_"For example, we've had a few discussions and while i've never met you in person and I'll need you to buy me dinner before we have any talk about you seeing my body I think its fair to say we both accept eachother as people and recognize a broad pattern of behavior."_

I recognize you as a person because it is natural for me to do so and interact in a way that is natural to me. I don't know anything about patterns of bahaviour that constitute you as a person.

_"I think that using genes as a defining characteristic of personhood fails to capture things which we might potentially want to include morally as "people" and which act in line with what we would want of that but dont use the same genes in order to do so."_

That is intended on my part... regardless if you think you can make a better definition that satisfies your requirements and doesn't use abstraction then I would like to hear it.

_"I differentiate that from being "human" deliberately as we might wish to retain your definition when talking about the species as we know it but in terms of moral recognition I see personhood as being a set of software, genes just the hardware. You need a certain spec of hardware to run the software, but that achieved it really doesnt matter."_

Softwere doesn't exists in a material sense. It is just a concept.

Also... will you tell me what you think is supposed to leave the "cradle"?

Tldr

lul same

@CronoSaturn soooo, if we are talking about trans-humanism, how do you get around the whole, "you can't transfer someones consciousness problem"? and how could you tell if you managed it? Anyway, i think a more interesting conversation to have is about the action of copying someones brain to begin with. imagine having a digital copy of Albert Eisenstein you could talk to

you wouldn't have to write a book to have your ideas move forward in time without you anymore

So basically create an AI that has a thought process similar to yours so when you die it will live on and people can engage with it and get a response that you would've said if you were there? @Scipio Americanus

Moral is totally linked with logics, the problem is that its hard to find the X and the Y of an equation if you dont have any values to start with, and this is why cultures are different.

@snakeeater ya basically. Can you imagine what this would do to culture? The morality debates would be horrible too, is this just a program? or should we consider it [the program] like a person? If the person is still alive, is it really a copy of the person? Or a new individual entirely? the amount of questions this prompts is quite extensive.

if you delete this program, is it murder?

what if you copy and paste it?

Reminds me of the plot of a Metal Gear video game, Peace Walker

@Scipio Americanus well, it doesn't have to be "a real person" as long as it can react to what people say in a way that mimics how the original person would react to things

yes, but what do we consider a person?

thats what the question revolves around

Indeed, and even if you consider the copycat to be a real person, are they the SAME person as the original?

hmmm, you know what, i would actually say no

the second you turn on the program, it just received a different experience

and is therefore, similar, but not quite the same

Well, in that video game I mentioned, the protagonist wrestles with that question, because the AI is a copy of his former ally who died, so from his perspective that person lives on via the AI

oh wow, and who said video games weren't art

He knows its an AI that was programmed to act like his ally, but he can't help but feel like its the same person

we can talk in the chat text channel if slow mode is making it hard for you to reply

thats kinda the beauty of it from a practical standpoint. However, now that you mention it, there is one thing i think that should be withheld: The AI should be forced to wait until loved ones are either gone or can handle it

uh no tbh

that's even more surreal, what if they made an AI to copy YOU while you're still alive, and the AI views you as a copy

Maybe the AI is a better friend to your friends then you are, like you snap at them or forget their birthday, but the AI is nicer, and your friends prefer it

thats messed up

@Aki
```what if a zygote gets modified```
I think beyond solving understood genetic defects, such as downs syndrome or xyy syndrome we should approach changing the germline until these processes are better understood. There are already frameworks available to tackle how regulating this space should work however and its unlikely this would be very different to how we approve pharmaceuticals for use.

Your quoting the spiel i wrote about predisposing people to hatred and disdain to those not sharing their lifestyle so thats likely why you feel it has little to do with the question you asked about influencing people to work harder for less money. Re that: the problem is aki that you can influence people without making them a slave, even in a mutually beneficial way. So for example alot of workplaces will offer their employees free tea and coffee which people obviously appreciate, thats considered a bit of a perk. At the same time though it allows people to work harder, longer and be happy about it and this is often explicitly the business case presented. For a given unit of work they are not paying as much as they otherwise might have to. I dont think anyone has an issue with this and we actually like workplaces that make that effort, alot of people will even take a lower salary to work at these places. Thats not a problem. Again the windfall / insurance thing was more to answer the other question but yes it would serve to tie people in who are unmodified to retain their interest in the success of society as a whole. The key thing aki is so long as these procedures are voluntary and people understand what they're signing up for i dont see slavery as being a thing and automation provides a strictly better means of doing so for those who'd be interested in that kind of economic model

```do you think the govt should put a muzzle on it or not?```
for zygotes before the technology is fully mature and we have a chance to fully explore the implications of that? Yes. This should be heavily regulated. For individuals choosing for themselves how they want to be modified? There should be significant oversight and auditing to ensure what is claimed is actually whats delivered but I dont feel I should stand in the way of what someone else wants to do with their body so i dont think there should be a massive regulatory wall there. For mandated modification this should be something we should be extremely hesitant of and only resort to where there is extreme consensus not only in the field but among the public and those who would be effected that this would be a beneficial thing.

```that won't do, an algorithm is a mathematical concept... it doesn't exist in the same way a brick does```
not to get into the weeds but we describe bricks in a similar way but i think a house illustrates the point better. You can build a house out of concrete, out of glass, out of bricks, out of plastic, out of combinations of all the above and other shit as well. A house doesnt have to have a set layout or only have a certain amount of rooms to be a house and it shares many features with an office, even has significant overlap and dual use but there are a set of activities and patterns that would still show that a building is an office, a house or both. Similarly we have a pretty solid conception of a bullet as a thing but without understanding that a bullet is intended to be fired from a gun at velocity in order to strike something a bullet doesnt really exist. That a bullet being fired and striking something at velocity is a relationship between things doesn't make it less real to me and I'd say the same is true of intelligence.

```I recognize you as a person... and interact in a way that is natural to me```
So when I say 'patterns of 'behavior' this is what I mean. theres a clear back and forth between us that you wouldnt have with say, a human who is comatose. You assume I'm human based on context and the rest of it and your right but it wouldnt make a difference to you most likely if this was all coming from a chatbot whereas despite knowing there are people with a physical body and human genes etc etc etc you also know that you cant have this discussion with a vegetable in the hospital. You treat me as a person despite the potential ambiguity yet despite knowing a human in a vegetative state is human you would not treat them as a person really unless they recovered.

```software doesnt exist in the material sense. It is just a concept.```
again thats untrue aki. the software is a pattern that be it encoded using magnetic material on a tape, grooves on a record, pits in silica or diode states amounts to the same interactions occurring. How your seeing the genome of the human species is functionally no different here as your not defining it as exactly the same sequence of chemicals in isolation. You dont recognize or give a shit about a skin cell in and of itself despite sharing your genes and you dont care and even prefer that your gf doesnt have the same exact sequence as you. If in this case we are to dismiss software, music, patterns etc as not being real how can you say that humans are any more real given this?

```what is supposed to leave the cradle```
the "algorithm" in this case.

@Scipio Americanus
```how do we get around the you cant transfer conciousness problem```
im not sold that you cant. way i see it we do anyway as braincells are replaced, lost, developed and we maintain a coherent whole. We already see the brains of those whove lost a limb and then who are given a prosthetic, especially if theres an electronic element to the functioning of that prosthetic to the peripheral nervous system in that neurons begin to as I've heard put, "fire and wire together" with the circuitry. thats not an immediate process but as you get those wetware links and the conscious mind starts to fully incorporate the extended system i dont see how the circuitry would be substantially different from how we feel about our neurons now. In such an extended system I think that the death of the biological brain would kinda be seen as partial brainloss however with the upside that its now not a permanent loss to your capability. How could you tell you've managed it? the same way that we can tell that people have accepted their prosthetics. they use it first like its something foreign, then a tool, an extension, and finally just as an ordinary part of them.

I am more hesitant as to how that would work as an interrupted process, say someone dies and you want to transfer their consciousness. It's a tricky question but I think pragmatically it should be accepted as a thing. I dont see a functional difference here in being knocked out or being asleep and while i have some nitpicks with this view we all pretty much see ourselves as the same person after these events. I dont know if its enough for me to step into the teleporter or put a bullet in my brain prior to being uploaded but if i got hit by a truck and my fam wanted to call the resultant upload me I'd have no problems

copying I think is kinda like a fork as you address later in that at the moment of copying you are "the same person twice" but after that moment you are different, but highly similar people. My view is this is pretty similar to how we go through life anyway as the same point could be raised about you and the "you" one moment ago and you can kinda understand the iterations of yourself as more of a "family" per se than a single distinct thing unchanging. I understand that its not functionally very different in practice however and its a pretty wild train of thought so its not the version ive been using in the discussion, though it does inform it and stay consistent more or less.

for me i would consider the program a person and copies as distinct, though related people. The conversation gets real tricky if you want to start going down the road of things like distributed services and syncing that are conventional in IT world but completely alien to how we think about thought currently.
deleting the program would be murder.
copy and pasting im gonna say no because its retained in memory. speculation but I'd think it would likely be seen as being knocked out
obviously i dont think we're at the level yet where even the most sophisticated programs would be considered people but i think we will reach that point

@snakeeater funny thing is after you set up the engine people in the field don't talk about "programming" an AI or machine learning engine, they talk about training it and the internal function of these kinds of programs is not like a script in that its fairly easy to unpack and go line by line and see what its doing and how its accomplishing their function. Neural nets as their name implies function remarkably similar to the human brain in doing things in terms of relations. @Just a weirdo makes a pertinent observation when it comes to how most people understand maths but AI leans heavily on some interesting ideas coming from maths which try to formally examine how to solve equations where the values can be tested but aren't initially known

@CronoSaturn _"Your quoting the spiel i wrote about predisposing people to hatred and disdain to those not sharing their lifestyle so thats likely why you feel it has little to do with the question you asked about influencing people to work harder for less money."­­­­­­_

Ohhh... I see there was a misunderstanding here. I was trying to describe the situation when they show hatered and distain for other workers in the office that do not share their dedication... as a way of creating a peer pressure that enforces the genetic predispositions... and you thought that the hatered and disdain was suposed to be aimed at the non-workers.

Regardless... I think this strain of the conversation is at its end. You don't seem to find anything wrong with the proceder itself (you only have qualms about how it is supposed to be implemented) and I do. In other words we differ on a moral level... and I can't really persuade you in this case.

_"not to get into the weeds but we describe bricks in a similar way but i think a house illustrates the point better. You can build a house out of concrete, out of glass, out of bricks, out of plastic, out of combinations of all the above and other shit as well. A house doesnt have to have a set layout or only have a certain amount of rooms to be a house and it shares many features with an office, even has significant overlap and dual use but there are a set of activities and patterns that would still show that a building is an office, a house or both....."_

_"So when I say 'patterns of 'behavior' this is what I mean. theres a clear back and forth between us that you wouldnt have with say, a human who is comatose... "_

In other words you view things threw their usage. That however only matters in a social context and is irrelevant when we try to ascertain a nature of things. You only describe a usage but not the object itself.

_"again thats untrue aki. the software is a pattern that be it encoded using magnetic material on a tape, grooves on a record, pits in silica or diode states amounts to the same interactions occurring."_

That is very true. Magnetic material on a tape surely exists, groves on record exist and so do pits in silica... but those things do not constitute a softwere. Softwere is a concept that allows humans to understand what is happening with material objects but it in itself doesn't consitute an object. It is an abstract my dear crono. It can not be separated from the material object it resides on.

_" How your seeing the genome of the human species is functionally no different here as your not defining it as exactly the same sequence of chemicals in isolation. You dont recognize or give a shit about a skin cell in and of itself despite sharing your genes and you dont care and even prefer that your gf doesnt have the same exact sequence as you. "_

Hmmm.. ok I will give you that my definitions describes more of a procedure to obtain human then the human itself. Regardless at the end we still obtain a human as an object. It is not an equivalent to what you are trying to do here~

_"If in this case we are to dismiss software, music, patterns etc as not being real how can you say that humans are any more real given this?"_

Well good question... how can you? I define humans as an object with certain properties. How about you?

_"the "algorithm" in this case."­_

The algorithm can not be separated from the objects it resides on. It can only be copied. However a copy is just another structure of atoms that is arranged in the equivalent way.

_"im not sold that you cant. way i see it we do anyway as braincells are replaced, lost, developed and we maintain a coherent whole. We already see the brains of those whove lost a limb and then who are given a prosthetic, especially if theres an electronic element to the functioning of that prosthetic to the peripheral nervous system in that neurons begin to as I've heard put, "fire and wire together" with the circuitry. thats not an immediate process but as you get those wetware links and the conscious mind starts to fully incorporate the extended system i dont see how the circuitry would be substantially different from how we feel about our neurons now. In such an extended system I think that the death of the biological brain would kinda be seen as partial brainloss however with the upside that its now not a permanent loss to your capability. How could you tell you've managed it? the same way that we can tell that people have accepted their prosthetics. they use it first like its something foreign, then a tool, an extension, and finally just as an ordinary part of them. "_

What if the brain was a connection between two different neural networks it was interacting with. Would you then say that the person has multipled or that two different people were created?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dwsYWF7TXI