Born to do Math 155 – Fidelity
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/02/01
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so, what is percent fidelity in this regard for the future of brain replication?
Rosner: The ultimate objective for extended human life is replicable consciousness. It renders everything else moot. The various strategies for living long and making your own body not age. Freezing your body, until they can come and fix whatever is wrong with it, all this stuff becomes much less of a desperate gambit or mott. You don’t need it if you can move your consciousness around.
Your memories, way of thinking. Your brain, basically, or a duplicate of your brain. A brain that is sufficiently duplicated that it has as much fidelity as your own biological brain does from day to day and month to month. I think that when this technology becomes available.
People will sell it on the basis of what percent it duplicates your thinking and experience with minimal discontinuity. The earliest products probably won’t even use this term because the numbers will be so terrible. The earliest products might not even reach 10% fidelity.
We already have something that has some non-zero fidelity, a technology, or a bunch of related technologies. Those are hanging out and talking with people. If you live with someone for 50 years, once you die, your way of thinking, memories, and attitudes are, to some extent, carried on by your close survivors.
In fact, Reformed Judaism have this as the only afterlife. We live on in the memories of others. It is a really terrible afterlife.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: It is not zero, the fidelity. It is way less than 1%. You’re, as a dead person, not getting any conscious experience. Your thoughts and attitudes are carried on while not getting the benefits of being alive anymore.
You are getting very minimal benefits from those who knew you have a picture of your mental landscape. It is a shitty picture. It is not your consciousness. However, people are already doing stuff with direct brain communications.
They are developing certain technologies for thinking certain thoughts and a reader will react. You can think stuff and manipulate stuff with your thoughts. It is very imprecise and shitty. Eventually, you will have technology that will allow increasingly direct brain-to-brain communication.
It will super shitty at first. One measure of how shitty is how ridiculous it is to talk about it.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: If two people decided to have direct brain-to-brain communication without needing speech or other forms of communicating and could, basically, think together, maybe not as a single entity but, as a linked pair of entities, and if you did this long enough with somebody else with sufficient technology, to some extent, some of your thinking would live on. Some of your consciousness would live on, after the person dies.
The percent fidelity would go from 0.0001% to, with this technology, 10% or 12%. Something that is much better than the near-zero that we have right now. Eventually, as we decipher consciousness and bran processes, the fidelity will go to 40% and, eventually, into the 80s.
As we understand how our brains will work better, there will be two indices to consider: the natural fidelity of our brains over time to ourselves, which isn’t perfect. I don’t even know how to calculate how much less than perfect it is because we lose most of what we experience.
We don’t remember most things in our lives. It is unrecallable. An unremarkable lunch from 2006 will not be something to remember. An afternoon spent clipping your toenails for ten minutes. Most daily stuff is not recallable.
Is that a huge ding against our fidelity score? We don’t experience it as a ding. We’re at home in our brains. We’re at home with the incompleteness of or deficiencies of our brains and our thinking. It doesn’t bug us that we are losing so much.
Jacobsen: Is that a bug or a feature?
Rosner: It is both. There are people with eidetic memories who can remember everything.
Jacobsen: Curse more than blessing, or blessing more than curse?
Rosner: I think it is just a thing that you have, which is kind of cool. Marilu Henner, the actress on Taxi a million years ago, claims to have an eidetic memory. I think the claim holds up. Because when she is quizzed on stuff, she is good at remembering things. She is good as an actress and adult in the world, and still able to live a normal life as a person. It hasn’t made her crazy.
So, people will like to make the claim that it’s good that we don’t remember everything. But I don’t know. I don’t think that that claim holds up. At the very least, we want to be better at remembering than we are.
We will be, as technology improves. As we deal with improved technology, we will have a lot of dumb, stupidly complete, remembering, that will be, “Meh.” It will need some more-than-fine-tuning. It may not be ideal an ideal adjunct to our brains.
We’ll have to learn to live in conjunction with brain add-ons and brain replication. It is not like things will not get figured out. Things won’t ever be settled because technology will keep coming along. We will keep discovering memory schemes.
When it becomes possible to remember with what fidelity that you want, whatever we become, they will determine what are the optimal levels and strategies of memory, for memory, given the software and the hardware that we will be working with.
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