Mr. Farlops:

Eschew wrote, "This sounds interesting, but if the self is defined by suffering, then wouldn't the self be lost if suffering were abolished?"

There we go! That's an angle I can say something about. Thanks Eschew.

There are many different kinds of suffering. If we take physical pain to be a kind of suffering then Ab's proposal is flawed. My selfhood doesn't vanish when the dentist numbs my mouth before starting a drilling. My selfhood doesn't vanish if I take an aspirin for a headache.

In terms of emotional pain, my selfhood doesn't vanish if I take prozac.

My selfhood does vanish if the drug makes me pass out however. General anesthesia shuts off consciousness and, thus, selfhood.

Selfhood may best be defined as consciousness? Perhaps so. If that's the case, then I should be asking : "what is consciousness?"

What are our qualia but the experience of pain and pleasure? Are not all aspects of experience subjectively qualified by the pain/pleasure axis?

neuronymph:

Simply: If you can reference yourself, you are conscious you exist. Once an AI can reference itself and make independent decisions (i.e. not programmed beyond its source code), then it will have self too.

IMO, this is only relative [observable] dependence on source code. Independence is an ideal as all things are inter-related.

In this case, the decisions will be based upon the combination of experience and design.

Abolitionist:

With the last sentence, I'm saying that if we are interested in preserving ourselves, we must first define what the self is - surely we don't want to preserve all the nastiness of our Darwinian design.

Yes, very good point. Answering this question will also be necessary to counter luddites who claim something essential is lost in reducing suffering/death.

Practically speaking, a copy will always be distinct from the original.

Why? If I copy a file on my computer, can any distinction be detected? The filenames and modification times will of course be different, but the actual content will be the same. If (as seems very likely) the mind is purely classical information, the same principle applies.

I'm very glad you feel your life is worth living - hopefully this will always be the case for you and all humans.

Thank you.

Can you elaborate on how we should experiment to determine whether or not the copy would be similar to the original?

Think along the lines of the Turing test. An impartial observer talks to the individual and the copy and tries to detect a difference.

If you are creating a copy so that you do not die - then you will not be successful. You will still die and experience death even if a copy is made. So, what is it that you are really aspiring to do?

As I've been saying, the copy IS me (another of me). I experience subjective continuity with both. If I copy myself, live for a while, and die, while my copy lives, the effect is only that I lose the memories I formed between copying and death.

Consider this thought experiment: I copy myself and freeze the copy. There's still only one of me active. When I die, say a year later, the copy is thawed. The copy is the exact same as me a year ago. So I'm still alive - just a year out of date. If the copy has been active during that time, it doesn't really change.

EschewObfuscation:

As I've been saying, the copy IS me (another of me). I experience subjective continuity with both. If I copy myself, live for a while, and die, while my copy lives, the effect is only that I lose the memories I formed between copying and death.

This is where I take issue with uploading.  If I copy myself and die a year later, the copy may have my memories and think that it's me, but it still won't be.  It will simply be  another entity with identical memories and (probably) a nearly identical outlook on life.  I'll be dead.  Perhaps this is simply more complicated for me since I believe I have a soul, but I don't see how anyone can think of another being with identical memories as themself.

Ab wrote, "Selfhood may best be defined as consciousness?"

It doesn't have to be. Selfhood could be even more general than that. It could be any way an organism has of distinguishing itself from its environment.

By that definition bacteria have selfhood. It has various chemical machinary that can distinguish food molecules from the molecules composing itself. This may seem like a trivial point but it's very important in understanding why bacteria don't digest themselves, how bacteria deal with foreign genetic material during conjegation or how mitosis works. By that definition multicellular plants definitely have selfhood. The biologist Lewis Thomas wrote a couple books on this subject.

But for human beings these mechanisms for interacting with the environment have become so complex that consiousness has emerged.

Looking at things this way we see that selfhood is actually a continuum between the very simple ways of bacteria to the extremely complex ways of human beings.

We don't have to use this definition either. Whatever.

But if we do, we see that things like suffering are emergent. Do bacteria experience pain if they have no brains whatsoever? Nearly all living things react to trauma but where does pain emerge? In complex plants? Or only in multicelluar creatures that actually have nerve cells?

Ab wrote, "What are our qualia but the experience of pain and pleasure?"

Qualia are much more general than that. A quale is defined as a subjective conscious experience of sensation or emotion.

The mental state of what I feel like when I experience the tone of foghorns, the slipperiness of a cold glass of tea or the color green are qualia. Or what I feel like when I experience anger or giddiness. The experience of recollection of memory can also be qualia (I think.). Whether that conscious experience brings me happiness or sadness doesn't always enter into it.

Because they are purely subjective, they are unknowable except by direct experience of them. For example, what I feel like when I stub my toe might be very different from what you feel like when you do.

I think we should be very careful before we start dragging qualia into all this. There is currently a lot of controversy between various philosophers of the mind, let alone scientists of the mind, whether qualia even exist or not.

ideal:

This is where I take issue with uploading.  If I copy myself and die a year later, the copy may have my memories and think that it's me, but it still won't be.  It will simply be  another entity with identical memories and (probably) a nearly identical outlook on life.  I'll be dead.  Perhaps this is simply more complicated for me since I believe I have a soul, but I don't see how anyone can think of another being with identical memories as themself.

Sure, in a sense, that's true but, this drives us back into the philosophically degenerate cases of solipsism and Heraclitus' river.

How do you know that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for your present state of mind? How do you know you aren't blasted to atoms every night after you fall asleep and replaced with a duplicate before you awake? You could make a logically consistent case that as you change from moment to moment the older versions of you are irrecoverably dead and that the continuity of identity is an illusion--you never step into the same river twice.

Whether this bothers you or not is your own concern but, philosophically speaking, there really isn't a leg to stand on here.

But if it bothers you, you can go the slow brain tissue replacement route we discussed elsewhere.

"Answering this question will also be necessary to counter luddites who claim something essential is lost in reducing suffering/death."

It might be helpful, we might also have to re-evaluate the Abolitionist project when new information becomes available.

"As I've been saying, the copy IS me (another of me). I experience subjective continuity with both. If I copy myself, live for a while, and die, while my copy lives, the effect is only that I lose the memories I formed between copying and death.

Consider this thought experiment: I copy myself and freeze the copy. There's still only one of me active. When I die, say a year later, the copy is thawed. The copy is the exact same as me a year ago. So I'm still alive - just a year out of date. If the copy has been active during that time, it doesn't really change."

Would you experience subjective continuity with both? I think you would not as your subjective continuity would end with your death. The separate copy would live on, yes. Even though it may believe it is you and have similar information - it would not carry on your existance. You go into the light while "version 2.0" gets to carry on your recorded information.

Even if the copy was perfectly identical at one point - it becomes distinct the moment it occupies it's own time/space. Would your minds be linked due to similarities? Anything is possible but what theory might account for this putative phenomenon?

Abolitionist:

Would you experience subjective continuity with both? I think you would not as your subjective continuity would end with your death.

I mean I experience subjective continuity from the moment of copying - no later. I thought that was obvious from my phrasing, sorry.

The separate copy would live on, yes. Even though it may believe it is you and have similar information - it would not carry on your existance. You  go into the light while "version 2.0" gets to carry on your recorded information.

My recorded information, my memories, IS me. To say otherwise is vitalism, I think.

Even if the copy was perfectly identical at one point - it becomes distinct the moment it occupies it's own time/space. Would your minds be linked due to similarities? Anything is possible but what theory might account for this putative phenomenon?

'Linked' in the same way two documents that start out the same and are modified are 'linked' - the original document is continuous with both, even though the two don't have immediate continuity with each other.

What do you think of the identity of indiscernibles?

Abolitionist & Ideal, I think I have a theory for you: Each night when we go to sleep we die. The next morning version 2.0 of me wakes up, living for that day in my place (and possessing all of my memories), to be replaced by version 3.0 the next day and so on. So perhaps this is why children sometimes don't want to go to sleep at night - they still know/suspect that they are going to die ? If you think you have any data that disproves my theory, I'd like to know about them. ;-)

And once you disproved my theory, here are two variations: (1) At night, when I am asleep, all the atoms in my brain are replaced by other, identical ones. Will that make any subjective difference for the person waking up in the morning ? (2) At night, when I am asleep, my brain is replaced by a functionally identical silicon computer. Will I (?) notice the difference ?

BTW: did any of you watch some of the talks of the Almaden Institute on Cognitive Computing that was linked to on the main page ? Some of that may be relevent for your discussion here - if anyone thinks he understands Searle's position, I'd also like to know. ;-) I was quite impressed by Markram's and Hawkins' talk, but I guess this starts getting off-topic...

EDIT: Oops, just noticed that Mr. F. had made a similar argument a few posts down in this thread. Sorry about that. Guess I should first read the thread before posting...

Hoelder1in:

Abolitionist & Ideal, I think I have a theory for you: Each night when we go to sleep we die. The next moring version 2.0 of me wakes up, living for that day in my place (and possessing all of my memories), to be replaced by version 3.0 the next day and so on. So perhaps this is why children sometimes don't want to go to sleep at night - they still know/suspect that they are going to die ? If you think you have any data that disproves my theory, I'd like to know about them. ;-)

And once you disproved my theory, here are two variations: (1) At night, when I am asleep, all the atoms in my brain are replaced by other, identical ones. Will that make any subjective difference for the person waking up in the morning ? (2) At night, when I am asleep, my brain is replaced by a functionally identical silicon computer. Will I (?) notice the difference ?

BTW: did any of you watch some of the talks of the Almaden Institute on Cognitive Computing that was linked to on the main page ? Some of that may be relevent for your discussion here - if anyone thinks he understands Searle's position, I'd also like to know. ;-) I was quite impressed by Markram's and Hawkins' talk, but I guess this starts getting off-topic...

This doesn't work.  It takes the soul out of play.  You may not believe in a soul which makes it okay for you, but according to my beliefs, I am more than my physical body.

Hoelder1in:

Abolitionist & Ideal, I think I have a theory for you: Each night when we go to sleep we die. The next morning version 2.0 of me wakes up, living for that day in my place (and possessing all of my memories), to be replaced by version 3.0 the next day and so on. So perhaps this is why children sometimes don't want to go to sleep at night - they still know/suspect that they are going to die ? If you think you have any data that disproves my theory, I'd like to know about them. ;-)

And once you disproved my theory, here are two variations: (1) At night, when I am asleep, all the atoms in my brain are replaced by other, identical ones. Will that make any subjective difference for the person waking up in the morning ? (2) At night, when I am asleep, my brain is replaced by a functionally identical silicon computer. Will I (?) notice the difference ?

BTW: did any of you watch some of the talks of the Almaden Institute on Cognitive Computing that was linked to on the main page ? Some of that may be relevent for your discussion here - if anyone thinks he understands Searle's position, I'd also like to know. ;-) I was quite impressed by Markram's and Hawkins' talk, but I guess this starts getting off-topic...

EDIT: Oops, just noticed that Mr. F. had made a similar argument a few posts down in this thread. Sorry about that. Guess I should first read the thread before posting...

we'll need to decide on a definition for death in order to test your theory.

not sure about how to test the variations - they might make great zen koans though ;-)

ideal:

Hoelder1in:

Abolitionist & Ideal, I think I have a theory for you: Each night when we go to sleep we die. The next moring version 2.0 of me wakes up, living for that day in my place (and possessing all of my memories), to be replaced by version 3.0 the next day and so on. So perhaps this is why children sometimes don't want to go to sleep at night - they still know/suspect that they are going to die ? If you think you have any data that disproves my theory, I'd like to know about them. ;-)

And once you disproved my theory, here are two variations: (1) At night, when I am asleep, all the atoms in my brain are replaced by other, identical ones. Will that make any subjective difference for the person waking up in the morning ? (2) At night, when I am asleep, my brain is replaced by a functionally identical silicon computer. Will I (?) notice the difference ?

BTW: did any of you watch some of the talks of the Almaden Institute on Cognitive Computing that was linked to on the main page ? Some of that may be relevent for your discussion here - if anyone thinks he understands Searle's position, I'd also like to know. ;-) I was quite impressed by Markram's and Hawkins' talk, but I guess this starts getting off-topic...

This doesn't work.  It takes the soul out of play.  You may not believe in a soul which makes it okay for you, but according to my beliefs, I am more than my physical body.

What is your definition of soul?

Ideal wrote, "This doesn't work.  It takes the soul out of play.  You may not believe in a soul which makes it okay for you, but according to my beliefs, I am more than my physical body."

And you have various routes open to you that respect those beliefs. I mentioned the slow replacement of brain tissue with synthetic brain tissue. With that, you only face the remote possibility that David Chalmer's "Dancing Qualia" thought experiment is true. It probably isn't so you should be fine.

But if it is, you may still live to see us crack the aging disease and come up with a bio-fix that lets you live a very long time but eventually your perpetually youthful, natural brain will fill up to compacity. At that point you may have to under periodic offloading of those memories to free up storage capacity.

Regardless, you have options that respect your personal beliefs.

I can't really define the soul.  My religious views are actually rather vague.  I can, however, tell you what purpose it serves while we're living.  I believe it gives us the motivations and desires which are beyond our base instincts(which still play a role though some try to deny that).  Basically, what gives us sentience and what continues on in some form after we die.

Mr. Farlops:

Regardless, you have options that respect your personal beliefs.

I realize this(which you've actually contributed to) I was simply pointing out the issue many(myself included) will take with uploading.