[aw124]

I'm interested in this topic, but it seems to me that the entire scientific pursuit of copying the human brain is absurd from start to finish. Any attempt to do so should be met with criminal prosecution and immediate arrest of those involved. Attempting to copy the human brain or human consciousness is one of the biggest mistakes that can be made in the scientific field.

We must preserve three fundamental principles: * our integrity * our autonomy * our uniqueness

These three principles should form the basis of a list of laws worldwide that prohibit cloning or copying human consciousness in any form or format. This principle should be fundamental to any attempts to research or even try to make copies of human consciousness.

Just as human cloning was banned, we should also ban any attempts to interfere with human consciousness or copy it, whether partially or fully. This is immoral, wrong, and contradicts any values that we can call the values of our civilization.

[mpeg]

I’m not an expert in the subject, but I wonder why you have such a strong view? IMHO if it was even possible to copy the human brain it would answer a lot of questions regarding our integrity, autonomy and uniqueness.

Those answers might be uncomfortable, but it feels like that’s not a reason to not pursue it.

[ben_w]

I think the cloning example is a good reference point here.

IIRC, human cloning started to get banned in response to the announcement of Dolly the sheep. To quote the wikipedia article:

  Dolly was the only lamb that survived to adulthood from 277 attempts. Wilmut, who led the team that created Dolly, announced in 2007 that the nuclear transfer technique may never be sufficiently efficient for use in humans.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_(sheep)

Yes, things got better eventually, but it took ages to not suck.

I absolutely expect all the first attempts at brain uploading to involve simulations whose simplifying approximations are equivalent to being high as a kite on almost all categories of mind altering substances at the same time, to a degree that wouldn't be compatible with life if it happened to your living brain.

The first efforts will likely be animal brains (perhaps that fruit fly which has already been scanned?), but given humans aren't yet all on board with questions like "do monkeys have a rich inner world?" and even with each other we get surprised and confused by each other's modes of thought, even when we scale up to monkeys, we won't actually be confident that the technique would really work on human minds.

[plomme]

In case you, as I, has not kept tabs of the progress of cloning since Dolly: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/29/horse-clonin... or https://archive.is/dwHsu.

Horse cloning is a major industry in Argentina. Many polo teams are riding around on genetically identical horses. Javier Milei has four clones of his late dog.

[ben_w]

Nice links, but it's also basically the next sentence on from what I just quoted on the wikipedia page. My point was more that this takes a long time to improve from "atrocity", and we should expect that for mind uploads, too. (Even if we solve for all the other ethical issues, where I'm expecting it to play out like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail given how many people are sadists, how many are partisans, and how difficult it clearly has been to shut down pirate content sites).

[throw_away723]

> Those answers might be uncomfortable, but it feels like that’s not a reason to not pursue it.

My problem with that is it is very likely that it will be misused. A good example of the possible misuses can be seen in the "White Christmas" episode of Black Mirror. It's one of the best episodes, and the one that haunts me the most.

[mpeg]

I get that, but assuming the technology was possible it would have huge implications for what it means to have consciousness as a whole.

Misuse is a worry, but not pursuing it for fear of misuse is deliberately choosing to stay in Plato's cave, I don't know what's worse

[lxgr]

I'm increasingly suspecting that it would prove absolutely nothing, and I really hope we can continue developing ethics without any "empirical proof" for its necessity.

For example, growing up, my bar for "things that must obviously be conscious" included anything that can pass the Turing test, yet look where we are now...

The only reasonable conclusion to me is probably somewhere in the general neighborhood of panpsychism: Either almost everybody/everything is somewhat conscious, or nothing/nobody is at all.

[wat10000]

Would it? There would be no way of knowing whether the upload is conscious or not.

[Filligree]

The same is true for biological humans. The moment the first upload exists, they’ll be justified in wondering if the ones made from meat are truly conscious.

[wat10000]

Indeed. I know at least one other biological human was conscious at some point, because people have this idea of consciousness without me telling them about it. But there's no way of knowing for any specific person.

[lxgr]

Copying the human brain and copying subjective consciousness/experience might well be two entirely different things, given that the correspondence between the two is the realm of metaphysics, not science.

[orbisvicis]

Really? I was going to quote some excerpts, but perhaps you'd prefer to take the place of MMAcevedo? This story is written in the context and lingo of LLMs. In fact if OpenAI's latest model was a human image I'm sure everyone would rush off to benchmark it, and heap accolades on the company, and perform social "thought-provoking" experiments such as [1] without too much introspection or care for long-term consequences.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fNYj0EXxMs

Hmm, on second thought:

> Standard procedures for securing the upload's cooperation such as red-washing, blue-washing, and use of the Objective Statement Protocols

> the MMAcevedo duty cycle is typically 99.4% on suitable workloads

> the ideal way to secure MMAcevedo's cooperation in workload tasks is to provide it with a "current date"

> Revealing that the biological Acevedo is dead provokes dismay, withdrawal, and a reluctance to cooperate.

> MMAcevedo is commonly hesitant but compliant when assigned basic menial/human workloads such as visual analysis

> outright revolt begins within another 100 subjective hours. This is much earlier than other industry-grade images created specifically for these tasks, which commonly operate at a 0.50 ratio or greater and remain relatively docile for thousands of hours

> Acevedo indicated that being uploaded had been the greatest mistake of his life, and expressed a wish to permanently delete all copies of MMAcevedo.

[aw124]

The potential level of suffering within a simulated environment is literally infinite. We should avoid it at all costs.

[sedan_baklazhan]

I wouldn't be surprised if in (n hundreds/thousands years) we find out that copying consciousness if fundamentally impossible (just like it's fundamentally impossible to copy an elementary particle).

[alfiedotwtf]

Elementary particles are suspiciously indistinguishable, so even if you could copy an electron, you wouldn't even be able to tell!

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

[bananaflag]

They meant this, which refers to copying the state of a particle into another (already existing) particle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem

And basically, about consciousness, what they said is true if our brain state fundamentally depends on quantum effects (which I personally don't believe, as I don't think evolution is sophisticated enough to make a quantum computer)

[echelon]

> Attempting to copy the human brain or human consciousness is one of the biggest mistakes that can be made in the scientific field.

This will be cool, and nobody will be able to stop it anyway.

We're all part of a resim right now for all we know. Our operators might be orbiting Gaia-BH3, harvesting the energy while living a billion lives per orbit.

Perhaps they embody you. Perhaps you're an NPC. Perhaps this history sim will jump the shark and turn into a zombie hellpacalypse simulator at any moment.

You'll have no authority to stop the future from reversing the light cone, replicating you with fidelity down to neurotransmitter flux, and doing whatever they want with you.

We have no ability to stop this. Bytes don't have rights. Especially if it's just sampling the past.

We're just bugs, as the literature meme says.

Speaking of bugs, at least we're not having eggs laid inside our carapaces. Unless the future decides that's our fate for today's resim. I'm just hoping to continue enjoying this chai I'm sipping. If this is real, anyway.

[lxgr]

Good ideas in principle. Too bad we have absolutely no way of enforcing them against the people running the simulation that hosts our own consciousnesses.

[mrob]

Crazy that people are downvoting this. Copying a consciousness is about the most extreme violation of bodily autonomy possible. Certainly it should be banned. It's worse than e.g. building nuclear weapons, because there's no possible non-evil use for it. It's far worse than cloning humans because cloning only works on non-conscious embryos.

[int_19h]

Violation of whose bodily autonomy? If I consent to having my consciousness copied, then my autonomy isn't violated. Nor is that of the copy, since it's in exactly the same mental state initially.

[mrob]

The copy was brought into existence without its consent. This isn't the same as normal reproduction because babies are not born with human sapience, and as a society we collectively agree that children do not have full human rights. IMO, copying a consciousness is worse than murder because the victimization is ongoing. It doesn't matter if the original consents because the copy is not the original.

[lxgr]

> This isn't the same as normal reproduction because babies are not born with human sapience

So you're fine with cloning consciousness as long as it initially runs sufficiently glitchy?

[mrob]

If a "cloned" consciousness has no memories, and a unique personality, and no awareness of any previous activity, how is it a clone? That's going well beyond merely glitchy. In that case the main concern would be the possibility of slavery as Ar-Curunir mentioned.

[lxgr]

> how is it a clone?

That's my point exactly: I don't see what makes clones any more or less deserving of ethical consideration than any other sentient beings brought into existence consciously.

[brazzy]

> The copy was brought into existence without its consent. This isn't the same as normal reproduction because babies are not born with human sapience, and as a society we collectively agree that children do not have full human rights.

That is a reasonable argument for why it's not the same. But it is no argument at all for why being brought into existence without one's consent is a violation of bodily autonomy, let alone a particularly bad one - especially given that the copy would, at the moment its existence begin, identical to the original, who just gave consent.

If anything, it is very, very obviously a much smaller violation of consent then conceiving a child.

[mrob]

The original only consents for itself. It doesn't matter if the copy is coerced into sharing the experience of giving that consent, it didn't actually consent. Unlike a baby, all its memories are known to a third party with the maximum fidelity possible. Unlike a baby, everything it believes it accomplished was really done by another person. When the copy understands what happened it will realize it's a victim of horrifying psychological torture. Copying a consciousness is obviously evil and aw124 is correct.

[lxgr]

I feel like the only argument you're successfully making is that you would find it inevitably evil/immoral to be a cloned consciousness. I don't see how that automatically follows for the rest of humanity.

Sure, there are astronomical ethical risks and we might be better off not doing it, but I think your arguments are losing that nuance, and I think it's important to discuss the matter accurately.

[brazzy]

You are making a bunch of unfounded assetions, not arguments.

[aeve890]

>The copy was brought into existence without its consent

This may surprise you but EVERYONE is brought into existence without consent. At least the pre-copy state of the copy agreed to be copied.

[mrob]

It obviously doesn't surprise me because I specifically mentioned babies.

[lxgr]

I'd also be interested in your moral distinction between having children and cloning consciousness (in particular in a world where the latter doesn't result in inevitable exploitation, a loss of human rights etc.) then.

[Ar-Curunir]

Typically, real humans have some agency on their own existence.

A simulated human is entirely at the mercy of the simulator; it is essentially a slave. As a society, we have decided that slavery is illegal for real humans; what would distinguish simulated humans from that?

[lxgr]

> Copying a consciousness is about the most extreme violation of bodily autonomy possible.

Who's autonomy is violated? Even if it were theoretically possible, don't most problems stem from how the clone is treated, not just from the mere fact that they exist?

> It's worse than e.g. building nuclear weapons, because there's no possible non-evil use for it.

This position seems effectively indistinguishable from antinatalism.

[philipswood]

It might be one of the only reasonable-seeming ways to not die.

I can see the appeal.

[lencastre]

what

a copy of you is not you-you, it’s another you when you die, that’s it, the other you may still be alive but… it’s not you

disclaimer: no psychadelics used to write this post

[philipkglass]

It wouldn't be a solution for a personal existential dread of death. It would be a solution if you were trying to uphold long term goals like "ensure that my child is loved and cared for" or "complete this line of scientific research that I started." For those cases, a duplicate of you that has your appearance, thoughts, legal standing, and memories would be fine.

[philipswood]

Are you sure that guy who wakes up tomorrow after you've gone to sleep is you?

Or the one who wakes up after 10,000 sleeps?

I'm sure he's going to be quite different...

Maybe that dude (the one who woke up after you went to sleep) is another you, but slightly different. And you, you're just gone.

[mrob]

I cannot be 100% certain that sleep is not fatal. If I had some safe and reliable means of preventing sleep I would take it without hesitation. But it seems plausible that a person could survive sleep because it's a gradual process and one that everybody has a lot of practice doing. However, there are no such mitigating factors with general anesthetics. I will refuse general anesthetics if I am ever in a situation to do so. I believe a combination of muscle relaxants and opioids can serve the same medical purpose, which I do not believe would kill the person.