1074: "Moon Landing"

[Max™]

Ship of Theseus, etc.

[webgrunt]

That all depends on how you answer "What makes you, you?"

For a lot of people the answer is: "I think therefore I Am."

Exactly. If something else is doing their thinking, then they aren't.

[J Thomas]

That all depends on how you answer "What makes you, you?"

For a lot of people the answer is: "I think therefore I Am."

Exactly. If something else is doing their thinking, then they aren't.

I don't have that answered.

If it's your memories and your kind of thinking, can the one doing it tell it isn't you? Would they care?

You're the one who experiences what you experience. Are you your thoughts, or are you the one your thoughts happen to? If you are your thoughts then it hardly matters what kind of contraption thinks them. But if you are a soul that experiences things, in a different contraption it might not be the same soul. Or since we're talking about souls, maybe it would be. How would anybody tell?

I just don't have an answer. I'm not sure I even have the right questions.

[nitePhyyre]

If something else is doing their thinking, then they aren't.

By saying this you are presupposing your answer in the question.

Perhaps you should answer the question directly: "What makes you, you?"

[SlyReaper]

If something else is doing their thinking, then they aren't.

By saying this you are presupposing your answer in the question.

Perhaps you should answer the question directly: "What makes you, you?"

Your earlobes. If a synthetic construct doesn't have perfect duplicates of your earlobes, then it's not you.

[nitePhyyre]

If something else is doing their thinking, then they aren't.

By saying this you are presupposing your answer in the question.

Perhaps you should answer the question directly: "What makes you, you?"

Your earlobes. If a synthetic construct doesn't have perfect duplicates of your earlobes, then it's not you.

So does that mean you become a new person when you pierce your ears?

Clean criminal record, here I come!

[SlyReaper]

If something else is doing their thinking, then they aren't.

By saying this you are presupposing your answer in the question.

Perhaps you should answer the question directly: "What makes you, you?"

Your earlobes. If a synthetic construct doesn't have perfect duplicates of your earlobes, then it's not you.

So does that mean you become a new person when you pierce your ears?

Clean criminal record, here I come!

Aye. Pretty handy isn't it.

[Wolfe2]

I think this might be relevant to the comic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxOGnEx0N-A

[ctsketch]

If something else is doing their thinking, then they aren't.

By saying this you are presupposing your answer in the question.

Perhaps you should answer the question directly: "What makes you, you?"

Your earlobes. If a synthetic construct doesn't have perfect duplicates of your earlobes, then it's not you.

So does that mean you become a new person when you pierce your ears?

Clean criminal record, here I come!

Aye. Pretty handy isn't it.

Actually it's pretty.....eerie!.... okay bad pun...

[Whizbang]

Ok, so a direct transplant of your "mind" to a computer isn't you anymore, according to some, right? But what if it isn't direct? You get a synthetic heart then later a synthetic liver. Then later still synthetic eyes. Then you get nanobots to increase synaptics. Then you get some sort of synthetic wiring inside your living brain to allow you to control robotics/electronics directly with your thoughts. Each year you get synthetic brain cells injected/grown inside your brain to replace the ones that died through natural and on-going causes. Over time you have replaced so many brain cells with synthetic ones, that it'd be hard to find an original. At what point do you stop being you? What happens when you take these synthetic brain cells and plug them directly into a computer or robot? Then, through maintenance, that synthetic brain is slowly replaced by other technologies. Are you still you? At what point did you die and the synthetic you take your place?

[J Thomas]

Ok, so a direct transplant of your "mind" to a computer isn't you anymore, according to some, right? But what if it isn't direct? You get a synthetic heart then later a synthetic liver. Then later still synthetic eyes. Then you get nanobots to increase synaptics. Then you get some sort of synthetic wiring inside your living brain to allow you to control robotics/electronics directly with your thoughts. Each year you get synthetic brain cells injected/grown inside your brain to replace the ones that died through natural and on-going causes. Over time you have replaced so many brain cells with synthetic ones, that it'd be hard to find an original. At what point do you stop being you? What happens when you take these synthetic brain cells and plug them directly into a computer or robot? Then, through maintenance, that synthetic brain is slowly replaced by other technologies. Are you still you? At what point did you die and the synthetic you take your place?

Suppose that you have cancer and you are dying very slowly. The last few months you're on life support and just metabolize with no brain activity. Finally they pull the plug and over 3 days you gradually cease all metabolism and begin to rot. At what point in that process did you really die?

And on the other end, after conception at what point should you become a live human being with legal rights? My own view is you don't have full legal rights until you can hire and fire your own lawyer. Until then somebody else might possibly exercise legal rights in your name, but it's really their rights and not yours even if it's your name on the documents.

[hotchagotcha]

My first post, having registered just to ask this pertinent question. When did Neil deGrasse Tyson say this, and in what media was it quoted? Google didn't help. Just a simple question, from a simple man.

[chaucer345]

So how about everyone writes to Congress and asks them to look at project Orion again? Seriously guys, one launch, one frigging launch and we could have ourselves a moon base if we did it right! We can make it safer now! We have cleaner bombs!

Fun little article about it: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclearspace-03h.html

Seriously, we people in CELSS research are just begging for a chance to show what we can do!

Oh, and as for people who think that human space flight doesn't provide useful things for society, just think about the greenhouse spinoffs from CELSS work. The tech we're making can put food into bellies for a lot of people right here on Earth, the moon isn't the only hostile environment on the block.

Man that post felt negative, sorry, I have surplus bile about this stuff, you xkcd readers are some of the people most likely to understand. You guys rock!

[ijuin]

My point was that:
1) If someone is really interested in going to Mars, they probably haven't thought it all the way through: the training, the psychology, having to read Red Mars, etc. I'd be concerned that such a person might not understand the gravity of the situation.
2) Someone who is both really interested and has thought it all the way through is probably a scarier proposition and even less likely to be eligible to go.

A trip to Mars combines two contradictory social aspects: you're both isolated (from the rest of the Earth) and forced together (with the other members of the expedition). It's fraught with issues.

Given the above conditions, I believe that the best people for an interplanetary mission would be people who have served on nuclear submarines. Except for the radiation and gravity, the living conditions are very similar--you are sealed together inside your relatively cramped vessel for months on end with your air maintained by the machinery, and your only contact with the rest of humanity is via radio (or ultrasound transmission under water for subs).

[Mishka_shaw]

America didn't land on the moon because Van Halen had radiation in their belts or something. I don't know why the KGB were poisioning a hard rock band but I guess it was part of their culture war.

[J Thomas]

My point was that:
1) If someone is really interested in going to Mars, they probably haven't thought it all the way through: the training, the psychology, having to read Red Mars, etc. I'd be concerned that such a person might not understand the gravity of the situation.
2) Someone who is both really interested and has thought it all the way through is probably a scarier proposition and even less likely to be eligible to go.

A trip to Mars combines two contradictory social aspects: you're both isolated (from the rest of the Earth) and forced together (with the other members of the expedition). It's fraught with issues.

Given the above conditions, I believe that the best people for an interplanetary mission would be people who have served on nuclear submarines. Except for the radiation and gravity, the living conditions are very similar--you are sealed together inside your relatively cramped vessel for months on end with your air maintained by the machinery, and your only contact with the rest of humanity is via radio (or ultrasound transmission under water for subs).

But submarine crews are all male.

Should a mars colonization expedition carry uterine replicators and frozen embryos?

Or should we learn how to run co-ed longterm expeditions?

There have been women on antarctic expeditions that lasted some time. At least one of them got knifed by a navy ex-boyfriend.

[philip1201]

That all depends on how you answer "What makes you, you?"

For a lot of people the answer is: "I think therefore I Am."

Exactly. If something else is doing their thinking, then they aren't.

I don't have that answered.

If it's your memories and your kind of thinking, can the one doing it tell it isn't you? Would they care?

You're the one who experiences what you experience. Are you your thoughts, or are you the one your thoughts happen to? If you are your thoughts then it hardly matters what kind of contraption thinks them. But if you are a soul that experiences things, in a different contraption it might not be the same soul. Or since we're talking about souls, maybe it would be. How would anybody tell?

I just don't have an answer. I'm not sure I even have the right questions.

"The soul" is a model with no predicting qualities. It's scientifically worthless. You need a concept which makes predictions - we're scientists, not philosophers.

There are many ways to define "me": your body, your brain, the parts of your brain that determine your conscious behavior, that which determines conscious behavior characteristic of you, the decision part of the brain, that which makes decisions in a way characteristic of you, an unphysical entity tied to any of these (the soul), that which observes and thinks (cogito ergo sum), etc.
Some of these would be duplicated when uploading your brain, and others would not be. Some of them change entirely every day or every hour or depending on the mood.

The individual you can not be duplicated, by definition. The identity that you are can be duplicated, by definition. The philosophical desire to attribute only one of these definitions with the status of "you" is physically and consequential-ethically irrelevant. Physically, first there is one individual whose identity is you, and then there are two individuals whose identity is you. Which of these "you" are is a matter of semantics, not ontology.

I am satisfied with the preservation of my identity and, though my future selves can overrule this, at least one future individual me and as many future me's as minimum[it is good for society if everybody used the same ethical system as me , it is good for society assuming any realistically plausible distributions of desire]

---

And how hard can it be to run a mixed expedition? Didn't humans use to do this all the time back before we all decided to live in cities?

[SlyReaper]

I don't have that answered.

If it's your memories and your kind of thinking, can the one doing it tell it isn't you? Would they care?

You're the one who experiences what you experience. Are you your thoughts, or are you the one your thoughts happen to? If you are your thoughts then it hardly matters what kind of contraption thinks them. But if you are a soul that experiences things, in a different contraption it might not be the same soul. Or since we're talking about souls, maybe it would be. How would anybody tell?

I just don't have an answer. I'm not sure I even have the right questions.

"The soul" is a model with no predicting qualities. It's scientifically worthless. You need a concept which makes predictions - we're scientists, not philosophers.

ORLY? Do you actually know J Thomas is a scientist or are you just guessing?

Anyway, the hypothesis that sentient creatures have souls does make a testable prediction - that the soul part will continue to exist after death. The kicker is it's only the dead guy who gets to observe (or fail to observe, as the case may be) the results of this test, and he'll be unable to report those results back to the living.

[nitePhyyre]

Yeah, that's pretty much the definition of untestable.

[J Thomas]

That all depends on how you answer "What makes you, you?"

For a lot of people the answer is: "I think therefore I Am."

Exactly. If something else is doing their thinking, then they aren't.

I don't have that answered.

If it's your memories and your kind of thinking, can the one doing it tell it isn't you? Would they care?

You're the one who experiences what you experience. Are you your thoughts, or are you the one your thoughts happen to? If you are your thoughts then it hardly matters what kind of contraption thinks them. But if you are a soul that experiences things, in a different contraption it might not be the same soul. Or since we're talking about souls, maybe it would be. How would anybody tell?

I just don't have an answer. I'm not sure I even have the right questions.

"The soul" is a model with no predicting qualities. It's scientifically worthless. You need a concept which makes predictions - we're scientists, not philosophers.

The question as asked, has no shred of a scientific answer yet. It might not be possible to treat this as a scientific issue.

How can science deal with the matter of consciousness? Let's start with a scientific definition of "you". We will give you a large battery of psychological tests. Then for our purposes, anybody who takes the same tests and whose answers come out the same as yours, within statistical margins, is you. Does that sound like a good start?

OK, so our first candidate for "you" in hardware is the database with your test results. It is guaranteed to test out as you.

But it's just a database! It has no consciousness! How could that be you? Well, can you give us scientific proof that you have consciousness and that you are more than a database?

There are various scientific tests of consciousness. Like, we could have a question.

When you look into a mirror, what do you see?

A. My own face.
B. Some reflected image that isn't very interesting.

If the database gives response A then it is conscious.

Let's make it more interesting. Instead of just a database, let's find an algorithm that will give the right answers and take up less storage space than the database. That algorithm is you. Right? There's no scientific test to say it isn't you....

I don't expect this approach will get us very far. But there's no harm in trying it to find out.

There are many ways to define "me": your body, your brain, the parts of your brain that determine your conscious behavior, that which determines conscious behavior characteristic of you, the decision part of the brain, that which makes decisions in a way characteristic of you, an unphysical entity tied to any of these (the soul), that which observes and thinks (cogito ergo sum), etc.
Some of these would be duplicated when uploading your brain, and others would not be. Some of them change entirely every day or every hour or depending on the mood.

The individual you can not be duplicated, by definition. The identity that you are can be duplicated, by definition.

You have defined away the problem because you wanted to. But who is it who wanted to do that? Can you explain why you wanted it? Only as a JustSo story after the fact. First we make choices, then we make up plausible reasons that are compatible with those choices. Do you believe you understand yourself? If so, you are probably wrong.

The philosophical desire to attribute only one of these definitions with the status of "you" is physically and consequential-ethically irrelevant. Physically, first there is one individual whose identity is you, and then there are two individuals whose identity is you. Which of these "you" are is a matter of semantics, not ontology.

Agreed. If there are two people who claim to be you, the question whether there should be a legal difference between them is not a real-world thing. If you are one of them, the question whether the other one is just as much you as you are, is irrelevant to lots of things.

Try this idea -- an evil researcher has captured two other yous. One of them is in a computer, the other is in a clone of you. He intends to vivisect them both, carefully tracing out each nerve and stimulating it in ways designed to create the most intense pain. Each time he destroys a section of nerve he does it in a way designed to create phantom pain in the part that is already gone. So for example when he removes your testicles he will arrange that they continue to feel as if they are being crushed and burned for the rest of your life. And for the computer version he can do worse, he can do things which are impossible in the physical world.

He will do these horrors to two of you, and he makes the you I am talking to an offer -- if you will turn yourself in to him he will release them and do it only to you personally. The other two yous are just as much you as you are, so you are better off with this deal. Will you take it?

I am satisfied with the preservation of my identity and, though my future selves can overrule this, at least one future individual me and as many future me's as minimum[it is good for society if everybody used the same ethical system as me , it is good for society assuming any realistically plausible distributions of desire]

How should we decide what's good for society? Perhaps we could do a bunch of simulation runs starting from our assumptions about what would happen, and see how the simulations go? And then game it out in live simulations, where some people stay in the game while others get replaced by new players? To really test it, though, we'd need many multiple societies to try it in and observe the results. This is yet another reason why we need to divide the human population into a collection of smaller populations each no more than say 10 million individuals, with minimum interaction among populations. Without that, how can we possibly tell what effects new technology and other changes have?

And how hard can it be to run a mixed expedition? Didn't humans use to do this all the time back before we all decided to live in cities?

The guess is that for most of human prehistory we lived in relatively small groups with occasional interchange among nearest neighbors. Different from being in a single structure for months at a time. Traditionally, sailors said it was bad luck to have a woman aboard although they did manage that on occasion. Ships put into port regularly where the crew found women, and it appears not to have been all that uncommon to have women slaves on board. Of course, a slave who was in any way troublesome could be sold at the next port.

The US Navy has accepted women on many Navy ships. I have not found definitive numbers but female US sailors appear to have a pregnancy rate around 15-20%/year.

I have no direct experience with submarine crews. The closest I have is one time a girlfriend broke up with me and took up with a submariner. They came to my science fiction club and I was polite. I figured, I wasn't what she wanted and I'd find somebody else, fine with me if she was happy. They got offended that I wasn't upset at them. I didn't understand and stayed polite. He talked like the US Navy and the USSR Navy were in a quiet war where occasionally a ship was lost, and they weren't making it public. After a relatively short visit he went back to his submarine where he would be out of touch for 6 months. The woman told me she was sick of being with men who were emotionally unavailable and she married a drug counselor. He seemed like a nice guy. I was pretty clear that this particular woman did not belong on a nuclear submarine.

I expect we could work out how to run mixed submarine crews for long missions. I just don't think we have a whole lot of experience with that yet.

[SlyReaper]

Yeah, that's pretty much the definition of untestable.

Well no, because everyone will eventually find out if it's true. And won't find out if it's false. So I'd call it more "unfalsifiable", but it's certainly verifiable if true. Testable, but via a somewhat costly test.

[PolakoVoador]

Ok, so a direct transplant of your "mind" to a computer isn't you anymore, according to some, right? But what if it isn't direct? You get a synthetic heart then later a synthetic liver. Then later still synthetic eyes. Then you get nanobots to increase synaptics. Then you get some sort of synthetic wiring inside your living brain to allow you to control robotics/electronics directly with your thoughts. Each year you get synthetic brain cells injected/grown inside your brain to replace the ones that died through natural and on-going causes. Over time you have replaced so many brain cells with synthetic ones, that it'd be hard to find an original. At what point do you stop being you? What happens when you take these synthetic brain cells and plug them directly into a computer or robot? Then, through maintenance, that synthetic brain is slowly replaced by other technologies. Are you still you? At what point did you die and the synthetic you take your place?

This is Asimov's The Bicentennial Man backwards I really like that book, and so I do like your post. This line of reasoning is very interesting: it raises some really hard questions, that no one can give a good answer (as of 2012)

[Max™]

I see my Ship of Theseus point got lost or was too vague?

If his ship has a sail replaced, it's still his right?

How about if I replace a plank?

Then another?

At what point does it stop being the Ship of Theseus?

Ok, so a direct transplant of your "mind" to a computer isn't you anymore, according to some, right? But what if it isn't direct? You get a synthetic heart then later a synthetic liver. Then later still synthetic eyes. Then you get nanobots to increase synaptics. Then you get some sort of synthetic wiring inside your living brain to allow you to control robotics/electronics directly with your thoughts. Each year you get synthetic brain cells injected/grown inside your brain to replace the ones that died through natural and on-going causes. Over time you have replaced so many brain cells with synthetic ones, that it'd be hard to find an original. At what point do you stop being you? What happens when you take these synthetic brain cells and plug them directly into a computer or robot? Then, through maintenance, that synthetic brain is slowly replaced by other technologies. Are you still you? At what point did you die and the synthetic you take your place?

Suppose that you have cancer and you are dying very slowly. The last few months you're on life support and just metabolize with no brain activity. Finally they pull the plug and over 3 days you gradually cease all metabolism and begin to rot. At what point in that process did you really die?

And on the other end, after conception at what point should you become a live human being with legal rights? My own view is you don't have full legal rights until you can hire and fire your own lawyer. Until then somebody else might possibly exercise legal rights in your name, but it's really their rights and not yours even if it's your name on the documents.

If an organism can breathe and try to avoid being killed, I don't think anyone would mind granting it a basic right to continue doing so in most cases, no?

As for a fetus, you don't get a soul til you're 1 year old anyways, so who cares?

[SlyReaper]

I think most people here got the Ship of Theseus reference. It just wasn't as clever as you thought it was.

[Max™]

Never said it was clever, just that it was a long standing examination of the very argument that was being played out as though fresh.

When I'm trying to be clever I'll let you know.

[ijuin]

Given the above conditions, I believe that the best people for an interplanetary mission would be people who have served on nuclear submarines. Except for the radiation and gravity, the living conditions are very similar--you are sealed together inside your relatively cramped vessel for months on end with your air maintained by the machinery, and your only contact with the rest of humanity is via radio (or ultrasound transmission under water for subs).

But submarine crews are all male.

Should a mars colonization expedition carry uterine replicators and frozen embryos?

Or should we learn how to run co-ed longterm expeditions?

There have been women on antarctic expeditions that lasted some time. At least one of them got knifed by a navy ex-boyfriend.

Well, when you are actually planning to have babies born on Mars you can send co-ed crews. If co-ed living in transit is problematic then we will send the men and women in separate vehicles--by the time we are building a base with more than a couple dozen staff, we will be sending multiple vehicles per year anyway, so separating them in transit will not increase the number of vehicles significantly.

Anyway, the "submarine crew" example was for the early missions where they were "Boldly Going Where No One Has Gone Before(tm)", before we have any actual experience on the reactions of crews on such a mission. It is similar to how military test pilots were chosen for the first team of astronauts--they were the best skilled at handling relatively-untested vehicles and at remaining calm and functional when an emergency arises. Submarine crews are the currently best skilled at "living in a cramped vessel cut off from the rest of humanity with the machinery maintaining the breathability of the air for months on end".

Of course what we really need is faster propulsion. A VASIMR-driven spacecraft, if operated on an Earth-Mars-Earth flight plan, can run off solar panels without a debilitating mass of them. For reference, each of the ISS's eight solar panels can generate a rated maximum 32 kW at Earth's distance from the Sun. At Mars' distance you would need twice as much, so a Mars craft with twice the solar panel area of the ISS would be able to continuously power a 200-kW VASIMR engine at a thrust of 5.0 Newtons and 5,000 seconds ISP (i.e. over eleven times the ISP of hydrogen/oxygen rockets).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VASIMR

[philip1201]

Spoiler:

That all depends on how you answer "What makes you, you?"

For a lot of people the answer is: "I think therefore I Am."

Exactly. If something else is doing their thinking, then they aren't.

I don't have that answered.

If it's your memories and your kind of thinking, can the one doing it tell it isn't you? Would they care?

You're the one who experiences what you experience. Are you your thoughts, or are you the one your thoughts happen to? If you are your thoughts then it hardly matters what kind of contraption thinks them. But if you are a soul that experiences things, in a different contraption it might not be the same soul. Or since we're talking about souls, maybe it would be. How would anybody tell?

I just don't have an answer. I'm not sure I even have the right questions.

"The soul" is a model with no predicting qualities. It's scientifically worthless. You need a concept which makes predictions - we're scientists, not philosophers.

The question as asked, has no shred of a scientific answer yet. It might not be possible to treat this as a scientific issue.

How can science deal with the matter of consciousness? Let's start with a scientific definition of "you". We will give you a large battery of psychological tests. Then for our purposes, anybody who takes the same tests and whose answers come out the same as yours, within statistical margins, is you. Does that sound like a good start?

OK, so our first candidate for "you" in hardware is the database with your test results. It is guaranteed to test out as you.

But it's just a database! It has no consciousness! How could that be you? Well, can you give us scientific proof that you have consciousness and that you are more than a database?

There are various scientific tests of consciousness. Like, we could have a question.

When you look into a mirror, what do you see?

A. My own face.
B. Some reflected image that isn't very interesting.

If the database gives response A then it is conscious.

Let's make it more interesting. Instead of just a database, let's find an algorithm that will give the right answers and take up less storage space than the database. That algorithm is you. Right? There's no scientific test to say it isn't you....

I don't expect this approach will get us very far. But there's no harm in trying it to find out.

This won't help you prove what "you" is. At best it'll give you a vague idea of what the scientists' opinion on the matter is. At a certain point in your series of tests, one scientist would say one behavior is characteristic of "you", and the other would say a different behavior is characteristic of "you". That is what the disagreement is about. Not some scientifically testable difference, but semantics.

For example, "Is your algorithm currently in the process of eating an apple? If no, then your algorithm is not "me"." is a valid scientific test with a clear prediction where the prediction relies on the individuality of "me". However, someone using the identity of "me" won't be able to make that prediction, unless explicitly given the external conditions that lead me to eating an apple at this moment. You can't do a test to prove which is the proper "me" any more than you can do a test whether (-,+,+,+) or (+,-,-,-) is the proper signature of Minkowski space.

There are many ways to define "me": your body, your brain, the parts of your brain that determine your conscious behavior, that which determines conscious behavior characteristic of you, the decision part of the brain, that which makes decisions in a way characteristic of you, an unphysical entity tied to any of these (the soul), that which observes and thinks (cogito ergo sum), etc.
Some of these would be duplicated when uploading your brain, and others would not be. Some of them change entirely every day or every hour or depending on the mood.

The individual you can not be duplicated, by definition. The identity that you are can be duplicated, by definition.

You have defined away the problem because you wanted to. But who is it who wanted to do that? Can you explain why you wanted it? Only as a JustSo story after the fact. First we make choices, then we make up plausible reasons that are compatible with those choices. Do you believe you understand yourself? If so, you are probably wrong.

If there is a point you're trying to make except for reiterating the original question, I don't get it. And is there really anyone here who thinks they understand him/herself?

The philosophical desire to attribute only one of these definitions with the status of "you" is physically and consequential-ethically irrelevant. Physically, first there is one individual whose identity is you, and then there are two individuals whose identity is you. Which of these "you" are is a matter of semantics, not ontology.

Agreed. If there are two people who claim to be you, the question whether there should be a legal difference between them is not a real-world thing. If you are one of them, the question whether the other one is just as much you as you are, is irrelevant to lots of things.

Try this idea -- an evil researcher has captured two other yous. One of them is in a computer, the other is in a clone of you. He intends to vivisect them both, carefully tracing out each nerve and stimulating it in ways designed to create the most intense pain. Each time he destroys a section of nerve he does it in a way designed to create phantom pain in the part that is already gone. So for example when he removes your testicles he will arrange that they continue to feel as if they are being crushed and burned for the rest of your life. And for the computer version he can do worse, he can do things which are impossible in the physical world.

He will do these horrors to two of you, and he makes the you I am talking to an offer -- if you will turn yourself in to him he will release them and do it only to you personally. The other two yous are just as much you as you are, so you are better off with this deal. Will you take it?

That's basic evolutionary altruism. A sibling will sacrifice himself to protect two siblings because of genetic profit. Ramping that up to functionally identical copies of myself is just overkill. I would also sacrifice myself to save only the immortal digital duplicate, again because of genetic profit.

I am satisfied with the preservation of my identity and, though my future selves can overrule this, at least one future individual me and as many future me's as minimum[it is good for society if everybody used the same ethical system as me , it is good for society assuming any realistically plausible distributions of desire]

How should we decide what's good for society? Perhaps we could do a bunch of simulation runs starting from our assumptions about what would happen, and see how the simulations go? And then game it out in live simulations, where some people stay in the game while others get replaced by new players? To really test it, though, we'd need many multiple societies to try it in and observe the results. This is yet another reason why we need to divide the human population into a collection of smaller populations each no more than say 10 million individuals, with minimum interaction among populations. Without that, how can we possibly tell what effects new technology and other changes have?

This is politics, sociology and some ethics. I agree that large-scale social experiments would improve the long-term quality of society, but it's not very politically feasible.

And how hard can it be to run a mixed expedition? Didn't humans use to do this all the time back before we all decided to live in cities?

The guess is that for most of human prehistory we lived in relatively small groups with occasional interchange among nearest neighbors. Different from being in a single structure for months at a time. Traditionally, sailors said it was bad luck to have a woman aboard although they did manage that on occasion. Ships put into port regularly where the crew found women, and it appears not to have been all that uncommon to have women slaves on board. Of course, a slave who was in any way troublesome could be sold at the next port.

The US Navy has accepted women on many Navy ships. I have not found definitive numbers but female US sailors appear to have a pregnancy rate around 15-20%/year.

If "occasional" can be less than once a year, the only difference appears to be confinement, which is the same regardless of the gender mix. And I find it hard to believe that you can't make a human society of 5-200 people where it is not necessary for somebody to be tossed out of an airlock at some point.

As for the US sailors, there is such a thing as birth control, if babies are inconvenient. Or just tie their tubes (both men and women) and don't let them have babies until after they can get an IVF clinic going on Mars. I have no ethical problem with astronauts fucking like bunnies.

[JohnTheWysard]

We got to the moon so soon after simply achieving heavier-than-air flight.

My great-aunt Muriel was born of missionary parents in China in 1896. She remembered getting the newspaper (on the steamship from New York, about six weeks late) announcing these two guys named Wright had flown.

And she remembered watching men walking on the Moon.

All in one lifetime...

[gmalivuk]

He will do these horrors to two of you, and he makes the you I am talking to an offer -- if you will turn yourself in to him he will release them and do it only to you personally. The other two yous are just as much you as you are, so you are better off with this deal. Will you take it?

That's basic evolutionary altruism. A sibling will sacrifice himself to protect two siblings because of genetic profit. Ramping that up to functionally identical copies of myself is just overkill. I would also sacrifice myself to save only the immortal digital duplicate, again because of genetic profit.

Memetic profit at this point, really, on account of the computer not having genes.

In any case, I would argue that *after* the split, there are three different individuals, because they are now observing the universe from three different perspectives. If original unitary me (person A) splits into three (persons X, Y, and Z), and then you offer X the choice to sacrifice himself for the sake of Y and Z, it's back to a "simple" question of how altruistic X is, whether he's willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of two *other* individuals that share most of his memories and sense of identity. If he's selfish, he won't do this, because when X considers his options he sees only one future in which he's fine, and one future in which he's tortured, and obviously picks the one where he's fine.

But this is different from the original discussion, which was about how person A should feel about things. If person A knows he's going to be split into three, and is then offered a choice between eternal torment for two of them and eternal torment for only one of them, I can't imagine why he'd choose the scenario where two are tortured.

[ijuin]

Of course what we really need is faster propulsion. A VASIMR-driven spacecraft, if operated on an Earth-Mars-Earth flight plan, can run off solar panels without a debilitating mass of them. For reference, each of the ISS's eight solar panels can generate a rated maximum 32 kW at Earth's distance from the Sun. At Mars' distance you would need twice as much, so a Mars craft with twice the solar panel area of the ISS would be able to continuously power a 200-kW VASIMR engine at a thrust of 5.0 Newtons and 5,000 seconds ISP (i.e. over eleven times the ISP of hydrogen/oxygen rockets).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VASIMR

Ok, after sleeping on it, I crunched the numbers and realized that, for the power-to-mass ratio of the ISS solar arrays and support trusses, and assuming that the interplanetary spacecraft's non-propellant mass is no more than 50% made up of such arrays and supports, the acceleration achieved would be on the order of 1 to 10 m/s per DAY. This is an order of magnitude too low for getting interplanetary flight that is faster than hydrogen/oxygen combustion--at 10 m/s per day it would take a year just to get from low Earth orbit to escaping Earth's gravity well. Lighter power generation is needed--either lightweight solar cells (e.g. "printed onto" mylar sheets), or a nuclear reactor.

[nitePhyyre]

Yeah, that's pretty much the definition of untestable.

Well no, because everyone will eventually find out if it's true. And won't find out if it's false. So I'd call it more "unfalsifiable", but it's certainly verifiable if true. Testable, but via a somewhat costly test.

No.

[Arcadium]

My point was that:
1) If someone is really interested in going to Mars, they probably haven't thought it all the way through: the training, the psychology, having to read Red Mars, etc. I'd be concerned that such a person might not understand the gravity of the situation.
2) Someone who is both really interested and has thought it all the way through is probably a scarier proposition and even less likely to be eligible to go.

A trip to Mars combines two contradictory social aspects: you're both isolated (from the rest of the Earth) and forced together (with the other members of the expedition). It's fraught with issues.

Given the above conditions, I believe that the best people for an interplanetary mission would be people who have served on nuclear submarines. Except for the radiation and gravity, the living conditions are very similar--you are sealed together inside your relatively cramped vessel for months on end with your air maintained by the machinery, and your only contact with the rest of humanity is via radio (or ultrasound transmission under water for subs).

But submarine crews are all male.

Should a mars colonization expedition carry uterine replicators and frozen embryos?

Or should we learn how to run co-ed longterm expeditions?

There have been women on antarctic expeditions that lasted some time. At least one of them got knifed by a navy ex-boyfriend.

or you could find that this has already been brought up a few (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARS-500, and earlier USSR long duration isolation tests in 1960s-present) times in the proper context. The human factor isn't nearly as big as the economical/political one.

Speaking of the Cases for Mars, reading the book on it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars), by Robert Zubrin, you'd be forgiven to think that it is strangely doable with today's technology (read: regular rockets) and at a cost comparable to the Apollo program (2bil per launch obo). Thats not to say VASIMR or improved ion propulsion couldn't help here, but those technologies can develop parallel to a manned mission, not instead of. The economical benefits of having a thriving aerospace industry(http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2010/10-38AR.html) are significant and can be supported in the same way that infrastructure leaves lasting benefits in addition to recycling money back into the economy. It is mainly a political issue to support a mission of this magnitude.

Not sure how that would work. I suppose it might someday be possible to read a brain and make a simulation of it, but the simulation ifs not the thing. When you die, you're dead. Your "mind" may exist in some other machine or entity, but that's not you, it's just a copy of you--you're dead.

Out of concern that I might be threatening someone's security blanket surrounding the fear of death, I will say that being dead is almost certainly not bad at all. All reasoning would point to the experience of being dead as the same as what you experienced before you were conceived. I don't have any memories of bad times back then, so I have no reason to suspect I'll dislike being dead.

If you'd posit that you can maintain certainty and a ruleset guarding the uniqueness of your qualified individual (cut, dont copy), then you can have the strange experience of becoming partially dead (qualified to percentages even!) upon synthetic data loss. To the outside it would be no stranger than as we currently have people with alzheimer's, or other progressive diseases with memory loss. The individual you and others remember/perceive changes in a drastically way.

What about waking up and finding out you had died that day, and learning what caused it, but having no memories (last backup theory).

For the individuality, or the 'feeling' of you, keep in mind that it shifts ever so slightly (but potentially chaotically) every moment you exist. You of now, is not the same as you of a minute ago, but probably 99.9... % similar. The continuance of the experience yields the illusion it is all somehow connected, but one could equally argue that it is not necessarily true.


PS: Hi to the board.

[SlyReaper]

Yeah, that's pretty much the definition of untestable.

Well no, because everyone will eventually find out if it's true. And won't find out if it's false. So I'd call it more "unfalsifiable", but it's certainly verifiable if true. Testable, but via a somewhat costly test.

No.

*sigh* Fine. This is what I get for trying to be facetious and pedantic at the same time.

[Sungura]

>_< this comic made me sick. Firstly because NASA HAS accomplished a shit-ton, even moreso when you take into account their resources. Funding has been cut for ages. Hell, NASA's budget was less than it costs to give air conditioning to troops in Iraq to put it into some perspective! People got bored with the moon idea while it was happening! You can't force people to give a crap about space. You can't force the government to actually give research funding. And if the people dont care, there certainly wont be money for it. When the general populus in the US starts to care about research, science, exploration, etc then maybe we'll start to see some of the funding return. But have fun trying to convince all the religious fundies influencing politics wayyyyy too much these days that science is a cool thing....

Spoiler:

GO NASA! Ahhh I love living in Huntsville

[jpers36]

But have fun trying to convince all the religious fundies influencing politics wayyyyy too much these days that science is a cool thing....

Yeah... That type of rhetoric is not the way to convince anyone of anything.

[J Thomas]

Spoiler:

That all depends on how you answer "What makes you, you?"

For a lot of people the answer is: "I think therefore I Am."

Exactly. If something else is doing their thinking, then they aren't.

I don't have that answered.

If it's your memories and your kind of thinking, can the one doing it tell it isn't you? Would they care?

You're the one who experiences what you experience. Are you your thoughts, or are you the one your thoughts happen to? If you are your thoughts then it hardly matters what kind of contraption thinks them. But if you are a soul that experiences things, in a different contraption it might not be the same soul. Or since we're talking about souls, maybe it would be. How would anybody tell?

I just don't have an answer. I'm not sure I even have the right questions.

"The soul" is a model with no predicting qualities. It's scientifically worthless. You need a concept which makes predictions - we're scientists, not philosophers.

The question as asked, has no shred of a scientific answer yet. It might not be possible to treat this as a scientific issue.

How can science deal with the matter of consciousness? Let's start with a scientific definition of "you". We will give you a large battery of psychological tests. Then for our purposes, anybody who takes the same tests and whose answers come out the same as yours, within statistical margins, is you. Does that sound like a good start?

OK, so our first candidate for "you" in hardware is the database with your test results. It is guaranteed to test out as you.

But it's just a database! It has no consciousness! How could that be you? Well, can you give us scientific proof that you have consciousness and that you are more than a database?

There are various scientific tests of consciousness. Like, we could have a question.

When you look into a mirror, what do you see?

A. My own face.
B. Some reflected image that isn't very interesting.

If the database gives response A then it is conscious.

Let's make it more interesting. Instead of just a database, let's find an algorithm that will give the right answers and take up less storage space than the database. That algorithm is you. Right? There's no scientific test to say it isn't you....

I don't expect this approach will get us very far. But there's no harm in trying it to find out.

This won't help you prove what "you" is. At best it'll give you a vague idea of what the scientists' opinion on the matter is. At a certain point in your series of tests, one scientist would say one behavior is characteristic of "you", and the other would say a different behavior is characteristic of "you". That is what the disagreement is about. Not some scientifically testable difference, but semantics.

Yes, exactly. This is not a question that science will give us useful answers for.

For example, "Is your algorithm currently in the process of eating an apple? If no, then your algorithm is not "me"." is a valid scientific test with a clear prediction where the prediction relies on the individuality of "me". However, someone using the identity of "me" won't be able to make that prediction, unless explicitly given the external conditions that lead me to eating an apple at this moment. You can't do a test to prove which is the proper "me" any more than you can do a test whether (-,+,+,+) or (+,-,-,-) is the proper signature of Minkowski space.

There are many ways to define "me": your body, your brain, the parts of your brain that determine your conscious behavior, that which determines conscious behavior characteristic of you, the decision part of the brain, that which makes decisions in a way characteristic of you, an unphysical entity tied to any of these (the soul), that which observes and thinks (cogito ergo sum), etc.
Some of these would be duplicated when uploading your brain, and others would not be. Some of them change entirely every day or every hour or depending on the mood.

The individual you can not be duplicated, by definition. The identity that you are can be duplicated, by definition.

You have defined away the problem because you wanted to. But who is it who wanted to do that? Can you explain why you wanted it? Only as a JustSo story after the fact. First we make choices, then we make up plausible reasons that are compatible with those choices. Do you believe you understand yourself? If so, you are probably wrong.

If there is a point you're trying to make except for reiterating the original question, I don't get it. And is there really anyone here who thinks they understand him/herself?

If you don't understand yourself, how do you know whether something is you or not?

The philosophical desire to attribute only one of these definitions with the status of "you" is physically and consequential-ethically irrelevant. Physically, first there is one individual whose identity is you, and then there are two individuals whose identity is you. Which of these "you" are is a matter of semantics, not ontology.

Agreed. If there are two people who claim to be you, the question whether there should be a legal difference between them is not a real-world thing. If you are one of them, the question whether the other one is just as much you as you are, is irrelevant to lots of things.

Try this idea -- an evil researcher has captured two other yous. One of them is in a computer, the other is in a clone of you. He intends to vivisect them both, carefully tracing out each nerve and stimulating it in ways designed to create the most intense pain. Each time he destroys a section of nerve he does it in a way designed to create phantom pain in the part that is already gone. So for example when he removes your testicles he will arrange that they continue to feel as if they are being crushed and burned for the rest of your life. And for the computer version he can do worse, he can do things which are impossible in the physical world.

He will do these horrors to two of you, and he makes the you I am talking to an offer -- if you will turn yourself in to him he will release them and do it only to you personally. The other two yous are just as much you as you are, so you are better off with this deal. Will you take it?

That's basic evolutionary altruism. A sibling will sacrifice himself to protect two siblings because of genetic profit.

Your brothers and sisters share on average half your genes. So saving two of them for you is a wash for genes. Unless there is reason to think they will have more than twice as many children as you will. If they are closer to the optimum age for children, say. Sometimes siblings sacrifice themselves, sometimes they don't. It's an individual decision.

Ramping that up to functionally identical copies of myself is just overkill. I would also sacrifice myself to save only the immortal digital duplicate, again because of genetic profit.

That says something about you. See, people choose what they would sacrifice themselves for. Some people are ready to die for the US Constitution. It makes a kind of sense to say they have their own identities wrapped up in the Constitution. Some US Marines are ready to die for their fellow Marines. It's more important to them to be a Marine than to be alive. Their identity is as Marines. But not completely. Marines might be fine with sharing whores, and sometimes they might share girlfriends, but it's rare that one of them will figure that any other Marine having sex with his wife is just as good as him having sex with his wife.

Imagine that you and 500 of your clones have a wonderful, close-knit community. You all work hard and support your families. But one clone doesn't work. He visits your homes while you're busy working, he drinks your wine and has sex with your wives, and doesn't contribute much else except that he's so well-rested and well-practiced that the wives like it. Would you feel there is nothing wrong with that? Every wife he gets pregnant is just like her husband doing it, the genetic profit is the same. But do you really not care at all whether it's you having your share of fun versus your clone having his share and your share too?

I am satisfied with the preservation of my identity and, though my future selves can overrule this, at least one future individual me and as many future me's as minimum[it is good for society if everybody used the same ethical system as me , it is good for society assuming any realistically plausible distributions of desire]

How should we decide what's good for society? Perhaps we could do a bunch of simulation runs starting from our assumptions about what would happen, and see how the simulations go? And then game it out in live simulations, where some people stay in the game while others get replaced by new players? To really test it, though, we'd need many multiple societies to try it in and observe the results. This is yet another reason why we need to divide the human population into a collection of smaller populations each no more than say 10 million individuals, with minimum interaction among populations. Without that, how can we possibly tell what effects new technology and other changes have?

This is politics, sociology and some ethics. I agree that large-scale social experiments would improve the long-term quality of society, but it's not very politically feasible.

Agreed, it isn't feasible in the short term. We must create a world society where it happens, or suffer the consequences.

And how hard can it be to run a mixed expedition? Didn't humans use to do this all the time back before we all decided to live in cities?

The guess is that for most of human prehistory we lived in relatively small groups with occasional interchange among nearest neighbors. Different from being in a single structure for months at a time. Traditionally, sailors said it was bad luck to have a woman aboard although they did manage that on occasion. Ships put into port regularly where the crew found women, and it appears not to have been all that uncommon to have women slaves on board. Of course, a slave who was in any way troublesome could be sold at the next port.

The US Navy has accepted women on many Navy ships. I have not found definitive numbers but female US sailors appear to have a pregnancy rate around 15-20%/year.

If "occasional" can be less than once a year, the only difference appears to be confinement, which is the same regardless of the gender mix. And I find it hard to believe that you can't make a human society of 5-200 people where it is not necessary for somebody to be tossed out of an airlock at some point.

I had trouble with that triple negative for a little while, but it worked out.

I think it can be done. It will take careful study, and trial and error.

As for the US sailors, there is such a thing as birth control, if babies are inconvenient. Or just tie their tubes (both men and women) and don't let them have babies until after they can get an IVF clinic going on Mars. I have no ethical problem with astronauts fucking like bunnies.

I expect it's a political thing that keeps the US military from enforced involuntary contraception. I don't know what political problems a Mars mission would face.

[Graham.Head]

The last moon landing was just under 40 years ago (Dec 1972). Therefore in the last forty years we have been to the moon. So the whole mopuseover was an epic fail...

... although the general point is well made.
Graham

[PolakoVoador]

The last moon landing was just under 40 years ago (Dec 1972). Therefore in the last forty years we have been to the moon. So the whole mopuseover was an epic fail...

... although the general point is well made.
Graham

Yeah, sure, rounding up a few months in a 40 year scale for comedy is an epic fail indeed. [/sarcasm]

[blowfishhootie]

The last moon landing was just under 40 years ago (Dec 1972). Therefore in the last forty years we have been to the moon. So the whole mopuseover was an epic fail...

... although the general point is well made.
Graham

If we're going to be needlessly pedantic and over-the-top literal, I guess we can consider your inability to spell "mouseover" an "epic fail" then too, right?

[kaidenshi]

Okay, something doesn't fit here, unless RM is making a joke based on acceptance of the faked Moon landing conspiracy theory. Which he most likely is given that he would know a basketball-sized earth would have a baseball-sized moon about 30 feet away, not half an inch.

(Why yes, I have been called "Captain Obvious" many times in the past, how did you guess?)

But the ISS would be half an inch away and the moonlanding was more than 40 years ago, so no mistakes there.
I'd love to see space travel get to the next level, but I guess we'd need a new economy system first.

Almost forgot about this thread...Yeah I realized I'm retarded way too late to keep from telling the world about it. In other news, it really has been forty years since the moon landings. Damn I'm old.