this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
141 points (98.0% liked)
chapotraphouse
13691 readers
46 users here now
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have a confession.
I actually agree with a fundamental principle behind rationalist/basilisk discourse: a simulation of you, if it's accurate enough, is essentially you. If Roko's Basilisk created a simulation of me then she is me, and if it tortured her it's indistinguishable from me being tortured. She'll be "me" in every way that matters. Continuity of consciousness is unimportant.
It's just that Roko's Basilisk is based on flawed priors so I'm not really worried about Skynet torturing my Metaverse avatar in the future. The basilisk wouldn't bother, there's literally no point. It wouldn't care about me at all. That's a waste of resources.
Instead, I'm hopeful!
I believe, if we don't kill ourselves, we will be able to simulate the dead and bring everyone back. There isn't going to be some dumbass Judgement Day where a basilisk determines if we were good, there's no point, but instead every person who has ever lived will be simulated and no one will ever have to say goodbye ever again. Some people will need some rehabilitation to get over their traumas from life, some people will need reeducation to get over their own bullshit, but everyone will be saved.
Rationalist psychos can't imagine this because the idea of saving everyone is antithetical to their world-view. They're still operating on essentially capitalist priors where only the righteous/productive will be saved while the wicked/unproductive will be damned. It's the same logic behind making the poor starve so they work harder for food, except their imaginations have run wild with it.
And they will build the basilisk themselves if we let them.
i fundamentally disagree on continuity. as soon as there's two of you there's divergence.
I understand that point of view, but have a slightly more radical view in that divergence isn't totalizing or instantaneous. Every time you sleep your brain changes, but we wouldn't say that the person who wakes up is a different person than the one that went to sleep. You just changed a little bit.
Or a more personal example: when I got hit by a car I lost about three weeks of memory, I no longer had aphantasia, and had an identity crisis that eventually lead to me accepting myself as trans. Did I die when I was hit by that car? Did someone else wake up in my body? I don't think so.
There's certainly some point at which the amount of changes are great enough that you become someone else, but if there were two of me we'd still be the same person for a while.
My simulation doesn't have to be perfect continuity, just whatever minimum is good enough.
I'm a bit out of my depth here,but while this sounds like a nice idea and all,how would I get to experience that nice immortality myself? I understand your point about sleep,but at least there you have some continuity,that being that your consciousness exists within your body,whereas a digital copy has little to no continuity with what's here right now.
I mean,I get why it wouldn't matter to other people,they'd see no difference,but if I go lights out in the physical world and the copy lives on in some metaverse heaven,how would that have saved me personally? For all intents and purposes what would be out there would be reflection taking my place in the world after I'm gone. A good copy,but for me it's a copy nonetheless. I mean,it's great that some copy of me would be existing out there having fun,but it's not so great for me the human,being dead and all.
Okay, so this is predicated on the assumption that the self is fundamentally just data (memories, feelings, thoughts), and if a machine can simulate that data accurately enough then it will have have recreated that self even if the previous self is gone.
I believe worrying about if "I'm gone" if my data copy is alive is metaphysics. There is no "I" - there's only the data I'm made of.
Going further, because the data of the self is always being corrupted and lost, worrying about perfection is also metaphysics. I am I even if my data is incomplete, because our dataforms are always changing anyway just the the course of living.
Ok,then I guess I believe in a soul or something like it apparently
Because I care more about the continuity of my consciousness rather than a data archive existing after my expiration date
Don't get me wrong,it's good for future generations to have access to that knowledge,but I can't help but think that the spark within me that is alive right now would be gone
Hell,no way to know if either of us are wrong,and I do see your point,but I just think that unless you ensure the continuity of consciousness,what you're gonna get is a new being,very similar to me, but never really "me" so to speak
Also,not to sift through old struggle sessions,but I can't help but think a certain killer of Kissinger would not look favorably upon that take (or not,never interacted that much with the person)
I can't write a good post but yeah, the phenomenal character of being (like, existing, experiencing, etc) is more than mere data.
Your brain is not a computer, putting it in a robot body would be so far from the embodied experience of being you that I don't think even that would be "you".
So, what about a clone body?
Again, thats perhaps the limit. Clone body for the original brain. Cloning the whole thing is no longer you.
If you have a clone brain that has all the same memories as the original brain then is there a difference?
Yes. It's a copy. No longer any attachment to the world that I was born in.
It's like the Joyce line about the omphalos telephone line back to eve. The clone won't have any more attachments to the history of the world in the way that you or I, through our mothers, do.
It will be a separate existence, born anew, and no longer the "me" born xx years ago.
Btw putting your brain in a clone might well have incredibly weird phenomenological aspects that like, I don't know if I'd want to do.. the ideal future is one where medical technology allows for the repair and maintenance of the bodies we have.
The clone remembers having those attachments, so it does have attachment to the world you were born in.
Let's say your clone with your memories replaces you, like a Star Trek transporter incident. Your mother won't be able to tell the difference, your clone won't be able to tell the difference, and the rest of the world won't be able to tell the difference. What's the actual physical difference between your clone remembering your mother and you remembering your mother? Seems to me that nothing actually changed.
It's no longer me. The clone doesn't actually have the material connection to my mother, to the historical world we live in. It's made of different stuff.
Again, for others, it might be able to play the role of "me". But it isn't me, will never be me. It will have been created in a new way, and brought into history in a different way.
I think that as historical materialists we need to hold the line on this kind of thing. Just as the bringing into being of a commodity imprints the history, the labor, the life into it, so does the bringing into being (continually and autopoetically) of the self constitute the historical and material conditions of its life.
The material conditions that create the clone are not me. It will never be me even if it "remembers" being me.
I don't see it. If you copy a book it doesn't become a different story, just because it's written on different paper.
Yes but the history of the book is different. The text of Augustine's confessions is the same but the copy produced by penguin is DIFFERENT from a manuscript produced by a medieval scribe. They have different histories and are different things in the world.
You can't say that my book and your book are the same. The "text" may be the same, but they aren't the same thing.
Unless you discount the materiality of life entirely you will never be your clone.
I see what you're saying, but I think I'd be happy if I got a new book after my old book was destroyed, even if I'd rather my old book not be destroyed. I'll take the clone body with the clone brain, and I'll still consider myself alive even if the original is long gone. It's a new copy of the book, but it's still the same story.
other people have covered most of my position well enough, i'll just slip in here and say it wouldn't be the you having this conversation who thinks she's alive.
I think that's for us to decide, isn't it? As far as I am concerned, as far as she is concerned, we are the same person.
Have you seen Don Hertzfeldt's World of Tomorrow?
No, but the synopsis definitely sounds relevant!
Not weighing in on the actual debate here, but just pointing out that "there is no I - there is only the data I'm made of" is also definitely metaphysics.
Well my self is also embodied in my actual flesh. I am my scars and gut flora and muscles and genetic predispositions.
My self isn't even fully contained in my body! My self is also in my living space and my family and my friends and my coworkers and all my other social connections. I am I because of everything and everyone around me.
And I am also my historical and material context, what makes me "me" can't be separated from my class position within this epoch of capitalism.
But those, too, can be simulated as more data points. I really don't think there's anything that can't be represented as data.
Fully on board the ontic structural realism and extended cognition bus. Just pointing out that it absolutely is a metaphysical position, and that giving arguments for it is doing metaphysics.
Fair. Metaphysics actually seems to be a fuzzy term: it can mean studying the relationship between mind and matter i.e. what I'm doing (although really I'm saying that "mind" can not be separated from matter, they are the same thing) and speculation about scientifically unanswerable questions i.e. beyond physics. I only mean to say that there's nothing nonphyiscal or immaterial about the self. It can be contained and explained purely through materialism.
I agree entirely; philosophy of science is philosophy enough, to paraphrase Quine. If you haven't read it (and are interested in some pretty hard-core contemporary philosophical elucidation of this stuff), you might enjoy James Ladyman's book Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized.