Welcome to Life

[Elok]

I mean, the problem is that the idea fails to make sense on its face. You aren't going to make any process more robust and less prone to failure by making it infinitely more complicated and resource-intensive. Even with incredible computing technology, just one virtual person would suck up enough energy to keep a hundred real ones comfortable. The world's population continues to grow, and doesn't look like declining for another, what, forty years? And the process of starting to decline will bring new challenges--aging populations don't work as efficiently as young ones. Not to mention climate change.

It would make far more sense to pursue simple genetic engineering to improve longevity.

[Jon Miller]

Not sure how simple it is, but I agree that the future is probably biological and not digital.

JM

[giblets]

How did you reach the conclusion that one virtual person "would suck up enough energy to keep a hundred real ones comfortable"...?

[Jon Miller]

I think that is just his guess based on current or near (next 20 years) future computing power.

And we are near the limit of the integrated circuit. Despite what some say, quantum computing (as an analog to digital computing) is still far away and not understood and biological computing is similar.

JM

[Elok]

How did you reach the conclusion that one virtual person "would suck up enough energy to keep a hundred real ones comfortable"...?

Very rough out-of-ass figure there, obviously. But you do know how many cells there are in a human body, right? How enormously complicated and interlinked all the various processes are? It takes relatively little energy to sustain them all as actual physical entities. But if you're actually simulating all of them, with all their various parts, you're talking about keeping track of billions of simulated moving parts, each of which require energy merely to continue existing as "real" objects in the fake world.

Even if you did a very low-fi mockup of reality, you're still talking about a very cluttered environment which requires constant energy consumption merely to avoid disappearing. A real-world chair or pen or coffee cup could, in a suitable environment, last for fifty years without requiring any expenditure of energy. Their virtual counterparts have to be continuously reprocessed to interact with any and all people in their environment.

Even a simple rock has a variety of attributes--mass, volume, shape, color, texture, hardness, heat absorption, and durability, plus derivative characteristics like aerodynamics or how well it skips across a lake. All these exist on their own perpetually IRL. In a virtual world, every single damn pebble is going to be taking up server space to store its values, plus processing power to retrieve and render them every time a curious replicant decides to walk barefoot on the gravel for a lark. There is no way in hell you're going to manage that without copious expenditure of energy, both to set up and maintain the world. To say nothing of the man-hours involved in programming, updating, debugging . . .

[Ben Kenobi]

Even if you did a very low-fi mockup of reality, you're still talking about a very cluttered environment which requires constant energy consumption merely to avoid disappearing. A real-world chair or pen or coffee cup could, in a suitable environment, last for fifty years without requiring any expenditure of energy. Their virtual counterparts have to be continuously reprocessed to interact with any and all people in their environment.

The problem with a low-fi version is it would make a facsimile. It might look real enough like the person - it might be able to quote them and use the words that they use - but it wouldn't actually be that person. There wouldn't be a person in the machine - just something pretending to be him. It would have the negative repercussions of not being that person, while looking like the person and 'wearing their skin' so to speak.

I don't know about you - but I would find it terrifying to speak with someone who's passed on in that fashion.

[Lorizael]

So the video I posted is clearly intended to be comical. Extrapolating our current lifestyle to a computer simulated one. Ha. I honestly don't think that's necessarily the way things will or should go. I don't see uploading necessarily as a solution to longevity, especially uploading to a Matrix-style afterlife. Uploading strikes me as useful for storage (during catastrophe, interstellar travel), communication (across distances where c matters), or emergencies (you're killed unexpectedly so your auto-updating brain needs a new body). These are all totally out there and science fictional, of course, which brings up the next point for me.

I think it's kind of silly to be talking about the computational complexity of uploading because we don't currently have even the faintest idea how to accomplish it. It's way in the future, which could mean 50 or 500 or 5000 years for all I know. (I would argue somewhere between 50 and 500, but that's honestly not based on much.) Yeah, I imagine it's going to be immensely difficult even when we do get the technology. Currently, though, and for the foreseeable future, it's not even unthinkably difficult; it's impossible.

In terms of longevity, that's where my silly gradual transition to electronic life idea comes in. That is, if you want to live forever, the answer is to ever so slowly move your consciousness along from one material substrate to another, which is arguably what does occur throughout life (individual neurons may persist over your lifetime, but the parts that make up those neurons must be replenished via food). This is more of a... turn into a cyborg where your brain has been uploaded to something similar to a harddrive kind of thing.

Is that easier or harder than some kind of genetic engineering or biological solution to aging? I don't know. It's different. The advantage of going the computery route is that you can start from scratch and build whatever you want, giving you the opportunity to live completely different lives rather than some poor facsimile of a normal, biological life. The advantage of simply improving upon nature is that it's been doing its thing for billions of years, so it is a pretty darn robust system.

[Elok]

But if you're doing something completely different, is the person still him/herself? So much of our selfhood being bound up in our biology, I don't see how you can avoid said poor facsimile without creating an entirely different entity. And biology provides better tools for the stuff human beings need to do, as a rule; machines are better at power, endurance and doing things we find too boring or fiddly to tolerate. A human being doesn't need to withstand high temperatures, or be strong enough to stamp steel plate, or find prime factors of eighty-digit numbers in seconds. And past discussions of AI on here have led to computer people telling me, "yeeeeeaaaahhh, we've been trying to do AI for fifty years now and the computers still make Forrest Gump look like Stephen Hawking."

Possibly we could circumvent the weaknesses of computers by reinventing the wheel and creating machines which mimic biological tissue quite closely--but would such close mimicry avoid the pitfalls of the biological tissue it's meant to displace?

Finally, given the remarkable hatred people exhibit towards people who do something as relatively trifling as use dope to win at the Olympics, I wouldn't underestimate the visceral hatred any attempt at transcending the human would conjure up in the vast majority of the population. Now, based on what you've said earlier, you don't need a reminder of that, but I'm just throwing that out there anyway.

[giblets]

Using dope to win the Olympics is cheating... bodybuilders who use dope because they just want to get really huge don't attract as much negative attention.

[Aeson]

So the video I posted is clearly intended to be comical. Extrapolating our current lifestyle to a computer simulated one. Ha. I honestly don't think that's necessarily the way things will or should go. I don't see uploading necessarily as a solution to longevity, especially uploading to a Matrix-style afterlife. Uploading strikes me as useful for storage (during catastrophe, interstellar travel), communication (across distances where c matters), or emergencies (you're killed unexpectedly so your auto-updating brain needs a new body). These are all totally out there and science fictional, of course, which brings up the next point for me.

I think it's kind of silly to be talking about the computational complexity of uploading because we don't currently have even the faintest idea how to accomplish it. It's way in the future, which could mean 50 or 500 or 5000 years for all I know. (I would argue somewhere between 50 and 500, but that's honestly not based on much.) Yeah, I imagine it's going to be immensely difficult even when we do get the technology. Currently, though, and for the foreseeable future, it's not even unthinkably difficult; it's impossible.

In terms of longevity, that's where my silly gradual transition to electronic life idea comes in. That is, if you want to live forever, the answer is to ever so slowly move your consciousness along from one material substrate to another, which is arguably what does occur throughout life (individual neurons may persist over your lifetime, but the parts that make up those neurons must be replenished via food). This is more of a... turn into a cyborg where your brain has been uploaded to something similar to a harddrive kind of thing.

Is that easier or harder than some kind of genetic engineering or biological solution to aging? I don't know. It's different. The advantage of going the computery route is that you can start from scratch and build whatever you want, giving you the opportunity to live completely different lives rather than some poor facsimile of a normal, biological life. The advantage of simply improving upon nature is that it's been doing its thing for billions of years, so it is a pretty darn robust system.

This is also why you should never allow yourself to be teleported ... or to go to sleep.

[Proteus_MST]

This is also why you should never allow yourself to be teleported ... or to go to sleep.

Youzr brain doesn't stop working when asleep ... it just switches to another mode ... therefore it isn't a problem.

But yes, you should never let yourself be teleported ... the "original you" at the point of origin gets killed/desintegrated and a copy created at the destination, who doesn't know that it is just a copy

[Aeson]

When you go to sleep how do you know that when you wake up that you were the same consciousness who went to sleep? Sure, you remember being that person ... but so would the teleported person or the digitized one or even another person who had "your" memories implanted in them. That consciousness who was experiencing things through "your" body before it went to sleep could very well be gone forever, unable to warn you, the consciousness that replaced them ... not to go to sleep!

(Of course I'm being silly ... going to sleep doesn't matter at all as this problem exists moment to moment even when conscious.)

[Lorizael]

Indeed the problem does exist moment to moment, which is why worrying about the continuity of consciousness itself isn't the key thing. Consciousness isn't a fundamental feature of the universe but a way that we label a suite of observations we can make about ourselves/others. So consciousness is a concept we've defined for a particular product of the operation of a crap ton of neurons. This means that it doesn't really matter if consciousness is maintained from moment to moment (due to quantum funny business or lapses in awareness or whatever) because we don't actually define consciousness that way. Consciousness does exist and persist, because we've defined it to within certain parameters.

Currently, science tells us that this locus of features we call consciousness probably requires the continuity of certain physical processes in the brain. So, if we can mimic those physical processes by other means, and bridge from one material substrate (neurons and synapses) to another (circuits, say), then we can maintain consciousness as we know it by maintaining the underlying physical processes.

This circumvents the fear of falling asleep but not the fear of teleportation. If the key thing is the continuity of a physical process (both spatially and temporally), then teleportation almost certainly always ****s that up. Sleeping does not, because of the underlying brain activity that Proteus_MST mentions.

[Aeson]

I agree that if consciousness does depend on maintaining a physical process then teleportation is different than sleeping, unless sleeping isn't really what we think it is. Given that we don't really understand what consciousness is, let alone how it works, I'm not sure it can be taken as a given though.

Consciousness (or continuity thereof) as we know it may simply be an illusion as well, in which case teleportation isn't a bad thing since the current moment "you" is going to end anyway, replaced by the next moment "you". (Perhaps not in that order, as order would be irrelevant).