Be Excellent To Each Other

so what is it? (no white hole, or any other red dwarf jokes here please)

Malc

Electrical impulses travelling along synapses, I always thought (ha!).

Electrical activity in the brain caused by Ca and K channels opening and closing. Nothing more. don't worry about it and go back to american gladiators.

Don't think about it, there'll be no sleep for you. Really.

I've always been troubled by the image of a body dying, at some point that person is alive. At another they are dead, but they can be brought back alive again. And at yet a further point they cannot.

Malc

If you have a circuit board that works, leave it outside exposed to the weather. If you get it back in quick enough, it'll most likely still work. If not, all the components will have degraded too much to allow the current to flow.

So you're monitoring a brain, and the person who owns it has a thought, you "record" everything about the brain for that 20 seconds or whatever. Then you kill them. Then you wire up the brain so it "plays back" those electric signals. Is the thought there again?

Malc

Brainstem death, fact fans.

But then, you do get to eat them, if you are a kiwi, and your ship had run aground just after brekkie, and it's now 1445 hours.

Let's just go with lack of air as the cause of death. The person dies, why are they not alive again if you restart the heart, give them air, and work their lungs for them?

Malc

Because the 'weather' in my analogy is comparable to the lack of oxygen to the brain.

But why?

Malc

slightly different tack then.

We're in Star Trek. They can beam people somewhere. I contend that when someone has been beamed from one place to another that the person who leaves "another" is not the same person as the person who arrived at "one place".

That person is dead, and there is an identical copy roaming about who has the same memories and will go on to do the same stuff as the first person, and to everyone is there is no difference, even to the person who leaves "another" there is no difference, but the person who arrived at "one place" is dead.

Malc

(Going off on one here, just trying on ideas...)

Dying doesn't worry me, it's the little deaths that might exist between that worry me.

The evidence suggests that my consciousness is just a pattern being perpetuated in my brain. Like a wave travelling along the sea, the atoms and cells in the brain come and go, and get replaced, but the pattern persists.

So whilst the Ship of Theseus paradox is happening to my body, it's just this pattern that is perpetuating me, but it's a pattern shaped by and controlled by the container it is in.

But when I sleep, when I faint, when I get knocked unconcious or when I'm brain dead that pattern maybe gets interupted for a little while. And when it reboots is it the same me?

I'm not the 5, 10 or 20 year old me any more than I'll be the older versions of me. The teenager Lave is dead. The child Lave is dead. I'm shaped by the journies and life those younger versions of me had, but I can't remember so much of their lifes. And so many of my memories of that time are fake, multiple remembering twisting them into compeltely different events. Maybe we die countless deaths....

Heh, I was going to pull that one out, down in pets corner...

Yeah you still exist. But the specific example of *you* who steppd into the machine is dead. (Assuming the machine works by taking you apart atom by atom to see how you are built, then putting you back together again).

It reminds me of a Sci-Fi show where a woman used a teleporter but it malfunctioned and so she went home. Expect a copy of her still appeared at the destination. Which was really her? Both.

Going off on one again here I've an outline of a short sci-fi story I wrote about an galactic federation of multiple species. The vast majority of which were AIs. A group were exploring in space ship and they had to leave behind someone to guard somewhere. So they took a vote on who had to ctrl-c, ctrl-v and leave a copy of themselves there. Basically I was playing with the idea that if AIs ever exist then they'll exist in a society where copying and pasting their existance is quite normal, unless they are artifically confined to a single body. And probably would happen multiple times a day.

I was under the impression that a forum full of techny folk would all believe that we were living inside the Matrix and thus a "thought" is simply an output of a computer program that drives our daily lives. So I'll offer it as my view with the grand proclaimation that I speak for everyone here when I say it

In my younger days I was heavily into Star Trek (I'm better now). The technical manuals always took great pains to insist that transporter sent the actual atoms of the person being transported and not just a digital copy. They even came up with an answer to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (vague recall states that it's bascially impossible to scan and record the positions of atoms in an object because they're constantly moving anyway) by inventing a 'Heisenberg Compensator'. Those clever geeks.

The idea of technological transport has always disturbed me. You step into a machine, it scans and records every tiny detail into a computer and annihilates the original. The machine then transmits the data to another machine which reassembles the body (and mind) from the data in a computer. Brrr.... I've seen jpegs corrupt after emailing or Freeview glitch due to a scooter driving past. Imagine what a solar flare would do to your memories.

Portals. Folded space. 5th dimensional travel. That's proper long distance transport and it looks cool too!

Not when you've got 2 points on you and a Pilgrim is Neuting your cap to shit (1080 cap per cycle) and tracking disrupting you as teh drones peck, peck peck you to death, and there's nothing you can do, as you're dead in the water. 10 seconds ago, you thought you were alone in that belt...

Star Trek nerds > Eve nerds.

Jumper?

Nice warm jumper, ooh and slippers!

You should read Accelerando by Charles Stross - link goes to a free ebook version (Creative Commons licenced). It deals heavily with the concepts of what it means to be human if we all start uploading copies of ourselves into computers, and those copies fork further copies. For example, one character, during an election, forks a million copies of herself to meet as many voters as possible in person. A few thousand of the copies decide they have become their own person and refuse to merge back with her; many of those people then proceed to not vote for her in the election.

The physics of Star Trek is actually a pretty decent book.