Phatose on 22/9/2012 at 23:44

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I reject the notion that the atoms/molecules themselves are important. Any brain is swapping out the actual particles that make up any cell constantly. If not being composed of the same particles you were composed of is death, we're all dying constantly.

The pattern is what's important, and that's all you need to transmit.


And yeah, GEB and TMI are great books. Been thinking of picking up the Cyberiad at some point. Does Smullyan have any books dedicated to the mind? His entry in TMI was the most interesting.

demagogue on 23/9/2012 at 05:34

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I think about it like this. You could think of neuron columns (arguably the smallest acting unit doing actual processing work, around 1K to 10K neurons) acting like billions of parallel processors. If you saw a signal coming into a column, you could imagine pulling out the column and replacing it with an exact copy just before the signal arrives (but keeping the rest of the brain the same), then that new column gets the signal and processes it the exact same, so the brain wouldn't notice the difference.

If you can swallow that, then replication-style transport is really not much more than that on a massive scale. You're stopping billions or trillions of signals in mid-tracks, replacing their destination processors with exact copies, then you start the signals up again on their merry way. The signals themselves are never in a position to know that anything has been changed. It's as if they'd kept going on like the original brain as far as they're concerned.

Edit: After doing some Dark Mod coding, I saw this is how loading a saved game works. When you save a game, it takes a snapshot of *all* signals for all game systems, and when you reload, it resets all those signals to those values and lets them go. We still think IMO it's the same game we already played through up to this point, not a *new* player in a new world. Sounds like teleportion is the same kind of thing.

demagogue on 23/9/2012 at 06:26

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For the record, that question is a variation of the (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus) Ship of Theseus problem ... where you replace a ship board by board, and ask when (if ever) does it stop being the old ship and start being a new ship (& what if you're using the old boards to make a "new" ship). It's a classic philosophical problem and I'm not sure if there's a definitive answer, but a different answer depending on your perspective.

1) If you're talking about the sum of pieces, it's a new thing when you replace the first board.
2) If you're talking about the embodied architecture, then it's the same ship throughout.
3) Any other answer and you have to bring in "human common sense", which isn't about the ship anymore, but on how humans identify & categorize things. But people may disagree on this (common sense can be very sensitive to culture), and it'd be hard to find a standard they'd all have to agree on.

Vasquez on 23/9/2012 at 06:49

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I don't disagree with dema, but when it comes to re-animating a dead thing, I'm sure even the science agrees there's more to it than jump-starting neurons. Under the question of teleporting there's a fundamental question: is there something "more" to a living thing than the material it's made of? And could it be teleported along with the tangible stuff, or would it die along the way or be left behind, get lost in space-time or whatever?

I've read a short story, can't remember who wrote it (Robert Sheckley, maybe?) and I don't even remember for sure whether it was about teleportation or just faster-than-light traveling. Anyway, the idea was that the passengers had to be put to sleep/hibernation before the trip, because otherwise they would go insane. In the story one of the passengers doesn't go to sleep (can't remember why), and finds out that despite the ship itself travels superfast across [folded?] space, the human mind takes "the long route" and experiences hundreds of years of space travel, all alone and isolated from everything. It was very creepy story, but also very interesting idea.

demagogue on 23/9/2012 at 07:18

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That reminds me of one of the stories on The Minds Eye where a group of scientists work out a map of Einstein's brain and reactivate it one computation at a time... With the added wrinkle it wasn't even in neurons. They just computed the results on paper. It takes 100s of years to register a few seconds of his experience, so he "experiences" the world in incredible slow motion. But otherwise he's thinking in real-time for himself, noticing things around him and commenting on them. That is, we can compute what he would be noticing & commenting on. And they could even have a slow "conversation" with him, asking him questions and letting him "think" about them and "answer" them.

Edit: Another fun thing regarding time: There's an experiment where they had a LCD screen that had numbers flipping by so fast it was an unreadable blur, but when a person is dropped from a bungee cord, for a few split seconds time slows enough in their experience that they can see the number-flipping slowing down, the blurring stops & they can see the numbers actually ticking off and read them. It's a good empirical result because the subject can either read the numbers or they can't. Experienced time is a construction, and there are times (when adrenaline starts running) when we do actually see the world move by in slow motion.

Actually there was some debate. Some interpreted it as experienced time slowing down. Other interpreted it as still seeing real-time going by at its normal rate, but at a finer level of grain than usual. Another way to think about it is "relativity" -- there is no fact of the matter what's the "real" progress of time. The experience of time is nothing more or less than experience of events clicking by relative to each other. It's all always animated in a blur ~30-40Hz (in experienced time!) as far as the experience is concerned. "Time" is just how much information of change out there in the world (in real-world time) you can squeeze in that frame. So (if that's right) you could even slow-teleport somebody particle by particle and they'd still experience events in a normal flow of time (from their perspective, e.g., if they were talking to themselves in their mind), just abruptly fast-fowarded scene going on around them.