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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

I think you're being incredibly optimistic if you believe it's possible to build a machine both complex enough to house a fully simulated human consciousness and robust enough to last billions or even thousands of years.

Bits rot, things break down, and it tends to happen to technology more quickly in most cases than to the human body. The more complex technology is, the faster it fails. We measure the life cycle of our most modern tech in months, not centuries.

The idea that you're going to surf the universe in an immortal, inviolate android body untouchable by aeons of time is closer to a religious hope than likely reality.

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It's more that we're able to build computers from scratch, and we can transfer data between them. You can ship-of-theseus-backup yourself ad infinitum (well, until the usable energy runs out.)

are you even still "you" at that point?

from the pov of your current consciousness, does it really matter to be copied?

By the same logic - are you really you from one moment to the next?

from the perspective of my experience, yes. I think that is not true if you make a copy.

At least, you would leave an old you behind. Which from my intuition would be "me".

I understand "me" would also live on, but at that point I think I would just prefer to die.

so "you" is connected with the physical matter that makes you up? You are aware that that physical matter is completely replaced many times over during the course of your life time?

By the time we get to this thought experiment we only really need to consider people that were fine with the initial upload process. Being transferred to a new computer is peanuts in comparison.

And people stop dying on this sphere, for which we still have no escape or distribution plan (into space).

They still die. "Uploading" is a copy operation, but the flesh and blood human and their flesh and blood brain still dies. Whether the copy counts as equivalent to the original is a philosophical matter. But as far as biology isn't concerned, you haven't eliminated death, you've just moved the goalposts on life.

The videogame SOMA is a pretty good exploration of this take :)

My point was - what will these growing numbers of living things do to a non-increasing volume of 4/3 pi r^3?

if the living things are electric they can be shot to interstellar space and beyond. even on earth, they'd be zero emissions

In the end, the geometry does imply that for a given reproduction rate, you eventually reach a crunch where there's not enough surface area of new space to expand to for your colonists, who are proportional to your volume. Being uploads speeds up your rate of expansion, because you could send out seedships much nearer to c and then beam over the digital colonists to be picked up by the infrastructure built at the new system- but digitised people could also reproduce much, much faster than biologicals.

It doesn't have to be.

Neurons are created and die all the time. Replacing them one at a time, with their virtual equivalent, would not be entirely different to what is already happening.

Not really, neurons are one of the few types of cells that don't undergo a cycle of death/creation of new cells. The neurons you had when you were born are the same you have now. They probably encode a lot of information that would be lost if they died and were replaced by fresh cells.

there is some neurogenesis, and the assumption is the new cells integrate with existing circuits over time.

However , in the scenario that single neurons are replaced with artificial copies with exact same synaptic weights, then yes they are functionally equivalent. It's already happening, with deep brain implants etc.

This is a myth. Neurogenesis changes with age and is mostly prevalent only in specific brain areas, but is a well investigated phenomenon.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3106107/ https://www.nature.com/articles/nm1198_1313 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4812798/

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