this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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chapotraphouse
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I have a confession.
I actually agree with a fundamental principle behind rationalist/basilisk discourse: a simulation of you, if it's accurate enough, is essentially you. If Roko's Basilisk created a simulation of me then she is me, and if it tortured her it's indistinguishable from me being tortured. She'll be "me" in every way that matters. Continuity of consciousness is unimportant.
It's just that Roko's Basilisk is based on flawed priors so I'm not really worried about Skynet torturing my Metaverse avatar in the future. The basilisk wouldn't bother, there's literally no point. It wouldn't care about me at all. That's a waste of resources.
Instead, I'm hopeful!
I believe, if we don't kill ourselves, we will be able to simulate the dead and bring everyone back. There isn't going to be some dumbass Judgement Day where a basilisk determines if we were good, there's no point, but instead every person who has ever lived will be simulated and no one will ever have to say goodbye ever again. Some people will need some rehabilitation to get over their traumas from life, some people will need reeducation to get over their own bullshit, but everyone will be saved.
Rationalist psychos can't imagine this because the idea of saving everyone is antithetical to their world-view. They're still operating on essentially capitalist priors where only the righteous/productive will be saved while the wicked/unproductive will be damned. It's the same logic behind making the poor starve so they work harder for food, except their imaginations have run wild with it.
And they will build the basilisk themselves if we let them.
i fundamentally disagree on continuity. as soon as there's two of you there's divergence.
I understand that point of view, but have a slightly more radical view in that divergence isn't totalizing or instantaneous. Every time you sleep your brain changes, but we wouldn't say that the person who wakes up is a different person than the one that went to sleep. You just changed a little bit.
Or a more personal example: when I got hit by a car I lost about three weeks of memory, I no longer had aphantasia, and had an identity crisis that eventually lead to me accepting myself as trans. Did I die when I was hit by that car? Did someone else wake up in my body? I don't think so.
There's certainly some point at which the amount of changes are great enough that you become someone else, but if there were two of me we'd still be the same person for a while.
My simulation doesn't have to be perfect continuity, just whatever minimum is good enough.
I'm a bit out of my depth here,but while this sounds like a nice idea and all,how would I get to experience that nice immortality myself? I understand your point about sleep,but at least there you have some continuity,that being that your consciousness exists within your body,whereas a digital copy has little to no continuity with what's here right now.
I mean,I get why it wouldn't matter to other people,they'd see no difference,but if I go lights out in the physical world and the copy lives on in some metaverse heaven,how would that have saved me personally? For all intents and purposes what would be out there would be reflection taking my place in the world after I'm gone. A good copy,but for me it's a copy nonetheless. I mean,it's great that some copy of me would be existing out there having fun,but it's not so great for me the human,being dead and all.
Okay, so this is predicated on the assumption that the self is fundamentally just data (memories, feelings, thoughts), and if a machine can simulate that data accurately enough then it will have have recreated that self even if the previous self is gone.
I believe worrying about if "I'm gone" if my data copy is alive is metaphysics. There is no "I" - there's only the data I'm made of.
Going further, because the data of the self is always being corrupted and lost, worrying about perfection is also metaphysics. I am I even if my data is incomplete, because our dataforms are always changing anyway just the the course of living.
Ok,then I guess I believe in a soul or something like it apparently
Because I care more about the continuity of my consciousness rather than a data archive existing after my expiration date
Don't get me wrong,it's good for future generations to have access to that knowledge,but I can't help but think that the spark within me that is alive right now would be gone
Hell,no way to know if either of us are wrong,and I do see your point,but I just think that unless you ensure the continuity of consciousness,what you're gonna get is a new being,very similar to me, but never really "me" so to speak
Also,not to sift through old struggle sessions,but I can't help but think a certain killer of Kissinger would not look favorably upon that take (or not,never interacted that much with the person)
I can't write a good post but yeah, the phenomenal character of being (like, existing, experiencing, etc) is more than mere data.
Your brain is not a computer, putting it in a robot body would be so far from the embodied experience of being you that I don't think even that would be "you".
So, what about a clone body?
Again, thats perhaps the limit. Clone body for the original brain. Cloning the whole thing is no longer you.
If you have a clone brain that has all the same memories as the original brain then is there a difference?
Yes. It's a copy. No longer any attachment to the world that I was born in.
It's like the Joyce line about the omphalos telephone line back to eve. The clone won't have any more attachments to the history of the world in the way that you or I, through our mothers, do.
It will be a separate existence, born anew, and no longer the "me" born xx years ago.
Btw putting your brain in a clone might well have incredibly weird phenomenological aspects that like, I don't know if I'd want to do.. the ideal future is one where medical technology allows for the repair and maintenance of the bodies we have.
Not weighing in on the actual debate here, but just pointing out that "there is no I - there is only the data I'm made of" is also definitely metaphysics.
Well my self is also embodied in my actual flesh. I am my scars and gut flora and muscles and genetic predispositions.
My self isn't even fully contained in my body! My self is also in my living space and my family and my friends and my coworkers and all my other social connections. I am I because of everything and everyone around me.
And I am also my historical and material context, what makes me "me" can't be separated from my class position within this epoch of capitalism.
But those, too, can be simulated as more data points. I really don't think there's anything that can't be represented as data.
Fully on board the ontic structural realism and extended cognition bus. Just pointing out that it absolutely is a metaphysical position, and that giving arguments for it is doing metaphysics.
Fair. Metaphysics actually seems to be a fuzzy term: it can mean studying the relationship between mind and matter i.e. what I'm doing (although really I'm saying that "mind" can not be separated from matter, they are the same thing) and speculation about scientifically unanswerable questions i.e. beyond physics. I only mean to say that there's nothing nonphyiscal or immaterial about the self. It can be contained and explained purely through materialism.
I agree entirely; philosophy of science is philosophy enough, to paraphrase Quine. If you haven't read it (and are interested in some pretty hard-core contemporary philosophical elucidation of this stuff), you might enjoy James Ladyman's book Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized.
I generally lean towards this myself.
If you take it further. Even if there is no afterlife, you just die and it's oblivion. Well over nearly infinite time, even in a universe where entropy dominates. Eventually, some tiny quantum tunneling event may create a new big bang. And a new universe. Over nearly infinite time, eventually you will be replicated in one of these universes nearly exactly. So there will never actually be oblivion.
But yeah just an interesting possibility if this holds true (which I'm not entirely sure).
Yeah, but if you don't know there is divergence you can't tell
What would these recreations of dead people, most of them long since departed, be based on? How would this differ from those ghoulish AI services that offer to train a chatbot on a deceased loved one's chat history
There's a few assumptions at play here.
We have to assume that it is possible to create a simulation that is advanced enough to actually be intelligent (we aren't anywhere close and these chatbots are just investor scams). In this assumption the simulation is not just a chatbot, it is at the very least a person.
And then we have to assume that it's possible to actually accurately simulate history; you could simulate the exact events of JFK's assassination and actually get a picture of Poppy pulling the trigger, as it really happened in real life.
These are assumptions, of course. Maybe artificially constructed minds can't ever be intelligent, maybe simulating history to that level of accuracy isn't possible, but if they both are possible I think you could simulate the dead and bring them back to life.
In the novel Accelerando by Charles Stross, a post-singularity intelligence revives various historical figures by studying their writings and creating iterative AIs until one of them reproduces the writings exactly. This means that all the "imperfect" versions are killed.
I'm pretty confident it's not. If a book burns to ash, you can't piece it back together.
There's a theory in quantum mechanics that information can never be destroyed, it merely changes forms. No human could put a burned book back together with their bare hands, obviously, but all the pieces are still there. Nothing was actually lost. It's just in a different form, and perhaps with the right techniques it can be put back together again.
In fact, scientists are successfully managing to read burned scrolls that were destroyed in the Pompeii eruption right now.
Information in the quantum physics context is not the same as information in the normal context. Things can be irretrievably forgotten or destroyed. For example, if you approach a stainless steel block sitting on a concrete pad in an isolated environment, how would you determine how long it's been there? There's no way to tell from simply observing that system. Or for a very different example, the cultural and linguistic practices of many Native American nations are entirely lost to history - much simply cannot refer be determined through the limited means available to us
Wouldn't (maybe the right word is "shouldn't") there be a difference between information and meaning?
You can reconstruct a book but will it mean the same thing after reconstruction?
Hell yeah I love this premise. I've always imagined it in a sci fi far future context, like humanity solves the economy and spreads out to the solar system and somebody gets the idea to do this as the ultimate utopian project, running back the entire history of the Earth as a simulation in order to pluck out people's consciousnesses right before their death and resurrect them to live in the immortal space future.
I highly recommend the game Soma if you haven't played it already. Don't want to spoil too much, but this whole line of conversation reminds me of that game.
Absolutely love that game.
Simon doesn't ever seem to really get what is happening, but I think he can be forgiven considering his situation.
"It's the same logic behind making the poor starve so they work harder for food, except their imaginations have run wild with it."
tangent, but it always bothers me that there are a lot of people out there who think the poor will only work if they're desperate, but the rich will only work if they're allowed to have their every whim fulfilled.
~~i think you meant to~~ ~~comment this to this post~~ ~~comrade~~
edit: i pulled a reddit folks sorry
My understanding is that this vegan/data scientist death cult is terrified of Roko's Basilisk, but they chose to become the Basilisk.
We should introduce them to Kim's Basilisk.
It's the same concept except the Basilisk will want you to have built global communism.
Given the powers of Juche necromancy, it's without question that it will in fact be you brought back to life.
~~for sure i agree, it's just this isn't the basilisk post i think you were trying to comment on this is the trans nonbinary vegan stabbing landlords with a katana post so the comment isn't hitting the right audience~~
Naw, these are just the thoughts I had when I learned about the Zizian cult and wanted to get them out there. I think it belongs in this thread 🤷♀️
Oh actually also I thought about how, in the web serial Worm, there's an immortal angel-machine called Ziz that simulates the future and past in her mind and uses that to kill and torture people and destroy cities and drive people insane and shit. Might be a coincidence??
i think you nailed it with the Worm connection, i searched it and this reddit poster who says they know ziz chose the name from Worm via "indirect personal communication" (whatever that means)
https://redlib.nohost.network/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1icege1/associates_of_exlesswronger_ziz_arrested_for/m9yyhw8/
Woah holy shit a real life zizbomb 👀
Didn't even know about the lesswrong connection but it makes perfect sense, since that's where I found out about Worm (after reading big yud's Harry Potter fic) and spent a decade hyperfrocused on "rationalist" amateur fiction and... so much fanfiction.
oh shit im sorry i didn't realize the ziz thing had a rationalist connection, i just saw the other post about the basilisk and thought that was what it was about
sorry for pulling a redditor on you comrade
oh my fucking god there's killings in the real world connected to Parahumans and bad Harry Potter fanfiction
Vriska-kinnie Charles Manson
You should watch the show Pantheon