- cross-posted to:
- morewrite@awful.systems
- cross-posted to:
- morewrite@awful.systems
guy recently linked this essay, its old, but i don’t think its significantly wrong (despite gpt evangelists) also read weizenbaum, libs, for the other side of the coin
This really sounds like mind-body dualism. Setting aside the body, which you could just stick the new brain back in your body and hook the nervous system back in, why would you be cut off from your sociocultural and historical material context? Go home. pet your cat with your robot arms. Hang out with your family, eat breakfast. Wherein lies the problem? All of those things exist inside your brain. Your brain is taking the very shoddy, very poor information being supplied by your sensory organs and assembling it in to approximations of what’s happening around you. We don’t interact with the world directly. Our interaction is moderated by our sensory organs and lots of non-conscious components of the mind, and they’re often wrong. If you hook up some cameras and a nervous system and some meat to this theoretical digital mind it has all the things a meat mind has. The same sensory information.
Like, really, where is the problem? A simulated brain is a brain is a brain. Put the same information in you’re going to get the same results out. Doesn’t matter if the signals are coming from a meat suit or a mathematical model of a meat suit, as long as they’re the right signals.
Okay, imagine your family does not recognize your mind upload as a person. That’s not hard to imagine, I bet most people today would struggle with that kind of barrier. Maybe they treat it like a memorial of a dead person and do not treat it like a member of the family, maybe they shun it because it’s creepy and don’t want anything to do with it, maybe they try to destroy it in the memory of who you were.
That’s your sociocultural and historical material context. The mind upload would become a new person entirely because of the insurmountable differences between being made of meat and being made of data. That upload could never be the person you are now, because the upload becomes someone different as soon as they stop being made of meat and stop eating hot chip and stop paying taxes etc.
That’s the day to day lived experience of like half the queer people in the world. I rejected part of my family and kicked them out of my life. i don’t have to imagine it, I’ve lived it.
You seem to have an assumption that some kind of digital transfer of consciousness would not physically interact with the world. You could just plug them in to a body. If you can run an entire brain on a computer hooking it in to a meat suit sounds fairly trivial. You can go right on eating hot chip and paying taxes. I think we’re operating from different perspectives here and I’m not sure what yours is. A digital mind could have a digital body and eat digital hot chip and they’d definitely be forced to pay taxes.
Okay, and are you the same person you were before that? I’ve experienced that too, and I don’t think I am the person I was before. I think I became someone else in order to survive. If I could somehow go back in time and meet myself we would hardly recognize each other!
No, they’d be property and someone else would have to pay taxes for owning them.
When I talk about the sociocultural context I’m talking about the fact that society would not treat the mind upload as a person. We have not developed far enough along our historical material context to recognize uploads as people. The trauma of that experience would necessitate becoming a different person entirely, and thus, they’re no longer an upload of you. That’s the problem with talking about mind uploads.
You are not just your brain (and its supporting structures). You are your context.