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mvassilev
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted July 29, 2013 04:47 PM |
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artu
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
My BS sensor is tingling again
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posted July 29, 2013 05:00 PM |
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mvass, how will you deal with the distribution of resources (food, shelter, heat, fuel, water... ) when no one dies?
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mvassilev
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted July 29, 2013 05:02 PM |
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Using free-market capitalism, of course.  (What did you think I'd say?)
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Eccentric Opinion
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Drakon-Deus
Undefeatable Hero
Qapla'
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posted July 29, 2013 05:04 PM |
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Capitalism is not good. And neither is socialism. They are both fundamentally flawed. The people should not have so much freedom, they are not smart enough for their own good.
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Horses don't die on a dog's wish.
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Zenofex
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
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posted July 29, 2013 05:15 PM |
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Drakon-Deus said:
The people should not have so much freedom, they are not smart enough for their own good.
You realize that you just said that you're not smart enough for your own good? Or you'll finally admit that you're a spambot and the above does not apply to you? 
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Corribus
Hero of Order
The Abyss Staring Back at You
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posted July 30, 2013 01:10 AM |
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Edited by Corribus at 01:26, 30 Jul 2013.
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It has been argued that death has two components: biological termination and informational termination. However, to be strictly correct, biology is really just chemical information, so the true definition of death is ultimately a loss of information. If consciousness is purely informational, then the only barrier to immortality may be the technology of information preservation.
Still, given the laws of thermodynamics, even information is unlikely to persist forever...
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I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're goin', and hook up with them later. -Mitch Hedberg
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Azagal
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
Smooth Snake
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posted July 30, 2013 02:32 AM |
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Corribus said:
It has been argued that death has two components: biological termination and informational termination. However, to be strictly correct, biology is really just chemical information, so the true definition of death is ultimately a loss of information. If consciousness is purely informational, then the only barrier to immortality may be the technology of information preservation.
I'm afraid I don't follow. What exactly are we talking about when you say "information"? It's not knowledge I get that much but is it more along the lines of signals telling your body to do X?
Also I'm guessing when you talk about immortality you don't mean it in the sense that you have a body that doesn't die but rather your consciousness lives on on a hard drive (something along those lines).
I'm not trying to intentionally sound thick I honestly don't fully understand.
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"All I can see is what's in front of me. And all I can do is keep moving forward" - The Heir Wielder of Names, Seeker of Thrones, King of Swords, Breaker of Infinities, Wheel Smashing Lord
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xerox
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
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posted July 30, 2013 04:04 AM |
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people die if they are killed
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Over himself, over his own
body and
mind, the individual is
sovereign.
- John Stuart Mill
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Corribus
Hero of Order
The Abyss Staring Back at You
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posted July 30, 2013 04:06 AM |
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Edited by Corribus at 04:06, 30 Jul 2013.
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What I mean, o thick one, is the following: ignoring the potential complication of the existence of a soul (although truly it makes no difference) and focusing strictly on biology, what distinguishes you from me, or indeed you from a barnacle, is not the stuff of which you are composed, but the way that stuff is put together. We are all of us composed of the same proteins, amino acids and other molecules. Indeed, we are all made up of the same atoms. Your carbons are no different from mine. Your hemoglobins are - assuming you have no mutation - no different from mine. How can such a simple array of ingredients yield such different endpoints? The answer is information.
Consider: the English alphabet has only 26 letters. It is the way in which those letters are arranged that gives us words, and it is the way those words are put together that gives us Shakespeare, Keats, Danielle Steele, and the Washington Times. It is the specific arrangement of letters that gives us poetry, just as it is the specific arrangement of carbons, nitrogens and oxygens that give us people. The difference between a random arrangement and a meaningful one is the fact that the latter has a specific order that has some function. Your atoms are arranged in a specific pattern, and that pattern has many levels: DNA, proteins, human being. At the most basic level is the language in which biology is written. The amino acids are the letters, the proteins are the words, and you are the novel. And what differentiates you from me is the way your words are put together, their unique order. And remember, uniqueness to the order alone is not sufficient. Randomly arranged letters are unique; only certain arrangements give rise to functional organisms.
You are, therefore, the product of information, and different information, at some level, than the information of which I am composed. This information, by the way, is not purely genetic. You are not the same person you were five years ago. You are different, yet again the stuff of which you are composed is the same. The information that constitutes you is not only wrapped up in genes. It's encoded in memories, in the fat you've gained from eating too much pizza, in the fact that you lost a leg in Vietnam.
In his book, Creation: Life and How to Make It, Steve Grand shares an astounding idea:
...something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place... Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.
If we are not the stuff of which we are made, what are we? Information!
When we die, that information (most of it, the part, anyway, that defines us as individuals) is lost. That is death, not the loss of our bodies, because again, those are just carbons and nitrogens and oxygens the same as all the ones that are already in the dirt. Humans have acquired the technology to copy some forms of this information. The genetic code. However while we can clone organisms, and presumably humans, it seems unlikely this is sufficient to generate another me. The information which defines me is more than just genetic information; I am more than what my body looks like. The technology we now lack is to copy other information that is stored in our brains. In fact, we don't even know the language such information is written in yet, or where it is located. But I suspect that will come in time. A hundred years ago we did no know the language in which the genetic code was written. Then we learned it, then we learned how to copy it. We are learning now how to write with it from scratch. I suspect some day we will learn how other information is written, and we will learn how to write it. Perhaps we can write memories, add new information to people. As in Total Recall?
The point is that once we know how to duplicate all the information that makes up you, the body means nothing. If we could use all the information that constitutes you and arrange your atoms just so... well, would you ever die? When this body gets old, we would just take this information and make a new body, and I would keep going, and then when that body is old, we take the new group of information that is me and make a new body from that... and so forth. Perhaps a body even becomes irrelevant. The only real information I need is that which makes up my consciousness. Could that be put into a machine? <shrug> This is the definition of immorality, when your information is never lost.
It needs to be stated that creating (and destroying) information takes energy. Because of entropy. There is only one combination of atoms that makes you. There are many possible combinations of atoms. To assemble you specifically from those atoms requires energy because it is entropically unfavorable. This process happens (spontaneously) now because we have energy available from the sun, and there's a process of self-assembly to catalyze it. Some day, this will not be the case. Indeed, in the event that the entropy of the universe is maximized, there will be no energy available to arrange atoms just so. Chemistry will cease to exist. Thus immortality seems impossible. But you can live a long time. 
The complication, of course, is the soul. I don't really want to open up a can of worms, but even if you do believe in a soul, it still stands to reason that you are information. The question would be: if you duplicate all of your information and put it in another body, does this duplicate your consciousness? Does your soul transfer with the information? Well, I'll leave that question for the philosophers and theologians!
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I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're goin', and hook up with them later. -Mitch Hedberg
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mvassilev
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted July 30, 2013 05:02 AM |
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Corribus said:
If we could use all the information that constitutes you and arrange your atoms just so... well, would you ever die? When this body gets old, we would just take this information and make a new body, and I would keep going, and then when that body is old, we take the new group of information that is me and make a new body from that... and so forth. Perhaps a body even becomes irrelevant. The only real information I need is that which makes up my consciousness. Could that be put into a machine?
There's a complication here, one that I've been thinking about for the past few days (though in a different context). The process of moving into a new body can be divided into two steps: copying the information and destroying the old copy. If you do the first without the second, what you'll have is two (?) people in two bodies, whose information happens to be the same. To imagine what this would be like, picture a clone of you appears next to you, with all of your thoughts, memories, thoughts patterns, etc. Is the clone you? It seems not, as you are still you - you're right there, in the same place where you were before the clone appeared. Though your clone's and your experiences were the same until the moment of copying, they become different afterwards (because you don't share a mental connection of any kind, no more than with any other human). So copying alone may not create a new you. But then consider what happens if you copy your information into a new body and destroy your old body at the same time. From the point of view of you-in-the-new-body, you've just switched bodies. But from the point of view of you-in-your-old-body, you're watching the information copy while feeling the flames sear your flesh (or the poison course through your veins, or the nanobots cutting up your brain, whatever scenario you prefer). You-in-your-old-body never goes anywhere, it just dies, the same way a human would now.
This doesn't pose a problem if you're copying information from a body that's unconscious and will never regain consciousness. But in any other scenario, it's something worth thinking about. Even if you can copy your information, from your subjective experience within your old body, you're not moving yourself, you're creating someone new (who happens to have your memories, thoughts, etc). So, if you take a new body, copy your information into it, then you-in-your-old-body kills your old body, did you survive or not?
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Eccentric Opinion
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mvassilev
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted July 30, 2013 06:52 AM |
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Zenofex
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
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posted July 30, 2013 08:52 AM |
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Quote:
So copying alone may not create a new you.
Information is not static as you are not static. Copying means exactly what it implies - doubling an existing information and putting one part of it in another place. It does not mean that the two sets of information will remain static (unchanged) after the act of the copying.
You don't even need a copy to comprehend this by the way. The person that you are now is not the person that you were 1 second ago. The differences might be minuscule but they are already a fact.
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Seraphim
Supreme Hero
Knowledge Reaper
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posted July 30, 2013 09:56 AM |
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Edited by Seraphim at 10:06, 30 Jul 2013.
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GunFred
Supreme Hero
Sexy Manticore
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posted July 30, 2013 10:02 AM |
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I have always been deathly afraid of death just like anyone who truly value life. Just the thought of death strikes terror into my soul as what can be scarier than complete void. So immortality is my top dream even though it is theoretically impossible. My only comfort is that I realise how pointless it is to fear the inevitable. Screw people who say they do not want to live forever though.
But no matter how much I fear this encrouching void, I can not see the religious ideas of an afterlife as anything else than comfortable delusions. Friends to heaven and enemies to hell sounds just a bit too good to be true and too individually satesfying.
If there turned out to be an afterlife then that would be the greatest but I am not going to risk the life I know I have on an afterlife I seemingly do not have.
Drakon-Deus said:
Eat and get stronger. Not bad. But I prefer not to spoil my stomach so I'll just dispose of the filth.
Everything for the sake of the nation.
Be careful with what you wish for. Jews and gays are historically the first to be disposed are you ready to supress who you are for the sake of the nation? 
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artu
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
My BS sensor is tingling again
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posted July 30, 2013 10:51 AM |
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Corribus said:
If we are not the stuff of which we are made, what are we? Information!
Well, the biggest question for me is, how much of our character is really based on information (memories, knowledge, education etc etc) and how much is determined by things like hormones, having high or low blood pressure, stamina, adrenalin etc etc... A ten year old never passionately falls in love (he may imitate adults) not because of character but simply because he does not have the hormones working yet. So, I think uploading us into machines won't have the results people imagine anyway. Uploading us into new bodies... That may just let us compare how much of our character is based on rationality or knowledge and how much is based on biological urges, flaws and needs.
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Drakon-Deus
Undefeatable Hero
Qapla'
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posted July 30, 2013 11:14 AM |
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I think of our soul like a hard disk containing all our personality, memories, etc, when we are resurrected God will simply put the hard disk into a better machine.
____________
Horses don't die on a dog's wish.
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mvassilev
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted July 30, 2013 04:21 PM |
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Zenofex said:
You don't even need a copy to comprehend this by the way. The person that you are now is not the person that you were 1 second ago. The differences might be minuscule but they are already a fact.
This and copying into another body are different. The person I am now has minuscule differences from the person I was a second ago, but I have continuity of experience. If my information were copied, me-in-my-new-body would also have experiential continuity with my old body up to the moment of copying, but me-in-my-old-body would not have experiential continuity with then new body.
If I grew my body parts in a vat and used them to replace the body parts in my body, one by one (including neurons in my brain, which would be configured to have the same information as the neurons they'd be replacing), I would have experiential continuity, as it would be very similar to the process that happens naturally. But if all of my parts were replaced at the same time (including my neurons), then I (in my old body) wouldn't have experiential continuity.
It's like Theseus's ship. If you replace the parts one by one, you can still reasonably say it's the same ship. But if you replace them all at the same time, it's definitely not the same ship anymore.
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Eccentric Opinion
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Azagal
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
Smooth Snake
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posted July 30, 2013 09:46 PM |
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Edited by Azagal at 21:48, 30 Jul 2013.
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@Corribus
Thanks a lot! That was by far the coolest and most interesting thing I've read on the internet for ages.
I didn't know this was a VW thread my bad... Hope you don't mind me quoting that post and posting it somewhere in an OSM thread I'm sure there is an appropriate one floating around there somewhere.
Would be a shame to just it get deleted.
Do you think " Creation: Life and How to Make It by Steve Grand" is something the un-initiated can read or do you need a advanced knowledge of chemistry, biology and the like for it to be comprehensible?
EDIT:
Quote:
It's encoded in memories, in the fat you've gained from eating too much pizza,
Oii... I've been working out for a while now I'm all good again.
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"All I can see is what's in front of me. And all I can do is keep moving forward" - The Heir Wielder of Names, Seeker of Thrones, King of Swords, Breaker of Infinities, Wheel Smashing Lord
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Corribus
Hero of Order
The Abyss Staring Back at You
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posted July 31, 2013 05:21 AM |
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@mvass
The points you raise are good ones. I don't pretend to have all the answers. It may very well be that the kind of immortality I suggest is impossible. However I submit that there are problems the other way as well. For example, assuming that any kind of information can be duplicated, if the self (your consciousness) cannot be duplicated or transferred, then it isn't information as I've postulated. In which case we are left with the equally puzzling question of what it is. The only thing it seems to leave is the supernatural.
Nevertheless, I can still conceive of a possible solution to the paradox of "two me's", but it requires a different perspective on... perspective. I shall illustrate my thinking with a thought experiment.
Suppose a scientist tells me they have figured out a way to copy all the information of "me" into another identical body, which they have also constructed from my information. I agree to do this. For the sake of the experiment, we'll pretend I go to sleep for this, but it isn't really necessary. When I wake, I sit up and across from me is an exact duplicate of me. Not only a genetic duplicate, but a person with the exact same memories, desires, thoughts, skills, dreams, dislikes, and so on. All the information in me is in this other person sitting across from me. Now the scientist comes to us both and says: "Which of you is the original?"
Stop for a moment and consider this question. If we are truly exact copies, there is no way to know. Does it make a difference, then, whether I am the original or the copy? If this process is repeated indefinitely, with me not knowing each time whether I'm the copy or the original, is my version of immortality possible?
Now, supposing the scientist says that I am the original, or that I am the copy - either way, this is new information that now distinguishes me from the other me. We are no longer the same person, because now we are each a different collection of information (one has the knowledge of being a copy and one the original). This of course becomes obvious if the copy is a younger version of the older me. When we both wake, immediately we are a collection of different information. However if I wake and find I am the younger one, my identity is still functionally the same as my previous self, because up until the point of the conversion, I have all the same memories and so forth. The only thing I recognize is that I've grown younger. For me, the functional difference is only a matter of age. I still have the same consciousness as the other me, the older me, so am I not the same person? Am I not immortal?
Therefore what I am suggesting is that it's possible for there to be two "me's", even simultaneously, because from the perspective of the self, it makes no difference whether I am one or the other. I guess what I'm getting at is that what distinguishes the self is a collection of memories, an awareness of time. I am different from you because I have a different awareness of the past. This is what distinguishes my unique self-awareness. If someone else is exactly the same and nobody gives me information on which of us is the original, that self-awareness is no longer unique. Information is required to separate our identities.
To convey this point, I bring up the example of an amnesia victim, which is kind of the reverse effect. In this case all my information is erased. I wake and know nothing of myself; my body is foreign. People say I did things, I liked this, I hated that, whatever, but it is as another person did these things. Which may very well be the case. If my information is erased through brain injury, am I not a new person? I think for the most part the answer here is yes, although it's not a complete yes because some information may be retained (emotions and such are largely biochemical, so this information may remain, and genetics are still there, obviously, but that is lower-level information). Still, I would conclude from this that "self" is a more fluid concept that what most people think it is.
One other thing to ponder. It is possible that the self is informational but my immortality is impossible, IF the information is not the sort that can be copied. For one thing, the information has to be copied perfectly. If it isn't, the information is different, and my copy is no longer the same person as myself. Sure the discrepancies may be small - in the case of genetic information this could lead to inconsequential effects, or it can lead to big ones. Given that we do not know the kind of information that makes up the higher consciousness, it is not possible to know what kind of effects errors in copying will produce. Second, it is also possible that the very act of copying changes the kind of information. In a sense this is similar to principles in quantum mechanics, where accessing the system changes it. If accessing the information to copy it changes the information itself, then exact copies may be impossible. On a macro level, if I do not lose consciousness while the copying is taking place, my awareness of the procedure is producing new information as it's being copied, which may lead to an effect whereby the full body of information can never be fully copied! A sort of Zeno's Dichotomy Paradox.
Anyway, just some things to chew upon. It's a fun thing to think about. I hope I made my thoughts clear. It's hard to put such confusing ideas into words that make sense.
@Azagal
Yes the book is approachable and I highly recommend it. The quotation I took from it, however, was took through Richard Dawkin's book The God Delusion, which is an equally good read. I encourage theists to not be turned off by the subject matter and read it as well. Certainly you will agree with little that is in it, but understanding opposing belief systems is never a bad thing in my opinion. You may even emerge from it with stronger convictions in your own beliefs.
I'm glad you liked the post.
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I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're goin', and hook up with them later. -Mitch Hedberg
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mvassilev
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted July 31, 2013 06:32 AM |
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The problem is, duplication and transfer are two very different processes. If you transfer information (say, take a brain from one body and put it in another), there is continuity of experience - your consciousness leaves one body and goes into another. When you're copying information, like copying a file, you're creating something new, and the old copy remains unchanged. It's like the difference between "cut and paste" and "copy and paste".
In your example, one of you is still the original, even though he doesn't know that he is - unless the original has been destroyed and only copies remain. Once the copy is created, it and the original become separate people, because their consciousnesses are now separate.
Imagine a different scenario - a teleporter. You go into it, it scans you, transfers all the information about you to another teleporter, creates a copy of you (both in body and in information), then destroys your old body. From the perspective of the you at the other teleporter, nothing has happened to you. From the perspective of you in the first teleporter, you get scanned, then are fried to death (or however it kills the bodies). From the point of view of an outside observer, you haven't been killed, because there's one person with your consciousness at the beginning and one person with your consciousness at the end. But from your point of view, you died in the first teleporter - your perspective doesn't transfer to the new body, because it has the copy of your consciousness.
Returning to your example - suppose you wake up and there's another copy of you. Two things can happen at this point: one of you can be killed, or both of you stay alive. In the former situation, there is still a person who suffers the subjective experience of being killed (or has it inflicted upon them while unconscious). To create what to an external observer would seem like one person, someone has to die. If neither the original nor the copy is killed, then from the observer's point of view, there are two of you (and your and your copy's point of view, there is another separate person with your thoughts and memories). Which one is the real you? The original? Both? Neither? Or does it not make sense to ask this question.
What are the ethics of teleporters, anyway? Is using a teleporter suicide? What if the teleporter doesn't destroy the old body - which one has claims to the original's property? Or what if you just want to create a copy of yourself?
Also, can this be moved out of the Wastelands? These posts are too good to be consigned to oblivion.
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Eccentric Opinion
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This thread is pages long: 
