> A terminal patient choosing brain preservation with the hope of future revival via mind uploading is making the same type of rational judgement –faced with the alternative of oblivion I choose to undergo an uncertain surgical procedure that has some chance of restoring most of the unique memories that I consider to define ‘me’ as an individual. Hopefully this makes clear that I am rejecting a ‘magical’ view of the self. An individual’s mind is computational and, just like with a laptop, an imperfect backup copy is better than complete erasure.
Doesn't this argue against the entire brain preservation enterprise? That is, without a "magical" view of selfhood, why attempt to preserve a partially faithful replica of one's self instead of finding other ways to do the things that you'd want to do in the future once revived?
I don't really back up my laptop in a conventional sense. I do git pushes of my git clones, I copy some files to rsync.net, I do a lot of work on cloud services like Google Docs and Trello, etc. A lot of what's on my laptop is transient. This is nice, because I'm not backing up a Mac; if I decide to run Debian or switch to a Chromebook or whatever, I can still achieve my high-level goal of not losing work without the low-level implementation of restoring a Mac. And certainly I don't back up servers at work in the conventional sense, either; most of those "servers" are now just Kubernetes pods anyway, represented declaratively, and that's a lot better than a backup.
I think in the same sense, I do have a plan for immortality, and that plan is to change the world for the better while I am alive, now, as conventionally defined, in lasting ways. I don't really know what I would do if I were resurrected many centuries in the future. (I would expect at least as much change in the world as between now and many centuries in the past, and I can't really imagine even the greatest thinkers or doers or heroes of ages past productively helping the world today. Should Arthur return from Avalon to save Britain today, he'd have a lot of trouble recovering the throne in a largely pro-democratic society, and he'd have no idea what to make of "Brexit.")
Meanwhile, there's quite a bit I can do today to improve the world, to improve the lives of others, to try to improve by a fraction of a percent the chances of human society even existing a few centuries hence, etc. My self - my life and physical conscious existence - is just a tool for accomplishing whatever goals I have; it's not the goal itself. My laptop is also a tool; if I can keep doing the work that was on my laptop, I don't need a clone of the laptop itself.
It seems to me, then, that the only argument for brain preservation - for attempting to preserve one's "self" into the future and for investing in the ability to make it happen - is seeing one's self in this "magical" way, in believing that there's more value in the very fact of one's existence, and in fact even a partial and inaccurate continuation of that existence - than in what you do with that existence.
(And it does not save you from having to influence the world and engineer its future. At the least, as we can see, you have to spend a fair amount of your life today convincing society that it should develop in a way so that, in the future, they build the means to restore you.)
I'm pretty sure historians from every category would positively salivate over the prospect of being able to interview an actual person from a few hundred years ago. And it isn't like they'd stop being interested at just one.
And in terms of work one can do to improve the world- the tools available today amplify the work someone can do by orders of magnitude compared to centuries past, particularly mental work. I see no reason to think this trend won't continue. Who is to say that, given enough time and development, a society of the future might have an entire pathway for the freshly-revived to go back to school, so to speak, and become able to do things those of us now can only dream of?
The first one is a good point, although it doesn't quite sound to me like the folks advocating for preservation are doing so with the intention of being valuable to future generations for the interests of those generations. If they were, then they'd get themselves comfortable with being revived multiple times (either re-preserved or terminated and re-cloned, whatever's easiest to future society) and would prefer to be revived as far in the future as possible, and they'd accomplish what they intend during this life. But most of the motivation I see around this seems to be focused around trampling down death by cryopreservation and continuing to live your life in the future.
You could also imagine that, in a future where we are close to being able to revive human brains, we can just query human brains via simulation without bringing them back to life. The ethics of that are different, but - at least with consent from the person while they were be alive - it doesn't seem obviously wrong.
Re work improving the world - why do we imagine that someone from the present would be more effective at using those tools than someone from the future? Again, take the example of Arthur: if he returned, what would he do? What would you have him do? Or if even Isaac Newton were to return, would he be able to keep up with the brightest minds of the present generation of students who all took calculus in high school? I'm not doubting that he'd still be a sharp thinker, but would he be doing anything groundbreaking and world-changing like he did in his natural life, or would he "just" interview well at FAANG?
I'm not disputing that both of them would do things beyond their own wildest dreams during their lifetimes. Honestly, I think Arthur would have a lot of fun being in the House of Lords (which is probably where they'd put him) and Newton would get a blast out of being an entry-level engineer at FAANG. I'm disputing that they would do anything beyond what the natural-born of today would do, and that unless you have a sentimental correlation between your revived self and your old self, there's not really a point in one more average or even above-average person existing in the future.
>The first one is a good point, although it doesn't quite sound to me like the folks advocating for preservation are doing so with the intention of being valuable to future generations for the interests of those generations.
They probably aren't. But that isn't incompatible with both them desiring to continue to live and them contributing to whatever society they are reborn in to. After all, people today are primarily concerned with their own lives first and foremost, yet we manage to work together to build societies just the same.
>why do we imagine that someone from the present would be more effective at using those tools than someone from the future?
Diversity of thought. That doesn't mean that revived-person-x is going to be better at any particular productive activity than someone who was born in to the future in question. But simply by being from a different era, I like to think that there is potential to be able to contribute meaningful value. Or, put another way, while it is true that the world benefits greatly from those who are the best of the best, it is also true that there is a place for a large number of competent but not exceptional people to do the bulk of the work, and that their lives have positive value, too.
Would it not be more feasible, more robust, and more effective to ensure diversity of thought for the future by building mechanisms into society to sustain them on their own (e.g., value and uphold communities that take both strongly positive and strongly negative views towards modernity) instead of relying on developing the technical ability to unfreeze people from the past and then promptly putting them to work in average jobs?
(It seems silly, leaving aside the ethics of it, that we may find ourselves in the position of wishing we had the "diversity of thought" of peoples that we had long since either wiped out or pushed to assimilate into what's rapidly becoming a single global dominant culture.)
I mean, it rather sounds like we have changed the pitch from "If you desire, you can avoid death" (and the specific form of "If you have a terminal disease at a young age, we can freeze you until the disease can be cured, so you can live out the rest of your life") to "It is good for society that we build mechanisms to clone large numbers of people from the past into the present to lead average lives," which at the very least is a whole different ethics ballgame.
For one, there's the question of what happens if turns out that we can clone people from the past, en masse, even without them having been prepared specially. (Perhaps certain types of embalming cause enough stability in brain structure. Perhaps we can revive people who froze to death, like the hundreds on Mount Everest or similar mountains.) Going back to the idea that we only need a partial restoration and that there's no magical "self," is it ethical to clone them, if it is helpful to present society? Is it ethical to clone parts of them, if that's a technology we develop and it's beneficial?
Also, it seems pretty unlikely that humankind is on its path to having a vastly lower population than we do today, and we have yet to be assured that we will be able to colonize other planets. Lives have value, but when we have reached the capacity of Earth, how do we weight the potential value of cloning millions of people rom the past?
Baby boomers run the world, and they're getting sick and dying. They've generally already achieved all that they're going to achieve, and survive by taxing generations who are still in their productive years (or are abandoned by comically bad safety nets.)
Maybe after they're gone, power will be distributed a little more equally throughout the remaining generations - if only because a lot of them had children very late in life. Until then, there's going to be a lot of money going into immortality schemes, no matter what their value is philosophically.
If you asked me, I wouldn't even understand the value of making a permanent mark on the world, even if that mark is positive. My job is to help the world think, to spread good information, and to minimize the material harm I cause. To disappear quietly and completely is to be biodegradable. My main problem with preserving rich people's brains is that it involves the burning of real resources to keep something around of dubious value. Nobody needs you 100 years from now; there will be plenty of people.
Doesn't this argue against the entire brain preservation enterprise? That is, without a "magical" view of selfhood, why attempt to preserve a partially faithful replica of one's self instead of finding other ways to do the things that you'd want to do in the future once revived?
I don't really back up my laptop in a conventional sense. I do git pushes of my git clones, I copy some files to rsync.net, I do a lot of work on cloud services like Google Docs and Trello, etc. A lot of what's on my laptop is transient. This is nice, because I'm not backing up a Mac; if I decide to run Debian or switch to a Chromebook or whatever, I can still achieve my high-level goal of not losing work without the low-level implementation of restoring a Mac. And certainly I don't back up servers at work in the conventional sense, either; most of those "servers" are now just Kubernetes pods anyway, represented declaratively, and that's a lot better than a backup.
I think in the same sense, I do have a plan for immortality, and that plan is to change the world for the better while I am alive, now, as conventionally defined, in lasting ways. I don't really know what I would do if I were resurrected many centuries in the future. (I would expect at least as much change in the world as between now and many centuries in the past, and I can't really imagine even the greatest thinkers or doers or heroes of ages past productively helping the world today. Should Arthur return from Avalon to save Britain today, he'd have a lot of trouble recovering the throne in a largely pro-democratic society, and he'd have no idea what to make of "Brexit.")
Meanwhile, there's quite a bit I can do today to improve the world, to improve the lives of others, to try to improve by a fraction of a percent the chances of human society even existing a few centuries hence, etc. My self - my life and physical conscious existence - is just a tool for accomplishing whatever goals I have; it's not the goal itself. My laptop is also a tool; if I can keep doing the work that was on my laptop, I don't need a clone of the laptop itself.
It seems to me, then, that the only argument for brain preservation - for attempting to preserve one's "self" into the future and for investing in the ability to make it happen - is seeing one's self in this "magical" way, in believing that there's more value in the very fact of one's existence, and in fact even a partial and inaccurate continuation of that existence - than in what you do with that existence.
(And it does not save you from having to influence the world and engineer its future. At the least, as we can see, you have to spend a fair amount of your life today convincing society that it should develop in a way so that, in the future, they build the means to restore you.)