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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

If you can cure aging, death itself becomes an engineering problem. Curing aging gives you the time you need to figure out gradual replacement, uploading (transfers, not copies), distributing consciousness across multiple fault-tolerant nodes in orbit or beyond, etc.

Then you have cured death for all practical purposes. You will still be vulnerable to certain cosmic catastrophes (which you can plan around) and the heat death itself, but I would still call that "cured."

Edit reply because of HN rate limit: Transfers are possible, copies aren't our only option. Consider replacing one neuron at the time with an uplink to a virtual neuron in the cloud. An implant (at the cellular scale) reflects communication back to your physical neurons - they don't even notice it disappeared.

Wait for your thoughts to normalize, rinse, repeat. This is gradual replacement. You'd do it with more than one neuron (a cluster of neurons) realistically.

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I have a very strong metaphysical prior against consciousness uploads being possible, but I hope to live in a universe structured in the right way to make me wrong.

It's not the difference in substrate that makes me doubt it's possible (I'm a very strong believer in panpsychism), but I doubt the transfer could ever be "continuous" in a way that my monkey brain was satisfied with.

The continuity flaw is a reasonable concern; I have it as well. (I don't want a copy of me to live on; I want to live on, myself.)

However, I do think it's entirely possible to solve, if we're already at the point where uploads are possible. It's harder than the alternative, but theoretically possible.

I've come to believe that the copy will seriously believe it's me, similar to a virtual machine being halted and moved to different hardware, how would "I" know I'm not me? My copy will have my memories, if it's an exact copy it'll have the same ways of thinking, maybe after the transfer it'll remember "Ah, I have a date tonight with my wife, geez I remember this morning she drank all the juice except for a sip, and then put it back in the fridge, that always makes me irrationally angry.".

Sometimes we even feel "out of body", even in our own consciousness, so why would it be so different when we are copied?

One easy way to tell the difference: if you do the full upload non-destructively, such that there's a full uploaded copy that thinks it's you, and your full original biological self, would the latter then happily get disintegrated? (There are people who say yes to that question, which genuinely baffles me.)

The thing I'm talking about, of attempting to build a "move" operation that isn't "copy then delete", is exactly what I meant when I said it seems harder but possible to solve.

Both the copy and the original wouldn't like to be destroyed, would they, it's like volunteering to end one's consciousness.

What if there's hardware to wirelessly combine the minds, and you can experience what your clone^W other-self experiences. A bit like having someone be in e.g. Iceland and facetime you a low quality sight and sounds experience of Iceland... would you then say "Ok, I don't mind having one of my input devices go offline".

"Combine" is a tall order. But "transfer in a continuous fashion, with continuity of consciousness throughout the process" is somewhat less so.

> it's entirely possible to solve, if we're already at the point where uploads are possible

The fundamental gating discoveries are all around the nature of consciousness. Is it emergent? Is it empirically detectable? Is it quantum magic? We have inklings around this. But our understanding of it hasn't fundamentally changed since, arguably, Descartes.

> Curing aging gives you the time you need to figure out gradual replacement

Sure.

> uploading (transfers, not copies), distributing consciousness across multiple fault-tolerant nodes

We have no idea what the path to any of this looks like. We could easily cure aging without making progress on this for centuries, maybe millennia.

Well, yes, if we had an idea we'd be there by now.

Even with the one-neuron-at-a-time thought experiment, I'm not sure if we are ever going to know for sure if we got uploads right — even in principle.

While a sufficiently detailed copy should be conscious, we don't know what "sufficiently detailed" is — and we can't just do this by external behaviour, because (1) People are still arguing both sides of the P-zombie thought experiment; and (2) LLMs regularly fooling people into thinking they're discoursing with a human, even though I think most people think LLMs aren't conscious.

There's something like 40 different definitions of "consciousness"; some are easy to test for, some are provably impossible, but I don't know if even one of them is actually what we want.

I remember my dreams, but was I really conscious, or was it an unconscious experience whose memory was available to my conscious mind when I woke? It's conceivable that I am fully conscious right now, that an upload of my brain would change and grow and report conscious throughout, that you could then download it into a new brain in a new body and that new mind would also report having remembered conscious experiences while uploaded — all without the upload having ever experienced anything that would match the hard-to-describe thing we often try to grasp at with the word "consciousness".

We have altered states of consciousness. People can have conversations and drive cars while sleepwalking. Am I only truly conscious while actively engaging in self-reflection, or all the time? Is my consciousness like your consciousness? Did my mother loose hers at some point during the course of her Alzheimer's, or did she keep it until the very end? When a Buddhist trains themselves to let go, do they lose theirs?

Before you were born you didn’t have the thing you call a consciousness. But now you do.

I think continuity is a red herring, realistically our whole idea of consciousness is probably off base. It might not even be a real thing, for example my pet cat doesn’t care if he has a consciousness or not because he never invented a word for it.

> But now you do.

Perhaps I do. Perhaps it's only there when I pay attention to it, and my brain smooths over the gaps like I know it does with saccades and blind spots (both literal and metaphorical). And even if it is there all the time, is it like yours?

The Ship of Theseus has questions.

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