It's not just the legal industry, it's the legislators. I used to be friends with a former state senator, who had a background in forensic accounting. She said they purposely made the bills harder to parse than necessary so it was hard to figure out what they were actually doing. Given enough time, people could do it but in practice there wasn't time before voting on the bill, and that was on purpose too. Of course some of it was to reward lobbyists or do other unpopular things, but she used to read bills from back to front because the back was where they put all the graft. An example I remember was $50K in taxpayer money going to a congressman's birthday party.
For a while I thought about trying to write software that would turn the obscure natural-language diffs in written bills into a readable diff, showing the laws before and after with highlighted changes. But she said they just got the bills as paper printouts which weren't always even up-to-date, so it might not have helped much. Maybe now they're online. And LLMs might make the project easier.
Presumably, there must be some point in time where the bill is made public in some form before going to a vote. If you could get the right tool in the hands of a journalist to turn whatever obscure format it’s in into something legible by an ordinary person there’s probably value there.
More of a digital copy scenario. The article says the process involves toxic chemicals that lock everything in place so the connectome can be examined. There's no known way to reverse the chemical process in the biological brain.
Not that I think this is anywhere close in actuality, but It's reminding me of MMAcevedo. (https://qntm.org/mmacevedo)
What server will I wake up on? Who is running the infrastructure? What will be asked of me to be allowed to continue to exist on that server? Given our current societal trends, I can't imagine I would enjoy any existence where a copy of me is spun back up.
And of course, my original thread of consciousness will still be ended, so this is some alternate copy of me. (Based on my view of the teletransportation paradox.)
The worse part is you can't know that your current life isn't one of those. Everything that you think of as perks of being alive could be part of the protocol to keep you cooperative.
Scott Aaronson wrote a bit about the following thought [0]. If copying a brain and simulating reality ala The Matrix is possible at all, then if you get your brain copied you live one biological live but your copies have an unbounded number of existences (millions? billions? trillions?)
So, if copying brains is possible, and you don't know which version of you you are, you might have odds of, say, 1 to 1 trillion to be living your first, biological live.
Which is to say, if copying brains is possible, you are likely to be running in a simulation already.
[0] there's multiple links and I can't find where I first read, but I found this one from 2024, https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7774 and uhh.. turns out the argument isn't from him personally (and he doesn't even believe on it), and is best presented here https://simulation-argument.com/ (though it's presented very differently so idk)
the important thing is for you to think you have the options, and that when you do them, you get the whole benefits and the simulation pays the whole cost. they could easily put precalculated memories in your address space and save the compute.
You will not wake up on any server. At best possible theoretical far future scenario better or worse copy of yours will. If you would survive such process, you yourself, the human instance that wrote that will be just looking at somebody else living their now-fully-digital (prison) life.
I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact. We are all gonna die, make inner peace with that (it isn't that hard, depends mostly on your ego) and enjoy rest of that short time here. If you seek immortality, do it either via exceptional deeds or via well-raised children, that's the best we have.
No force in the world is going to move both your mortal neurons with all synapses and electric charge between them that together form your personality into anything else, digital or not. Its like asking to transfer this cup of tea I hold right now into digital form. No, it can be copied to certain precision and that's it.
>I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact.
Some people think identity and the continuity of consciousness are based on information or computation, and not on specific physical matter or soul-like constructs, so for them a transfer of all relevant information would constitute a transfer of consciousness and identity. From this perspective (leaving aside questions of practicality) "you yourself looking from the biological body at somebody else in the computer" is exactly as valid as "you yourself looking from inside the computer at somebody else in the biological body" (and in fact the whole idea that you have to choose one or the other as "the real you" becomes moot on this view).
Of course it's a difficult metaphysical conundrum but to say that your view of things is "a simple fact" when the basic scientific materialist worldview of today points at least as much in the opposite direction is a bit overconfident.
If you were to slowly replace your brain with a cybernetic appliance, you could also have perfect continuity.
Not that it matters; we sleep and wake up, no one freaks out daily that they were unconscious for hours.
No reason to suspect waking up in 3030 after being unfrozen or in 6045 after being cybernetically reanimated would be any more disconcerting physiologically than an extended coma patients experience.
Your continuity is just as illusionous as your free will.
Anesthesia impairs the electrons transport in your brain, effectively ending that thread of consciousness, and, depending on the procedure, your brain can be altered by chemical/oxygen saturation changes. You wake up very subtly different, but most people are ok with that.
People have strokes or accidents and wake up missing memories and with changed bodies, but their families still call them by name.
You still being you is a matter of degree, not a binary, and different people are comfortable with different degrees of change.
I wouldn't call that degrees of change but degrees of damage. The thing is, past a certain degree of damage people stop having opinions, so how would you know the individual is comfortable with it?
In this case, the damage is total. The degrees end here, it reaches a binary state: from alive to dead. And then something else entirely says they are the dead person and they are alive.
The question is, does society accept a complete switcheroo? The individual died in the process, they cannot give an opinion on this. The copy is another entity. There are no degrees, it's all absolutes with this process.
> I wouldn't call that degrees of change but degrees of damage.
If you define any change from a previous state that loses some state as damage, then that's a tautology, not an argument.
> The thing is, past a certain degree of damage people stop having opinions, so how would you know the individual is comfortable with it?
We don't. I didn't say everyone was ok with every change. Some people aren't ok with being mildly inebriated, hence my "different strokes for different folks" take. Some people are comfortable losing a decade of memories, and some people would mourn a day lost.
> In this case, the damage is total. The degrees end here, it reaches a binary state: from alive to dead. And then something else entirely says they are the dead person and they are alive.
You're equivocating death with the end of the self. The core conversation here is whether or not that is true, and my opinion is that it is a manner of degree. This goes back to the earlier mention of the teletransportation paradox. Different people how different opinions on what constitutes the self.
> The question is, does society accept a complete switchero?
Society has generally been pragmatic and taken the approach of "if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's a duck".
> The individual died in the process, they cannot give an opinion on this. The copy is another entity. There are no degrees, it's all absolutes with this process.
Again, you're assuming your opinion on what constitutes an individual is the one and only interpretation, which isn't the case.
No. That's the definition of damage. "Change" doesn't imply loss. Damage does. With change you can add and/or subtract characteristics. Damage subtracts, it is a more precise term for the examples you gave. Using such a broad term as "change" makes it a euphemism for damage. A bit dishonest really.
>I didn't say everyone was ok with every change.
Neither did I.
>"different strokes for different folks" take.
Dead folks included? That's absurd. Also, who is comfortable losing a decade of memories? Is "comfort" a euphemism for "acceptance due to not having a choice on the matter"?
>Different people how (have) different opinions on what constitutes the self.
Because no one asks the dead guy! (tongue in cheek)
>You're equivocating
How can you be so sure? I have has much right to have an opinion on what constitutes the self as much as you do. Equivocating would imply that my opinion on what constitutes the self is based on an error, a misunderstanding. But you don't even know my opinion on that, we haven't got to it yet.
>Society has generally been
If that were the case then there would be no argument. All opinions opposed to accepting whatever comes out of this process as the same person are hereby dismissed due to tradition. Society has generally been such and such. It's settled then.
>Again, you're assuming
No, it is you who's assuming you know my opinion on this.
Glad you asked, here's my opinion:
Continuity. The ship of Theseus (with all planks and everything replaced) will always be the same ship. The copy of the ship of Theseus built right next to the original won't become the original ship of Theseus just because the original is destroyed.
The process destroys the original. This does not promote the copy to original status. It breaks continuity. If the original wasn't destroyed, the copied person and the original are easily distinguished by the people who witnessed the process since both cannot occupy the same space at the same time, one of them is definitely more to the left than the other, at least.
Now for the original and the copy, both will think they are the original if there's no information that satisfies them both about who's who. I would consider that lying to either one of them about their status is a serious crime.
But in this process, there's definitely a corpse left behind. Probably not complete since the copying is destructive to the brain. But the existence of a corpse will definitely convince the copy is the copy. The copy might stubbornly refuse to accept it as such, but that's on them and they are responsible for the consequences that stance might bring.
This proposed technology is messy. They don't even advertise a copy. Just a scan that could one day maybe used to make a "copy"(within questionable standards of what constitutes a copy in the future). That makes things easy for me, really. If it was a teletransportation paradox (without the killing part) then I'd have to accept that the original and the copy are the same, atom for atom, and now there's simply two of them, like a string of bytes on a computer, neither is the original or the copy and they are just the same individual that start diverge due to the impossibility of both occupying the same space at the same time, yada yada yada. But this isn't that, it's the cheap, oh so cheap knock off that only a sad few will settle for. If ever.
So no, I'm not equivocating death with the end of the self. This is just not a teletransportation paradox situation. The technology the article presents is not even close to make an atom for atom copy of a person. Furthermore, I figure if we ever reach that level of technology, we won't need to let the original die to make a copy, we could just cure whatever they are suffering from.
And finally, I would settle for a not so perfect copy of a brain scenario. Magic "Nanobots" replacing the neurons of a subject in vivo, gradually over the span of a few days/weeks/months. The new neurons can be non-biological, but must work identically to the original ones and obviously the connectome should be identical. The subject would be asked if they feel ok with this process regularly and the general part of the brain that is responsible for answering that question would be the last part to be replaced, otherwise it would be cheating wouldn't it? On completion, I would assume it's the same person and if it was me I would assume I'm the same person. This preserves continuity (of the self) to my personal satisfaction. Anything less than that is cryonics-level of bull**.
> No. That's the definition of damage. "Change" doesn't imply loss. Damage does. With change you can add and/or subtract characteristics. Damage subtracts, it is a more precise term for the examples you gave. Using such a broad term as "change" makes it a euphemism for damage. A bit dishonest really.
Again, you're missing the point. We can use the word damage and it doesn't change the argument here. A concussion is damage, but it doesn't mean you're someone else after you have one.
> Neither did I.
Not sure why you brought up people who don't have opinions then.
> Dead folks included?
If we are talking about reanimated consciousnesses of the dead, the yeah.
> Also, who is comfortable losing a decade of memories?
So you think people should be more accepting of losing ALL memories (dying) than losing 10 years of memories? I'm kinda losing the point you're trying to make here. Should we hold on as hard as possible, or accept obliteration. You seem to be saying both.
> How can you be so sure? I have has much right to have an opinion on what constitutes the self as much as you do.
By definition? You are stating your opinion as fact. Having an opinion is fine, but if your argument relies on your opinion being true then that's just circular reasoning.
> No, it is you who's assuming you know my opinion on this.
I'm not assuming it, I'm reading it. Maybe I misunderstood something, but I only have what you give me here.
> Continuity. The ship of Theseus (with all planks and everything replaced) will always be the...
If we use Theseus as the proxy for our convo:
I'm not saying the new ship "is the original ship" in some philosophical way. I'm saying, if it behaves the same and carries the same passengers, I don't see any reason to change the ship's name. If the original ship said "hey, I'm cool to be taken apart as long as you save my design and build me again later to the best of your ability," then I have no problem building the ship later and calling it "The ship of Theseus".
> So no, I'm not equivocating death with the end of the self.
So, what did you mean by "it" when you said "it reaches a binary state, from alive to dead"?
I highly recommend playing Frictonal Games' Soma from 2015. It is an extremely critical examination of this entire concept. Without spoiling the plot, a digitized consciousness doesn't imply just one, but an infinite number of copies, some just subjected to torture as they are essentially disposable.
All of the concepts SOMA explored were already familiar to me, but the experience of exploring the through the game was so much stronger than reading about them in a text book. Such a strong, lasting effect, I wish I could play it again for the first time.
Interesting! Which atoms do you consider to be your identity? That demonstrate someone is the "same" person for a lifetime?
And more importantly, why?
If our identity involves any abstraction whatsoever, any independence from particular material constituents (whatever dependency could possibly mean in a universe where particles of a type are indistinguishable (i.e. can appear in different contexts but do not have identities), then we are not substrate bound. We just require isomorphism.
(Any assumptions that there can only be one future "self", that isomorphic copies are neither inheritors or branches of our identity, require some clear explanation. To separate solid reasoning from our intuitions which are often strongly biased by a lack of prior experience.)
This feels like an odd cope, sure I might not be able to do anything about my mortality, but I still view the fact that I and other people are mortal as a damn tragedy (and often the gradual decline and non-dignified end of people's lives). If someone held a gun at my head and I knew that within a minute they're going to pull the trigger, I'd be rightfully quite disturbed. Now knowing that a metaphorical trigger will be pulled at a random time decades later doesn't make it any less disturbing. The only solace there is ignorance.
> do it either via exceptional deeds or via well-raised children
Both of those are worthy pursuits, but are also categorically different from you being here. So sure, you can and probably should say that living a good life is what people should do instead of losing sleep over their mortality - but that also moves the goal posts in a sense. You could have cut it short at the equivalent of "you'll never be immortal".
Most likely if you put a gun to his head and he'll beg for his life and stoop to do the most pathetic tasks to stay alive. It's not cope, more delusional arrogance.
Ahh, but you can't know if it's the actual you that wakes up or a perfect copy of you.
If a copy is indistinguishable enough from the original, you have to treat that copy as you would treat you.
Imagine the following experiment, you are on a room seeing 5 (or 20, or 100) live streams of as many perfect copies. You are informed that a livestream of yourself is being presented to the rest.
You are given the same questions and you all answer in the same way. Now they tell that out of all of you, only one is the original and that you can vote to proceed with some pretty terrible physical punishment to the simulations. Which way are you voting?
That doesn't mean you have to like the fact that you're dying. But make peace with the fact that you too, will die - it's one of the very few universal truths of life. I see so many people living like they are going to live forever - world would be a better place if more people realized that this isn't true, and your time on earth is limited.
I don't really think you're correct on that one. To begin with, what makes us whole is mostly memories and our subconcious.
What makes it obvious are illnesses like dementia and general decay of neural activity as we get older.
If we implant the same memories into something or someone that person/entity would become you, like waking up from a long nap. You might not feel the same, think the same, or act the same, but it would still feel like you. Going one step further and growing an exact clone can probably go even further than that.
they're also just you, but with a different derivative.
This is roughly inline with a many-worlds theorem where tiny variations can create many versions of you, this would be that but within the same universe.
Well, proving it would require you to end your life because the basis for the theorem is that there will always be a version of you that will not die.
I don't get the complete certainty with which people post this opinion.
You have no special access to data or insight that anyone else does, nor new evidence and the argument itself is always pretty specious (those patterns over there are different because like, they're not here).
> You will not wake up on any server ... I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact.
Did you even read my comment? In the last paragraph I discuss this and the teletransportation paradox, and how it will not actually be me but a copy, my thread of consciousness dies with me.
Please give me the courtesy of at least a full read before replying.
> I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact.
It's an element of faith, not fact. If you simulate a human body from quarks up, the physics won't know if it's running on base reality or in a computer.
Eh, it’s mostly for the trillionaires to keep their wealth after death. For everyone else, you will inevitably eventually end up driving a garbage truck. Don’t believe me? Your digital copy runs on a server doing important work! Company goes out of business. Assets get auctioned. Garbage truck.
Or another? The trust you set up ran out of money because all of the fees continued to increase and outpaced certain economic downturns. More and more people drew money off of your remaining static assets. You run out of money. Estate sale. Garbage truck.
Just remember, you’ll have all of time to end up there.
One of the many details of Altered Carbon (Netflix) that they got right. Digitized minds would become so numerous as to be considered little more than fancy trash.
Electrostatic Therapy is the key to immortality. An external energy source, charging capacity. Adenosine Triphosphate production freely available, Telomere Magnetic Shielding improvements.
Does the thread of you your consciousness end when you go to sleep?
Does the thread of someone elses consciousness ends when they experience grand mal seizure and thrir electrical brain activity goes wrong all at once and then resets?
How's "waking up" in the virtual different from waking up from grand mal seizure? (assuming that all relevant biochemical data of neurons was read correcly and their behavior is simulated correctly)
> What will be asked of me to be allowed to continue to exist on that server?
I can't imagine anything of value that you could offer at that point, when artificial intelligence has become so powerful. Any knowledge you have would have been outdated and any intellectual ability would have been surpassed already.
While the connections are important I think the individual cell behavior is also very important and that is driven by DNA. Brain cells last a lifetime and can modify their own DNA so each one ends up being unique. I do wonder how much of behavior/consciousness is encoded in the cells DNA versus the connections between the cells.
Do you have a citation for the notion they can modify their own DNA? I would fairly easily believe they can modify its expression, but I’m skeptical of the idea they can modify the sequence.
If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need. In terms of a modern ANN, it's the connections (axons) and the weights (transmitters/receptors in tandem).
That said, this article doesn't get to the point in the free section. How are they collecting the information? Slicing is inherently destructive. Someone's got to manufacture an entirely novel imaging modality. Perhaps they could scan millimeters ahead of the slice at a resolution high enough to image receptors. Not possible currently.
Take a gander at the OpenWorm project. It's a great example of how simple neuronal activity is (given details like the connections, number of receptors, and transmitter infrastructure). SOTA models of neuronal activity are simple enough for problem sets in undergraduate biomedical engineering programs.
Sure, to your point, we don't know. But the worm above (nematode) swims and seeks food when dropped into a physics engine.
My main point is that the scale of the human brain is well beyond the capabilities of modern imaging modalities, and it will likely remain so indefinitely. Fascicles we can image, individual axons we cannot. I guess, theoretically, we'll eventually be able to (but it's not relevant to us or any of our remote descendants).
> But the worm above (nematode) swims and seeks food when dropped into a physics engine.
Nematode worms have an oxytocin analogue called nematocin that is known to influence learning and social behaviors like mating. As far as I can find, the project doesn't account for this, or only minimally, but aims to in the future.
It's not surprising that immediate short-term behaviors like movement depend mostly on the faster signaling of the connectome. But since we know of other mechanisms that most definitely influence the connectome's behavior, and we know we don't account for those at the moment, it is not accurate to say that the connectome is "all the information you need".
I agree that mapping the connectome of the human brain is impractical to the point of impossibility. But even if we could, the resulting "circuit diagram" would not capture all the details needed to fully replicate human cognition. Aspects of it, sure. Maybe even enough to make it do useful tasks for EvilCorp LLC while being prodded with virtual sticks and carrots. But it would be incomplete.
I saw a putative 3D animation of a fly whose brain had been digitized and then run in a simulation. It buzzed around, sipped food it had found on the ground, even rubbed its forelegs together as flies do. A true Dixie Flyline. We live in strange times...
There's research on the translation process where cells are basically flash-frozen (to avoid water crystals), then imaged with cryoelectronmicroscopy / AFM etc. where they image the translation process (RNA to protein) in order to get snapshots and get a better understanding of how the folding proceeds and is aided.
If we can image sub-cellular features, what makes you believe we can't trace all the axons, dendrites and the synapses?
It seems more like a question of how to do it cost effectively at scale, not so much a question of "can we or not?".
> If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need. In terms of a modern ANN, it's the connections (axons) and the weights (transmitters/receptors in tandem).
This is exactly what I’m doubting, how can you be so sure?
Yeah but it wasn’t though. I found your answer unconvincing. I suppose “we don’t know” is an answer but that is nothing like “we have all the information we need”
Am I right in thinking that even if you had all of the connections and weights mapped out for a brain, the specifics of synaptic plasticity are still pretty poorly understood?
What is the state of the art in regards to how neurons learn over time? Do existing neuron models account for that? Being trapped, unable to learn anything, sounds terrible.
It is my understanding that for the animals where we have a simulation of the full connectome the behavior you see approximates the real behavior reasonably well, so maybe the jury is still out as to whether it is sufficient or not.
Surely all of behavior and consciousness are encoded in the connections between cells. I think the question you want to ask is how much those connections are determined by DNA.
Isn't consciousness more like what emerges out of the neurons firing? If I turn off my calculator, I can't input calculations into it and get an answer, but if I turn it on, the electricity running in the circuitry will react to the button presses, and I can say "the calculator is working".
So the consciousness is the "computing session", and if we can persist the state of the hardware before shutdown, then booting it back up will give us that consciousness.
Electricity costs more in Europe than the US, but so does gasoline, by about the same ratio. EVs in the US have lower running costs than internal combustion cars.
The EV industry in general is growing quite well in Europe. It's just that China is capturing the biggest share of that growth.
I just said that China is taking the biggest share of the market, and you counter with the price of a Volvo? Prices are the biggest advantage of the Chinese models. BYD for example has the Dolphin compact at £30K, Atto 3 SUV at £38K, and Seal sports car at £46K.[1]
BMW is coming on strong though, and gives us close equivalents to compare. The 2027 i3 is supposed to start at $53K according to Car and Driver,[2] and Edmunds agrees.[3] It's all-wheel drive with fast bidirectional charging, 440 miles EPA range, 463 horsepower, and plenty of high-tech features. By comparison, the gas-powered all-wheel drive 3-series starts at $50K, and has 255 horsepower.[4] The M340i has 386hp and starts at $62K, and if you want more power then you'll be up into the 70s or more.[5]
For SUVs you could compare their iX3, coming out this summer, with the gasoline-powered X3. The M50 X3 at 393hp costs $67K, and the iX3 at 463hp will start at about $60K, with a 400 mile EPA range.[7]
There are a couple good reasons for Tesla to do that, which don't apply to most carmakers.
One is that their stock is priced for extreme growth, so they need to be in businesses that can justify that. Cars are not that kind of business. They were for a while when Tesla was much smaller and the only decent EV maker, but not anymore. For any carmaker with a typical carmaker PE, cars can be a fine business.
Tesla's other problem is that Elon did serious damage to their brand, and they're not even getting the growth that other EV makers are getting.
It's priced for extreme growth cause that's the way the CEO and board want it to be. They don't want to make cars and sell them to consumers for a small profit cause that's not an extreme growth opportunity so the focus is elsewhere.
Whatever the reason, it wasn't because his characters were "openly maga and a homophobe and a transphobe," because they weren't. Bruce Lee movies and Texas Ranger didn't address those issues at all.
And in spite of his flaws, it's possible that he had some good qualities as well, or at least aspired to them. So maybe those other qualities were what he looked for in the characters he played.
Doesn't seem like he aspired all that hard, since instead of expressing empathy for people who weren't like him, he continued to be a bigot in nearly every aspect. But sure, if you were a white cis straight guy I'm sure he was perfectly kind.
Ironic that this article sounds like it was written by AI.
> The desperation is gone. In its place: epistemic certainty.
> And it told her, in prose that sounded like medicine and felt like prophecy, that she was right about everything.
> In Greek, medical terminology isn't borrowed, it's part of the native language.
> it doesn't land like pseudoscience. It lands like something Galen might have written.
> Strip out the hedging, and you have something that sounds like medicine but functions like prophecy.
> It wasn't her framing. It was the LLM's. She brought real pain, real conditions, real institutional failures. The LLM gift-wrapped them in the one genre guaranteed to get them dismissed.
> obvious what it does, and I think the game even tells you that they want to understands how the POI looks like in 3D.
But most people probably assumed the purpose was to improve the game, not to train delivery robots.
Or whatever else they end up doing with the data. If, as the article suggests, this ends up adding to the surveillance state by making geolocation of photos more accurate, then I really don't think that's what the players had in mind.
I'm pretty sure that by now almost everybody know that anything you put online is monetised. I'm also 100% sure they sell my location data as well. I just don't care. Not my responsibility to stop it.
Steve Yegge has been a dev for several decades with lead spots at Amazon and Google, has completely converted to using AI, wrote a book about it using it effectively for large production-ready projects, and still calls it vibe coding.
I don't think I'll ever adopt this term, I'm not a fan of it at all. I find myself saying "I was working with AI" and just leave it at that. It is a collaboration afterall.
For a while I thought about trying to write software that would turn the obscure natural-language diffs in written bills into a readable diff, showing the laws before and after with highlighted changes. But she said they just got the bills as paper printouts which weren't always even up-to-date, so it might not have helped much. Maybe now they're online. And LLMs might make the project easier.
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