Mind uploading, falsifiability and cryonics

22. September 2010 · Comments Off · Categories: Cryonics, Neuroscience · Tags: , , , , ,

On the cryonics discussion list Cryonet cryobiologist Brian Wowk weighed in on the topic of mind uploading in a post that merits quoting in its entirety:

I read with interest Bob Ettinger’s recent remarks about Mark Gubrud’s piece in The New Atlantis.

http://futurisms.thenewatlantis.com/2010/06/why-transhumanism-wont-work.html

Although I have not been around as long Bob, I have nevertheless observed arguments about uploading, identity duplication, and related subjects for decades.  In all that time there are two things I’ve never seen: (a) A truly new argument, and (b) Someone change their mind.  What is seen are people who passionately believe they are correct, and who believe that they have just the argument to finally convince the other side that they are right.  They never do.

I have come to believe that the question of whether a computationally equivalent duplicate of a human mind (assuming equivalence in this context is even definable) constitutes a continuation of the original person may be objectively unanswerable.  It’s almost a matter of taste, like alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics that assume different underlying realities that give exactly the same measurable results.

Eventually the distant day will come when the computational processes of a human brain are duplicated in an electronic computer, or even in another identical organic substrate.  When that day comes, we can be certain of this: If the person who was “duplicated” believed before duplication that duplication constitutes survival of the self, then, by definition, the duplicated entity will insist vociferously that indeed they did survive.  This has ethical implications.  Conversely,
an entity derived from a person who did not believe in this form of survival might be quite unhappy to be told that they were the product of a destructive scan of somebody.  This too has ethical implications.

Philosophical truth aside, evolution selects against humans who spend time worrying about whether sleep, anesthesia, or biostasis endangers personal identity.  Similarly, it is easy to predict which side of the uploading and duplication debates will win in the long term.  There is no entity more invulnerable or fecund than one that believes it consists of information.

Recent discussions of the topic of mind uploading on the Cryonics Institute members mailing-list contradict Wowk’s claim about people changing their mind about mind uploading. Robert Ettinger posted an itemized list with objections against the idea of mind uploading as a strategy for personal survival and I weighed in on the (current) lack of experimental evidence to settle the matter. The effect was that some people changed their mind or became more agnostic about mind uploading.

Wowk may be correct that the question whether a “computationally equivalent duplicate of a human mind…constitutes a continuation of the original person may be objectively unanswerable.” The discussion about mind uploading and persistence of the original person has distinct similarities with discussions about solipsism, consciousness, and the existence of the external world. It is not inconceivable that in a world where mind uploading has become routine the debates will still continue because the hard problem of persistence of the person is not falsifiable in a meaningful manner.

There are mind uploaders and there are Mind Uploaders. The Mind Uploaders are a small but vocal minority who display little patience for the argument that the technical feasibility of mind uploading requires empirical verification and cannot be completely settled by logical deduction or thought experiments. As cryonics activist and ex-Alcor Board member David Pizer says, “Having existed with Uploading Lovers for many years now, I believe they are as firmly entrenched in their beliefs as  traditional religious persons believe that their souls are going to Heaven after death here on Earth.”

Cryonics is often associated with ideas like mind uploading and transhumanism. One negative consequence of this (un)intentional association is that some people who are considering cryonics feel that they have to embrace a much larger set of controversial ideas than what they are actually being asked to consider. As a result, there is a real risk that people reject cryonics for reasons that have little to do with the proposal of cryonics itself. Advocates of cryonics do not do themselves a favor by promoting the idea of human cryopreservation as part of a larger set of futurist ideas instead of just promoting cryonics as an experimental medical procedure to extend life. There is too much at stake to alienate people by piling more controversial ideas on top of what is already considered to be a radical idea. Such a low-key attitude will also produce a more consistent message because it extends the element of uncertainty that is inherent in cryonics to other areas of life as well.


David J. Chalmers on the Singularity, mind uploading and cryonics

16. September 2010 · Comments Off · Categories: Cryonics, Neuroscience, Science · Tags: , , , ,

If I would make an argument in favor of mind uploading (or substrate independent minds) it would not be a logical deduction from what we know about neuroscience but from what we don’t know.  As one of the leading philosophers of mind David J. Chalmers has argued in this insightful paper about the Singularity and mind uploading:

Can an upload be conscious? The issue here is complicated by the fact that our understanding of consciousness is so poor. No-one knows just why or how brain processes give rise to consciousness. Neuroscience is gradually discovering various neural correlates of consciousness, but this research program largely takes the existence of consciousness for granted. There is nothing even approaching an orthodox theory of why there is consciousness in the first place. Correspondingly, there is nothing even approaching an orthodox theory of what sorts of systems can be conscious and what systems cannot be….

It is true that we have no idea how a nonbiological system, such as a silicon computational system, could be conscious. But the fact is that we also have no idea how a biological system, such as a neural system, could be conscious. The gap is just as wide in both cases. And we do not know of any principled di differences between biological and nonbiological systems that suggest that the former can be conscious and the latter cannot. In the absence of such principled di differences, I think the default attitude should be that both biological and nonbiological systems can be conscious

One can argue with this derivation of what the “default position” should be, but his more skeptical approach has a degree of modesty in its favor that is often lacking in transhumanist circles.

David J. Chalmers also discusses cryonics in a favorable context:

Cryonic technology off ers the possibility of preserving our brains in a low-temperature state shortly after death, until such time as the technology is available to reactivate the brain or perhaps to upload the information in it. Of course much information may be lost in death, and at the moment, we do not know whether cryonics preserves information sufficient to reactivate or reconstruct anything akin to a functional isomorph of the original. But one can at least hope that after an intelligence explosion, extraordinary technology might be possible here

On his blog he also writes that “for the last couple of weeks I have been in Oxford giving the John Locke Lectures on Constructing the World.  The title is an homage to Rudolf Carnap’s 1928 book Der Logische Aufbau Der Welt. The lectures are based on a book I have been writing for the last couple of years, trying to execute a project that is reminiscent of Carnap’s in certain respects.”

A person who discusses mind uploading in a meaningful context, gives cryonics a fair hearing, and has a work in progress that is inspired by Rudolf Carnap’s The Logical Structure of the World should not be ignored, let alone be ridiculed.

Edward O. Wilson's Consilience

07. September 2010 · Comments Off · Categories: Science, Society · Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson believes that a major reason why the social sciences have made so little progress is that its practitioners have ignored the biological basis of human behavior. He is not impressed with arguments that purport that the complexities of human behavior cannot be reduced to more elemental physical principles as embodied in modern neuroscience and biochemistry. Wilson recognizes that his view on the unification of the sciences carriers forward the logical positivist ideal of the Unity of Science. In his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge he writes:

Logical positivism was the most valiant concerted effort ever mounted by modern philosophers. Its failure, or put more generously, its shortcoming, was caused by ignorance of how the brain works.

The canonical definition of objective scientific knowledge avidly sought by the logical positivists is not a philosophical problem nor can it be attained, as they hoped, by logical and semantic analysis. It is an empirical question that can be answered only by a continuing probe of the physical basis of the thought process itself.

Wilson is basically saying that logical positivism was not empiricist enough, a view that was anticipated by the logical empiricist Hans Reichenbach in his seminal work Experience And Prediction: An Analysis of the Foundations And the Structure of Knowledge.

On the tension between religious and scientific  perspectives of the world he writes:

The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure.

Remnants of such supernatural thinking are still with us today when we exempt humans from physical reality and attribute agency and free will to them.

Wilson is sensitive to the scenario that defective or disadvantageous genes increase and persist in modern human life but he believes that such a course of events will be relatively short-lived as humanity will master and embrace human genetic engineering. On the use of such technologies he writes:

I predict that future generations will be genetically conservative. Other than the repair of disabling defects, they will resist hereditary change. They will do so in order to save the emotions and epigenetic rules of mental development, because these elements compose the physical soul of the species. The reasoning is as follows. Alter the emotions and epigenetic rules enough, and people might in some sense be “better,” but they would no longer be human. Neutralize the elements of human nature in favor of pure rationality, and the result would be badly constructed, protein-based computers. Why should a species give up the defining core of its existence, built by millions of years of biological trial and error?

His reconciliation of human enhancement and cultural incrementalism is reminiscent of the “conservative transhumanism” of the biologist Alexis Carrel.