One day we'll have biological networks of the size that can compete with today's biggest artificial neural networks, capable of running things like, well, ChatGPT. Then the philosophical questions will run even deeper....
Nobody would argue that turning off ChatGPT is killing a sentient being.
With a biological network, "turning it off" and killing it are very close if not the same (depending on who you ask). Biological network are present in our physical reality, you have some matter to deal with, which also makes the experience completely different. People fall in love and have compassion with ChatGPT, what would you think happens if you care for a brain a vat for months? If it is an actual neural structure resembling natural ones, than it might be possible it forms memories and becomes sentient. This is a completetly different array of ethical questions, you can't think of (living) biological matter like a machine, especially not regarding ethics.
To be honest, i thought it would first go the other way around. To many billionaires afraid of death, trying to encode there mindstate-personality into a machine and become semi-imortal.
And some billionaires aren't afraid enough, of death. Steve Jobs could have outlived his pancreatic cancer if he got it treated on time and didn't indulge in fake cures.
Honsetly if you're an 80yr old billionaire who has done 'everything', why not go for some mind encoding shenanigans?
I've never understood this. Even if we would have perfect mind-uploading capabilities, this doesn't help the billionaire who is afraid of death, right? It'd just be a copy of them. An immortal one, sure, but the original person would die just the same, no?
There's the philosophical argument that we have no continuity of consciousness in our meatbag bodies either - e.g. when you wake up, it's rebooting your consciousness from suspended memories.
There's physical continuity. You can be sure that most of your neurones will be the same tomorrow.
So to solve immortality, you gotta replace meat cells with silicone ones, slowly, one percent after another. It'll maintain relative continuity and hopefully will transfer memories and other person traits to the silicone, so one day the brain will be immortal and repairable.
But once they pay $$$ and turn on the uploaded consciousness won't they be like "Hey, why I'm still here in my meat body and not in Amazon Brain Cloud(c)"?
I thought the the fact that your mind is not magically booted into simulation while you are still alive (during sleep, backout while drunk or just pressing the power button on the server running it) should be a clue that you won't suddenly wake up in simulation after you have died.
You conscious thoughts might be asleep but some part of you is still "there" and operating or else you wouldn't be able to wake up and remember anything?
There would be no way to find out if that would be true however. The person in the vat might say they are the same person but you don't know if they really are. Also what happens if you create a copy? Is that two people or is there some kind of shared consciousness? If it is, how do they communicate?
Afaik Ship of Theseus is replacing parts incrementally until eventually no part is from the original ship. This is more like taking the ship, building an exact copy of it and then throwing away the original ship. Not sure that thought experiment is applicable.
I think there's a good reason that trying to cheat death and meeting a grim end as a result is such a common trope in mythology. Even in ancient times I think people generally recognised the profound harm refusing to accept the inevitability of death does to a person.
We have religious mythologies promising eternal afterlife since ancient times too, I think it's more an irrational coping mechanism to deal with it's inevitability. Everybody grows old and dies, that doesn't make death less horrific, it's the worst aspect of the human condition. We just often pretend it's not in various ways to better deal with it. But that shouldn't prevent us from trying to cure it the same way we are trying to cure cancer.
Given the bizarre behavior seen around extremely old politicians, such as the recently deceased Feinstein (D), and the permanent unelected upper legislature of the US Supreme Court, I think the first uploaded forever politician is a bigger threat. But who will pay for their extended life?
(The word for "ageless billionaire" is "corporation")
Note that in the "uploaded politician" case it's not nearly so relevant as to whether the person themselves believes it's the same person, as to whether everyone else believes they're the same person, and whether the upload has legal continuity in their job and position.
Billionaires shouldn't exist; to continue the crab metaphor, they're already outside the pot and it's disingenuous to suggest that we're trying to pull others down by removing the flaws that allow such extreme accumulations of wealth - that's the kind of divisive talk they're all for.
People want to own things even if they are not billionaires, and they want to value things freely even if they are not billionaires. Those two things combined make billionaires unavoidable if you think about it.
I think what you really desire is that billionaires should not be able to corrupt society or exploit the environment to the detriment of others. Which I am fully behind and consider an attainable and worthy goal even though we're currently far from it.
>Those two things combined make billionaires unavoidable if you think about it.
What service, commodity, or neccessity one owns, one pays a billion for? Considering production is worker owned, there would be no necessity for billionaires. This is basically a statement on the concentration of wealth, and that theoretically no one should have 20 Billion more "moneys" then any other person, with the linked fact that this person has 20 billion more influence in politics and getting their voice heard than a person with only one dollar on them. Because the fact that money buys influence is also "unavoidable" if you think about it. If I can feed 10.000 people daily and make them rely on me, they are much more likely to do my bidding and listen to me.
>What service, commodity, or neccessity one owns, one pays a billion for?
Nobody has to actually pay a billion to make someone a billionaire.
If you and three of your friends create a website that someone wants to buy one percent of for 40 million dollars, you are all billionaires whether you want to sell or not.
It doesn't even matter if nobody else wants to buy the other 99% for the same price, in the eyes of the world you are a billionaire anyway.
Society doesn't create billionaires because they need to exist, they are a side-effect of other things that we desire to exist.
Any society that allows 1) ownership and 2) freedom will generate billionaires when it reaches a sufficient population.
It unfortunately sometimes also happens because 3) criminal activity, and we should of course do everything we can to prevent 3, but if we prevent 1 and 2 we've created a dystopia.
"Neural networks" as in chatgpt and friends have almost nothing to do with "neural networks" as understood in biology, more than a passing analogy to how synapses fire. I'm very skeptical of projects which seek to conflate the two in some vague way.