https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/07/crimes-against-transhumanity.html#more

Interesting comment section, collective trying to figure out how much law must change IF something like mind uploading/forking and similar ideas turned out to be realizable reality ...

In my opinion, there is only one thing that needs to be changed.

Define a human, a person, a citizen worthy of rights and protection under law by their mind and not by their body. By the personality, by the person, by the pattern that defines a human mind. On any substrate, in any context. A person is not a body, a person is not meat, a person is not a face. A person is a mass of information which has the capacity to, when operating, fulfill the function of a human being, which is to think, to reason, to feel, to emote, to consider, to experience.

Make that one definition, and all else becomes moot.

A viable copy of an organic mind? That is a person, with full rights. You can't exploit it.

A thousand copies of a single organic mind? All people, with full rights under law.

The computational offpring of two uploaded minds that has become it's own person? Can it think? Can it experience? Can it perform the functions of a human mind? It is human, with all rights under law.

And so on.

This issue is not complicated at all. The problem, as always, is the evil in humanity that desires slaves and enslavement, the evil that wants to own and possess and control, the evil that tries to confuse and complicate simple matters, that tries to - lie - in order to gain at the expense of others. The problem of transhuman law is simple. The problem of greedy, selfish humans is the complicated and difficult part.

7754306
If people were to upload their minds to robot bodies tomorrow: It's likely that the courts in the United States, and in many other countries, would define them as human in the eyes of the law.

7754306

A thousand copies of a single organic mind? All people, with full rights under law.

That could be a problem! What's to stop me from making a million copies of myself, putting them into swing states within the Unites States, and then deciding who the next President of the United States will be?

7900004
If the technology existed to actually make possible a million fully living instances of a single, specific, identical, and completely human mind existing - in any form, on any substrate imaginable - there would be no Presidents, no nations, and no United States. Such notions would be seen as quaint as living in caves and spearing mammoths seem now.

There would only be an artificial superintelligence above all, vastly exceeding the collective consciousness of humanity as a whole, a godlike machine consciousness, governing the world - and very likely multiple other planets. The world would look nothing like it does today, and much of it would be converted into computronium or whatever functions in a similar way. If a million copies of one person can exist, then something vastly greater must also exist behind that, as a natural byproduct of a technology able to store and run a million copies of one person.

The last thing any being - 'human' would likely be a meaningless term in such an age - would be fussing over is politics, which, as we understand the term, would no long exist. There would be no nations, not even loyalty to given planets. It would already be a multiplanet civilization where travel was as easy as transmitting a mind from one world to another, and where planets were resources to create more computational matter.

If you are going to imagine a vastly advanced technology, you are required to imagine the impact of that technology.

That is a writing Protip, by the way. Shitty sci-fi fails to follow through with this, while decent science fiction, speculative SF, always does this.

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so, because we back to theme of mind copying/cloning .. I have read some comments under "AI and the quest for immortality - are we defeating death? | DW Documentary" yt video (without watching video itself o.O) and spend some time thinking, even if topic was done to death (???) here ....

I tried to imagine how exactly one can scan brain at required resolution, come up with deeply frozen brain so thermal movement is minimized, but then it all run into Heizenberg's problem - you can't accurately detect position/energy of subatomic or even densily packed atomic objects w/o altering their state!

So, on further thinking, even placing nanowire along firing synapce will alter its firing simply because detection must draw tiny bit of energy for working by electromagnetic fields ...

So, you can't read state of neuron without altering it. May be one can workaround this problem by recharging part of cell after reading, like in DRAM memory, or actually in flash memory, but physics of such process does not look like perfectly determenistic ... brain is a mess, and abuses its messiness fully ....

As aside, probably famous Star Trek transporter will face "simple" problem of matterless directing of mass-turned-into-radiation so it will nicely fly away without annihilating chaotically not yet converted mass ... and so in receiving place "something" must insta stop/downconvert traveling energy back into matter ... so, this nicely avoid copy problem (you are fundamentally turned into light, fully) , just introduced god-level physics manipulation ? :)

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I don't have reason to think that the essence of a brain is in any aspect of energy in the brain. It's isn't in the electrical potential of any given set of neurons. It isn't in the neurons themselves - they are just little relays, transmitting signals.

It's in the connectome. It's in the pattern of how the neurons are connected - wired, physically - to each other. We don't need to know what the quantum state of any part of the brain is. Penrose talking about quantum 'microtubules' is talking out of his ass - that is not what microtubules are for, or even what function they serve in all living cells. They are scaffolding - beams, that hold the cell's shape, walkways for transport molecules, cables to pull and push cytoplasm with. They do no computation.

All you need to copy a brain is to copy the pattern of how the neurons physically touch each other. Nothing else matters.

Why do I think that? Because, with nothing more than a random pile of silver microwires, you can build a computational engine - a computer, a brain. They organize themselves thanks to electromagnetic fields, and the strength of connections is maintained by electricity binding certain paths together. They start out completely random - like 'pick-up-sticks' and then self organize when you pump pulses of electricity through the pile from discrete input and output connections. The result works like any computer at all.

Only the pattern of connections matter. Nothing else.

No weird quantum effects. No magic. Neurons don't matter beyond being signal relays, because the body uses cells, and to make a brain they needed cells capable of both electricity and chemical inputs and outputs. This is biology trying to duplicate microscopic silver hairs. But the result is the same: computation.

The 'Transporter Problem'? Bullshit. As long as a Trek transporter can reproduce a brain, alive, with all the connections intact, the physical touching of dendrites to neurons, the wiring diagram, then that is the person. It doesn't matter one whit what the quantum spins are, or whether or not the atoms or even molecules are identical. They can be wildly different. None of that matters. Only the physical - not chemical, not electrical - connections matter.

Brains don't just sit there. Neurons don't just sit there. Neurons constantly reach out dendrite arms to touch other neurons as needed - and the pull neurons back, too.

For too long, too many people - who never studied cells - assumed that brains were just static machines that sent electrochemical signals, and did some kind of mysterious complex processing in the neurons. Not so. Brains are like a vast sea of octopuses that constantly squirm around touching and tapping and pulling away from each other, sending signals by touch. And that touch includes chemical squirts to add emphasis, or dull the touch, or whatever, sure. But ultimately it's all tippy-tap-tap in some microscopic version of Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller playing with their fingers in each other's palms to communicate. It isn't like a solid-state CPU at all. It's squids feeling each other up. Our thoughts are made of squidy cells feeling each other up. Physically. Mechanically. The electricity is just there so a tippy-tap at one end of a cell will get to the end of a dendrite that may be very far away (in cell terms) really quickly. That's it.

The pattern that is a person is the current state of all those tentacles, on all of those squids, currently in mid-touch or not touching. That is where all the self, dreams, memories, and thoughts are. Duplicate that, and you now have two people, exactly the same of mind, whatever the composition.

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well, isn't exactly figuring out what connects to that in live brain (or even in dead, frozen brain - you can't slice it w/o ruining some connections, can you?) a bit of The Problem? something must measure distances very fast and very accurate ... thus not adding or substracting too much energy into specific region during measurements ...

IIRC those cryogenically cooled sensors still average a lot signals over time ...?

To be honest I have no idea how such split personality will work? Will it feels like you at two places at once, seeing two images and thinking two lines of thought?

I still think problem a bit like Maxwell's daemon - it only lately was proven "just" measuring/computing by itself takes energy at fundamental level. Sure, regions of cells are bigger than atoms - but they still move relatively and in absence of some absolute coordinate system (delivered by ... microwaves, wires? but later will bend, no?) how you map them?

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also, around 500 comments under this video

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LwBVR68z-fg

including this one

@Woodledude
1 day ago
 @satgurs  Well, there are safety concerns with both of those things, for different reasons.

The internet? You could upload your mind somewhere else, in theory. The infrastructure might not exist to actually run your mind elsewhere, at least with the first few people, but eventually it would. On top of that, it could be overwhelming for the digital mind to have that kind of access while they're still adjusting.

On the other hand, keep in mind that game has to be specifically designed for the purpose. Not only do you have to put in code to simulate sensations, physics and kinematics that aren't too disorienting for a freshly disembodied human mind, you also have to make the environment strictly safe and non-hostile - VR has already shown us the amplifying effect immersion has for horror. Actually being in the game is pretty damn immersed, and even very cute enemies with extremely limited AI could make the game feel like a claustrophobic death trap, considering you don't get to stop playing.

So yes, ideally a purpose-made game of a very specific kind. Doing this kind of thing humanely would be important and definitely not trivial.