This is one reason I’ve always been skeptical of the “uploaded brain” idea. My intuition is that inevitable minor errors in the model of the brain would cause the model to diverge from the source in a fairly short time.
This is true, but also e.g. minor environmental perturbations like seeing something at a slightly different time would also cause one to diverge from what one otherwise would have been in a fairly short time, so it seems like any notion of personal identity just has to be robust to exponential divergence.
Consider—A typical human brain has ~100 trillion synapses. Any attempt to map it would have some error rate. Is it still “you” if the error rate is .1%? 1%? 10%? Do positive vs. negative errors make a difference (i.e. missing connections vs. spurious connections)?
Is this a way to get new and exciting psychiatric disorders?
I don’t know the answers, or even how we’d try to figure out the answers, but I don’t want to spend eternity as this guy.
Trial and error? E.g. first you upload animal subjects and see what’s fidelity seems to preserve all the animal traits you can find. At some point you then start with human volunteers (perhaps preferentially dying people?), and see whether the rates that seem to work for nonhuman animals also work for humans.
Also I guess once you have a mostly-working human upload, you can test perturbations to this upload to see what factors they are most sensitive to.
This is true, but also e.g. minor environmental perturbations like seeing something at a slightly different time would also cause one to diverge from what one otherwise would have been in a fairly short time, so it seems like any notion of personal identity just has to be robust to exponential divergence.
Consider—A typical human brain has ~100 trillion synapses. Any attempt to map it would have some error rate. Is it still “you” if the error rate is .1%? 1%? 10%? Do positive vs. negative errors make a difference (i.e. missing connections vs. spurious connections)?
Is this a way to get new and exciting psychiatric disorders?
I don’t know the answers, or even how we’d try to figure out the answers, but I don’t want to spend eternity as this guy.
Trial and error? E.g. first you upload animal subjects and see what’s fidelity seems to preserve all the animal traits you can find. At some point you then start with human volunteers (perhaps preferentially dying people?), and see whether the rates that seem to work for nonhuman animals also work for humans.
Also I guess once you have a mostly-working human upload, you can test perturbations to this upload to see what factors they are most sensitive to.