Epistemic status: Wildly speculative. I am not a physicist. It may quickly become apparent that I have no idea what I'm talking about. Nevertheless, I found the thought experiment interesting. The set of models known as superstring theory posits the existence of multiple compactified dimensions in addition to the usual...
Epistemic status: extremely uncertain There are contested reports of a new type of pneumonia, significantly more lethal than Covid-19, in Kazahkstan. Its cause is unknown.
Normal humans have a fairly limited set of true desires, the sort of things we see on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Food, safety, sex, belonging, esteem, etc. If you've become so committed to your moral goals that they override your innate desires, you are (for lack of a better word) a saint. But for most people, morality is a proxy goal that we pursue as a strategy to reach our true goals. Most people act a culturally specified version of morality to gain esteem and all that goes with it (jobs, mates, friends, etc).
Your true desires won't change much over your lifetime, but your strategies will change as you learn. For example,... (read more)
The ancients considered everything to be the work of spirits. The medievals considered the cosmos to be a kingdom. Early moderns likened the universe to a machine. Every age has its dominant metaphors. All of them are oversimplifications of a more complex truth.
Suppose you had an identical twin with identical genes and, until very recently, an identical history. From the perspective of anyone else, you're similar enough to be interchangeable with each other. But from your perspective, the twin would be a different person.
The brain is you, full stop. It isn't running a computer program; its hardware and software are inseparable and developed together over the course of your life. In other words, the hardware/software distinction doesn't apply to brains.
To call something an "uploaded brain" is to make two claims. First, that it is a (stable) mind. Second, that it is in some important sense equivalent to a particular meat brain (e.g., that its output is the same as the meat brain, or that its experiences are the same as the meat brain's). The sorts of methods you're talking about to stabilize the mind help with the first claim, but not with the second.
I've always struggled to make sense of the idea of brain uploading because it seems to rely on some sort of dualism. As a materialist, it seems obvious to me that a brain is a brain, a program that replicates the brain's output is a program (and will perform its task more or less well but probably not perfectly), and the two are not the same.
What if there would never be someone I trusted who could tell me I was Good Enough, that things were in some sense Okay?
The internalized feeling that you're not okay is a huge part of what motivates you to become better. If you lost it, you would be much more likely to become complacent and stagnate. Both inner peace and relentless drive are profoundly valuable, but they are mutually exclusive.
I certainly agree that brains are complicated.
I think part of the difference is that I'm considering the uploading process; it seems to me that you're skipping past it, which amounts to assuming it works perfectly.
Consider the upload of Bob the volunteer. The idea that software = Bob is based on the idea that Bob's connectome of roughly 100 trillion synapses is accurately captured by the upload process. It seems fairly obvious to me that this process will not capture every single synapse with no errors (at least in early versions). It will miss a percentage and probably also invent some that meat-Bob doesn't have.
This raises the question of how good a copy is good enough. If brains are chaotic, and I would expect them to be, even small error rates would have large consequences for the output of the simulation. In short, I would expect that for semi-realistic upload accuracy (whatever that means in this context), simulated Bob wouldn't think or behave much like actual Bob.
Surely both (1) and (2) are true, each to a certain extent.
Are the random thermal fluctuations pushing me around somehow better than the equally random measurement errors pushing my soft-copy around?
It depends. We know from experience how meat brains change over time. We have no idea how software brains change over time; it surely depends on the details of the technology used. The changes might be comparable, but they might be bizarre. The longer you run the program, the more extreme the changes are likely to be.
I can't rule it out either. Nor can I rule it in. It's conceivable, but there are enough issues that I'm highly skeptical.
Let's try again. Chaotic systems usually don't do exactly what you want them to, and they almost never do the right thing 1000 times in a row. If you model a system using ordinary modeling techniques, chaos theory can tell you whether the system is going to be finicky and unreliable (in a specific way). This saves you the trouble of actually building a system that won't work reliably. Basically, it marks off certain areas of solution space as not viable.
Also, there's Lavarand. It turns out that lava lamps are chaotic.
That wasn't well phrased. Oops.
Epistemic status: Wildly speculative. I am not a physicist. It may quickly become apparent that I have no idea what I'm talking about. Nevertheless, I found the thought experiment interesting.
The set of models known as superstring theory posits the existence of multiple compactified dimensions in addition to the usual three spatial and one temporal dimension, which I'll call 3+1 space. Here I will suggest that an observer approaching a black hole might perceive 3+1 space collapsing into a 2+1 space. By extension, our 3+1 space may have resulted from gravitational collapse in a higher dimensional space (possibly more than once).
Consider an observer approaching a black hole. If the observer is well clear... (read 257 more words →)
Epistemic status: extremely uncertain
There are contested reports of a new type of pneumonia, significantly more lethal than Covid-19, in Kazahkstan. Its cause is unknown.
Fair enough, but I'd still say that most people do "good" (by which they mostly mean culturally approved things) as a strategy to achieve some more basic end. In support of this proposition, I'll note that "good" is defined by different people in different ways that all generally correlate with cultural approval in common cases but strongly diverge in matters of basic principle. See Scott Alexander's: The Tails Coming Apart as Metaphor for Life.