The consciousness problem: AI, Uploading, Cryonics etc.

Talk about scientific and technological developments in the future
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Ken_J
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The consciousness problem: AI, Uploading, Cryonics etc.

Post by Ken_J »

If we are to create AI, load our brains into computers, wire in consciousness prosthetics, and even survive the cryopreservation of our brains, we will have to solve the riddle of what the consciousness in a being is.

I've seen some psychiatrists posit that consciousness is a fundamental force of the cosmos, akin to gravity. and that bodies and brains are simply matter that we use to create sensory inputs and interactive elements within our abilities. think of it like a scientist using a microscope and fine tools to interact with single celled lifeforms. our brains and eyes and hands are all are tools we wield while the wielder is something beyond those tools.

I've also seen scientists that posit out consciousness is an emergent property of matter of our brains.

This all becomes very important when we examine the idea of recognizing consciousness when it emerges, and understanding when it disappears.

If we follow the idea that consciousness exists independent of the physical body, then we could upgrade the meat puppets with abandon. We could cold store them away in a place where they won't rot and come back later to use them again when we can thaw them out alive.

And we could manufacture artificial puppets/tools for interacting with the world we see now. But it also implies that a puppet/tool could be made and if it become conscious it is another consciousness like our own that arises, and thus ethical questions of slavery and consent when their information and actions are controlled by our building of the puppet/tool. (imagine it like a mad scientist takes your brain in a jar, jams it into a body and brainwashes/hynotises you to except with question you live of constantly cleaning sewers or serving as a bimbo prostitute plaything for rich men).

It also meshes with the idea of the universe being a simulation. Your consciousness is not here, everything about your life is simply the creation of this simulation. Even your memories are more a save game file than they are something that you have.

But if we go the other way and suggest that it's all an emergent property of the material worlds matter, then can AI ever come to be something like us, or are they doomed to be clever magic tricks that can only ever create a convincing illusion. Can the self persist after disrupting continuity in cryopreservation or gross structural changes in disease and or augmentations and prothetics? Could that emergent element be seperated from that which it emerged from in a way that would allow uploading?

Does it matter? Because if it's an emergent quality, how do we know you are still you? Did the first you die some years back when some key change happened in your neural development that so changed the materials consciousness emerges from that the emergent thing is no longer the same person, you are just some new temporary pattern that has access to the same memories. You too will disappear someday unnoticed as your replacement fills in for you.


Like in the case of some strokes, or dementia, is that person no longer them? or they still them interacting through a glitchy simulation with corrupted memory and thinking files?

We're going to have to understand these things better if we are going to blunder our way through things like cryopreservation, AI, brain computer interfaces, uploading, and many other things that the future suggests we may bring about.

I feel like what we find out will be a bit of both and yet in part things that we couldn't even imagine yet and change a lot of the details of both these thoughts.
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funkervogt
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Re: The consciousness problem: AI, Uploading, Cryonics etc.

Post by funkervogt »

Does it matter? Because if it's an emergent quality, how do we know you are still you? Did the first you die some years back when some key change happened in your neural development that so changed the materials consciousness emerges from that the emergent thing is no longer the same person, you are just some new temporary pattern that has access to the same memories. You too will disappear someday unnoticed as your replacement fills in for you.


Like in the case of some strokes, or dementia, is that person no longer them? or they still them interacting through a glitchy simulation with corrupted memory and thinking files?
How do you know that your consciousness doesn't die each night when you go to sleep, and is replaced with a new consciousness each morning when you wake up?

Also, anesthesia plunges your brain into a state of inactivity even more profound than a deep, dreamless sleep, and you have no memories from the time period when you were anesthetized, so should we count those as transitions between one consciousness dying and another arising in your body?

For the record, I don't think we can answer any of these questions or most of yours. If we cryopreserve someone, and when they are revived, they have only fragmentary memories of their old lives and personality differences, we should look at them the same way we'd look at a person who had the same changes due to a stroke.
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raklian
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Re: The consciousness problem: AI, Uploading, Cryonics etc.

Post by raklian »

I posit that consciousness is perceiving a higher dimension and we just don't readily realize it.

As a consequence, consciousness as a "fundamental" force like gravity might be closer to the truth. I would go even further to postulate that gravity and consciousness are two facets sharing a common, underlying root. A rock (including everything) interacts with this same quality as we do. The reason we seem to think every one has our own capacity of consciousness and experience it separately is because the dimensions (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) we take for granted create an illusion of separation between us.
To know is essentially the same as not knowing. The only thing that occurs is the rearrangement of atoms in your brain.
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Ken_J
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Re: The consciousness problem: AI, Uploading, Cryonics etc.

Post by Ken_J »

saw a video today where the familiar argument that we are not the atoms we are made up of, because we can die and no longer experience existence while all the cells and the atoms that make them up are still right there for minutes and hours after our death.

and I come back to the crazy notion that we may one day be able to decode what makes us aware and experiencing the world. and what happens when we can decode the exact code of a single identity, or even build a new copy of that identity.

Now clearly the memories are coded in the matter and structures of the brain, so I'm not talking about that. That isn't who we are either. The memories are data storage for record keeping that we access when we remember things. and we may some day be able to record, edit, and implant memories. It's not really that far off in the grand scheme of things. But if we implanted a memory of my childhood into your head, you don't become me and I don't experience your life from then on. I'm still stuck within the confines of this line segment that is my lifespan...

But what if I reach the end of this life. Die, and rot away. But somewhere in that time we record enough memories, brain patterns and functional MRI of my brain, that by assembling them together they sort of build a negative space image of the thing that is me experiencing existence. Maybe they can't get the resolution well enough to find me exactly, but they could build a cluster of probable me's and maybe I'm in there somewhere.

They could provide whatever memories they wish, by that point, and they don't even have to construct me/us within matter. they could very likely simulate the various mes within a digital space. (the whole brain in a jar idea taken up a notch). But one of these recreations I might well experience through.

Is this reincarnation? Is this how we become constructed post human beings? what happens when we construct two exact copies of me? (likely it's just two incarnations of me experiencing existence in a non-linear existence. both me in seperate lives, but neither before or after each other). How many possible patterns are there? Are there an infinite number of potential patterns? Billions? a few thousand? One, are we all in fact the same mind incarnating both in parallel and in series?

will we actually find any of this out, ever? is it an uncrackable code? The black hole of consciousness. In which we can theorize but never actually experience the real truth beyond the event horizon.
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Re: The consciousness problem: AI, Uploading, Cryonics etc.

Post by Outlook »

I struggled with this question a lot earlier, and I feel like I've found an answer to satisfy me until I test it against my delving into philosophy, specifically with regards to continuation/identity, logic, ontology, and the philosophy of language.

The answer is rooted in the teletransportation paradox, I believe, which is based off of Star Trek's teleportation device where they essentially disintegrate you, and rebuild you in a different place. The question being does consciousness travel from the disintegrator to the rebuilder? It can't, because if it malfunctions, you'll have two duplicates. The other answer is that it's reliant on the atoms that make you up, which makes no sense since even our neurons have a rate of turnover.

The only real answer that can be given to this paradox is this: Consciousness doesn't exist in a continuation. Every moment you're aware is in the present moment. If you rebuild yourself in a different place, you're not going to experience that person because there is no continuation, really you only imagine yourself in that "future" iteration, when in reality you are always the person stuck in the present time. It's like watching a film, you're really only experiencing the present frame of a film at any one time, you can imagine what it will be like in the future, and remember the past, but it still won't be *that* frame. For that reason, the idea that consciousness continues from you in either the clone or the original physical continuation doesn't make any sense. It doesn't continue, you really only exist in the present.

Another character of consciousness I've found is more pantheist and I thought of in a bipolar mania so take that what you will; our ability to deconstruct and abstract the world around us in linguistic creativity (which can either be a symptom or cause of language), allows us to access the universal character of existence, which is consciousness. Think about it, we take seemingly invisible objects outside of us and the different ways they change and put them into words which we can then use and manipulate to share, and create fake ones with. Same thing with mathematics and empirical theory, which is basically exactly like that and we use to model real world events to predict their outcomes (as in physics). Our ability to do this creates conscious, which can only be described as an ontological thing.

It's problematic because it detracts animal consciousness, and it's heavily critical of ideas like logic/reasoning being limiting or imperfect or even wrong, because it presents a perfect ideal of what consciousness is. It also may not lead to that conclusion because it doesn't really say anything about consciousness. Our ability to abstract and manipulate the world around us (regardless of whether it's real or not, as in the matrix), only means that we can abstract and manipulate the world around us, it doesn't mean that it can lead to consciousness. It may just very well be a symptom of consciousness, or there is no correlation at all.

Anyways, that's my ramble. I'll have better answers after I've read more.
Last edited by Outlook on Thu Dec 02, 2021 6:02 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Ken_J
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Re: The consciousness problem: AI, Uploading, Cryonics etc.

Post by Ken_J »

I think for some people it's harder to contemplate a consciousness co-existing as seperate entities without connection at the same time because they are used to thinking in a particular way about identity.

So lets see if we can communicate the idea a little differently.

If a person loses consciousness and comes back to consciousness we don't often assume that somebody new came into existence in their head after the first stopped existing. This implies the ability of consciousness to 'flicker''. Think like a flip book animation or zoetrope. The book, zoetrope, or animated movie exist as a single entity and are percieved to persist along a segment of a timeline. But there are no indications how long the gaps between frame can be, and no established rule set saying there is any arbitrary length of gap is two long to allow a person to exist.

So when we start doing things like cryo-stasis of preservation and reanimation, we will have periods of time where in the animation of the person flicks off and the resumes after a longer timeframe. Aside from the memories encoded in the hardware, how sure are we they are the same person? I think fundamentally we hit a point where there are two ways to answer that. You can say that there is no proof that we persist or you can say there is no proof that we don't.

I think for me, the question becomes a matter of, if you believe that a cryo-sleep of months or years means there is some other consciousness that comes into being to fill the void left by the original, then how small can the skips be. a day? do we die every time we sleep. Only when anesthesia is used on us? or does it happen multiple times a day? Maybe every pico second of our existence is not real and the persom who is TyPiNg each of those letter is a different consciousness piloting this flesh suit with the same data file of memories.

To me, that is a meaningless set of arguments, in part because the time I've been responding, and my sense of starting this topic in the past still maintain a sense of subjective existence. and so if it is the case that I've been a string of consciousnesses in a linear path it will not be negatively effected by attempts to extend the string.

Then too is the question of why those particular consciousnesses, why me no and not some other entity filling in the spot I am. bread doesn't come out of the tooth paste tube when I squeeze it in part because what you put into it has to be what comes out, but also because what goes in has to fit in. so if the personalities that take up residence each pico second, day or lifetime as me must have a commonality of fit, and perhaps that commonality of fit is 'me' not the individual moments.

So it seems to circle back to this idea of a flickered existence. and how long between flicks. But let me throw another wrench in the works here. who says that the flickering flows linearlly through time? The idea that we have to go from universal time 100257, to 100258 has not been proven as a requirement in consciousness. Perhaps there is a linear path within a single lifetime, but it's also possible there are multiples of my consciousness living right now in the world like the person with alien hand syndrome but the 'alien hand' has a complete body and life of it's own. It's still me I just experience it there and here without awareness of the other experiences. kind of like when you put your feet in water there at the surface of the water will be two objects moving independently. If each foot/leg stored memory independently like alien limbs can seemingly do, then they might based on sensory data believe themselves to be distinct entities.

It's also possible that the origins point of consciousness is completely non-temporal. That I am a many limbed being existing with one leg in 1824, two in 1931, 5 now, 3 in 2000 BC, and 4 in 3109.

All that can be a bit much to take in. But the specifics don't really matter so much as the thought that consciousness could flicker, the length of the flickers does not seem to have an established limit. so it may be theoretically possible to flick out at the end of one time, and flicker back into existence at another time as a new person living for the first time, or a reconstructed consciousness in a future where we simulate past consciousnesses.
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raklian
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Re: The consciousness problem: AI, Uploading, Cryonics etc.

Post by raklian »

Ken_J wrote: Thu Dec 02, 2021 3:49 am
Is this reincarnation? Is this how we become constructed post human beings? what happens when we construct two exact copies of me? (likely it's just two incarnations of me experiencing existence in a non-linear existence. both me in seperate lives, but neither before or after each other). How many possible patterns are there? Are there an infinite number of potential patterns? Billions? a few thousand? One, are we all in fact the same mind incarnating both in parallel and in series?
I think all of us, including all matter, are imbued with one consciousness. We are one and the same, but each of us perceive ourselves as distinct from one another in terms of the experience of subjectivity. It has to do with the quantum nature of reality where we are one but at the same time we aren't, like a wave collapsing into particle the moment one observes its position at that point in time.

So, even we make two copies of ourselves identical down to the last atom, we are exactly the same but at the same time distinct. It would appear two of us have distinct consciousnesses because we are not "occupying" identical coordinates in spacetime or within the larger structure of reality. It is this "illusion" of existing at different coordinates within this subset of a larger reality that give us the difference in subjective experiences.

This is why I argue that consciousness is actually a higher plane of reality. I'm not saying we perceive it. I mean we exist in it and are one with it, just like we exist surrounded by molecules that make up our air. Our reality is actually in at least five dimensions that we can interact, with time and consciousness as fourth and fifth respectively. We just aren't readily realizing it because millions of years of evolution didn't equip us to become intuitive about it since it didn't give our species any adaptive advantage. This quantum rabbit hole goes even deeper, but that's a discussion for another day.

I like to say a rock has an equal claim to having an experience of its own subjectivity as we do.
To know is essentially the same as not knowing. The only thing that occurs is the rearrangement of atoms in your brain.
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Ken_J
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Re: The consciousness problem: AI, Uploading, Cryonics etc.

Post by Ken_J »



not saying I agree with everything said but it is a talk of the topic.
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