Hacker News Reader

Comment by wikiburner | Hacker News Reader

Soul Extraction - Assuming that there is a technological singularity at some point in the future, and assuming that time travel is possible[1], but that we've seen no evidence of it because it must be mostly observational in nature in order to prevent disruptions that would create time paradoxes, humanity adopts the practice of extracting the brain/nervous systems (and then replacing w/ equivalent matter) of every human in history at the moment of their death, to live in a post-singularity utopia.

[1]: Einstein, Hawking, and many others have speculated that time travel should be possible, but were ultimately skeptical of it because of the "Where are all of the time travelers?" argument. Fear of the creation of time paradoxes could be the reason why there's no evidence of time travel.

View on HN

Extracting all info out of the brains would be impractical. A lot of the things humans do we do because we are humans. Our emotions only make sense because they are mechanisms of survival and passing our genes. They would be quite impractical in a singularity (although, some other emotions, specific to the digital world, may be employed). So in a sense, I can only see one force in a post-singularity utopia, driving post-humans: knowledge and understanding the beauty of it.

All of the things humans do, we do because we are humans. There is no "natural set of universal goals for sentient beings"; we simply like what evolution has made us like. Changing (and especially removing) our terminal goals is the same as creating a new species with no relation to us. Why would we want to do that?

Because why would I care if I change species if it keeps my consciousness alive?

What is your consciousness, separate from a subsumptive architecture of event loops that react to recognized stimuli in response to goal conditions?

Which is to say, if you remove all your goal conditions, all your reference points that could be moved away from center to provoke response -- if you are reduced to http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Orgasmium, in other words -- are you really aware any more?

I like to imagine at least that our consciousnesses are abstract enough, and derive enough pleasure from art, and music, and conversation, etc., that they don't need arbitrary goal conditions like "death is relatively imminent, so get out of bed." Or at least, if they do, we'd be smart enough in the short term to manufacture goal conditions. And that they'd happily exist, and flourish even, in a new substrate.

> What is your consciousness

It's me; and I'd be happy to give up the biological machine I'm running on and trade it for an equivalent or better technological machine or VR environment where the limits of biology no longer applied. Removing my biology doesn't remove all of my goal conditions; it removes the ones nature imposed upon me. I could add back any I like and choose to drop those I don't.

We're intelligent beings who have transcended being driven by instinct alone; we can choose our own goals independent of nature.

What if the "info" is in the heart... And for those who downvoted, you need to read more about the functions of the heart besides blood pumping. The heart has neurons too and an electromagnetic field far stronger than the brain's.

Update: some links

The little brain on the heart: http://www.ccjm.org/content/74/Suppl_1/S48.full.pdf

Does changing the heart mean changing personality? A retrospective inquiry on 47 heart transplant patients: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1299456

Then exactly what would the brain be doing? Then how come when you poke around the brain it changes peoples behaviors?

How come people who get a heart transplant don't become different people?

https://www.google.com/search?q=heart+transplant+food+cravin...

which info? you mean human memory? How is electromagnetic field of heart related to memory

All the time machines that seem possible in current physics require massive objects and must exist before the earliest point in time to which you can travel. So, the simplest explanation for why there are no time travelers is that we haven't constructed a time machine for them to use to visit us, yet.

Also, see "massive object".

I've heard that argument before, but people much more knowledgeable on the issue than you or I (no offense) always seem to obsess on the time paradox issue, and to a lesser extent the radiation feedback loop that could be created from an expanded wormhole, as the only stopping blocks:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1269288/STEP...

I've never really heard that argument from any heavyweight physicists, but who knows, you could be right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com