Do you agree with the quantum physics sequence? This is the big reveal:
If you can see the moments of now braided into time, the causal dependencies of future states on past states, the high-level pattern of synapses and the internal narrative as a computation within it—if you can viscerally dispel the classical hallucination of a little billiard ball that is you, and see your nows strung out in the river that never flows—then you can see that signing up for cryonics, being vitrified in liquid nitrogen when you die, and having your brain nanotechnologically reconstructed fifty years later, is actually less of a change than going to sleep, dreaming, and forgetting your dreams when you wake up.
You should be able to see that, now, if you’ve followed through this whole series. You should be able to get it on a gut level—that being vitrified in liquid nitrogen for fifty years (around 3e52 Planck intervals) is not very different from waiting an average of 2e26 Planck intervals between neurons firing, on the generous assumption that there are a hundred trillion synapses firing a thousand times per second. You should be able to see that there is nothing preserved from one night’s sleep to the morning’s waking, which cryonic suspension does not preserve also. Assuming the vitrification technology is good enough for a sufficiently powerful Bayesian superintelligence to look at your frozen brain, and figure out “who you were” to the same resolution that your morning’s waking self resembles the person who went to sleep that night.
Assuming the vitrification technology is good enough for a sufficiently powerful Bayesian superintelligence to look at your frozen brain, and figure out “who you were” to the same resolution that your morning’s waking self resembles the person who went to sleep that night.
But I don’t think the person tomorrow is the same person as me today, either.
Point taken. Any interest in having your volition realized? This seems much more likely to me to matter and I do happen to run an organization aimed at providing it whether you pay us or not but we’d still appreciate your help.
being vitrified in liquid nitrogen when you die, and having your brain nanotechnologically reconstructed fifty years later, is actually less of a change than going to sleep, dreaming, and forgetting your dreams when you wake up.
I haven’t been entirely convinced on that note. The process of dying and the time it takes from heart stopping to head frozen in a jar seems like it would give plenty of opportunity for minor disruptions even granted that a superintelligence could put it back together.
I’m not sure if this has ever been presented as a scenario, but even if you are looking at many minor disruptions, physically speaking, there aren’t that many places that your neurons would have gone.
So, it is possible that many versions of you might be woken up, wedrifid1, wedrifid2, etc. , each the result of a different extrapolation that was minor enough to be extrapolated, yet major enough to deserve a different version. This would only happen if the damages have occurred in a place critical to your sense of self. I simply don’t know enough neurology and neurochemistry to say how much damage this is and where, but I’m sure that the superintelligences would be able to crack that one.
And your great grand children, being the nice sweet posthumans that we expect them to be, (they did recover you, didn’t they?) will spend time with all versions of their great grand parents. Their brains would be running at higher cycles and keeping intelligent conversations on with 10 versions of you will be trivial to them.
Do you agree with the quantum physics sequence? This is the big reveal:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/
But I don’t think the person tomorrow is the same person as me today, either.
Point taken. Any interest in having your volition realized? This seems much more likely to me to matter and I do happen to run an organization aimed at providing it whether you pay us or not but we’d still appreciate your help.
Well, I am a monthly donor, and unless something unexpected happens I’ll be coming over in a few months to see what I can do for SIAI, so yes. :)
I haven’t been entirely convinced on that note. The process of dying and the time it takes from heart stopping to head frozen in a jar seems like it would give plenty of opportunity for minor disruptions even granted that a superintelligence could put it back together.
I’m not sure if this has ever been presented as a scenario, but even if you are looking at many minor disruptions, physically speaking, there aren’t that many places that your neurons would have gone.
So, it is possible that many versions of you might be woken up, wedrifid1, wedrifid2, etc. , each the result of a different extrapolation that was minor enough to be extrapolated, yet major enough to deserve a different version. This would only happen if the damages have occurred in a place critical to your sense of self. I simply don’t know enough neurology and neurochemistry to say how much damage this is and where, but I’m sure that the superintelligences would be able to crack that one.
And your great grand children, being the nice sweet posthumans that we expect them to be, (they did recover you, didn’t they?) will spend time with all versions of their great grand parents. Their brains would be running at higher cycles and keeping intelligent conversations on with 10 versions of you will be trivial to them.