However, if they could replace it incrementally and guarantee I was conscious the whole time, I don't consider that death, Does anyone else share this intuition? — RogueAI

Doesn't something like this happen naturally? That is, cells die off all the time, but we still that we are the same at a moment to moment basis.

As for your intuition, sure I share it too. At the same time we find it almost unnaturally easy to think of consciousness as something distinct from body, including intuitions about it belonging to the brain.

So while in seems intuitive to me, perhaps if such a thing could be done in real life I'm not sure if this intuition will remain.

Yes. Continuity of phenomenal self-awareness is personal identity, and with a spectrum of cognitive functions encoded redundantly in each brain hemisphere (re: hemispherectomies that radically treat cases of extreme epilepsy have repeatedly demonstrated in observations of and self-reports by recovered post-op epileptic patients that their memories, emotions, desires, ... personalities & self-awareness remain (mostly) unchanged), [1] remove a hemisphere, [2] replace it with a nanoengineered self-assembling "recording" medium that's connected to the remaining organic hemisphere by the corpus callosum, then [3] postmortem remove the expired (preferably euthanised) organic cadaver and [4] either (A) connect the synthetic hemi-brain via BMI to a teleoperational synthetic drone and/or (B) implant the synthetic hemi-brain directly into a synthetic body (humanoid replica).

The devil, of course, is in the details (YMMV), but I think that scenario, however speculative, is technologically plausible without violating any known 'laws of nature'. Other scenarios (N O T uploading / scanning , etc) occur to me as well but they are just variations on this 4-step phenomenal self-continuity transfer / extension process. Given the nearly intractable complexity involved, we'll probably have to wait for the advent of Strong AI system or structured networks of Weak AIs (e.g. AlphaGo Series-like neural nets) to implement and perfect such a technology. Furthermore ...

Thoughts?

edit: Previously elaborated on further here.

As you say, the devil is in the details. The personality side of this putative process intrigues me the most. I wonder in this scenario if you would retain the same traits and tastes and if these would evolve or change as they might in life. Or would this kind of 'synthetic hemi-brain' work to maintain a sense of consistency, remaining as it was when 'copied'. If that makes sense...

Continuity of phenomenal self-awareness is personal identity

I agree, so what happens when that continuity is broken by periods of non-consciousness? Death and rebirth?

if they could replace it incrementally and guarantee I was conscious the whole time, I don't consider that death, — RogueAI

Speaking as someone who has had the experience of general anesthesia during a surgical procedure, I would say that there are times in life when consciousness is greatly overrated. What if the replacement procedure is painful? Don't you want them to use medical technology to make you comfortable? Would you feel this way if they needed to repair your spleen?

What do you make of the fact that every cell in your body (except your brain cells) regenerates periodically, a few days for some cells and months or years for other? Of course this medical factoid supports your point, since your brain cells don't regenerate when they're gone. But the rest of you does. You are literally not the body you were yesterday and you're getting a partially new one tomorrow.

Worth noting: while the brain doesn't replace many of its lost neurons, if any, the trillions of connections among the 80 billion neurons are constantly changing.

Another thing, our "being" isn't static; it is intimately involved in our environment. If the replacement brain wasn't able to experience real-time immersion in the environment, "you" or your former brain-system would not be the same.

:up:

As I point out, there's more than a half-century of data on the adverse outcomes with respect to cognitive functions on hemispherectomy patients. The plasticity of the brain is robust enough that a person with half an intact brain remains in every discernible cognitive way herself as she was with a whole brain (except for the localized epileptic pathology which the surgery had removed). The rest of your concerns, Tom, belong to those devilish details which mere speculation on this principle cannot address.

No reason to think anything different happens than when the organic human brain loses consciousness; it operates, especially its higher functions (neocortex and, perhaps, some aspects of the cortex), exactly as the organic hemisphere had functioned. The only difference in the end is cognitive substrates, one biological and the other not biological. As for "death" and "rebirth", a synthetic system doesn't die, therefore being reborn doesn't obtain (even if there were such a thing). Step 4 of the phenomenal self-continuity transfer / extension does not imply that the synthetic hemisphere ceases to function when the organic hemisphere dies; I imagine it's like waking up but in a "locked-in" lucidly dreaming coma that will continue on – perhaps without a sense of psychological duration like being in a perfect sensory deprivation tank – until the synthetic hemi-brain is made to interface with an adequate computational system (A / B in my previous post).

The devil, of course, is in the details (YMMV), but I think that scenario, however speculative, is techologically plausable without violating any known 'laws of nature'. — 180 Proof

Of course... Replace one half of the brain by a synthetic. Dream along...

If someone told me they were going to duplicate and replace my brain with a mechanical one (and dispose of the organic one), I would consider that death. However, if they could replace it incrementally and guarantee I was conscious the whole time, I don't consider that death, Does anyone else share this intuition? — RogueAI

Are you asking this for purely philosophical inquiry, or for medical science and the public?
It always puzzles me whenever an attempt is made to transplant a head. Recently, they had transplanted mice heads. It lived for a day. But there's also a procedure done on monkey decades ago. The monkey survived for hours.

My question is, what is it that transplanting a new head to a person warrants the resources and difficulty and succeeding medical care for this person to make it worth it to transplant a head? It's not like humans are rare. Or one person is so unique that there's never gonna be another one like him to walk this earth.

I'd like to know the practical use of this. We know that face transplant had been done -- but note that these people who had undergone face transplant had a compelling reason: their faces were destroyed by their pets or some other entity, but they're pretty much alive and well. They could go on with their life after the face transplant.

But head transplant is another matter. If your injury is so horrific that your head was decapitated during the incident, the head transplant procedure would take too long to benefit you and success rate is worst than getting hit by a lightning 3 times.

First, where are they going to get the new head? Decapitate another healthy human being? It's not like we have a storage of fresh heads in the refrigerator ready to be transplanted in case one of us got hit by a scythe in one swoop making a clean, surgical cut -- and mind you, you can't use a scythe against your head, another person must perform the decapitation because it has a long handle and a long blade.

So then, say you are now decapitated and needed to be transported to a hospital -- you'd think the nearest hospital would do? No! It has to be a facility that performs regular head transplant. Ask where in the entire world this hospital is located? Nowhere. We do not have a facility that performs head transplant on a regular basis. It's not a cancer hospital.

A corollary to this is, "Would you mind if we use mice head on you since that's all we've practiced up to this point of your accident? Or a monkey, maybe you'd look better with a monkey head."

It always puzzles me whenever an attempt is made to transplant a head. Recently, they had transplanted mice heads. It lived for a day. But there's also a procedure done on monkey decades ago. The monkey survived for hours. — L'éléphant

I'd have said that it was a replacement of everything below the neck, not above it. You didn't get a new head. The head got your body. You're gone.

Continuity of phenomenal self-awareness is personal identity, — 180 Proof

I fall asleep and my personal identity survives, even if I've been unconscious indefinitely. A full replacement with a mechanical brain that was somehow loaded up with all the memories would be no different in principle than just waking from anesthesia. In practice, while I have no problems with the mechanical thinker being conscious, it just wouldn't feel the same. You'd have to rig it up to react to all the chemical changes and such, and not just be a bunch of digital circuits.

As for the OP:

If someone told me they were going to duplicate and replace my brain with a mechanical one (and dispose of the organic one), I would consider that death. — RogueAI

Lots of games to play here. Would you consider a star-trek style transporter to be death? The machine takes you apart down to the atom and rebuilds an identical one somewhere else. The memories are there, but is it you? What if it's a copy and they don't destroy the original. Is the new one you now?

Have you ever read the book, "Artificial You"? It was written by Susan Schneider, and released almost exactly a year ago. It's a thoughtful and timely examination of the exact approach to the same subject matter that your thread focuses on; incremental replacement(s) for the human brain. Quite interesting stuff, in my opinion.

Maybe they have already done this on you: you have no way to know it. Whatever you think of as evidence to deny it can be considered part of the way you were programmed. It is the old problem of Descartes, that he thought he solved, but he didn't realize that it is impossible to solve problems we are part of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

If someone told me they were going to duplicate and replace my brain with a mechanical one (and dispose of the organic one), I would consider that death. However, if they could replace it incrementally and guarantee I was conscious the whole time, I don't consider that death, Does anyone else share this intuition? — RogueAI

You should read Chalmers. He claims that if every neuron is replaced with a small computer which has neuron signals as input and outputs signals other neurons, like the real one, you'll be conserved up till the last neuron replaced. Can you believe he's serious?

David Chalmers

Maybe they have already done this on you — Angelo Cannata

I know for sure this hasn't been done.

What's got that ship to do with it? There has to be a copy of you or me in the first place to compare. A copy can't be made. So no comparison can be made. You can imagine a copy, identical to the preon level, but then you just imagining yourself.

If someone told me they were going to duplicate and replace my brain with a mechanical one... — RogueAI

,...then you should tell them to think carefully about that again. They tell you a lie. Well, they're maybe not tell you a lie, as telling a fantasy when one is psychotic can't really be called a lie. I should ask them firstly what they have in mind.

Perhaps if you read the OP and the link you would see? If you have and don’t see what it has to do with the OP I can only suggest you try harder.

Perhaps if you read the OP and the link you would see? — I like sushi

There is no link in the OP, but correct me if I'm wrong.

Old wine in a new bottle: The Ship of Theseus. What if we reassemble your brain parts. What then?

The link I provided you numb nut :D

The link I provided you numb nut :D — I like sushi

You're very cryptic now. What riddle I must solve, in my humble humbleness, your highness? What did I numb out?

How do you know it?

Neurons can't be made in a lab. Let alone 100 billion of them, interconnected like lightning in intricate ways. In a living body. In a living world.

Old wine in a new bottle: The Ship of Theseus. What if we reassemble your brain parts. What then? — Agent Smith

This can, in my respectful opinion be established in a new episode of the cosmological drama. Within the current episode, the particles being you, can never be you again.

Neurons can’t be made in the lab that you can imagine, but maybe they have been already made in the lab that was able to build your brain. It is the same way my laptop is unable to imagine the kind of intelligence that is in my brain, because I have built it in a way that makes impossible to my computer to imagine my intelligence.
So, the same proportion between the limited awareness on my laptop, built by me, and me, might exist between me and somebody who built me, endlessly. Who knows?
My laptop has no idea of the quality and level of my awareness. The same way I have no idea of higher level and quality of intelligence that might have built me.
What I am saying is different from Matrix, because I am also considering that even those who built me can be in the same condition towards an hypothetical superior intelligence that built them, and so on, endlessly.
The final result of this infinite matrioska is that we don’t know anything, we can’t know anything, we can only work with ideas, play with them.

This sounds the same as the simulation argument. We can be in a simulation without knowing it. And not only is the world simulated, like in the Matrix movie, but our brain too. Because our brain is a simulator, it should become a simulator being simulated.

I'm convinced though that all intelligences can appear only from natural processes, so not from conscious construction. Only the gods can do that.

I'd have said that it was a replacement of everything below the neck, not above it. You didn't get a new head. The head got your body. You're gone. — noAxioms

Funny you say this. Our identity is tied to a mirror, if I may say so. I almost agreed with you -- but then, first thing you look at if you want to know if you're still you, is your reflection on the mirror. You don't question why your mind has changed.

Just look at our societies -- a valid identification of your personhood is one that has your picture on it.

particles being you, can never be you again. — Haglund

I would like to be me again! I have some very reliable people who can/will ensure that is the case...till the sun grows cold and the stars are old. :grin: