Raymond Tallis - Virtual Immortality

Virtual immortality is the theory that when the fullness of our mental selves can be uploaded with first-person perfection to non-biological media, then when our mortal bodies die our mental selves will live on. But the complexity of the science is vast. And what about the nature of consciousness?

[streamdr]

I really cannot think of a better interviewer...? Not only teasing out all the most important questions from the interviewee, but always contributing to the topic in hand and taking the interview to another level. Just brilliant. Thanks for sharing.

[kreyvegas]

"Uploading" is bullshit. Robert isn't listening to Mr. Tallis. Tallis says he doesn't believe conscoiusness or mind is essentially made up of information, but Robert goes on and on about the same thing. BTW, Robert says "a person's memories can be captured, " How exactly can that be done? Captured where and how does one verify the guy's memories are there in fact?

[UnderscoreZeroLP]

What makes humans "human" is deeply rooted in our biology. The way our minds work is so deeply intertwined with the way our bodies work and the way we evolved as biological organisms.

[radsoconyoutube]

Tallis does not seem to be a materialist. But uploading to a different medium seems complicated even if you are and requires a reproduction of brain (and body) hardware to run/"decode" its software. Discussing a sufficiently 1:1 copy in the exact same medium might be more natural. If you teleported someone, would a copy emerge at the other end? What if you didn't disassemble the original? If you teleported yourself, i.e. your matter and its states, would you experience self at the other end(s) or at the source - and why? What if you gradually reduced the teleportation distance to infinitesimal distances? Aren't we then in fact "teleported" through space at each point in time, would it not imply that we are copies all the time and that the continuity of our short term memory maintains coherent experience of consciousness?

[bradsmith]

Interesting, but ultimately useless in that we have no idea (none whatsoever) as to what consciousness itself actually is.
Personally, I believe in the soul (For a number of good reasons) which is immaterial and therefore negates the whole concept.

[Actuarium]

If there is something like a soul in a dualistic way, which seems plausible again (long time not), than this whole idea of uploading your consciousness is impossible. Maybe you want to interview Tom Campbell? I would like to see how he stands against your questions.

[Thomasp]

The problem I have with all of this is where would you put an input and output to download the information needed to produce consciousness in a machine ?

To me, even if it where possible, it would still be just a copy of a person and not the real person itself.

[belablasco]

Uploading your first person consciousness would only be a copy of you, it wouldn't be "you, " any.more than an.identical twin would be "you."

[raymondparsley]

Interesting conversation, two brains, minds, debating what they are... and whether uploading themselves onto a computer chip or whatever, is This is deeper than quantum mechanics and or understanding the Higgs boson We need Neil DeGrasse Tyson in on this one... Neil is one smart Dude.

[mrnessss]

I think this was my favorite CTT clip ever (and I've watched a lot). Brilliant conversation. These two are amazing together.

[rasanmar]

You cannot disagree with an idea without saying clearly the reason why you disagree. I think we are our brains. What we need to upload is not the information, but rather the instructions to exactly replicate our brains, which is also a kind of information. The disagreement was more semantic than essential.

[kreyvegas]

Think about it: Robert says Mr. Tallis believes "all this" is generated by physical mechanisms, therefore it is ultimately capturable. Tallis never says that, and he clarifies. Is Robert trying to learn something, or is he trying to push his own opinion forward?
I get the sense that Robert leans towards the position of a materialistic explanation for consciousness, and considering how hard the so called "Hard Problem" is, isn't it just too soon to try and pick parties?

[redirishmanxlt]

Let's assume that neuroscience has definitively proven that consciousness, and every other function of the brain that contributes to person hood, is reducible to information processing. Let's also assume that technology is at a point where the mind can be virtually recreated on a nonbiological substrate.

How could we ever know whether the subject simply died in the transformation process, and the virtual copy began its existance? Of course the copy would say that the process was a success, but how would it know?

[alexmerab]

please talk with bernardo kastrup on the same topic and you will get fascinating answers

[DKFX]

Funny how they wen't all this time talking about consciousness and decoding/encoding information without mentioning the sensory apparatus and the activity taking place in this domain.

[stephenconliffe]

Good interview....Good believe Raymond is right

[lycakito]

What a great talk... love hearing the two points of view.

Ultimately for me it boils down to;

If the brain is a physical biological machine then anything that it has and is should be replicable by the physical world.

If it’s not then ... the question is from where is the ‘not’ coming from and how is it interacting with the physical world??

[Funnysterste]

You can have a snapshot of a flying cannonball and if you have all necessary data, you can determine where the cannonball was shot from and where it will land. The idea is, that you can do exactly the same with a snapshot of a brain... it is just much more complicated. Maybe it is too complicated to be ever achieved, but in principle everything is physics.

[batman]

I don’t believe you can attain digital immortality. Your computerized identity would be a clone of you, but it would not be you.

[theophilus]

Raymond Tallis makes points that badly need to be heard in the great roaring ocean of scientism. In particular, comes this fact: physicalists will often use such words as 'information', 'encoded', and 'emerge', but while (if they are to remain consistent with their physicalism) they are only entitled to use them in a very thinned-out sense (as Shannon & Weaver did with 'information') which cannot deliver a mind, they often want to retain many of the goods of the mind that only a much broader sense of those words can purchase. They want to _explain_ the conscious mind as we understand it. The conscious mind is not just a thing, or a state of a thing, or a process going on in a thing (such as could - in principle at least - be downloaded). This is a major category error. It is essentially something already joined to its environment, history, relationships and body. One cannot understand the mind _in absentia_ from all this. Memory, for instance, is not just apprehending (somehow) a present internal state, it is for the mind already to be in intrinsic (if not flawless) relationship with its past.

Thus, downloading the brain's 'information' (which must be understood in the thinned out sense) would be insufficient for the continued life of the existing mind. One would have also to download the whole of reality together with the mind's existing relationships with that reality - or rather, one would have to _replicate_ all that is there already. Understood in the richer sense of 'information' that _can_ (in part, at least) be used to construct a mind, alas, is just the kind of understanding that cannot be expressed in terms used to describe physical things and processes. 

The hidden question here, of course, is whether one can buy into mind (in the proper full sense of the word) and still remain a materialist. Tallis tends, if rather deftly, just to hop over this question. The eliminative materialists (so called) have the right idea, I fancy - just 'nuke' to obliteration such things as consciousness, freedom and self on the grounds ta they cannot be fitted into the conceptual framework to which the physicalist is entitled. There's only one crucial trick about pulling off that one - living life while simultaneously deluding oneself that one really means it. Any takers?

The whole notion of downloading immortality falls because of all this, and it falls not merely into impossibility but into utter incoherence.