1. The Singularity. Jeron Lanier pointed out that technological atheists regard The Singularity in much the way Pentecostals regard The Rapture - a poorly-understood waving-of-hands and suddenly, we all get to live forever. There's a leap of faith involved in The Rapture - God will make it happen. There's a leap of fallacy involved in The Singularity - computers will solve all the problems involved in climbing "into the box." William Gibson brought up the Singularity before it was cool in Neuromancer. Case uses a "copy" of a hacker he used to know. It's only a copy, though, and even the copy feels fake. How perfect is perfect enough, presuming the technology exists? At what point is the "you" in the box as good as the "you" on the outside? And which one is "you" by the way? Lanier puts it this way in Your Brain In Silicon: If you dupe me and throw me in the box, is that me? I don't think it is - any more than my writing is me, any more than my photos are me, any more than my wife's memories of me are me. I think "the singularity" isn't immortality, it's an extremely intricate cenotaph. *So now your consciousness exists as a series of numbers in a computer; that is all a computer program is, after all. Let's go a little further with this. Let's suppose you have a marvelous new sensor that can read the positions of every raindrop in a storm. Gather all those raindrop positions as a list of numbers and pretend those numbers are a computer program. Now start searching through all the possible computers that could exist up to a certain very large size until you find one that treats the raindrop positions as a program that is exactly equivalent to your brain. Yes, it can be done: The list of possible computers of any particular size is large but finite, and so is your brain, according to the earlier steps in the thought experiment, anyway.
OK, so is the rainstorm conscious? Is it conscious as being specifically you, since it implements you? Or are you going to bring up an essence argument again? You say the rainstorm isn't really doing computation- it's just sitting there as a passive program- so it doesn't count? Fine, then we'll measure a larger rainstorm and search for a new computer that treats a larger collection of raindrops as implementing BOTH the computer we found before that runs your brain as raindrops AS WELL AS your brain in raindrops. Now the raindrops are doing the computation. Maybe you're still not happy with this because it seems the raindrops are only equivalent to a computer that is never turned on.
This one's my least favorite of the arguments you've written here. You start by talking about the singularity and then switch to representing consciousness in computers. The former doesn't interest me too much, but the latter is a neat exercise in philosophy: The difference between the rainstorm and your brain is that a second from now the raindrops are going to be in the positions dictated primarily by gravity. In contrast, your brain has regulators, sensors, and actuators. Rain can represent one model. Your brain processes sound, moves your hands, your eyes. (To a certain extent) It recognizes failures of its internal model to capture reality and adjusts itself accordingly. Neuron connections grow and die. It changes behavior in response to a changing environment. Even ants store their rules in the physical realm. The same as axons re-adjusting themselves, they refresh the chemical trains to food let the others wash away. A computer can re-write its code, too, but the positions and motions the theoretical program relies on are nothing more than external signals to what we may or may not choose to call consciousness. Rain? It fails. Asteroids? That's a weird sort of falling, too.OK, so is the rainstorm conscious? Is it conscious as being specifically you, since it implements you?
Imperfect copies aren't the only non-technological problem with brain uploading as a kind of immortality. It only makes sense in principal if you buy a continuity of consciousness theory of personal identity. So, say you both can make a copy of your consciousness, and your favorite continuity of consciousness theory hold. Say you go ahead and make a copy of yourself.
The moment you do it, there are two yous. One of you is still made of meat, and is still going to die. One of you is not, and is not identical to the meat-you from the moment you forked (no more continuity of consciousness). So, even with the most generous assumptions, the best you can do is another person a bit like you.
We already have the technology to make persons a bit like us. Most of us figure out how it works as teenagers.
I wasn't sure if I should post this reply under "Singularity" or under "Transhumanism" or even 3D printing? I have the same skepticism regarding my "duped" version actually being "me." I can't escape the thought that my meatspace self needs to still exist in order for me to exist. Will I someday be able to travel to virtual places that seem real to me? Sure, but they'll still seem and not be. As for the whole eternal life aspect, that's where the growing and harvesting of actual organs and stem cells etc comes in, right? My guess is that being able to manipulate our biology with organic biology will be the path forward, right? But my question to you is this, do you foresee a time when humans can live indefinitely or perhaps for hundreds of years due to biological advances in medicine that allow things like cell regeneration etc? Great post btw, have a badge.recognizing my nasty tendency to spoil everyone's fun, I hereby foreswear any participation in these threads. It's no fun for anyone - I piss in everyone's cheerios and the dreams die a little
-As someone that largely lurks those type of posts, I'm bummed you'll not be participating. I enjoy the back and forth quite a bit. Many of these concepts are new to most of us and it's nice to read points of view from all angles.
There are real drawbacks to living in an oxidizing atmosphere. You rust. That's aging in a nutshell - the stuff that makes you work bleaches in the sun. As soon as we committed to hemoglobin we committed to an expiration date and I'm unaware of any critter that's gotten around that. We'll live longer, presuming we maintain our standard of living. When the Soviet Union fell the life expectancy of adult males plummeted 23 years; it has yet to climb all the way back up. So much of our time is dependent on externalities. From my understanding, one of the main things that bites you in the ass is telomeres. Forgive me if I fuck this up, but they're basically "heat shielding" - they keep the important stuff from getting screwed up by absorbing the damage themselves. As a consequence, they shorten as you age. That's what fucked Dolly the Sheep - she was born with the same length telomeres as her adult donor, which means she was "born" adult. (Accelerated decrepitude!) Yeah, the patching will get better. But old people die of being old. Immune systems aren't as robust. Wounds heal more slowly. Organs function less efficiently. And I'm not seeing stem cell bits being perfect replacements ever. the NIH did a study a couple decades back where they eliminated all causes of death and did a regression to see what the average lifespan would be. I think it was like 114. That's a long-ass time when you consider it was barely 40 a hundred years ago but it's a far cry from Methuselah.
Maybe. But there's a lot of evidence that oxidation is not really the primary cause of aging, and that it's easily gotten around. No, the 'real' reason we age is because we've evolved to age. Take mice and humans, for example. Our basic biology is essentially identical, yet mice live 2 years if allowed to complete a full life cycles, while humans can live 40 or 50 times that. Energetically speaking (I know you're a thermo guy), it's actually much less costly for an organism to repair oxidative damage than it is to reproduce, which entails growing a whole new being, a being that is now also going to compete with you for resources. So, then why go to all the trouble of growing old and dying when there's no real biological reason it has to be that way? Because the very nature of biological evolution (descent with modification, in Darwin's very much more apt parlance) requires replacement. If we were perfectly suited to an environment, we could live forever. But even in that case, the environment will change eventually (or a new disease will crop up, or whatever other catastrophe), and the species will be wiped out in one generation. The species that have survived through the eons are the ones that have found ways to deal with small and even large changes in their niche. Therefore, the reason a mouse matures in 2 months and dies in two years, while a human or an elephant does not, is because that is the most stable state in which they can exist. It's an evolutionary strategy, so to speak (even though I hate to use terms that imply design; it's use is metaphorical). Whether it's oxidative stress, telomere shortening, or the several other specific mechanisms that contribute to decline, they don't answer the question of why we age, which is a way more interesting question. We age because it makes sense. In the end, the idea of living forever is not only stupid and pointless, it's downright harmful.There are real drawbacks to living in an oxidizing atmosphere. You rust. That's aging in a nutshell - the stuff that makes you work bleaches in the sun. As soon as we committed to hemoglobin we committed to an expiration date and I'm unaware of any critter that's gotten around that.
I...would like to see citations on that... Rust dissolves in certain liquids, and the same oxidation state, Fe3+, is released during heme degradation, which happens frequently enough to turn poop brown. Now I'm by no means an expert on inorganic chemistry in the human body, but this is definitely a claim that I have never heard before. Usually it's cancer or organ failure that kills everyone if they last long enough. Everything in us with a genome has telomerase, but the problem is that keeping it off is a nice safe-guard against tumors.There are real drawbacks to living in an oxidizing atmosphere. You rust. That's aging in a nutshell - the stuff that makes you work bleaches in the sun. As soon as we committed to hemoglobin we committed to an expiration date and I'm unaware of any critter that's gotten around that.
The former is uncontrolled cell division, most frequently due to genome mutations. The latter is a vague term that can be anything from cancer to gradual tissue necrosis / failure to replace the cells that regularly die. Cell failure generally results after loss of the nutrients / oxygen required to maintain protein levels and clear out cell poop. You also have cell suicide when it senses things are not as they should be and straight up bursting when too much liquid enters the cell. The list goes on and on, but I'm not sure what point you want me to get at / how it's related to iron oxidation...
I didn't much like biology. However, my father got his undergrad in it and my mother taught microbiology at the college level for 20 years. Both of them emphasized that most of the breakdown processes associated with replication and division were driven by oxidation. I'm asking, not telling.
Ah! I misinterpreted your original comment! Things definitely oxidize, it's just the carbon chains, not the iron atoms, that play the biggest role in maintaining the energy stores / structural integrity of cells. At their peak energy, they are stored in long -CH2- chains -- at rock bottom, CO2. The same goes for all the lipids, proteins, and sugars that hold a cell together, just at different degrees above rock bottom and with nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, and other trace elements mixed in. Now, cells are perfectly capable of reduction, too, when fed. It's not to say that an end to aging isn't possible, but really, human bodies were never designed to live past a hundred years. They accumulate problems that tortoise and elf genetics already figured out how to deal with.I didn't much like biology. However, my father got his undergrad in it and my mother taught microbiology at the college level for 20 years. Both of them emphasized that most of the breakdown processes associated with replication and division were driven by oxidation. I'm asking, not telling.
I'm unaware of any critter that's gotten around that
Barring "accidents", lobsters live forever. Presumably the same goes for other crustaceans. I have no idea whether they have hemoglobin, so your point may still stand.