Thread: Transportation of consciousness

Originally Posted by Salem

Do you need absolute atomic accuracy, or just "close enough" to reliably re-establish the molecular bonds?
Is this close enough to not have to worry about Heisenberg Uncertainty?

Remember that temperature is just kinetic energy. At body temperatures, 310 Kelvin or so, atoms move quite a bit, even in solids. You can, coarsely, approximate an atom in a molecule by imagining springs between the atoms; at body temperatures, they're always moving quite a bit with respect to each other.

If you don't position the atom just right -- we're talking about fractions of atomic radius (which are of the order of 10^-11 meters) -- it's like tensioning the spring, and then letting it loose. You'll impart a lot of energy to that atom, and it'll likely break the molecule.

In practice, not only do the atoms be pretty much in the correct position (I'd guess something like sub-picometer precision, perhaps femtometers or tens of femtometers (10^-15 or 10^-14 meters) precision), but also their velocities (including direction) should be roughly retained.

Originally Posted by Salem

can the problem be reduced to knowing the position and orientation of known composition?

I think so, except for active neurons.

If you construct an animal from known molecules, you can just record the molecule type, position, velocity, temperature (internal kinetic energy), isomeric folding (if metastable molecule like proteins that can "fold" into different shapes), and ionization (if any), and ignore the individual atoms.

(But, like I mentioned earlier, that might not suffice for active neurons; you might have to include atom excitation, to retain the activity in the neurons.

Or you could even go one step higher, and record individual cells.

(Then again, most of the cells in your body -- in your gut, specifically -- are not human; they're bacteria. And without them, you don't live very long.)

Originally Posted by Salem

Further, could it make changes to the data stream on the fly?

Like I said earlier, current ideas about "transport" don't allow examining the data stream at all.

For replication, why not? If you look at the ways the data is best replicated, things like "normalizing" the DNA in all cells and adding a bit to the telomeres (negating the effects of aging in the DNA) would be trivial. To fix other effects of aging, you'd filter out waste compounds inside cells (also related to aging), and e.g. removing fatty materials from the insides of blood vessels.

Let's do some math.

There are about 6×10²³ water molecules in 18 grams of water. Using that as a rough guide, and noting that a water molecule contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, we can estimate that a 100 kg (220 pound) human contains roughly 10³¹ atoms.

One cubic millimeter of water weighs about one milligram, and therefore has about 10²² water molecules; three times as many atoms.

If we need a "filter" that removes unwanted molecules of up to one cubic millimeter in size -- or uses up to one cubic millimeter region to decide what should be removed or changed -- the filter would have to access roughly 10²² atoms to do that.

Sounds terribly daunting, doesn't it? My current workstation has just under 10¹³ bytes of RAM. That's less than a millionth of what I'd need to "filter" a single cubic millimeter of tissue.

However, this type of filtering is extremely easy to parallelize. Sure, you'd need a massively parallelized machine to do it, but if atom-scale manufacturing was possible (and it'd have to be for any of this to be feasible), such machines would be easy to construct.

In my experience, the biggest bottleneck would be the memory access.

It might be possible to "layer" the memory and processing similar to image mip-mapping: each "layer" describes its contents at a more and more general or abstract level -- the lowest layer describing atoms, the highest layer describing abstract stuff like "part of a blood vessel going thataway", "bone tissue with marrow" --, and the "filtering" causing modification requests to be sent towards the lower layers, and the modifications refined on a layer-by-layer basis.

Heh.. even the idea of getting to program something like that makes my brain perk up

Originally Posted by megafiddle

What I can't imagine is what happens, ie, what does the original person experience, through the process of branching off into two separate conscious identities.

The thing is, it does not branch.

That is, there cannot be any point where a part interacts with another part during the replication. That will cause fatal errors in the transcription.

With regards to the consciousness, even non-fatal experiences can be extremely destructive. Consider surgery: if anasthesia fails, experiencing the surgery is enough to drive a person insane -- even if the surgery goes perfectly, and the body is repaired well enough to heal.

The duplication or transmission has to be instantaneous (at least to the perception of the transportee/duplicee). At one moment you're there, and the next moment you're here. If duplication occurs, there is also another you there too. Both of them share their entire being up to the moment before.

(Note that it does not matter whether time is continuous or quantized, or whether the animal perception is continuous or quantized: the transport or duplication has to be "instantaneous", or the transportee/duplicee will be damaged -- just like you would be if you woke up in the middle of a big surgery.)

Originally Posted by megafiddle

Assuming the accuracy and detail were sufficient, would the copy be indistinguishable from the original?

When you wake up, can you tell the difference between yourself yesterday and yourself today?

I can't, therefore I must assume all copies of 'me' would think themselves the 'original'. (Unless there was some detectable error in the replication, of course.)

Originally Posted by megafiddle

Could a computer be used as an analogy?

Well, there is still quite a bit of uncertainty about the exact scale at which important stuff in the brain happens. Certainly, computers are still much larger in scale.

On the other hand, I do believe that all the "ineffable" stuff in the brain happens at the quantum level.

In other words, I'd say a quantum computer (not the imaginary kinds, the real kinds that have already been constructed and demonstrated) is a good analogy. If you can transport or duplicate a quantum computer, with its state intact -- I'm assuming quiescent state both in the brain and the quantum computer, not "actively processing"/conscious --, I believe it should work for the brain, too.

Originally Posted by megafiddle

Doesn't their current state dictate their next state?

That's the Big Question: Does the current state and inputs to the human brain dictate the next state? Or, in other words, does free will exist, or it is simply an illusion?



I suspect it does not really matter, because our sense of "self" is robust enough to deal with a few inconsistencies. In other words, even if the replication was a bit shoddy, I believe we'd still feel continuity. You might have one of our legs the wrong way around or something, and still feel "you" and have perfect continuity.

After all, there are people who've lost a massive part of their brain (due to illness or accident), but still feel perfectly themselves.

The thing that worries me, is how the family and friends react to the transportee/replicate. Would it be easier to accept them as the original, if you considered the technology "magic", not knowing any of the details?

(Knowing what I do about computer security does cause me a lot of grief, knowing how insecure most systems are, and not allowed to do anything about it. I wouldn't be surprised at all if all replicator or transport personnel absolutely refused to use the devices themselves..)

Well, there is a good deal of philosophical debate on this, if you didn't already know.
Ship of Theseus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

To put Theseus' paradox in perspective: Physically, 98% of the atoms comprising the human body are replaced each year.

Originally Posted by Nominal Animal

When you wake up, can you tell the difference between yourself yesterday and yourself today?

I can't, therefore I must assume all copies of 'me' would think themselves the 'original'. (Unless there was some detectable error in the

replication, of course.)

That's what I am assuming. We first have to establish that one virtually perfect copy can be made.
My real question though, involves two copies.

Originally Posted by Nominal Animal

The thing is, it does not branch.

That is, there cannot be any point where a part interacts with another part during the replication. That will cause fatal errors in the

transcription.

Once we can transport one, we should be able transport another simultaneously. We just need
two transport terminals.

Ok, I thought of something.
This might not help with an answer, but it might help with the question.

Suppose two transporter terminals reconstruct the travellers in a small room
facing each other. The wall behind duplicate A is red. The wall behind duplicate B
is green.

I get into the transporter and it is activated. An instant later (by my own subjective time)
I find myself in that room facing myself.

What color wall do I see?

Originally Posted by megafiddle

What color wall do I see?

To me, the logical answer is, both. One of you will see red, the other green. The one that sees the red is as much you as the one that sees green. Each of them has the exact same past up to that point, and each of them feel as much 'you' as you do now.

Some may argue that the phenomena of consciousness is an ineffable thing that does not obey the laws of physics as we know them, but I doubt that.

Consider this: The 'you' that woke up this morning has absolutely no way to prove it's the same 'you' as you where when you fell asleep last night. How would you know whether you were duplicated or not -- and whether you are the original or a duplicate? I don't think you can. Assuming good enough process, I don't think you could even tell.

However, if many of the atoms comprising the corresponding neurons in the brains of the duplicates were entangled, then the duplicates would essentially share a single brain, that slowly branched into two (as the entanglements break). In that case, I think you could actually perceive yourself splitting into two, somehow seeing both red and green walls. I don't know if that kind of entanglement in the brain would last, or if it would be survivable, but it certainly is interesting to think about.

(Note that quantum entanglement isn't some fancy theory, it's already used in real-world applications.)

Originally Posted by Elkvis

you have 10 terabytes of RAM? are you sure you're not off by a factor of 1000?

Good catch! Quite embarrassing, really.

In reality, I have only on the order of 6×10⁹ bytes of RAM on my workstation.

(To get access to 10 terabytes of RAM, I'd need to use one of the computational clusters nearby. There are already BigMem nodes with half a terabyte to terabyte of RAM, though, so it's not like ten terabytes is totally outside the realm of possibility. If I had a hundred k€ to spend on toys, I just might get one, say an 8-node bigmem cluster. Include a couple of top-of-the line GPUs for playing with OpenCL, and maybe some Spartan ASIC boards to play with.. Oh wait, the electricity bill would be a bit of a pain, though. I'd have to get some real work done on it to pay those.)

But would it remain that way over time?

Yeah. I do not believe in collective consciousness, if that's where you are going with it.

Originally Posted by whiteflags

Yeah. I do not believe in collective consciousness, if that's where you are going with it.

No, just wondering what might happen as they diverge along their separate paths.
The two duplicates would be indistinguishable at first. Maybe that's what allows
experiencing both. That would not be sustained, though.

Originally Posted by Nominal Animal

Some may argue that the phenomena of consciousness is an ineffable thing that does not obey the laws of physics as we know them, but I doubt that.

My guess is that it does indeed follow the laws of physics, but is still ineffable.

Suppose two transporter terminals reconstruct the travellers in a small room
facing each other. The wall behind duplicate A is red. The wall behind duplicate B
is green.

I get into the transporter and it is activated. An instant later (by my own subjective time)
I find myself in that room facing myself.

What color wall do I see?

I'm certainly no expert, but I think your question is a non-sequitur. Here's how I suspect it would work.

In your example, imagine the transporter is located in the same room as the two colored walls, along a third wall. You step into the transporter, disappear, and two of "you" appear in front of the colored walls. You're asking which one (or both) is "you".

Consider an alternate example. Instead of a transporter (destructive), imagine a "cloning machine" (non-destructive) that otherwise works in the exact same way. You step into it, you don't disappear, but now there are two more of "you". To you, those two "you"s are essentially different people. They are not you, but copies of you. You, in the cloning machine, would see one separate entity in front of a green wall, and another in front of a red wall. They would each have their own mind, and would each perceive their environments through their own consciousness. You in the cloning machine would have no insight to their minds or perceptions.

Going back to your example, when you disappeared and two versions of "you" appeared in front of the colored walls, the one in front of the green wall would see a copy of itself in front of a red wall, and the other would see a copy of itself in front of a green wall. They would each have their own separate experience, as though they were two different people (which they technically would be).

For all intents and purposes, you (who stepped into the transporter) would cease to be. If we imagined your current consciousness somehow "separated" from your physical body and was able to observe the results, it would "see" two separate entities. But it wouldn't go inside one or the other or both. Each copy would now effectively be a different person than the one that stepped into the transporter. But since they share the same thoughts, memories, and experiences up to the point of transport, it could appear to an outside observer (as well as the copy) no different than if the transport never took place.

At least, this is how I'd hypothetically suppose it would be.

Originally Posted by Yarin

My guess is that it does indeed follow the laws of
physics, but is still ineffable.

That is my guess also.

Perhaps the understanding of consciousness and other hard problems, like qualia, require an intelligence
that we simply don't have. Or maybe it requires thinking that is so far "outside the box", that it might never
occur in the history of human existence.

Originally Posted by Matticus

I'm certainly no expert, but I think your question is a non-sequitur. Here's how I suspect it would work.

In your example, imagine the transporter is located in the same room as the two colored walls, along a third wall. You step into the transporter, disappear, and two of "you" appear in front of the colored walls. You're asking which one (or both) is "you".

Consider an alternate example. Instead of a transporter (destructive), imagine a "cloning machine" (non-destructive) that otherwise works in the exact same way. You step into it, you don't disappear, but now there are two more of "you". To you, those two "you"s are essentially different people. They are not you, but copies of you. You, in the cloning machine, would see one separate entity in front of a green wall, and another in front of a red wall. They would each have their own mind, and would each perceive their environments through their own consciousness. You in the cloning machine would have no insight to their minds or perceptions.

Going back to your example, when you disappeared and two versions of "you" appeared in front of the colored walls, the one in front of the green wall would see a copy of itself in front of a red wall, and the other would see a copy of itself in front of a green wall. They would each have their own separate experience, as though they were two different people (which they technically would be).

For all intents and purposes, you (who stepped into the transporter) would cease to be. If we imagined your current consciousness somehow "separated" from your physical body and was able to observe the results, it would "see" two separate entities. But it wouldn't go inside one or the other or both. Each copy would now effectively be a different person than the one that stepped into the transporter. But since they share the same thoughts, memories, and experiences up to the point of transport, it could appear to an outside observer (as well as the copy) no different than if the transport never took place.

At least, this is how I'd hypothetically suppose it would be.

I think that brings up the only other possibility that I can conceive of: the original 'me' ceases to exist and
one (or more) duplicate 'mes' come into existence (by 'me', I mean my conscious identity).

But then it means that there is no forward continuity of conscious identity. It's just an illusion. It is just
each present instant in time during which we have the memories that give us a continuous sense of identity.
So after the transport, I don't continue to exist. Instead, the duplicate carries on my existance.

It's been pointed out (and I agree with) that duplication would be no different than falling asleep and reawakening.
If identity really is based on present memories and has no real continuity, then that must also be true every
night we go to sleep.

I think that brings up the only other possibility that I can conceive of: the original 'me' ceases to exist and
one (or more) duplicate 'mes' come into existence (by 'me', I mean my conscious identity).

But then it means that there is no forward continuity of conscious identity. It's just an illusion. It is just
each present instant in time during which we have the memories that give us a continuous sense of identity.
So after the transport, I don't continue to exist. Instead, the duplicate carries on my existance.

I've read some theories that the sense of "I" in our minds is really just an illusion, a byproduct of other cognitive processes. If this is the case, I personally feel that this is largely to blame for the commonly held belief that consciousness is in some way separate from the brain (dualism), which leads to such non-rational ideas such as out of body experiences or an afterlife. I tend to agree with those who claim that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, and is intrinsically tied to it.

An analogy I like to make is, if we liken the brain to a computer, and consciousness to an operating system - once the hardware is destroyed, there is no longer an OS. It doesn't "go somewhere else" for eternity - the voltages that constituted the bits that created the OS are dissipated (electrical energy is converted to thermal energy), and the emergent result of their configuration (the OS) is no more.

I wish I could recall the actual theory that explains how the sense of "I" is not as real as we tend to think, but I haven't had my head in this stuff for several years. It might have been scientific philosopher Dan Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", but I'm not sure at the moment. (If you're interested in hearing some amazing thoughts about consciousness, check out some youtube videos of his talks.)

It's been pointed out (and I agree with) that duplication would be no different than falling asleep and reawakening.
If identity really is based on present memories and has no real continuity, then that must also be true every
night we go to sleep.

I've never thought about this until I saw Nominal's posts above, but in doing some quick research for this post, I found ideas along these lines. More food for thought.

I've tried to read Dennett's book "Consciousness Explained", a few times, but it doesn't seem like it's really written for the layman.
Even still, I seem to understand pieces of it a little better each time. I'll have to listen to the videos. I wasn't aware of them.