Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
Let me see if I understand:
First you have your original body.
Next you hook it up to a computer so you can see through its senses and your own.
The computer makes a copy that is seeing through your eyes.
Finally the original body is destroyed.
The computer mind remains, recalling all of the original memories without any blips.I don't consider preserving that continuity of experience important enough to jump through those hoops. There's no practical difference from traditional uploading and, without a soul, no metaphysical one. I can see why people would do it psychologically, though.
I thought about this problem, last night, and I realized you were right and I was making a mistake in my assessment.
Here is what would actually happen:
If you "suspend" the person's program - shut it down and put it into a sleep state - the individual does NOT lose the subjective experience of self. WE, the observer lose that experience of the person. PRESTO! You found the solution. Our perception of self is not dependent upon contiguous operation. It is only dependent upon the set of our memories, synaptic associations, and other neuronal processes. As long as all of that information is preserved, the perception of self is still maintained. What would happen if we used your "suspend state" idea is this: the person would shut down and lose ALL perception of self. However, when brought back online, time would have not passed for the person so they would only perceive reality as just an instantaneous "blip". In other words, if our digital selves "hibernated" we would not perceive a loss in time, at all...it would be an instant to our perceptions with no ability to discern what time happened when we were dead and when we were alive. So we COULD take people offline, compress their "personhood" file, store it, and bring others online. Just as you suggested.
Now, back to what you were talking about in your very last post. Yes, that's essentially how you digitize someone. You slowly interface electronics with their brain so that they gradually transfer all of their consciousness into a digital form. Part of our consciousness would be biological and part of it completely digital. As we make the transition, we would eventually be all digital. No lapse in consciousness and no loss of self.
Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
I don't think we can really have a discussion about this. My expertise in the subject are nonexistent and what you're proposing contradicts everything I know about physics, logic, and computing. There is absolutely no way for me to come to a conclusion on the subject.
If we can design a computer (which we are working on, now), that can process and store more information than the universe itself currently has in it, then it violates current physics. Nothing should exist in this universe that can have or process more information than currently exists in this universe, right? Not really. How the computing works is creating information from information. Algorithms that create more information than the items that create the information itself.
For example, a bit can read as multiple forms: off or on.
If you arrange a bunch of off and on bits to be read in a certain manner, you can create more information than those off or on bits are providing. Just having 2 bits provides us with twice as much information as they individually represent. We now can arrange those two bits as off off, off on, on on, or on off. That's four states wheraas, individually, they can only produce two states. We can design algorithms to read those states (algorithms that, by themselves, still do not violate our set of physics...they are innocent). Now expand those states to 4 different states. Now with only 2 qbits, we can get 16 different states out of it.
We can increase the complexity of information we can read from this computer by sequencing the states of bits, as well. Still, the algorithms we create to read this information are still within our set of physics. Back to the 2 bits: if we have a sequence of "off, on" followed by "off, off", we can set an instruction to execute...or anything to happen based off of that sequence. If we expand the complexity of such a system enough, since it grows geometrically (2 ^n), we will eventually create a system capable of generating more information than the universe itself contains. We are still using finite amounts of matter to do so. The algorithms used to read this information are also made out of matter. We are already working on computer programs (game engines) that literally create environments down to the atom (literally (did I mention "literally", yet?)). They are not running on hardware that is much more advanced than what we have now right in front of our faces (I don't think you have an ultra-gaming machine). In just a few years, we will be creating massive massive games but we will not be violating any physics laws to do so (think of entire planets being created down to the atom).
The 300 q-bit computer is supposed to be equivalent to us turning every single atom in the universe into an "on-off" switch. That's the classical computing method. Since we obviously canNOT turn every piece of matter in the universe into a "clunk-clunk" computer, we must find other ways...such as the near infinite states that a single particle can have (I know it isn't an actual state...but to be more clear, I am referring to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the expansion of his work: particles travel an almost infinite number of paths from point A to point B...measuring those paths and using them can increase our compting power. We see a collapse of that travel...not all the states. We can partially measure those states and that where we get our qbits. I read about an 8 state qbit trying to be made. That's twice as complex as the 4 state qbits we use, now. Imagine how much more craptacular that will be ...) . The more states we can read from that individual particle, the more complex our computers become WITHOUT having to get more matter to "be" in one of two states. (Does that make sense?) So as you can see, the exponential change in computing power occurs because we do not have to only use two states. Because of this, you can also assign your "CPU" multiple threads to execute SIMULTANEOUSLY. HOLY SHIT BALLS is all I have to say about that. Currently, we use a messy multi-core setup with threading to ALMOST accomplish the same thing. With quantum computing, the CPU can literally solve multiple math problems at once. It is physically impossible for a traditional "clunk-clunk" to do that.
But this thread is not about the computer. We assume we have already perfected our quantum computers.