Imagine someone presents you with a replication device similar to the Star Trek Teleporter which instantly makes a totally perfect copy of your body, and simultaneously destroys your original body. Would you get in such a device, if given a million dollars? Most people would say "No, because the copy wouldn't actually be me". I will explain why most people are wrong. I know it sounds ridiculous, but copying and simultaneously killing yourself is the same thing as a true "transfer" of consciousness (mainly because there is nothing to transfer in the first place).
Imagine the same replication device described above, with a twist. Right after copying you, but before destroying the original body, it is allowed to switch an identical portion of your brains (assuming you believe you are your brain)*. It has a settings knob titled "swap percentage" that is adjustable from 0% to 100% which determines the % of brain switched. For example:
Assuming this is true, if 0% results in death and 100% results in survival, then one of the following must be true for the in-between percentages between 0-100: Either at some point the answer abruptly changes from "death" to "survival", or increasing the percentage knob gradually changes the result from "death" to "survival".
How is this possible? In short: "One true you" is an illusion. The uncanny first-person awareness exists only in the present moment, and every passing moment can be thought of as a different person inheriting the old one's memories. The physical memories in your brain are the only reason you feel like a single continuous entity throughout time.
Imagine the same replication device described above, with a twist. Right after copying you, but before destroying the original body, it is allowed to switch an identical portion of your brains (assuming you believe you are your brain)*. It has a settings knob titled "swap percentage" that is adjustable from 0% to 100% which determines the % of brain switched. For example:
- At 0%, nothing is switched; it just copies you and destroys the original like before.
- At 10%, it cuts out the same 10%-sized chunk out of each brain and surgically swaps them perfectly before killing the original.
- At 100%, it does a full brain transplant to swap the brains before killing the original; at this point it's basically killing the copy and leaving the original intact.
Assuming this is true, if 0% results in death and 100% results in survival, then one of the following must be true for the in-between percentages between 0-100: Either at some point the answer abruptly changes from "death" to "survival", or increasing the percentage knob gradually changes the result from "death" to "survival".
- Abrupt: If the answer abruptly changed from death to survival at some point, that would mean there exists some "threshold" percentage of brain matter swapped, which when crossed would suddenly result in your original consciousness "jumping over" to the new brain, despite it being physically identical to previous scenarios with slightly lower percent. In other words, you'd be claiming that there exists some percent, e.g. 50%, whereby if we swap exactly 50% of your brain matter, you will jump into the copied brain, but at 49.9999%, you will stay in the original brain.
- Gradual: If increasing the percent of the scenario gradually makes you more and more alive, that implies that in between, it is possible for you to be in a half-alive state, with your consciousness straddling two brains. In other words, you'd be claiming that at some percent e.g. 50%, your true consciousness is half in one brain and half in the other brain, even though in this scenario both brains are exactly physically identical to before the operation, thus have no physical capability to feel any different than what they would've normally felt without any modification.
How is this possible? In short: "One true you" is an illusion. The uncanny first-person awareness exists only in the present moment, and every passing moment can be thought of as a different person inheriting the old one's memories. The physical memories in your brain are the only reason you feel like a single continuous entity throughout time.
You are not the brain. You are a moment of information produced by the brain. I know it's hard to digest, but I think it is a lot more believable than the "abrupt" and "gradual" options I have outlined above.
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*Responses to common rebuttals:
"Isn't this just Ship of Theseus?"
No, you're not gradually moving more and more of your brain; you're setting the knob between 0%-100%; the machine switches out that amount of your brain in one fell swoop.
Isn't this just Sorites Paradox?"
No, Sorites Paradox literally just ignores that changes can be fuzzy/gradual. Something I explicitly addressed and debunked is the possibility of fuzzy/gradual change in your consciousness in spite of your brain remaining completely the same.
"But of course consciousness exists; how can you deny the first-person experience?"
The only sure thing about the first-person view is that it's happening right now. It's "I think therefore I am", not "I think therefore I was". There's no evidence your first-person awareness has any connection to the past, beyond what your physical brain memories are telling you.
"It's impossible to partially replace the brain and have everything be okay. The result will be brain-damaged etc."
You are debating the implication of a futuristic device which can materialize a whole person atomically from scratch so completely that they're indistinguishable from the original. So why is it when I start talking about partial brain replacements it's suddenly impossible?
"Maybe the part of the brain responsible for consciousness is just a tiny portion or even 1 neuron, or maybe some other part of the body is involved (e.g. muscle memory, gut bacteria)"
Modify the replicator in the experiment to swap a % of whatever physical thing you think produces consciousness. Whether it's a brain or something else is inconsequential to the argument as long as it's physical and divisible.
"Even the slightest modification of the brain results in an impostor who just thinks he's you, so you're actually dying in all the scenarios except 100% swap."
Then you believe you're replaced by a new consciousness even if you lightly bump your head and kill 1 neuron by accident. Either that or you misspoke and you're actually okay with switching a very small number of neurons or at least atoms, in which case the original argument still applies...
"Mind uploading is different from physical copying"
The same scenarios can be applied to partially uploading a brain and connecting it via BCI to the corresponding un-uploaded biological part. It's the same issue as before: "drawing a line" has absurd implications about consciousness.
"Maybe consciousness is supernatural, beyond the brain, etc"
You are entitled to that belief and it is beyond the scope of this article. The intended audience are people who, like me, believe consciousness is purely caused by physical processes in the brain.
It's information. Well, then computer science teaches us that it's still a copy.
ReplyDeleteA neuron swap is a physical process and no one but no one has a handle on how one recreates the physical scaffolding the immaterial mind exists upon in a piecemeal manner while keeping the mind intact. Furthermore the copy is technically an AI based on a specific human intelligence rather than the broad concept of human intelligence. As such, at best you will create a philosophical zombie. The hard problem of consciousness is that no one has yet provided a convincing scientific explanation as to how and why we are conscious, yet you suppose we can replicate it. And replicate it perfectly from what? A frozen snapshot? A looped simulation of a period of one's life? How does that mind continue to grow and develop? You don't know? Neither does anyone else.
Btw, if God exists and a soul exists, the "one me fallacy" isn't a fallacy at all, which is to say that your (admittedly flawed) argument is based on pure phyicalism with mind as an information phenomenon that *naturally* occurs on that substrate. Yet we know that all specified, complex information is the result of a creator. It's SETI is looking for. We only deny the possibility of a creator (or rather Creator) when we encounter such specified complexity in the field of biology.
Actually, you're right that this article assumes the reader is a physicalist and you're not the intended audience. The "one me fallacy" is espoused by physicalists and non-physicalists alike, and here I point out that a true physicalist should be unafraid of the destroy/copy scenario.
DeleteA copy of anything is a copy, with or without computer science. But what I'm saying is, if there is no meaningful/scientific distinction between the two, then the copy is just as "original-like" as the true original.
I don't deny the possibility of a creator at all; I actually think Intelligent Design theories are pretty cool as long as they are not obviously motivated by religion as your comments seem to be. In fact I would contend many atheists are more receptive to intelligent design theories than they’d admit -- the Simulation Hypothesis is one such theory.
There is no explanation as to why a mind arises from a brain -- this I discussed in my other article concerning the Hard Problem of Consciousness -- however, this is totally separate from saying we can’t make or replicate a mind. It is an undeniable fact that collections of physical particles reacting to physics can be sentient -- we are walking living proof of it. If one were to replicate a physical brain perfectly, one will have replicated the mind as well, even if science does not explain how the subjective mind exists in an objective world in the first place. Here’s an analogy: We know that gravity happens whenever there is matter around. If you were to replicate the moon, you’d also replicate the gravity being produced by the moon -- it’s not like your new moon magically won’t have gravity, right? We can utilize the principles of matter to manipulate gravity even though we don’t fully understand fundamentally WHY matter causes gravity.
"at best you will create a philosophical zombie"
DeleteHow do you prove whether or not something is a philosophical zombie? This seems like a hypothesis that can never be proven/disproven. If the replica brain is physically and behaviorally indistinguishable from a "real" brain, then any "philosophical zombie" claim holds exactly as much weight as if I were to claim that you were a philosophical zombie just because I can't definitively prove that you aren't one.
"How does that mind continue to grow and develop?"
Seeing that the hypothetical replica would be identical in every physical way, it would grow and develop same way any existing living person's brain grows and develops. You do agree the brain operates on physical principles right? There is no magical unseen force that's manipulating the brain in such a way that it violates physics -- if you truly believe such a thing exists, you should be able to detect inexplicable forces scientifically.
p.s. that is NOT how you use the word "admittedly".
DeleteLiterally woke up in the middle of the night debating this in my head. Still having a hard time convincing myself that going to sleep in one “vessel” and waking up in another one is possible. I guess for me it is the whole question of what makes us conscious. If it was just a couple neurons, I’d say just transferring those physical parts over. But then if that is true then surely that could be downloaded as well. Very interesting thought experiment to say the least.
ReplyDeleteWe don't exist IN the present moment, we exist AS the present moment.
ReplyDeleteIf this were not true, then your statement that "the "me" in the sentence "a copy wouldn't be me", never existed in the first place", would not make any sense. It would follow that the me that exists IN the present moment has never existed either.
This is why you have to take 2 more steps, beyond this formulation. 1 - what is "I as the universe?" 2 - what is the Universe as I? Then you can revisit the questions of "real" and "illusion" and find them to be both like two sides of the same coin.
TLDR something about being a nerd?
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAny copy wouldn't be "me" for the same reason that a copy is by definition not made of the same atoms as the original. Consciousness is probably not a single "thing", each person possessing one and only one residing solely in the brain's wetware, like a single acorn I carry around in my left pocket. More likely it is a gestalt, built up into complexity from many smaller consciousnesses, working together as the cells in the body work together to function as a unit, which are in turn built of gestalts of atoms and molecules finely tuned to work together as a whole. Call this cellular consciousness if you will; it is basically an emergent property of the complexity of the arrangement of its constituent parts. As a lifelong piano player, I know that at least part of my consciousness resides in my fingers, not entirely in my brain, so uploading simply the brain parts will not result in a complete transfer of consciousness. I think it is this complexity which defies the possibility of being copied identically enough to call itself "me" in the first place. Maybe in the world of frictionless pulleys and weightless strings, but not by the standards of real-world physics where things are messy and fuzzy and subject to hangovers.
ReplyDeleteWhich introduces another problem, which is that of quantum uncertainty. Just as it has been proven flatly impossible to know with absolute precision both the position and momentum of a given particle at any given time, it is therefore impossible to make a perfect copy of the some 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms in a human body, even if we replace them one by one. Now think of the 7E+27! possible ways those atoms could be arranged in the same shape and volume as the original human body, by far not all of which would assemble into a viable organism much less one with a higher consciousness. Certainly not all our atoms are static and they do swap positions around within certain limits, but 7E+27! is an unfathomably large number, especially if we are hoping to by chance fumble into an arrangement of all those atoms in the identical configuration as the original. We don't yet know, or even if we can know, how much of our consciousness, or of what we think of as "me" as differentiated from "you", is dependent on the exact configuration, position, and momentum of all the individual parts that make up the whole. An incomplete copy is therefore not the same as the original.
No doubt the copy would think it was me, it might have all the same memories (see "Bladerunner"), skills, and health issues, but I for one would always have the nagging suspicion that I'm not the same me now as the one who went into the matter transference or consciousness upload device to start with. For that matter I wonder that now every morning when I wake up. :)
IMO you have simply repeated the common belief that most people hold, which is the entire reason I posted this article. You didn't explain why you disagree with the article's reasoning. However, I agree consciousness is probably not a single "thing", maybe more like a field.
DeleteThis is not related to our debate, but most neuroscientists would say your consciousness does not reside in your fingers. Muscle memory takes place in the brain. Your fingers aren't thinking about which keys to hit. That being said... there is no easy/obvious way on where to "draw the line" on the physical boundary of "your consciousness" (for example, gut bacteria influencing your brain).
Quantum issues: This is a very common refutation but it assumes your consciousness is tied to your quantum state; moreover your brain is constantly changing so if you bump your head your quantum state is different from before, so again you'd be forced to conclude under this logic that you're constantly replaced anyway.
I would ask you to read the partial replacement scenarios again and explain why you disagree with the reasoning (e.g. what you think would actually happen to "you" in each of these partial replacement cases, and how it could be that "you" survive if there's nothing replaced but somewhere along the way you "die" if enough atoms get replaced).
Very interesting explanation, thank you.
ReplyDeleteA couple of questions that are still unsolved in my opinion:
1. What if you make multiple copies of the same subject?
2. What if you kill the original after few minutes or days?
Thanks a lot
The copy is 100% real me but not *this* me. It's still a complete death of the original me at 0% and 100% brain transfer and at every % in between. Such "meat" transfer doesn't add anything to the "information" transfer. The key is the continuity of consciousness. For the copy to be "this and only me" there needs to be a moment in the mind transfer when the both neural systems work as one and you feel both bodies, then losing contact with the first body upon its destruction is like losing a limb, you are still you.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, from this point of view we die every time we go to sleep, we actually do.