OK, so we do disagree on this fundamental level. I apologize for the following infodump, especially when it’s late at night for me...
I assign high probability to the patternist theory of consciousness: the thesis that the subjective thread of consciousness is not maintained by material continuity or a metaphysical soul, but by the patterned relations between the different complicated brain-states (or mind-moments, if we want to be less brain-chauvinistic). That is, you can identify the configuration that is my-brain-right-now (A1), and the configuration that is my-brain-a-millisecond-later (A2), and they’re connected in a way similar to the way that successive states of Conway’s Game of Life are connected. (Of course, there are multiple ways A1 could go, so throw in A2′, A2″, etc, but only a small subset of possible brain-configurations have a nonnegligible connection of this sort to A1.) Anyway, my estimate for “what I’ll experience next after A1” should just be a matter of counting all the A2s and variants in the multiverse, and comparing the measures of each.
This sounds weird to our evolved intuitions, but it appears to be the simplest theory of subjective experience which doesn’t involve extra metaphysical entities or new, heretofore unobserved, laws of physics. As noted in the link above, the notion of “material continuity” is a practical aggregate consequence which doesn’t cut to the way the universe actually works. Reality is made of configurations, not objects, and it would be unnatural to introduce a basic property for a substructure of a configuration (like A2) which wouldn’t hold for an identical substructure placed elsewhere in space and time. (Trivial properties like “location” obviously excepted, and completely historical-social properties like “the first nanotube of this length ever constructed” should be in a different category as well.)
The patternist theory of consciousness, incidentally, is basically assumed in the OP and in a good deal of the LW discussion of uploading and other such technologies.
I follow this general theory and mostly agree with it, though I admit it isn’t fully adapted into my thoughts on consciousness generally.
What I don’t see, exactly, is how “good enough” copies could work. (I also don’t see how identical copies could work, but that’s a practical issue, not a conceptual one.) Recreating someone who’s significantly more like me than most seems rather categorically different from freezing and later reactivating my brain, particularly since people who are significantly more like me than most probably already exist to some degree. At what degree does similarity cross some relevance threshold, if ever? Or have I misconstrued the issue?
At what degree does similarity cross some relevance threshold, if ever?
That’s precisely the issue at the heart of the current discussion, as I see it. And it’s on that issue that I’m uncertain. A copy of the cellular structure and activity of my brain is definitely good enough to carry on my conscious experience. Is a best-guess reconstruction of that structure from my written records good enough? I strongly suspect not, but it’s always dicey to say what a superintelligence couldn’t figure out from limited evidence.
OK, so we do disagree on this fundamental level. I apologize for the following infodump, especially when it’s late at night for me...
I assign high probability to the patternist theory of consciousness: the thesis that the subjective thread of consciousness is not maintained by material continuity or a metaphysical soul, but by the patterned relations between the different complicated brain-states (or mind-moments, if we want to be less brain-chauvinistic). That is, you can identify the configuration that is my-brain-right-now (A1), and the configuration that is my-brain-a-millisecond-later (A2), and they’re connected in a way similar to the way that successive states of Conway’s Game of Life are connected. (Of course, there are multiple ways A1 could go, so throw in A2′, A2″, etc, but only a small subset of possible brain-configurations have a nonnegligible connection of this sort to A1.) Anyway, my estimate for “what I’ll experience next after A1” should just be a matter of counting all the A2s and variants in the multiverse, and comparing the measures of each.
This sounds weird to our evolved intuitions, but it appears to be the simplest theory of subjective experience which doesn’t involve extra metaphysical entities or new, heretofore unobserved, laws of physics. As noted in the link above, the notion of “material continuity” is a practical aggregate consequence which doesn’t cut to the way the universe actually works. Reality is made of configurations, not objects, and it would be unnatural to introduce a basic property for a substructure of a configuration (like A2) which wouldn’t hold for an identical substructure placed elsewhere in space and time. (Trivial properties like “location” obviously excepted, and completely historical-social properties like “the first nanotube of this length ever constructed” should be in a different category as well.)
The patternist theory of consciousness, incidentally, is basically assumed in the OP and in a good deal of the LW discussion of uploading and other such technologies.
I follow this general theory and mostly agree with it, though I admit it isn’t fully adapted into my thoughts on consciousness generally.
What I don’t see, exactly, is how “good enough” copies could work. (I also don’t see how identical copies could work, but that’s a practical issue, not a conceptual one.) Recreating someone who’s significantly more like me than most seems rather categorically different from freezing and later reactivating my brain, particularly since people who are significantly more like me than most probably already exist to some degree. At what degree does similarity cross some relevance threshold, if ever? Or have I misconstrued the issue?
That’s precisely the issue at the heart of the current discussion, as I see it. And it’s on that issue that I’m uncertain. A copy of the cellular structure and activity of my brain is definitely good enough to carry on my conscious experience. Is a best-guess reconstruction of that structure from my written records good enough? I strongly suspect not, but it’s always dicey to say what a superintelligence couldn’t figure out from limited evidence.