[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.