r/IsaacArthur • u/Horror_Program_1878 • 6d ago
Sci-Fi / Speculation Speed of light travel?
In the past four years I've been interested in space things, I've only known that if we can travel in the speed of light it will still take millions of years to travel to another galaxy, but this year accurately this month I saw that someone said that if we manage to travel at the speed of light, it will only take us few days or hours in our perspective to reach our destination but by the time we reached a place a million years would've pass in Earth's timeline, how is that?
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u/tothatl 6d ago edited 6d ago
It's true.
This effect called time dilation was discovered and predicated by Einstein's theory of relativity.
And it has been validated by experiments several times over. With particles, not with ships.
The problem is you'd need huge amounts of energy to get anywhere near the required speeds for it to be relevant. More than any currently feasible rocket could produce.
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u/conventionistG First Rule Of Warfare 6d ago
And it has been validated by experiments several times over. With particles, not with ships.
Although, it might be worth noting that we do have to take time dilation into account even with macroscopic (large) things. The classic example is GPS, which requires precise timing and correction for the relativistic time differences between static clocks on Earth's surface and those in orbit in GPS satellites.
My point is just that sattelites are closer to ships than particles in terms of scale and if you measure precisely enough, you don't need extreme velocities to detect time dilation.
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u/ijuinkun 5d ago
Sure, you can detect it—the variance is on the order of one part per billion for objects orbiting Earth. You’re going to need some combination of laser propulsion and antimatter rocket to travel fast enough for intergalactic travel to fit into your own lifespan, though.
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u/conventionistG First Rule Of Warfare 5d ago
Maybe if you are willing to burn many stellar masses as fuel tho, no?
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u/returntasindar 4d ago
Well, that's A problem for sure. There's also the little matter that going fast enough to experience time dilation means you have also effectively subjected yourself to such titannic force that your going to be turned into a meat pancake well before you hit the light barrier.
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u/Team503 5d ago
Incorrect; it's relevant in all kinds of ways just not on the millions of years is one second scale.
NASA proved time dilation with the Apollo missions: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720022040/downloads/19720022040.pdf
We adjust for it every day with GPS and every other orbiting satellite, the ISS, and other spacecraft. Sure, six months on the ISS is 0.005 seconds difference - the astronauts are that tiny fraction of a second older than they would be if they were on Earth - but it IS there.
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u/firedragon77777 Uploaded Mind/AI 6d ago
Time dilation
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 6d ago
well technically ifbyou moved at lightspeed exactly zero time would have passed for you while the full light distance-time would have passed for those on earth. tho it's not really possible as beings with mass and no negative energy seeming to exist
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u/Anely_98 5d ago
Technically it is possible if you accept traveling as uploaded data, from station to station on beams of light, if the stations are close enough you could even maintain consciousness in the processors of two or more stations during the transfer, although this would probably involve very close stations or drastically slowed consciousness.
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u/Refinedstorage 4d ago
Your just transferring information then. Can't process anything as photons. Additionally your data transfer rates are no where near the petabytes that you would require
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 5d ago
Technically it is possible if you accept traveling as uploaded data,
good point tho u aren't really traveling so much as a copy of ur mind state is traveling. Consciousness is a process not just data and you would experience no time while in transit cuz "you" wouldn't exist in transit.
if the stations are close enough you could even maintain consciousness
also fair but just like the signals in transit in ur brain anything in-flight isn't really part of conscious activity until it reaches a processing node. A smaller mind could be run slower and its the same thing. tbh that kinda complicates the whole mind transfer situation as well. if you didn't experience the time between the experience would feel seemless and its really just a slower framerate when u get right down to it.
of course continuity of consciousness is just kind of a silly incoherent idea so i guess its as close as makes no meaningful difference.
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u/Anely_98 5d ago
good point tho u aren't really traveling so much as a copy of ur mind state is traveling.
Whether or not it is a copy is only about whether the upload was destructive (either gradual or non-gradual) or non-destructive, that is, whether the upload generated a new instance or whether the number of instances during the process remained constant.
If you upload destructively I don't see much point in talking about "copies", in fact talking about copies seems like something that hinders rather than helps in the discussion about uploading in general, but that is another subject, and in this case the distinction between "you" traveling and your "mental state" traveling seems irrelevant to me.
Consciousness is a process not just data and you would experience no time while in transit cuz "you" wouldn't exist in transit.
I don't think it would be fundamentally different from someone traveling in cryogenic freezing for example, you being in a static state is not the same thing as you not existing per se, although you would definitely be unconscious unless you gradually uploaded from station to station.
tbh that kinda complicates the whole mind transfer situation as well.
It probably wouldn't be worth the effort for interstellar travel, too much infrastructure for a trip that would effectively take the same amount of time as traveling in a data ship if you still wanted to ensure continuity of consciousness for some reason, considering that the amount of round-trips needed to maintain something vaguely resembling a unified consciousness for even an extremely short period of time is probably quite large.
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 5d ago
Whether or not it is a copy is only about whether the upload was destructive
that's completely irrelevant. Whether its destructive or not its a copy, tho personally i dont really care or think it makes any meaningful difference. Copy or not when its running its you. At the same time i guess if you left another instance running it might have a better claim on being you than the other instance, but imo that's really just a matter of opinion. For all practical purposes they're both you. Over time they will divergence but which one is "really you" is just subjective opinion.
and in this case the distinction between "you" traveling and your "mental state" traveling seems irrelevant to me.
idk a static upload on a harddrive isn't a person. Its inert mass. Intelligence/consciousness is a process not just data.
I don't think it would be fundamentally different from someone traveling in cryogenic freezing for example,
A cryogenically frozen person is dead. Its the same thing just inert mass that does nothing and is no one until reinstantiated.
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u/Anely_98 5d ago
that's completely irrelevant. Whether its destructive or not its a copy, tho personally i dont really care or think it makes any meaningful difference.
Copying generally, at least from what I understand, refers to a process of transferring information where the original instance remains undamaged, which to me would mean that if you were going to call someone a copy a non-destructive upload would make more sense, but even so I also think that copying is not a good term to understand what is happening and is somewhat biased (in fact I would bet that if we actually developed uploading the term "copy" would eventually be considered derogatory), I have heard the term "fork" and I think it would make more sense to describe what is happening in a non-destructive upload, that is, when one instance turns into two or more.
idk a static upload on a harddrive isn't a person. Its inert mass. Intelligence/consciousness is a process not just data.
I would say that the person still exists, they are just not active or conscious. If the data pattern that we can consider to be the "self" still exists in a recoverable form then the person still exists, even if they are not conscious or active at that moment. So as long as it is not corrupted, the transmitted data pattern would still be the person, even if they are not conscious during the transmission.
A cryogenically frozen person is dead. Its the same thing just inert mass that does nothing and is no one until reinstantiated.
If we have the technology to recover the person in that state, they are not dead, they are unconscious/inactive. For me, it only makes sense to say that something/someone is dead from the moment that the information that made up that person was irreversibly lost, which is not the case with either the transmitted upload or the person in cryogenics that we are discussing, especially because there is the possibility of them being reinstantiated in the first place.
And I don't think anyone considers that a person who took a cryogenics trip wouldn't have made the trip because that person was unconscious during the trip, or in less analogous but more modern cases if it was a person under anesthesia, in a coma or even sleeping, you being unconscious during the trip doesn't mean you didn't actually make it.
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 5d ago
Copying generally, at least from what I understand, refers to a process of transferring information where the original instance remains undamaged,
copying just means exactly that. Making a copy. the original instance is not relevant. Its why there's really no such thing as cut & paste. under the hood what ur doing is two separate processes. copying and deleting. whether u like the implications of that or not doesn't matter ur still making copying.
in fact I would bet that if we actually developed uploading the term "copy" would eventually be considered derogatory
idk if it would be. id expect people to just not care since they know that they are copies and if ur not comfortable with that reality then ur not comfortable with uploading. i think people are gunna get a lot more flexible about what constitutes personhood and identity cuz those concepts are on some real shakey ground from a physical scientific perspective.
I have heard the term "fork" and I think it would make more sense to describe what is happening in a non-destructive upload
That makes sense for creating multiple inatances of the same person tho as a matter of fact u are still copying urself.
So as long as it is not corrupted, the transmitted data pattern would still be the person, even if they are not conscious during the transmission.
but they aren't alive. Are you just data? i don't think so. A person, like intelligence more broadly, is a process. If the process isn't processing there is no person. Just inert mass/data. Like is a text file containing source code an actual program? No it isn't. Its a human readable representation of what the program actually is which is machine instructions actually running on hardware.
For me, it only makes sense to say that something/someone is dead from the moment that the information that made up that person was irreversibly lost
That's a matter of personal opinion. I would tend to call that permadeath to distinguish it from regular death since if ur not running you aren't alive either but still recoverable. More medical definitions tend to refer to not having running biological/mental processes as well.
you being unconscious during the trip doesn't mean you didn't actually make it.
This really starts getting into the difference between philosophical, physical, and colloquial treatments of mind uploading/cryogenics/consciousness. Like a lot of the involved concepts most of this just boils down to opinion and whether you personally care. Like I would argue that you did not make the trip, but rather an inert data package did which was then reconstituded into a new instance of "you" at the destination. Whether you care about the difference is a personal decision for you to make, but I've noticed many people do seem to care. Same with being copied which is something a lot of people seem to care about and leads them to the assertion that digital immortality/mind uploading isn't really useful to them or "isn't real". I don't personally because i understand that continuity of consciousness is physically nonsensical, but that's just me. Your milage may vary.
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u/Anely_98 5d ago
Its why there's really no such thing as cut & paste.
I see this being talked about, but in reality of course it does, it's just that cut & paste is the same thing as copy + delete the original & paste, they are two ways of describing exactly the same process, it doesn't make much sense to say that one is wrong and the other isn't.
under the hood what ur doing is two separate processes. copying and deleting.
That's true, but it also depends a bit, some copy processes are inherently destructive, and in those cases it doesn't seem to make much sense to say that they are separate processes, but that's something more arbitrary that depends on how you define a separate process itself.
id expect people to just not care since they know that they are copies and if ur not comfortable with that reality then ur not comfortable with uploading.
Oh, they may know that it's technically true that they're copies, it's not so much about how correct the term is as it is how it's used, as if by being a copy you're inherently less than the "original", and when you start talking about people I can see where that could go.
Are you just data?
Yes, that's probably the distinction, I consider everything I am, my mind, as data, but my consciousness as something that emerges from the processing of that data, which means that for me if I were "stored" as data I would still exist, just in an unconscious/inactive form.
A person, like intelligence more broadly, is a process.
I would say not necessarily, but that is a distinction in the definition of person only, I consider the mind/identity of the person as the data, even in static form, and the consciousness of that person as the process itself.
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 4d ago
it doesn't make much sense to say that one is wrong and the other isn't.
again it really depends how you want to treat these concepts(physically/philosophically/colloquially). Physically there absolutely is a difference. Cut is impossible. It just doesn't exist its a copy operation. Philosophically some people think this matters a lot because they belive in continuity of consciousness and that the different instatiations are are a philosophically separate entity which isn't you. colloquially(like with computers) laymen don't make a distinction.
some copy processes are inherently destructive, and in those cases it doesn't seem to make much sense to say that they are separate processes
whether the read is destructive or not you are still just copying data. again ur milage may verybon whether this matters, but physically ur copy is just that, a copy.
how it's used, as if by being a copy you're inherently less than the "original",
That's very much a cultural concept which is subject to change. some of is in the modern day might see a copy as less-than, but a civ with uploading and copying being a common metgod of immortality and transport probably stops using that derogatorily. some might still, but i doubt they'd be a majority.
which means that for me if I were "stored" as data I would still exist, just in an unconscious/inactive form.
yes exactly. the data exists, but "you" don't because "you" are a conscious intelligent being. if ur unconscious i don't think you are "you". ur just an inert body until you "wake up".
I would say not necessarily, but that is a distinction in the definition of person only, I consider the mind/identity of the person as the data
like i said a lot of this is wrapped up in personal opinion and what you think is important. I would argue that personhood is important to whether a person is alive and effectively exists. But that's just me and tbh it would be pretty disingenuous of me to make a hard distinction between the machine instructions of a program and the program running. Like in a sense they're both and neither the program. A program can't exist without its instructions, but a program isn't really a program if it isn't running. Whether you care to make a distinction is up to you. I do, but that's me.
I really don't envy the lawers/judges that are gunna have to deal with and decide this stuff. If someone has a backup and you delete it but the OG still exists have you murdered someone? If tou fork urself is that ur child? Do you have any obligations to "yourself"/fork? If uploading is not destructive does ur OG instantiation have to choose suicide for ur claim of identity to pass to the upload? Does that even count as suicide? Idk im just glad its not my job to rule on sht like this in a way that affects others.
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u/firedragon77777 Uploaded Mind/AI 4d ago
good point tho u aren't really traveling so much as a copy of ur mind state is traveling. Consciousness is a process not just data and you would experience no time while in transit cuz "you" wouldn't exist in transit.
Really? Really??
I kinda thought you wouldn't be the type to pull this argument. I'm gonna have to call you out on that, because this is a tired old argument I've seen made mostly by people with merely a passing interest in this stuff who think they're contributing something unique to the conversation (they're not). Now I'm sure you're aware of the alternative methods, but I figured you weren't the type to stress continuity as we both know an inactive copy is basically the same as a slow framejacked mind, or a normal mind from the perspective of a fast framejacked one. Sure maybe your brain now is working as fast as it can, but then the difference between internal timers to drag out the process and the various chemical speed limits in your brain aren't that different, and for that matter the entire data of your brain traveling from beam emitter to receiver station isn't any different either. Slow thoughts, fast thoughts, paused thoughts running on a timer to reactivate, beamed mindstates on their way to a receiver, it's all the same, really. Same thing for identity as well, as that changes (albeit very subtly) every time you're brain dies literally anything, from thoughts to individual neurons firing, down to slight movements of atoms the contents of your consciousness are always changing. We may not be bodies, brains, or even data, but rather like a phenomenon, a wave crashing against the shore, a cascade of atoms that is always in motion even when it seems not to be, as the timer ticking down to reawakening from stasis, the timer ticking down to create a though for a slowed down mind that's small enough to run faster, the slow signal speeds of a biological brain, or even the stream of invisible light traveling lightyears away, it's all the same, just as a mind could be "stuttered" running in intermittent bursts that feel like continuity to it, or could even be run backwards from an external pov, or as your personality can be rewritten, it's all still continuity just of a different form.
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 4d ago
Now I'm sure you're aware of the alternative methods, but I figured you weren't the type to stress continuity as we both know an inactive copy is basically the same as a slow framejacked mind, or a normal mind from the perspective of a fast framejacked one
im not stressing continuity but photons in transit are not a person. They aren't even data to be honest. Thats just raw energy and it has no structure or processing until decoded at the destination.
but also is a framjacked mind alive during the periods of inactivity? Are we even during those periods? Idk its pretty dodgy philosophically, but i personally don't care all that much. Whether i care or not a copy is a copy and arguably you are never the same moment to moment either. thats part of why continuity of consciousness is such a silly idea and continuity of identity is equally dubious.
But idk if we can treat an inactive data representation as a full person and data in transit arguably has an even poorer claim. Setting aside the philosophy because honestly who cares, how does that work practically? If i make a thousand copies of my mindstate and then delete them am i a mass murderer? If someone is sending mindstate data and i create interference is that manslaughter?
in any case as i said at the end of that its as close as makes no meaningful difference. Just philosophically wooly like most ponderings of selfhood, aliveness, uploading, etc. tbf im also faded af so maybe right now isn't the time to be waxing philosophical.
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u/firedragon77777 Uploaded Mind/AI 4d ago
im not stressing continuity but photons in transit are not a person. They aren't even data to be honest. Thats just raw energy and it has no structure or processing until decoded at the destination.
That seems like entirely your opinion, afterall data can be represented in photons just as in any particle, this jsut has a long transit time functioning as almost a timer mechanism to restart thoughts, same as having your hypersleep chamber hooked up to a digital clock counting down the date to reawaken you, or even to trigger an individual neuron firing if your brain is running slower than its max speed (big brains are inherently slow, but small ones need some extra complications as a timer mechanism to delay and slow down your though process). All data is just matter and energy my dude, a 1 and 0 are just values we assign to flooding a transistor with electricity vs not doing so, a simple on and off, a "yes or no" gate, and that can be extended in complexity to full brain scans. It's all jsut a matter of what processes need to happen to make a thought, whether that be biological chemical signals, a timer purposely letting a small digital mind run slow by dragging out each neuron firing, or even the whole information of your current brain state sent over via beam, or a simple timer set to restart your brain after a digital hypersleep, it's all the same.
but also is a framjacked mind alive during the periods of inactivity? Are we even during those periods? Idk its pretty dodgy philosophically, but i personally don't care all that much. Whether i care or not a copy is a copy and arguably you are never the same moment to moment either. thats part of why continuity of consciousness is such a silly idea and continuity of identity is equally dubious.
Yeah, continuity is silly so I'm confused as to why you're mentioning it like it's meaningful. Either all thought is just a patchwork of moment-to-moment copies in which case the difference between that and uploading is nill, or neither are mere copies and this the difference is still nill. The only difference is the philosophical standing of if consciousness and identity are even preserved in the first place. If you don't believe that, I guess that's fine, you do you, but then you'd have no reason to point out mind uploading being a copy since you believe all thought is just killing you and replacing you with a slightly altered copy after a time gap in which no thought occured because biological brains are slow (and all brains really, even light takes time).
But idk if we can treat an inactive data representation as a full person and data in transit arguably has an even poorer claim. Setting aside the philosophy because honestly who cares, how does that work practically? If i make a thousand copies of my mindstate and then delete them am i a mass murderer? If someone is sending mindstate data and i create interference is that manslaughter?
Idk man what do I look like, lawyer? My head hurts too much for all this😵💫. I just give all the benefit of rhe doubt because the idea that we're constantly dying is just too much for me and it's all philosophical ponderings, so at the end of the day we might as well be flipping a coin and still likely being wrong, only to ignore it and just live life like the at least semi-functional humans we both are🤣. I think that ultimately all data, both actively changing, stored, and in-transit should be treated the same because there's really no difference, an active mind is just an inactive mind occasionally coming to life and recieving data that was in-transit across the stored copy. Basically activity is an illusion made by stored data with bits in-transit to update (aka kill, copy, and replace) bits of data, and I say bits because it's gradual and all over the place. Like, maybe having all of you in-transit is being dead, but then you always have part of your data in-transit anyway, and the difference between transit of substrate and transit of data seem pointless as really it's just light vs baryonic matter, it's all physical stuff in patterns that represent data.
in any case as i said at the end of that its as close as makes no meaningful difference. Just philosophically wooly like most ponderings of selfhood, aliveness, uploading, etc. tbf im also faded af so maybe right now isn't the time to be waxing philosophical.
Yeah probably, I just figure that regardless people are gonna do it because nobody can prove either way and if your ancestors have been doing it for eons getting a mind upload doesn't seem like a big deal, heck even if it's brand new but a small niche group is doing it that may be all the assurance people need, either wah it's like how we don't (typically) question if the very process of thought just kills and copies us. Honestly it's all a headache when you look too closely into it, and that line of thought only makes preconceived notions of biological continuity and even individuality (where does the structure of your brain begin and end?) crumble into dust, and it's better to just take it at face value and look at the more practical implications like "Hey! I can become an immortal machine, teleport around, and travel to the future now!".
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 3d ago
All data is just matter and energy my dude, a 1 and 0 are just values we assign to flooding a transistor with electricity vs not doing so
My point is that a tightbeam is not stored data. It can't be retrieved or processed where it is. I suppose that now that im thinking about it tho that's not really much different from Delay-line Memory so fair point.
The only difference is the philosophical standing of if consciousness and identity are even preserved in the first place.
I mean yeah but also its not about whether those things are conserved, but what "being alive" means. I don't really have a problem with "aliveness" being a transient state that only really applies while data is being processed. If we agree that continuity doesn't matter then why are we married to the idea that life is continuous? Don't see why something cant be alive and dead periodically.
The only difference is the philosophical...but then you'd have no reason to point out mind uploading being a copy since you believe all thought is just killing you and replacing you with a slightly altered copy after a time gap in which no thought occured because biological brains are slow
Dont see why i can't bring that up. Philosophy matters to people and the amount of time that passes also matters on a practical level in the sense that the dead periods we experience are generally short enough for nothing meaningful to happen. And when i say meaningful i mean something that the person in question would have time to actually affect the outcome of. Like if u go into cryo and get revived a hundred years from now you were for all practical purposes dead all that time. You had no way to respond to changes in the world. Ur friends and family have moved on without you or even died.
all this not to say its something universal either. If u and all ur relations/community run on ultra-fast computronium how long starts counting as effectively dead goes down. If ur all running on ultra-slow computronium at the end of time even hundreds of millions of years might be irrelevant.
My head hurts too much for all this😵💫.
🤣fair enough and tgis right here is why while i can't wait for mind uploading to be a tging I wouldn't wish the legal responsibility of diguring out the implications on my worst enemy. Still it is worth thinking about because if in-transit mindstates are people that has some wacky implications like being able to call anyone who blocks the transmission a murderer or at least manslaughterer just by being in range of my transmitters and not devoting infrastructure and energy to reciving and decoding/storing them(constantly). I feel like treating stored mindstates as people is a lot more practical, but still has impractical moral implications like being able to effectively claim matter(possibly in a way that makes it unusable to even you) by using it to encode a mindstate which now can't be harvested or used without wasting ur own energy to run the mindstate to obtain consent.
I just figure that regardless people are gonna do it because nobody can prove either way
oh absolutely and i never said otherwise. hell id be one of the ones doing it. meat is garbage quite frankly
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me...I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine.
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u/firedragon77777 Uploaded Mind/AI 3d ago
My point is that a tightbeam is not stored data. It can't be retrieved or processed where it is. I suppose that now that im thinking about it tho that's not really much different from Delay-line Memory so fair point.
Yeah, it is basically still data, plus there's only a scale difference between a complex mind-beam on a laser highway and a simple on-off signal of electricity of photons traveling through a transistor or similar equivalent.
I mean yeah but also its not about whether those things are conserved, but what "being alive" means. I don't really have a problem with "aliveness" being a transient state that only really applies while data is being processed. If we agree that continuity doesn't matter then why are we married to the idea that life is continuous? Don't see why something cant be alive and dead periodically.
Yeah, I mean to be fair a car's engine is thought to be "running" when in reality it's just smaller gaps between combustion in the engine than the longer gaps between when it's "on" and when it's turned "off", and that engine can be gradually replaced and still be essentially the same thing, and it can be modified and customized over time, but neither of those are the same as the instant absolute change of switching out the engine entirely. So I think my leading theory is that death is when a bunch of those criteria are met at once, with significant breaks in continuity, substrate, and identity all at once. Of ciurse it's all fuzzy though and if that were such a perfect definition I'm sure others would've been using it already, but it's the most refined definition I personally have.
🤣fair enough and tgis right here is why while i can't wait for mind uploading to be a tging I wouldn't wish the legal responsibility of diguring out the implications on my worst enemy. Still it is worth thinking about because if in-transit mindstates are people that has some wacky implications like being able to call anyone who blocks the transmission a murderer or at least manslaughterer just by being in range of my transmitters and not devoting infrastructure and energy to reciving and decoding/storing them(constantly). I feel like treating stored mindstates as people is a lot more practical, but still has impractical moral implications like being able to effectively claim matter(possibly in a way that makes it unusable to even you) by using it to encode a mindstate which now can't be harvested or used without wasting ur own energy to run the mindstate to obtain consent.
Yeah, I'd tend to think that interrupting a beam is much like hijacking a cryo facility and pulling the plug on everyone there. Now if those were copies it might be a bit different, especially if there's no actively changing running version elsewhere, only say a digital backup and the frozen clone (or digital clone backul and frozen original). The difference there is that it might be more like property since the backup hasn't been activated and is more a way to ensure the original survives in some form, and I'd say if the frozen bio-body dies and the digital is awoken then the dead bio is more like property of the digital copy that was destroyed, afterall they were never meant to both be active at once, and if that does happen then I'd say they quickly diverge despite starting out as original, though "quickly" is vague and maybe some people regularly make copies and merge said copies back together again, it all depends really😵💫. But yeah saved minds are weird, though I'd suspect most wouldn't purposely do that to render matter off limits to others, heck that'd probably be a crime on their part instead of those who have to deal with it, same thing for signals whether that be sending a copy of yourself to force an enemy to deal with sustaining or "killing" you, or doing that to someone else forcefully, that'd seem to be all on you and not the poor folks you made deal with that dilemma.
But yeah I can see temporary "death" being somewhat common in the future and not really seen as weird, like someone might just go "yeah, I was dead, but now I'm not, what's the big deal?". And really this may change how we see a lotta things, like we say a system like an engine or machine-gun is "running" or "firing", but there's gaps in-between that, and how are those any different from the gaps between you pressing the trigger and you walking away and letting your thought processes eventually lead you back to the machine at a random time, and how is that any different from letting a random algorithm or even some quantum system decide? In that way human behavior is just a timer mechanism to trigger the machine's activation again, and such a system could be a whole society slowly voting on it, or a tiny quantum computer that decides to turn the machine "on" again so fast it just looks like continuous operation. It's all a matter of perspective I suppose, and it may help give us some insight into how other things work and help widen our perspective on life. Framejacking really messes with the mind, and is honestly something I wish more sci-fi would cover, because it's barrative potential is amazing, like being trapped in an unresponsive body for subjective eons, or two lovers in an asteroid, RKM impact, or nuclear war putting their heads close together and living a whole simulated life together as a last hurrah before the bitter end, or "time travel" through slowing down your thoughta to see eons pass, or framejacking as an "FTL" system that's like time dilation but better and allows you to seemingly instantly get to your destination and even swap back and forth between previous destinations only to find them vastly different, so much potential honestly.
oh absolutely and i never said otherwise. hell id be one of the ones doing it. meat is garbage quite frankly
Lol yeah, fair point. You and I tend to not care as much about whether uploading will "break continuity" as some people obsess over or insist is true (though even for those folks there's at least two ship-of-theseus alternatives I know of, with one being the nanite approach and the other being more ofna gradual data transfer on a currently active mind). But honestly though, even if we had definite proof that uploading killed you and that the upload was truly a clone and that it really was different from slowed minds in some metaphysical way... I'd still make frequent backups for when my brain-in-vat self died, and you bet I'd go brain-in-vat as soon as possible, and that I'd go cyborg and gene-modding as soon as possible before even that (or as soon as it was safe anyway), and definitely life extension the moment that becomes cheap enough.
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u/the_syner First Rule Of Warfare 2d ago
Of ciurse it's all fuzzy though and if that were such a perfect definition I'm sure others would've been using it already, but it's the most refined definition I personally have.
I've noticed woth a lot of this stuff it all boils down to personal definitions and subjective opinion. I don't necessarily aubscribe to ur definition but imo anyone who claimed it was wrong has no clue what they're talking about. Really it just depends on the POV and what properties you consider most relevant. Like i see plenty of people subscribing to more biological definitions and those still have the property of basically being reversible(often in practice tho tbf it isn't exactly common) which irks people sometimes. I personally like thinking of death as a generally reversible state, but i can see how adding the irreversibilty in makes sense. Afterall death has generally not been reversible for us meatbags for moat of our existence and even today is exceedingly rarely reversed.
I'd tend to think that interrupting a beam is much like hijacking a cryo facility and pulling the plug on everyone there.
I mean if u consider the crypreserved people who are just framjacked low then that's murder/manslaughter. Its weird cuz while idk if id call bombing a cryo facility mass murder it's kinda close. Like not modern cryo since those have basically zero chance of revival, but if we do get our cryo good enough that we can reasonably expect revival to be an option then yeah that's some dodgyass behavior. Very damned if you do damned if you don't vibes. Like if they do have people rights u've got the issues i mentioned but if you don't it also sets a pretty dangerous precedent
The difference there is that it might be more like property since the backup hasn't been activated and is more a way to ensure the original survives in some form
like sure i could see that and that's probably how i would mostly feel about it, but at the same time treating mindstates as just any old property feels wrong to me. Maybe its somewhere in-between. I mean human cadavers can also be property, but their treatment is still regulated very differently from a pair of sneakers or whatever.
though I'd suspect most wouldn't purposely do that to render matter off limits to others, heck that'd probably be a crime on their part instead of those who have to deal with it
Im not sure that makes sense. I mean i would always want to have some quantity of my matter stockpiles as multiple redundant backups. Its one of the main advantages to being an uploaded: multiply-redundant digital immortality. Idk how ud ever prove intent to deny material as opposed to extreme paranoia. Hell if ur storing matter over deep time you may as well use it to store data redundantly at the same time.
same thing for signals whether that be sending a copy of yourself to force an enemy to deal with sustaining or "killing" you, or doing that to someone else forcefully
Intersting in the context of long-range interstellar/intergalactic communications and especially first contact. imagine sending a mindstate and causing an intergalactic incident. Not even because ur wasting resources or being hostile. Turns out the aliens are a UBH civ and they're just super pissed because of how irresponsibly you treated a person's life. Like you can't know that thw place will be safe for them to begin with, after millions of years, or if rhe mindstate will even make it to the destination uncorrupted by natural interference. Instead of exchanging diplomat mindstates they send back a huge lecture about how you should value people's lives more.
Framejacking really messes with the mind, and is honestly something I wish more sci-fi would cover
facts. the last time i remember seeing that be really prevalent in a story was lk the Bobiverse series or synchromesh in House of Suns. The culture series has that a bit too. We need more messing with high and low framjack.
like being trapped in an unresponsive body for subjective eons
reminds me of that story u sent me that one time of the guy who takes some experimental framjack thing and then ends up living subjective Myrs in a subway tryna get home. Wish i had saved that. stuff is crazy. Tho without an internal VR and a high-speed internet connection that seems like the deepest ring of hell.
two lovers in an asteroid, RKM impact, or nuclear war putting their heads close together and living a whole simulated life together as a last hurrah before the bitter end,
ok but that is super cute tho. They was an attack on their wedding day and instead of accepting their early demise they spend the last few seconds but subjective years living in a shared VR cabin in the woods. And its not just them cuz as soon as their autonomous monitering systems detected their impending doom a fiberoptic jack exploded out of everyone's bodies and linked up to make a little village net. Im lwgit imagining basically guided smart bullets with a decent lk 100m range or something. The emergency deathnet hooks up as many people as it can limited only by how much time it reckons everyone has and how long they want to live for(smaller communities but for longer or longer communities for shorter periods).
though even for those folks there's at least two ship-of-theseus alternatives I know of, with one being the nanite approach and the other being more ofna gradual data transfer on a currently active mind
imo these are just uploading by another name. I never saw much meaningful difference. Ur still just copying ur mind onto another substrate. They just like the vibes more and that's all it is, vibes.
I'd still make frequent backups for when my brain-in-vat self died, and you bet I'd go brain-in-vat as soon as possible,
same 100%.
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u/firedragon77777 Uploaded Mind/AI 2d ago
imo these are just uploading by another name. I never saw much meaningful difference. Ur still just copying ur mind onto another substrate. They just like the vibes more and that's all it is, vibes.
Maybe, idk if I'd go that far, afterall they're not interrupting anything, normal thinking rate resumes, plus it's more similar to natural cell replacement. But I do largely agree with you, I just like having multiple different angles of rebuttal against this stuff.
reminds me of that story u sent me that one time of the guy who takes some experimental framjack thing and then ends up living subjective Myrs in a subway tryna get home. Wish i had saved that. stuff is crazy. Tho without an internal VR and a high-speed internet connection that seems like the deepest ring of hell.
https://youtu.be/9eAOXG7jom0?si=Xi2D9rIl1wrn3hgT https://youtu.be/6VHhGO4ATj4?si=IPxDe5zqy5WAlwNR https://youtu.be/doMREwYhVhs?si=i-5oXZBvjoePrr0N
Here's it, it's sequel, and an animated version.
Hell if ur storing matter over deep time you may as well use it to store data redundantly at the same time.
That at least seems good for the end of time where matter and data storage are crucial, but in more near-term scenarios it just seems irresponsible to say, store copies of your loved ones on the structure of you car and then drive that around, especially if you're just trying to force a trolley problem onto someone.
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u/kurtu5 6d ago
My dear young stargazer, you’ve brushed up against a grand marvel of Einstein’s special relativity—time dilation, no less! Should you voyage at the speed of light, a brisk 299,792 kilometers per second, time would dawdle for you alone. A jaunt to a galaxy, millions of light-years distant, might seem a mere handful of hours or days in your eager eyes. Yet, back on our humble Earth, eons—millions of years—would unfurl. You’d alight at your starry haven swiftly by your reckoning, whilst Earth’s clocks march relentlessly onward. Quite the cosmic conundrum, isn’t it, lad?
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u/Underhill42 6d ago
Space and Time dilation.
Grossly oversimplified, as you approach light speed your orientation in spacetime changes so that I, as a "stationary" observer, see your ship-time slow to a crawl as you travel vast distances in vast amounts of time without aging appreciably, while you see the universe compressed in your direction of travel so that you can quickly cross the short distance to your destination.
According to Relativity, when you accelerate you perform a hyperbolic rotation of your 4D spacetime reference frame so that your "forward" and "future" axes partially swap places, similarly to how rotating a piece of graph paper can partially swap your X and Y axes.
As you approach light speed relative to me, your "future" axis approaches 90° away from mine, who will as a result see time slow down almost to a stop for you, so that a million years may pass for me, while I see only a few minutes pass for you. Since I can only see your motion in the the same direction as my time-axis as being passage through time.
The reality is a little more complicated, since you're only rotating reference frames, so that from your perspective you see my time slow down almost to a stop while yours moves normally... but that "axis swap" also means you see the universe heavily compressed along your "forward" axis, so that the distance you need to travel will only take a few minutes to cross, while I see it as being millions of light years.
The math is a little complicated, but it works out so that everything will always remain perfectly consistent for all observers, and everyone's interpretation of what's "really" going on will all be equally correct.
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u/mrmonkeybat 5d ago edited 2d ago
Yes. Relativity is very complicated there are lots of different simplifications that partially explain it in different ways. The problem Einstein was trying to solve was: how is it that no matter which direction you measure the speed of light no matter the time of day as the Earth rotates around the sun the speed of of light remains the same.
So he came to the conclusion that it is the speed of light is the constant and time that distorts to preserve it. So he came up with thought experiments about observing clocks on moving ships if you see a ship going past real fast the you must see the clock parts move slower so they don't diagonally exceed the speed of light.
In relativity a light year and a year of time are equivalent. In 4d spacetime.
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u/Imperator424 6d ago
Just look up special relativity. That explains how Einstein determined that time is not constant across all reference frames.
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u/Refinedstorage 4d ago
When you go fast (The effect isn't noticeable at anything you will experience) like 1% of the speed of light you will experience time at a slower rate relative to anybody going slower than you
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u/CosineDanger Planet Loyalist 6d ago
Almost everything you hear is a simplification.
But saying time slows down aboard a very fast ship is a decent simplification.
As you approach the speed of light, time pretty much stops for you. There is no limit to how close to the speed of light you can get and how big the time dilation factor - gamma, or the Lorentz factor, if you care - becomes. So a million years can become five minutes.
Travel at these speeds is expensive and potentially unsafe for a number of reasons.
Exactly at the speed of light, clock time is a divide by zero error. Time should probably be a real number, and this is the math's way of telling you that you cannot or should not. Also you couldn't ever press the button to slow down if you did because this action would take time.
If you're merely constantly accelerating at 1 g with a flip halfway rather than instantly changing velocity, you reach Andromeda in a mere 28 years on the ship's clock.