay, and the particular tech used by Alcor at the time they were frozen.
That being said, in a century powerful SI seems quite possible/likely. There are huge economies of scale involved in simulations. It is enormously less expensive—in terms of per human reconstruction cost—to do a historical simulation/reconstruction for all of the earth’s inhabitants at once.
The SI would use DNA (christendom has done a great job over the millenia at preserving an enormous amount of DNA), historical records, all of the web data from our time that survives, and of course all of the alcore data. It could have the equivalents of billions of historians working out the day by day details of each person’s lives before constructing more detailed sims, etc etc. It would be the grand megaengineering project of the future, not some small scale endevour.
With regard to your first question, you could also
A) plan to move to a hospice near a facility when you are near to death
and/or
B) arrange for standby to transfer you after legal death.
Of course, there are many trade-offs involved with either. In my estimation, the most useful thing would be for you to get engaged in a local community and try to push forward on basic research and logistical issues involved, although obviously that is not an easy task.
With regard to your second question, as with everything in cryonics, this has been endlessly discussed. See a good article by Mike Dawrin on the topic here: http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.php/2011/08/11/the-kurzwild-man-in-the-night/index.html