If you believe that there is no separate thing which is a soul — that all that we are is just a particular arrangement of matter — then duplicating some particular arrangement from a backup is like forking from an old git commit: just because you can label one particular branch “master” doesn’t make it genuinely special, and any special treatment you give to one branch is merely your convention.
It does matter, depending on your motivations. If you think the reason for living is that you're a great person whose continued existence will benefit society and/or your loved ones, then sure, it doesn't matter as long as the copy is identical. If you simply want to stay alive and experience/enjoy more of it, then having a bit-for-bit identical copy might not achieve your goal.
For the latter option, consider the following thought experiment: suppose say you want to do an enjoyable activity, such as going on a one week vacation, but you can't afford it. Would you pay 50% of the cost (which you can afford) so a clone of you go on vacation?
If you can have the Mona Lisa, and a copy of the Mona Lisa simultaneously, the copy is not the original. It is clear that if I burn the original, no harm comes to the copy, and vice versa. I don't think the Mona Lisa has a soul, though. I also don't think any correct arrangement of molecules becomes the Mona Lisa.
A better word isn't all we're lacking. We don't have a clear idea of what that thing is, or whether it even exists.
> Clearly you won't be having the experiences of both bodies, would you?
Whether there is a "you" distinct from both bodies is the actual question to be answered here. If the experiment were done, my guess is that both bodies would swear that they were the original -- in much the same way, perhaps, that you would swear that you are the same "you" you were yesterday.
I think the best way to think of it is to assume that when you clone a brain, consciousness splits between the two copies.
However, in this case, one of the two conscious paths doesn't really exist since the procedure is destructive. Therefore it seems probable to you subjectively, that you will wake up in a lab in a future century if that ever comes to pass.
Otherwise, you just die like a regular schmuck.
It seems like it's worth a try, since the alternative is certain death and non-existence.
but only if it's free, right? Otherwise it turns into a variant of pascal's wager.
For the rest of us it's fine.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001346...
In the end, this is a philosophical discussion because consciousness is not something we can observe in a way to test and falsify hypotheses.
It's a short story. A worthy, on-topic read, I promise!
Doesn't this argue against the entire brain preservation enterprise? That is, without a "magical" view of selfhood, why attempt to preserve a partially faithful replica of one's self instead of finding other ways to do the things that you'd want to do in the future once revived?
I don't really back up my laptop in a conventional sense. I do git pushes of my git clones, I copy some files to rsync.net, I do a lot of work on cloud services like Google Docs and Trello, etc. A lot of what's on my laptop is transient. This is nice, because I'm not backing up a Mac; if I decide to run Debian or switch to a Chromebook or whatever, I can still achieve my high-level goal of not losing work without the low-level implementation of restoring a Mac. And certainly I don't back up servers at work in the conventional sense, either; most of those "servers" are now just Kubernetes pods anyway, represented declaratively, and that's a lot better than a backup.
I think in the same sense, I do have a plan for immortality, and that plan is to change the world for the better while I am alive, now, as conventionally defined, in lasting ways. I don't really know what I would do if I were resurrected many centuries in the future. (I would expect at least as much change in the world as between now and many centuries in the past, and I can't really imagine even the greatest thinkers or doers or heroes of ages past productively helping the world today. Should Arthur return from Avalon to save Britain today, he'd have a lot of trouble recovering the throne in a largely pro-democratic society, and he'd have no idea what to make of "Brexit.")
Meanwhile, there's quite a bit I can do today to improve the world, to improve the lives of others, to try to improve by a fraction of a percent the chances of human society even existing a few centuries hence, etc. My self - my life and physical conscious existence - is just a tool for accomplishing whatever goals I have; it's not the goal itself. My laptop is also a tool; if I can keep doing the work that was on my laptop, I don't need a clone of the laptop itself.
It seems to me, then, that the only argument for brain preservation - for attempting to preserve one's "self" into the future and for investing in the ability to make it happen - is seeing one's self in this "magical" way, in believing that there's more value in the very fact of one's existence, and in fact even a partial and inaccurate continuation of that existence - than in what you do with that existence.
(And it does not save you from having to influence the world and engineer its future. At the least, as we can see, you have to spend a fair amount of your life today convincing society that it should develop in a way so that, in the future, they build the means to restore you.)
And in terms of work one can do to improve the world- the tools available today amplify the work someone can do by orders of magnitude compared to centuries past, particularly mental work. I see no reason to think this trend won't continue. Who is to say that, given enough time and development, a society of the future might have an entire pathway for the freshly-revived to go back to school, so to speak, and become able to do things those of us now can only dream of?
You could also imagine that, in a future where we are close to being able to revive human brains, we can just query human brains via simulation without bringing them back to life. The ethics of that are different, but - at least with consent from the person while they were be alive - it doesn't seem obviously wrong.
Re work improving the world - why do we imagine that someone from the present would be more effective at using those tools than someone from the future? Again, take the example of Arthur: if he returned, what would he do? What would you have him do? Or if even Isaac Newton were to return, would he be able to keep up with the brightest minds of the present generation of students who all took calculus in high school? I'm not doubting that he'd still be a sharp thinker, but would he be doing anything groundbreaking and world-changing like he did in his natural life, or would he "just" interview well at FAANG?
I'm not disputing that both of them would do things beyond their own wildest dreams during their lifetimes. Honestly, I think Arthur would have a lot of fun being in the House of Lords (which is probably where they'd put him) and Newton would get a blast out of being an entry-level engineer at FAANG. I'm disputing that they would do anything beyond what the natural-born of today would do, and that unless you have a sentimental correlation between your revived self and your old self, there's not really a point in one more average or even above-average person existing in the future.
Maybe after they're gone, power will be distributed a little more equally throughout the remaining generations - if only because a lot of them had children very late in life. Until then, there's going to be a lot of money going into immortality schemes, no matter what their value is philosophically.
If you asked me, I wouldn't even understand the value of making a permanent mark on the world, even if that mark is positive. My job is to help the world think, to spread good information, and to minimize the material harm I cause. To disappear quietly and completely is to be biodegradable. My main problem with preserving rich people's brains is that it involves the burning of real resources to keep something around of dubious value. Nobody needs you 100 years from now; there will be plenty of people.
(It also demonstrates why you shouldn't have light-gray text on gray background, pale green links, and dashed underline links.)
I'm surprised that people care at all, but perhaps I underestimate how many are as interested in the content as I am.
Regarding the formatting, I will try to update the background to something more readable using wordpress, although I obviously lack your skills in this area. In the meantime, you're free to copy it onto your website or elsewhere.
https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Dodge-Hell-Neal-Stephenson/dp/00...
