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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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Our understanding of the way information is stored in the brain is limited. I enjoyed this article from 2015, but even it is largely speculative, we have no idea if 'engrams' exist, we presume they do and presume to understand how they're stored.

What seems likely is that would be technically possible (at some current or future level of technology that we haven't yet ascertained) to preserve the brain such that its memory/personality content is maintained for possible future extraction or revival. We don't know for a fact whether the current most advanced forms of cryonics preserve any of this information, although it seems extremely unlikely that they do. But stranger things have happened, science advances extraordinarily rapidly, and who knows what superintelligent AI might make of the problem of a cryogenically frozen brain.

"Uploading" is even easier. There are probably already some reality television personalities for whom enough video footage of their daily life exists to train a future-generation multimodal LLM (attached to additional synthesis tools) to fully recreate their personality to an indistinguishable degree. You don't need to upload your brain, you just need to train a model to be you.

What seems likely is that would be technically possible (at some current or future level of technology that we haven't yet ascertained) to preserve the brain such that its memory/personality content is maintained for possible future extraction or revival.

It seems possible. Claiming that current preservation methods will allow resurrection seems wild and extremely unlikely. Someone claiming that estimating resurrection chance at 5% for currently frozen brain seems extremely miscalibrated for me.

to fully recreate their personality to an indistinguishable degree. You don't need to upload your brain, you just need to train a model to be you.

Someone with personality mimicking me is not me. The same goes for photo of me and mirror image of me and so on.

Someone with personality mimicking me is not me. The same goes for photo of me and mirror image of me and so on.

I disagree. A model that can perfectly predict what you would do at any moment and in response to any stimulus is you in every appreciable sense.

  1. even if they would be atom-by-atom identical then they would still not be me

  2. "you just need to train a model to be you" is insufficient to reach "model that can perfectly predict what you would do at any moment and in response to any stimulus"

I certainly won't appreciate it, so it isn't.

In every appreciable sense. In other words, a perfect copy of me would seem exactly the same to everyone else but if I had them standing in front of me I would be very sure they aren’t me. And if they killed me I would be dead.

Of course, having a legacy copy of you walking around might be considered better than nothing.

There are probably already some reality television personalities for whom enough video footage of their daily life exists to train a future-generation multimodal LLM (attached to additional synthesis tools) to fully recreate their personality to an indistinguishable degree.

That is simultaneously pathetic and horrible. So build an automaton that says the things you have been recorded saying, does the things you have been recorded doing, and never mind if you die because we'll all pretend - or worse, believe - this doll is really you.

A civilisation of puppets all playing pre-recorded roles forever and ever, engendering nothing new, after the last real human died and is now a heap of bones. But don't worry, their puppet exists so it's really them, honestly!