RuneScape Forum Archive | Cloning Minds

Feb

2017

Blasty

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Weyburns said :
if i could steal anyones mind to use I'd steal elon musks. he's got something in there that makes him a God

My response to that is that Elon Musk is a human just like anyone else, with a unique set of experiences that helped him go from a student studying at school to a successful entrepreneur.

The question I'd like to know the answer to is whether or not there is a way to help everyone gain at least a bit of an understanding of the kinds of experiences that help you do the things that a successful entrepreneur does.

I'd be pretty keen on having a chat and learning from Elon Musk too if I had the chance

Blasty

// @BlastytheBlue // Blasty#5167

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25-Oct-2016 07:38:16 - Last edited on 25-Oct-2016 13:08:01 by Blasty

Feb

2017

Blasty

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Morgan said :
Would I have ownership of my clone's mind? Would it be ethical to command your cloned mind to do your bidding? Would it be right?

Those are, I think, the main questions that came to mind when I read this. The cloned version of my mind wouldn't have a body, but would that make it any less a person than me?

Really interesting and thought-provoking topic.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Morgan

I think a lot of difficult questions come out of this topic when it comes to ethics. I've posed several ethical dilemmas to friends about decisions they would make given situations that are sometimes difficult to imagine.

The tricky thing about these difficult questions is that we'll need an answer at some point, and hopefully it'll be before they actually happen.

BMW had some interesting publicity recently about how their cars would solve the trolley problem, and the last statement I saw from them was that it was not BMW's responsibility to make decisions like that, but instead that they should program their cars to act according to what is acceptable in society.

Blasty

// @BlastytheBlue // Blasty#5167

| Co-owner of Mine Nation

25-Oct-2016 07:43:05 - Last edited on 26-Oct-2016 05:37:17 by Blasty

HeroicSnorro

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Glad I stumbled on this thread, as it directly links to a moral dilemma I have been mulling over for quite a while.

If you were to make a perfect copy of your own nervous system, you would assume it to be identical to what you are, thus you would logically attribute it consciousness. If we were to make such 'conscious-capable' constructs in the future, would terminating one of such things equal murder? After all, you are robbing it of its 'life'.

What constitutes as murder in such a situation? Killing someone of the same species? Terminating one's consciousness? Robbing someone's chance to interact with their environment permanently?

-=HeroicSnorro=-
Sometimes, less is more.

12-Dec-2016 04:36:52

Feb

2017

Blasty

Posts: 9,319 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

Hiii, sorry for the late reply! I've been away from RS for some time.

HeroicSnorro said :
If you were to make a perfect copy of your own nervous system, you would assume it to be identical to what you are, thus you would logically attribute it consciousness. If we were to make such 'conscious-capable' constructs in the future, would terminating one of such things equal murder? After all, you are robbing it of its 'life'.

What constitutes as murder in such a situation? Killing someone of the same species? Terminating one's consciousness? Robbing someone's chance to interact with their environment permanently?

-=HeroicSnorro=-

I think something interesting about these questions is that the way they are answered is very different in a world where it's easily done compared to one where it's not yet done.

One thing to consider is that murder and death have very grave implications. A life is not easy to create, and it can take 18 years before someone is considered an adult. The unfortunate loss of a life means that all the years someone spent growing up and learning are lost, and the impacts they could have made in the world with the rest of their life are gone forever.

If we assume that a supercomputer simulating consciousness is able to identically replicate a consciousness into another computer in a short amount of time, then that completely changes the above implications.

If a supercomputer clones its consciousness onto 100 other supercomputers, and then one of the supercomputers is turned off either intentionally or by accident, what would the wider consequences be? What kind of compensation would you expect from the person/entity responsible? Would it make sense to treat it as murder and give them a life sentence?

Now imagine that the 100 supercomputers were all carrying out the same operations as part of a distributed program to work out how to respond to a disaster situation.

Blasty

// @BlastytheBlue // Blasty#5167

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12-Apr-2017 19:01:54

HeroicSnorro

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In a world where personalities can be stored in a cloud I'd reckon there would be a significantly lower punishment placed on terminating someone's physical construct. After all, when you look at it from the broader point of view you could just create a new husk and reupload the saved personality in that case.

But hear me out here, I think something like this would still constitute for murder. I'd like to point out that twins are two (albeit imperfect) copies of each other, yet they are still two different persons when it comes down to habits and personality.

Now I know that identical twins are far from perfect copies from each other, but even though they essentially started out the same they do not share the same consciousness. If one twin dies, then that's the end for that person. This person will not continue to live on in some way through the living twin's consciousness.

What I'm getting at is the following: if you could recreate your personality after you died and give it a new husk it will seem apparent to the world that you as a person seemed to have survived, with all your personal characteristics and such. A mechanical twin of you will continue on your legacy, but it will be game over for the original you, the one in charge of the body you control right now.

And if, at some point, this perfect mechanical twin were to cease existing the exact same thing will happen again when you 'reboot' yourself in a new body. The consciousness you created at first will cease to exist and 'die', only to be replaced by another perfect copy. And so the cycle continues.

Of course, this would only hold true if they are unable to find a way to get the me-me (so to say) into another (mechanical) body. What do you guys think of this take on the discussion at hand?

-=HeroicSnorro=-
Sometimes, less is more.

14-Apr-2017 05:35:32

Feb

2017

Blasty

Posts: 9,319 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

HeroicSnorro said :
And if, at some point, this perfect mechanical twin were to cease existing the exact same thing will happen again when you 'reboot' yourself in a new body. The consciousness you created at first will cease to exist and 'die', only to be replaced by another perfect copy. And so the cycle continues.

Of course, this would only hold true if they are unable to find a way to get the me-me (so to say) into another (mechanical) body. What do you guys think of this take on the discussion at hand?

It seems like there's an implication in your post that a clone of someone's mind necessarily requires some kind of physical form like a human body, or something humanoid anyway. If we do treat that as a requirement, then it would be very different to a situation where consciousness can be completely represented in some virtual form. (consider virtual or augmented reality creating the illusion of a physical presence)

If we do treat a humanoid physical form as a requirement, then that could potentially lead to a situation where the mechanical humanoids get closer and closer to becoming visually indistinguishable from a person. (consider soft robotics and some pretty good hollywood make-up).

If the resources some time in the future allow it to be possible, there could be companies producing and selling these super realistic shells for what a good laptop costs today. I don't think it would be resource-efficient, but it would be hypothetically possible for another company to buy these human-like robots in the thousands to do jobs cheaper than humans, with each robot being given the exactly same initial state of consciousness when they begin working.

Even in a case like this with thousands of almost identical human-like robots that can be bought from a shop like a laptop, I can definitely see why it makes sense to be resistant to terminating it after it has been activated.

(continued in the next post)

Blasty

// @BlastytheBlue // Blasty#5167

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14-Apr-2017 15:04:34 - Last edited on 14-Apr-2017 15:06:33 by Blasty

Nov

2021

Weyburns

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Blasty said :
Weyburns said :
if i could steal anyones mind to use I'd steal elon musks. he's got something in there that makes him a God

My response to that is that Elon Musk is a human just like anyone else, with a unique set of experiences that helped him go from a student studying at school to a successful entrepreneur.

The question I'd like to know the answer to is whether or not there is a way to help everyone gain at least a bit of an understanding of the kinds of experiences that help you do the things that a successful entrepreneur does.

I'd be pretty keen on having a chat and learning from Elon Musk too if I had the chance

well of course, but there's something that makes him tick that allows him to take the same information and make some of the best decisions.

he's put aside (mostly) his selfishness and started working on a better future for us, and has done more than most governments have to push our technology.

Most rich people donate money to helpe people out, which I'm not trying to reduce how great of an act that can be, but most of these donations are just for tax purposes or to make people think they aren't horirble people and mostly don't actually care about people. Elon Musk literally came to america with almost nothing, created a company that sold for a fuck ton, then instead of buying or starting a new company to keep on making him rich, he bet all that money into companies to help advance humans and risk an amount of money most would kill 100x over for.

idk, im probably just ranting to the choir, but if we had more people like him we'd be better off in the world.

..

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14-Apr-2017 15:37:19

Feb

2017

Blasty

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There are potentially other ways a cloned mind could have some kind of presence though. It doesn't have to be a super realistic human-like robot, or even something physical. A clone of someone's mind could just be present in the form of a virtual avatar in virtual or augmented reality.

In these cases, the representations you interact with would essentially just be a computer program running on a computer. It could even run on cloud hardware and be livestreamed onto your devices.

Once you run that program, the entity is going to be there, on your computer, talking to you just like a real person. They're going to be able to express emotions just like a real person, and at first you'll probably feel like there's got to be a person controlling them, but there won't be. Looking back at the original post, my thoughts were about what you would do if you could emulate consciousness on your computer.

Recently I've been wondering what they would do.

Blasty

// @BlastytheBlue // Blasty#5167

| Co-owner of Mine Nation

14-Apr-2017 15:44:28 - Last edited on 14-Apr-2017 16:12:42 by Blasty

Feb

2017

Blasty

Posts: 9,319 Rune Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

Weyburns said :
there's something that makes him tick that allows him to take the same information and make some of the best decisions.

he's put aside (mostly) his selfishness and started working on a better future for us, and has done more than most governments have to push our technology.

Most rich people donate money to helpe people out, which I'm not trying to reduce how great of an act that can be, but most of these donations are just for tax purposes or to make people think they aren't horirble people and mostly don't actually care about people.

Aww, it sounds a bit sad to look at it that way

Weyburns said :
Elon Musk literally came to america with almost nothing, created a company that sold for a fuck ton, then instead of buying or starting a new company to keep on making him rich, he bet all that money into companies to help advance humans and risk an amount of money most would kill 100x over for.

idk, im probably just ranting to the choir, but if we had more people like him we'd be better off in the world.

Haha, I think it's funny that you used the phrase "ranting to the choir"

Isn't it strange that making people better off seems to be a controversial topic? Why is it the case that there are apparently people both for and against making the world a better place?

I'm hopeful for a future where improving the world becomes less controversial, and that you won't have to feel like you're ranting to the choir ;p

Blasty

// @BlastytheBlue // Blasty#5167

| Co-owner of Mine Nation

03-May-2017 03:09:12 - Last edited on 03-May-2017 04:09:04 by Blasty

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Cloning Minds