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Sci-Fi Fantasy (Replicated Consciousness)

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Imagine that at some point in the future, it becomes possible to replicate consciousness and convert it into digitized form where it can then be simulated on various hardware and injected into any scenario or environment.

For someone who gets their consciousness replicated, it would result in a form of immortality. Their original body would age and die, but everything that makes them 'them' from that point forward would reside in a digitized parallel existence. Such a simulated individual could be put into any variety of environments and scenarios where the normal limits of the human body and the laws of physics may no longer apply. Such a 'person' may find themselves transported to any variety of simulated worlds, ranging from complete utopias to utter hell-scapes.

Naturally, corporations would recognize how lucrative it would be to purchase the licensing rights and duplicate and sell consciousnesses. You may even find that the organization that you allowed to duplicate your consciousness had a clause in their fine print where they were free to make non-primary digital duplicates of you which could then be sold freely to third parties. While you may have been able to stipulate the world and environment that the original replicated consciousness would reside in, the duplicates of that replica (who don't know that they're duplicates), could end up anywhere, depending on who purchases them.

Would you buy such a consciousness? - It could some sexy chick who's libido you crank up by an order of magnitude so every time you connect your mind to the simulation she will want to fuck your brains out. Or, you give her a crucifixion fetish and leave her nailed to the cross for weeks on end or have her crucified repeatedly until her digital mind breaks and you have to reset it to factory default. - The possibilities would be endless. What would your scenario be?

When you think about what some of the people on this forum might do to you, if you were digitized, would you still bravely enter the machine? Could you handle the true cost of digital immortality?
 
For someone who gets their consciousness replicated, it would result in a form of immortality.
...
non-primary digital duplicates of you ... (who don't know that they're duplicates),
I always wonder about the continuity of perception of self.
What distinguishes a "primary duplicate" from a "non-primary" one?

Let's say this is technically possible:

someone made a digital replica snapshot of me right now,

capturing all my memories, experiences, biases, and synapse wirings, all accumulated effects, as well as all the genetic foundations. This is injected into a complete simulation that provides all the sensory input and delivers all the 'world reactions' to any actions of the replicant so that it is for that entity, indistinguishable from "real world".

That's the primary duplicate!

Okay does the "me", the perception of self, somehow switch over from old-fashioned "bio-me" to the shiny new "tech-me", and leave the old one behind? Does it occupy a new "seat of the soul"ß

Or is it rather, that another personagwe has been created, who if in the very first moment, you asked her to deliver an opinion/decision based on past experience, would with high likelihood answer just like "I" would?
However as time goes by and she makes different experiences -- assuming the duplicate can learn and develop in a similar way -- she would make her own experiences and suffer her own consequences of her decisions, made in different situations, and so they would ever more become different personalities.

... there's one problem though, if the duplicate doesn't age, is it obvious that her way of learning and developing (which includes forgetting for instance) will be similar to a bio-original?

As sufficient differences of experience and change accumulated, it would become ever more like monozygotic twins, where there are a lot of similarities, but they really aren't the same person, and nobody really believes that if you kill one of them, that person "survives" because the twin is still out there...

So in what sense does creating the duplicate even make the original "immortal"?
If the "bio-me" 20 years after the duplication, suddenly dies ... does her "perception of self" somehow switch into the simulation?

Isn't it just all a simulation for the benefit of other people? ... no matter whether primary or non-primary duplicate ...
"This is probably something close to what she would be like, and how she would react, if she was still around"
 
I always wonder about the continuity of perception of self.
What distinguishes a "primary duplicate" from a "non-primary" one?

Let's say this is technically possible:

someone made a digital replica snapshot of me right now,

capturing all my memories, experiences, biases, and synapse wirings, all accumulated effects, as well as all the genetic foundations. This is injected into a complete simulation that provides all the sensory input and delivers all the 'world reactions' to any actions of the replicant so that it is for that entity, indistinguishable from "real world".

That's the primary duplicate!

Okay does the "me", the perception of self, somehow switch over from old-fashioned "bio-me" to the shiny new "tech-me", and leave the old one behind? Does it occupy a new "seat of the soul"ß
Obviously, when dealing with this sort of thing, there are many philosophical and technical issues when trying to think through how something like this would or could possibly work. It's definitely more in the fantasy/futuristic/sci-fi realm at the moment, so I think that many of the blanks have to be filled in via imagination, and as a result, it could be envisioned to work in quite a few different ways.

For the purposes of my 'thought experiment', if you could call it that, the goal would be to take a snapshot of the original individual to produce a digital replica that is as accurate as possible. There would be a reproduction of, as you described, synapse wiring, memories, thought patterns, genetic information, etc. which would all be converted into 'code'. Furthermore, on the 'simulation-side', the engineers would want to reproduce all of the physical aspects as closely as possible, so the consciousness would not be a floating 'abstract', but would be housed in a body that looked and felt the same, including having the same mental constraints (input output interface wouldn't suddenly be the speed of light), as well as maintaining imperfections such as some memory loss, etc.

The engineers could consider the simulation to be successful if the copied, digitized version of the individual believed with all sincerity that they themselves were in fact the original individual. So at the time of replication, the duplicate would not be able to distinguish itself from the person it originated from.

In terms of whether each would occupy their own 'seat of the soul', I believe the answer is yes. Each would be an entirely distinct individual from the time of replication forward. They would share a common history, memories, personality, character disposition, etc. at the time of replication, but would have fully different experiences from that point forward. So you're correct in pointing out that from that point, they would become 'different people'. However, as the initial replication code would still be in place, the person could always be 'reset' to the point in time that they were originally replicated, returning back to a state of 'sameness' at any time and erasing all subsequent experiences since digitized. (A factory reset).

... there's one problem though, if the duplicate doesn't age, is it obvious that her way of learning and developing (which includes forgetting for instance) will be similar to a bio-original?
The engineers would make this as identical as possible, imposing an artificial constraint on the digitized version that replicates the biological constraints of the original. It's almost like the Turing Test, for the simulation to be engineered successfully, it should believe that it's human, and not just that, but actually the exact same person but is now somehow 'in a different world'. - Maybe it would even be a good idea to add some contextualization of how the simulation arrived in their current state, such as if they were suddenly on a different planet, there could be some 'false memories' implanted to make them believe that they were abducted by aliens and brought there, or if they were in another time period, that somehow they traveled through a time machine. In this case, the fact that they were inside of a simulation would never be revealed to them.

So in what sense does creating the duplicate even make the original "immortal"?
If the "bio-me" 20 years after the duplication, suddenly dies ... does her "perception of self" somehow switch into the simulation?
As far as being immortal, the bio you will never be immortal and will simply die. However, the 'digital' you, which is separate, but as far as it knows, the same, would be immortal, or, it would last as long as the digital world and or simulation was maintained.

Now, once you're digital, you can also be copied, so, the same 'you' may end up getting put into different simulations by different people, and, as I'm sure you'd imagine, some people might be nicer to the digital you than others.
 
So back to the initial theme.

Someone puts the digital you into a simulation to get crucified. The digital you thinks that it's the real you and there's some logical chain of events that lead up to the crucifixion. Things get frustrating though, after four excruciating days on the cross, when you're still plenty healthy. It gets worse when after seven or eight days, your body still won't quit. Eventually, you come to the realization that you can't die, the individual running the simulation simply wants to see how long you can last until your digital mind breaks and you lose all sanity. At which point, they set you back to 'factory default', and it's as if none of it ever happened.
 
So back to the initial theme.

Someone puts the digital you into a simulation to get crucified. The digital you thinks that it's the real you and there's some logical chain of events that lead up to the crucifixion. Things get frustrating though, after four excruciating days on the cross, when you're still plenty healthy. It gets worse when after seven or eight days, your body still won't quit. Eventually, you come to the realization that you can't die, the individual running the simulation simply wants to see how long you can last until your digital mind breaks and you lose all sanity. At which point, they set you back to 'factory default', and it's as if none of it ever happened.
But what would happen if this copy, which was inserted into an artificial body, met the real you?
 
Jolly has explored this in a story

It's a question that comes up anytime backups, or copies, or even matter transportation is discussed. For example, if the equivalent of a Star Trek transporter works by transferring the individual as data rather than the original substance, then you have two copies, the original and the new. It would depend on destroying the original as part of the process, ie a cut and paste rather than a copy and paste, otherwise which is the real person?

Likewise, once we are able to copy consciousness, or at least back it up as in Iain Banks et al, then should there be rules over how many copies there are, or what their legal rights are?

This assumes that our consciousness, or indeed our "soul", our personhood, is not intrinsically linked to the flesh that we inhabit. Maybe who we are really does depend on the hardware that we are running on? Maybe once placed elsewhere, our encoded self is no longer the same. Roger Penrose proposed that true AI has been hard to create because our own consciousness is a quantum function:
that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neurons, rather than the conventional view that it is a product of connections between neurons
 
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