= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
TheOtherDave comments on Cryonics and the importance of body to cognition - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (22)
No idea about what's raised in the standard literature.
For practical purposes, the key question here is not how important the non-brain body is to cognition, but how much of the variation among individuals is explained by differences in bodies vs. differences in brains.
If the variation due to body differences is sufficiently negligible, then the "personality extraction" process can be done with just the brain, and uploaded into a standard body (whether biological or mechanical or digital or energetic or what-have-you), and the resulting person will be a "close enough" match to the original.
If not, then the resulting person won't be a close enough match.
Personally, I suspect that most people vastly overestimate the precision-of-duplication required to be a close enough match for practical purposes. I suspect the differences in cognition caused by the loss of original somatic context will be swamped by, for example, the differences caused by the original social context.
Of course, if one wants to drop the practical stance and instead ask metaphysical questions about whether it's "really the same person" without the original body, then different issues are salient... of course, that's true even with the original body. I have trouble seeing the point of that, though.
Incidentally, it seems to follow from this line of reasoning that quite a lot of the brain is unnecessary, also. Though the state of the art in neuroscience is nowhere near up to being able to freeze just the necessary bits.
It leads to an interesting thought experiment, though... if I can only preserve enough information to allow an N%-match copy of me to be constructed at the other end, at what point does my intuition that "I" have been "brought back to life" (or teleported, depending on the particular intuition pump being used) collapse? What tests would I want to have the terminal point use before certifying that the constructed person was Dave, and what would I want them to do with people who failed the test?
My own intuition is that this is really no different than the question of whether I'm the same person I was 20 years ago, all we're doing is playing with how strongly privileged the default answer is. The more exotic the process, the less confident we are in preservation of identity... that's all.
If that's true, then if reconstituting people from frozen brains becomes commonplace, we will quickly develop just as much confidence that we really are the people we were as modern-day septagenarians have about their adolescent selves.