Is cryonics necessary?: Writing yourself into the future

Writing is extremely low-bandwidth. If I recall correctly, Shannon did some experimentation and found that per letter, English was no more than a bit and I've seen other estimates that it's less than a bit, per letter. (In comparison, depending on language and encoding, a character can take up to 32 bits to store uncompressed. Even ASCII requires 8 bits/1 byte per character.) And given the difficulty of producing a megabyte of personal information, and the vast space of potential selves...

If we're going to try to preserve ourselves through recorded information, wouldn't it make much more sense to instead spend a few hundred/thousand dollars on lifelogging? If you really do record your waking hours, then preservation of your writings is automatically included - as well as all the other stuff. Plus, this solves the issue of mundane experiences.

EDIT: I've put up some notes at https://www.gwern.net/Differences

Dear Diary,

My doctor told me today that of all the Elven Jedi he has ever treated I have by far the largest penis...

(Words we write down are only very loosely correlated with who we are.)

Unfortunately people who can't afford cryonics are unlikely to have the time or resources to create meticulous records of themselves. When you consider the opportunity cost of creating such records, the actual materials needed, and the cost of preserving them reliably for at least several decades, it isn't obvious that this is much cheaper than cryonics.

There's also the problem that most people don't consider 'make a perfect copy of me' and 'bring me back to life' to be equivalent operations, and the ones who do are almost all Western intellectual types who could easily afford cryonics if they actually wanted to. The world’s poor almost all see their personal identity as tied to their physical body, so this kind of approach would seem pointless to them.

I don't have direct access to a large percent of my memories. Many cannot be put into words, and I don't just mean music and imagery. The knot between these memories is utterly complex. In self-reflection, I am dishonest with myself, and I don't feel like it is so. My mother has the idea that poetry is a means of most honestly recording some of the difficult-to-explain thoughts, but I think that the scope, inexpressibility and interconnection of the memories makes this infeasible.

How good a record is good enough? In truth, I don't think we even know enough to get the order of magnitude right. The best I can offer is that you need to record as much as you are willing to.

But this estimate is essential. By deciding to pursue this course of action, you in effect state that you estimate sufficient probability of it being enough to justify the additional effort. You can't say "I don't know" and act on this knowledge at the same time.

This post addresses the subject of the appropriate human data compression format. Though an interesting idea, I think that the proposed method is too low in resolution. You acknowledge the lossiness, but I think it's just going to be too much.

Although the method you advocate is probably the best thing short of cryonics, I doubt there is any satisfactory compression method that can make anyone that's more similar to you than a best friend or a family member who gets stuck with your memories. It's better to have too much data than too much.

Because we share the same evolutionary past as all of our conspecifics, the biology and psychology of our brains is statistically the same. We each have our quirks of genetics and development, but even those are statistically similar among people who share our quirks. Thus with just a few bits of data we can already record most of what makes you who you are.

I'm not confident in this part. Although a large percentage of human biology and psychology are identical, the devil is in the details. From a statistical perspective, aren't humans and chimps practical identical also? Percentage similarity of traits is probably the wrong metric, since small quantitative differences can have large qualitative impact.

Your idea of a generic human template, with various subtemplates for quirks, is also interesting, but still too low resolution.

Under what metric do we say that you and I have the "same" quirk, even if our phenotypes look superficially similar? How much data is discarded by the aggregation?

Even if we assume that the notion of a generic human template is meaningful, there are almost as many ways that people can deviate from the generic human template as there are people, and there would have to be that many quirky subtemplates. It's possible that we could compress human phenotypic deviation into a lower number of templates than the number of people, but I don't think we are anywhere near having a satisfactory way to do so. In the least, storing the deltas of human phenotypes might cut down on the data we all have in common.

The problem with lossy measures of phenotype such as memories and our current ability to measure quirky deviations from the average is that they discard too much information: the genotype, and other low-level aspects of phenotype.

Let's start with the genotype problem. In the future, we synthesize a human with the same phenotype as our crude records of you (your memories, and your quirks according to the best psychometric indexes currently available). We will call this phenotype set X. Yet since multiple genotype can converge towards the same phenotype (particularly for crude measures of phenotype), the individual created is not guaranteed to have the same genotype as you, and probably won't. Due to having a different genotype, this individual could end up having traits outside X that you didn't have. They will have the same set of phenotypic traits as you that were recorded, but they may lack phenotypic traits that weren't recorded (because you method of recording discarded the data), and they may have extra phenotypic traits that you didn't have because keeping those traits out wasn't in the spec.

Fundamentally, I think it's problematic to try to reverse-engineer a mind based on a record of its outputs. That seems like trying to reverse-engineer a computer and its operating system based on a recording of everything it displayed on its monitor while being used. Even if you know how computers and operating systems work in general, you will still be unable to eliminate lots of guesswork in choosing between multiple constructions that would lead to the same output.

If you know a system's construction, you may be able to predict its outputs, but knowing the outputs of a system doesn't necessarily allow you to work backwards to its construction, even when you know the principles by which systems of that type are constructed.

I think the best reconstruction you will get through this method won't be substantially more similar to you than taking your best friend (who has highly similar personality and interests) and implanting him with your memories. At best, you would get someone similar enough to be a relative of yours.

We really need to preserve your genotype; otherwise, future scientists could make an individual with all your memories and crudely measured personality traits, but a different personality and value system (in ways that weren't measured), who wakes up and wonders what they heck you were doing all your life. We would need a solution that has all the phenotypic traits recorded for you, with the constraint that the individual created has the same genotype as you.

Yet even such a solution would still be discarding too much information about biological traits that influence your phenotype yet are not recorded in your genetic code, such as your prenatal development. It's been shown that prenatal factors influence your brain structure, personality, and interests. So we need to record your prenatal environment to be able to create a meaningful facsimile of you. Otherwise, we could end constructing someone with the same genotype, memories, and psychometric measures as you, who nevertheless had a different brain structure; such a person would probably be less like you than a twin of yours who was implanted with your memories, because your twin shares a similar prenatal environment to yours, while your copy does not. A different brain structure would create a similar problem to having a different genotype: a different brain that has the same recorded phenotype as you will differ from you in unrecorded aspects of phenotype.

I would worry that a record of every single thought and behavior you have, both from yourself and observers, would still not be enough to reverse-engineer "you" in any meaningful way. Adding the constraint of matching your genotype would help, but we still don't have a way to compress biological factors other than genotype, such as prenatal development. We have no MP3 format for humans.

The best record of your prenatal development that we have is your body and brain structure, so these would have to be stored along with your memories. Preferably at a rather cold temperature.

How many hours do you estimate you'll be putting into your autobiography for the resulting record to be "good enough"?

Next question, what is your hourly pay rate?

How good a record is good enough?

No record in English (and I'm using English as a shorthand for any human language) can ever be good enough. English is not a technology for transmitting information.

English is a compression format, and a very lossy and somewhat inaccurate compression format at that. But it has a stupendously high compression rate and compression algorithms with reasonable running speeds on specially adapted hardware (i.e. brains), so for the particular purposes of human communication English is a pretty decent option.

I own a t-shirt with this graphic printed on it. If you possess a mostly correct compression algorithm (that is, you speak modern English), the ~5kb of data on that shirt contains sufficient information to reproduce ~30 major scientific or technological discoveries. I don't know exactly how much space you could fit that information into if you encoded it in a way that wasn't very heavily optimized for very specific types of human brains, but I suspect it's many orders of magnitude greater than 5kb.

On the surface this seems like it could be an argument for reproducing a specific human from their preserved written material, what with the amazing information density of English. But using a standard English decompression algorithm to analyze what you've written is worthless, because we're not trying to recreate the meaning of what you've written. We're trying to recreate the compression algorithm used to create your writings, which would be approximately isomorphic with your brain. But because the English data format is lossy and imprecise, reconstructing that algorithm from only its output is impossible.

If you could preserve a copy of the decompressed version of what you were trying to write along with your writings, that might be enough to reverse-engineer your brain('s compression algorithm). But I don't think that's possible for any human, much less most of them.

A few thoughts:

-This would require both an enormous amount of time spent meticulously documenting your experiences (most of which would be mundane), and incredible writing skill to be able to capture various nuances of emotion. The number of people who are able to satisfy both these conditions may be less than the number who will sign up for cryonics.

-It's not clear to me that there's any consistent way to translate the written expression of a memory (particularly an emotional memory) into a mental state, partially because...

-I'm not sure writing is a fine-grained enough tool to capture a person's mental state.

-As nickernst stated, a large (perhaps most) of what makes up my mental state isn't stored in the form of memories I can access.

One way to help test the feasibility of this plan is to both write prolificly and undergo cryonic preservation.

On the one hand, I do expect a society after a positive Singularity to be interested in, say, reconstructing Feynman from the evidence he left, and of course the result would be indistinguishable from the original recipe to anyone who knew him or knew his writings, etc. It goes without saying that I expect this to be awesome, and look forward to talking with reconstructed historical figures as if they were the originals.

However, I do suspect that there's a deep structure to an individual human's experience and thinking which might be essential to the continuation of subjective experience, and which might be underspecified by the records left by a dead person. Thus the most probable reconstruction may not be a continuation of the original person's experience. And I think I have a much stronger preference for "seeing the future myself" than "having someone very like me see the future".

To make this concrete, let's say that we had access to both a nondestructive brain scanner and to a superintelligence capable of doing such reconstructions, and that I'll either be scanned and uploaded, or else a reconstruction of me from my writings (and other relevant data of the sort accessible today, leading up to the point of entering the chamber) will be uploaded. In the first case, upon walking into the chamber I'd anticipate a 50% chance of suddenly finding myself an upload. In the second case, I'd expect a much smaller chance of that being the case.

I know that we don't have the relevant data yet on the variance between human mind-states, but given this uncertainty, I find I'd much prefer cryonics to reconstruction.

Martine Rothblatt has written a lot about this idea, using the term 'mindfiles.'

You should probably give a number for the cost of cryo.

As far as I know, $9,000 is the cheapest possibility, which is cheaper than many cars, and there are a lot of those in the world.

Part of the reason why I make available records of e.g. the books I own, the music I listen to and the board games I've played (though this last list is horribly incomplete) is to make it possible for someone to reconstruct me in the future. There's a lot of stuff about me available online, and if you add non-public information like the contents of my hard drive with many years worth of IRC and IM logs, an intelligent enough entity should be able to produce a relatively good reconstruction. A lot would be missing, of course, but it's still better than nothing.

I don't put that big of a priority this, though - I haven't made an effort to make sure that the contents of my hard drive will remain available somewhere after my death, for instance. It's more of an entertaining thought I like to play with.

You don't want a written diary, you want a highly efficient miniature camera that's always on. And maybe an option to annotate it in real time.

we need to inject the stuff that sets you uniquely apart even from your fellow humans who share your statistically regular quirks: your memories. If the record of your memories is good enough, this should effectively create a person who is so much like you as to be indistinguishable from the original, i.e. restore you.

I put a lot less importance on memory than you do. For instance, if I suffered amnesia and was not conscious of any of my previous experiences, I would still be me. In fact, given the choice between (A) someone who had a completely different past but had my memories transplanted, and (B) me with permanent amnesia, so I'm not consciously aware of any of my past experiences, I care much more about preserving B than A. It's not clear to my why I should care about my memories put into a 'blank body', if that's even meaningful to talk about without all the lost resonances and connections.

Besides your memory, you have all sorts of unconscious connections that your brain has made over your lifetime, and all sorts of skills, thoughts, and beliefs for which you no longer have the memories. I've forgotten a lot more than I know right now, but all those things that I've forgotten have distilled down into who I am in a way that's not necessarily reflected in my memories.

I don't think that writing yourself into the future would work very well, but I've got another idea for a cheap cryonics-substitute: get your brain frozen in plain old ice. By the time we get whole brain emulation, a brain frozen in ice may contain enough information to replicate on a computer, even if it cannot be biologically revived like a cryogenically frozen brain.

I find it deeply weird that nobody has pointed out that the information describing you, written as prose, is not conscious. This is a major drawback. The OP mentioned it, and dared people to take him/her up on it, and nobody did.

I attribute this to a majority of people on LW taking Dennett's position on consciousness, which is basically to try to pretend that it doesn't exist, and that being a materialist means believing that there is no "qualia problem".

With cryonics at $9000, you have to ask which method is getting you the most utility per unit effort. $9000 equates to about 200-600 hours of work for most reading this, but if the writing takes an hour a day for the rest of your life, that's 10,000+ hours.

Of course the best protection would be to do both.

This post is in dire need of a reference to Hofstadter's I am a Strange Loop.

Also maybe Halperin's The First Immortal which explicitly considers the possibility raised here.

Also maybe Lion Kimbro.

http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2012/04/how_many_persons_can_there_be_brain_reconstruction_and_big_numbers.html

This doesn't seem particularly useful to me. Even if the written copy could be identical to me in every way, I would place a much lower value on the creation of such a copy than on the extension of my current life. You're right that this might be slightly preferable to death, but I certainly wouldn't position it as a real alternative even to cryonics.

We are going to have to rely on simulations of the deceased for the foreseeable future. Individuals who have not left extensive records will be relatively more quality simulations.

Hopefully at some point a sufficiently advanced simulation will exist which can interpolate the remainder of humanity, but even then we are left looking for a reason to do so.

Would you also write about the large pecentage of your time spent writing?

I've had a similar idea for a while. It involves reconstructing people from the memories of those who knew them, like Kaj_Sotala describes. So, for instance, my maternal grandfather died a few years ago. But if a bunch of us who knew him lived into a future where our memories of him could be scanned and analyzed, a copy of him could be built that we would find indistinguishable from the original as far as those of us who remember him are concerned. I thought it might be useful from a comfort standpoint.

How much is gained by writing about yourself? Aside from personal development aspects, less than video-logging. But likely different information than video-logging. Possibly stuff buried in your childhood. Logging biometrics like heartbeat could be more total benefit than video-logging, but again different information. Having a combination could prove more useful in a synergistic manner than any one information source on its own, because comparing them against each other allows you to infer more information.

The same goes for cryonics. At a guess I'd say preserving the nanostructure of your brain to the highest technologically feasible level is going to be thousands of times more effective than all the digital and plain-english data in the world. But combined they would be significantly more effective, because of the data you can gain by cross-referencing different types of information.

This is an idea Paul Almond suggested a while ago in his article Indirect Mind Uploading.

Also, he has quite a few new AI related articles on his website http://www.paul-almond.com. I haven't read any of them yet, so I can't comment.

I think this is missing out on a lot of other higher bandwidth source of information about us. Part of the problem is a focus on output, as if creating a pale imitation of the process of scanning a brain. But you could also reconstruct much of brain by looking at the things that went into it: DNA, the environment. tack on the records that are already automatically made of its choices, and you isolate a very small part of the potential mind space.

Any person with my DNA, my grades, my bookshelf, my pantry, my bank statements and my web VIEWING history would be quite a bit like me, tack on the things I've posted and my Gmail acount, memories from people who know me, and a hi res visual scan of places I go, and you've got a pretty narrow criteria for rebuilding.

From here: the phobia that this was the last post of my original, and my simulated life has reproduced all the artifacts left by my original. (or that my artifacts have begun to deviate, and I am no longer a candidate for a true copy.)

How good a record is good enough? In truth, I don't think we even know enough to get the order of magnitude right. The best I can offer is that you need to record as much as you are willing to. The more you record, the more there will be to work with, and the less chance there will be of insufficient data. It may turn out that you simply can't record enough to create a good restoration of a person from writing, but this is little different from the risk in cryonics of not being well preserved enough to restore despite best efforts. If you're willing to take the risk that cryonics won't work as well as you hope, you should be willing to accept that writing yourself into the future might not work as well as you hope.

I think you're equating the relative risks here. If I wrote about myself for an hour a day for the rest of my life, I would rate chances very low that I could be reconstructed in contrast to cryonics. Your chances of being reconstructed increase with the amount of information present. One of the arguments for the safety of vitrifying the brain is that because the brain has a lot of redundancy (structure), we might be able to reconstruct damage.

I worked for a while in cryptography, where we try to recover original data wholly or partially from encrypted data. Based on those experiences and talking with Peter de Blanc, I looked into this reconstruction problem for a couple of hours at one point. Off the top of my head here's some tips which might make it easier for me to reconstruct your body, brain and memories if I'm alive:

Record lots of data. Speech is better than writing. Include at least one photo. Videoblogging should record at a ate of least ten to a hundred times faster than writing, and if storage stays as cheap as it now it'll survive. Freeze a DNA sample (cheap, but riskier) or record one (expensive because you have to scan it, but less likely to be destroyed). This should allow one to reconstruct a physical twin at minimum. I'm going to stick my neck out here and say don't censor yourself if you're recording audio. If I want to reconstruct your brain, the first step is probably to reverse-engineer your thoughts, so the more freely you talk the easier to deduce how you arrive at what you say. For example, I would learn more about someone if I watch them solving a cryptogram for ten seconds, than if they just gave me the answer. I have no idea if free association is equally as likely to work as essays. In general, the closer to the source the better in reverse-engineering: I've heard an estimate I buy that a minute of high-quality video could replace DNA in a pinch, but would still pay to freeze it, myself.

A friend of mine made a design for a $50 EEG cap, but the bandwidth is low enough that I doubt it's worth the cash for most people. If you have money to spare it can't hurt.

I wouldn't guess I would be able to exactly reconstruct so that you'd notice no difference, which is my personal standard and why I'm not doing any of this myself.

Ciphergoth, I'd be interested in what you have to say about this.

I'm very curious as to your theory of what happens if you do both. That is, suppose you're cryogenically frozen and then revived, while someone also makes a top-notch copy of you based on the recorded memories you left behind. It seems rather obvious that you can't have double-you, so what happens?

This hypothetical suggests to me that one or both are doomed - and if it's just one, I'd think it's this method you've suggested that wouldn't work. But I really haven't thought too hard on this issue, so I'm curious as to what others think the solution/outcome is.

Cryopreservation works pretty well for embryos, eggs and sperm. Or, if you are feeling optimistic, you could sequence your DNA - and store that. That is not preserving everything - but it should be enough to make some identical twins - which is pretty close for most purposes.