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Scientists Discover magnets can fiddle with moral judgements. (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125304448)


Listen to the story, because the transcript leaves some parts out.  Still, an interesting development in the understanding of humanity and human kind. 

I think it also lends to the notion that folks who have different moral judgments about situations are, in fact, brain damaged, and not just thinking differently.  Which is mildly uncomfortable.

Piffle.  According to their own interpretation of the data, it's the ability to decipher intent that was knocked out.  Which is an important piece of making a moral judgement, and it's a very interesting experiment, but it's a big leap to claim that magnets neutralize morality or whatever.  You might as well say that blindfolds impair moral judgement because a study showed that people with blindfolds are unable to tell which of two potential murderers is holding a bloody knife.

Everybody knows there's no such thing as morality.  C'ya later thread.

I want to say this is a load of shit but there's no obvious link to an article so I'm left with no way of knowing what is actually being talked about. It sounds like maybe there's a portion of the brain (that cannot be accurately identified) that when subjected to intense magnetic forces, causes a person to pay less attention to intention and more to results of actions when assigning responsibility.

Now I know that sounds exciting but without reading more I'm willing to bet it's actually far less significant.

I hope you're asking for a link to a greater story from the NPR story I linked and not just failing at Forum 101.

Fucking what.  A psych professor is saying this?  Is he, in any way, related to this experiment?  They couldn't get a neuroscientist or a philosophy major or someone who might actually understand either side of this argument?  God damn, I'm finding it hard to argue that people have or need a brain.  This is seriously supposed to be journalism?  "SCIENTIFIC STUDY PROVES THAT ELECTRICAL STIMULATION CAN IMPAIR JUDGEMENT p.s. all religion is a hollow lie"

Uh, magnetic induction induces an electrical field and I'm pretty sure everyone knows what happens when you shock brain centers.  This is not news other than that it seems to be a non-invasive method for stimulating the brain, which could be kinda cool.

I'm not sure why the two bit psych analysis is in there other than that NPR has offices in Harvard Sq.

So, is this the lead up to remote mind control? And since it uses magnets will tinfoil hats actually protect me?

Lead lining would help.

As far as using magnets to influence thought, there have been several studies on it. There was one big article I read on it a while back (http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/neuro/TMS_NYT.html). I wouldn't say it's common but it's a known and fast-developing field.

Tinfoil is better.

They're about equally useless.  Making them scramble for new materials would be funny though.

Helmet mounted degaussing coil?

wouldn't that wipe your brain of all thoughts?

No, you need to arc electricity through the brain to get that strong an effect.

Intra-cranial van der Graaf generators for all!

LINK (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20351278)

I just read a story the other day that boldy stated that massive head trauma can cause a 3rd grader to do poorly on his timed long division test. 

So you're saying third graders may not have souls?

Also I had been referring to a lack of link to a journal article rather than news article, thanks Merusk. I was also quite drunk and crawled off to bed shortly after posting. The experiment really doesn't mean a lot from a moral perspective beyond showing that the mechanical side (not to say there's any other way, maybe mechanical perspective?) of how we think can be affected by non-visible forces and perhaps more precisely than we're used to dealing with. There's also some interesting experiments out there that claim a link with poor emotional processing and a predilection towards harder Utilitarian style moral judgements (so people are more accepting of stuff like killing one person and harvesting their organs to save 5 others).

No one as soul.  I don't even get the concept, it's supposed to be a magical essence that think for your physical body yet it stop working if you drink too much or get dementia.  Just a comment, a full discussion on this would get denned.

I only start to think about souls when I think about Star Trek transporters. Or the A-Gates and T-Gates Charles Stross postulates.

While, on the one hand, I can totally see the benefit of having my body completely disassembled and put back together with all the broken bits fixed (or, as Stross points out -- better. Or looking like a centaur. Or having four arms. Or perhaps just taller. Really, whatever you want providing you can get the physics to work), on the other hand I'm a bit concerned that the "me" that comes out the other end is just a copy and I actually died.

Although it's sort of a moot point after the first trip through.

Simak's version of teleportation in Way Station (http://www.amazon.com/Way-Station-Clifford-D-Simak/dp/1882968271) was the best for giving you the heebie-jeebies.  The technology would make a copy of you on the other end (no nice "matter-energy stream" like in Star Trek), and the "old" you would be euthanized and dissolved in acid.  Apparently after a while you just learn not to think about it.

People not used to thinking about it get reminded that they're really nothing more than the goop inside their skulls, become uncomfortable, film at eleven.

One would think "personality change" being a symptom of brain trauma would be adequate demonstration of that fact. Have you ever had someone you knew very well go into a coma and wake up a different person? I have, and while their medical problems are severe, they're nothing that should be able garble a "soul". They weren't attacked by a fucking wizard.

Ha!

Actually, I think the most famous case was a poor fellow 200 years ago that took a crowbar through the face (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage). Although, according to Wikipedia, most of those stories are just tall tales.

In any case, I've never actually associated 'soul' with the bit of you that does all the thinking and deciding, if such a thing even exists. I suppose that's why I'm not thrilled with Star Trek transporters -- I'm not entirely sure that'd it be "me" on the other end, since I'm not really of the mind that there's some magical bit that follows me around.

I suppose it would rely on how well the copy was made, and the actual nature of consciousness. Still, I have to admit of Stross-style A-gates started hanging around, I'd happily use one to get rid of some pounds. :) Assuming they're not infected with Curious Yellow. (Which your personal state vector can travel the net, getting YOURSELF infected with a virus that then infects the machines that break you down and puts you back together, is sort of a bitch.)

Did he moved on and founded Black Mesa?

You got obliterated.  NewYou wouldn't notice the difference though, and would be convinced they were You, even though they sprang into existence a few moments prior.  On the return trip NewNewYou would still believe themselves to be You.

Ya, this is a fun thing to think about.  I thought going under general anesthesia was kinda freaky.  It seemed like someone hit my 'off' switch.  

What the about how Multi-world Theory requires infinite clone generation constantly.  Are all the billions of you the same person?

It's not about wanting to believe in faeries or some shit.  There are actual, serious philosophical arguments about the existence of souls, the nature of the human mind, that kind of thing.  For example, it's a fairly common contention in Dualism. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_%28philosophy_of_mind%29)  There are a lot of arguments in dualism, and maybe you can come up with some counter arguments or something, but at no point will it hinge on the infallibility of moral choices.  That is what fucking bugs me.  The guy does not know what he's talking about, or if he does, the journalist presented none of the relevant points of his argument.  It would be like me getting up and announcing that Relativity provides a theoretical basis for time travel, time travel is logically inconsistent, and therefore Einstein was wrong.  It's an argument that you might get over a cup of coffee with someone who knows nothing about the topic.

If the article was an argument about souls or something, I could see that comment fitting in, but the experiment has pretty much no impact on any of the arguments for or against, and this psych prof is citing it as scientific proof that God doesn't exist.  That's fucking ludicrous.

Dualism isn't so popular anymore, though for my undergrad we had a professor that is very firmly one of them. He doesn't believe in immortal souls that can fly off or travel beyond our bodies or any of that, it's a metaphysical position rooted in logical identities (basically that the terms we apply to human minds cannot be applied to the physical stuff). Frankly you're never going to perform an experiment that proves him wrong, it would be like Escher claiming his pictures had disproved geometry.

Unless conciousness is just a state machine. If it's not discrete -- or discrete on a finer level than you can map and copy -- no dice, it's faxing you not teleporting you. I suppose if you can model it as a wave and copy the wave --- but I think the finer bits of the brain's processes dip really close to the quantum level. And heck, I've often wondered if the "me" that wakes up in the morning, or from general anesthesia, is the "me" that went to sleep or went under the drugs as it is.

So, I take it you guys are all fans of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy?

In as much as an 8 is the same as another 8, yes.

If you can reproduce a complex biological being, enzymes and all, like a piece of plastic from a 3-D line printer, then yes, I believe it's just a state machine.

If you can't reproduce everything down to the atomic level, then you're not getting the same thing out and it will be different.  Some memories may be there as long as the neural pathways are laid down the same, but chemical imbalances, defects, and impurities would have such a drastic toll that essentially you're getting an 'identical' twin, if not a very close fraternal twin.  One that probably needs medical attention.

Regardless, if the ability is there to produce an exact copy, then it can be done multiple times.  All you end up with is a series of identical twins whose splits happen at the moment of production rather than in the womb.  They all think they're the original you, but time and differing experiences will make them You_n, You_n+1, ...You_n+m.

What if you can merge them back? :) I'd be happy to fork off my conciousness a few dozen times and get some work done. David Brin's Kiln People was all about that, and it's a common theme in Stross' Accelerando and Glasshouse.

It's hard to die when you have hot copies of yourself scattered around, tend to back yourself up regularly, and whatnot.

As I said before, I'm not really sure the same "me" wakes up each morning as went to bed. I'm running on the same hardware, but chunks of my software got rebooted.

Just look at photos of yourself as a child and try to rationalize that it's the same "YOU".  The body is COMPLETELY different, why would the mind be any less so?

Teleporters make for interesting philosophical discussions but the only difference between you being teleported and you growing up is that you have a continuity of consciousness (mostly) in the second case.  Although like you said, falling asleep kinda breaks that argument too.

The only question left remaining is whether you are technically two-boxing yourself, or if one of you is a pirated copy?

Also an issue Brin brings up in Kiln People. Synopsis of the concept: People can imprint copies of the conciousness on pseudo-clones (imagine them as golems, always identifiable as such, but can be shaped like anything. Bus Drivers clone their conciousness into a huge Brontosaurus like bus, that takes copies/dittos off to work. Real people stay home and party, while their clones do all the chores and work.). You can merge them back into you at the end of the day, or leave them off.

Clones can be specialized, even improved -- to the point where your copy might be a heck of a lot better able to grasp abstract math, for instance. They only have enough 'gas' for like a day or two, and can't be refueled. They're designed to melt down and be recycled.

Anyways, a bit of a side story involves a famous Dominatrix whose business was, basically, selling clones of herself. Customer would buy one, have it shipped to them, turn it on, get a nice 24 hours with a skilled Dominatrix. Except someone stole one of her clones, and was making hordes of cheap copies of the copy.

I know Glasshouse deals with something similar -- travelling between star systems is done through wormholes, where you're broken down to a data-stream, heavily encrypted, and sent. It makes identify verification a bit of a bitch, especially since if you can make absolute digital copies, you can modify them. Or hack them.

So if you merge it back into yourself, do its experiences and knowledge become yours?

Yep. In Kiln People, people mostly did it with the "fun" ones (shit like, say, gladiator clones they created and played the equivilant of Battlebots with), clones that went to parties, and clones that went to work -- if they did knowledge work, where cumulative experience mattered, and not repititive stuff.

If you went crazy enough with it -- like spawning off dozens of clones a day and merging them back in at night, and doing it for decades, you'd sort of overload your brain with information.

In Accelerando, the process a bit different. People would -- closer to the end of Singularity, not at the beginning -- fork off versions of themselves (from full-up versions to lightweight ones) to run virtually, which they'd use to do everything from consider problems to effectively seeing if you and the chick you just met had chemistry, as you'd both fork off 'ghosts' (virtual selves) who'd virtually date, virtually fuck, and report back a thumbs up or down, and merge back in.

However, real world divergence -- copies of yourself running around, much older copies of you being woken up by yourself and others -- was handled differently. Made shit complicated when you could find out you were declared dead, or that "you" were now considered a derivative work of yourself.

By the end, they'd take kids who had all the implants and hardware, fork their conciousness, let it grow up, learn, and age into about the 20s or so virtually, then socket it back in to be a virtual babysitter there to keep an eye on the kid and hit panic buttons if something weird happened. Under, I suppose, the theory that the person who knows BEST what to do with a 4 year old is, you know, himself. Just 20 years older.

How is the 'copy' merged?  If it's putting you on a slab and tweaking a few neurons, sure.  If you vaporize both and reconstruct an average of the two then it's just a third slightly altered copy.  You only exists with continuity.

Any exact or near copies will think they're you, why not since they're the same state, but aren't.  Whomever was the original was vaporized.  It's not the same person, regardless of how much the copies want to believe they are.  They think they are since they'll believe they were continuous, but they weren't.

It's absolutely no different than cloning a hard disk across several identical builds.  They'll perform the same, but they are not the original.

If your computer was sentient, would it be okay to make a copy of it, shut it off, then restore it to a new platform?  Is BobAI still really BobAI or is it really BobAI^2?  B^2 might not care, but B0 certainly would.

One aspect of The Butterfly Effect (yes, the Ashton movie) I really liked was the sudden "merging" of two sets of memories every time he changed the past, so that on returning to the present he remembered both the "original" timeline and all of the different experiences he'd had in the "new" timeline after the point in his life he had changed.  The ultimate consequence of time travel (SPOILER ALERT) aside from screwing yourself over with unintended consequences was overloading your brain with all those different lifetimes and going nuts.

With Kiln People, it was basically just accumulating a day's worth of memories. Just, you know, all at once. Accelerando had much the same thing, with forked ghosts. THey'd either merge differing experiences back into the main process, merge the two selves creating a slightly different 'new' self, or leave the information as a lump for the main process to assimilate like an ongoing experience.

If you only exist with continuity, I stopped existing the night I had my first seizure. I've got missing time, I've been reliably informed that the post-seizure state is fucking creepy (very obvious 'lights are on, no one's home') and my parents said it was surreal watching my brain reboot back up. About the only part of me that was continuous was the bit that controls my heartrate and breathing.

Typically, post-seizure, I don't remember anything from the 30 to 45 minutes after physically awakening, but before my brain's back online. I've even, I've been told, gotten up and wandered around in the latter stages -- albeit drunkenly and without purpose. I generally have swiss-cheesed memories of the hours preceding my going to bed (mine occur, and rarely, only during sleep). It normally takes a day or two before I can even remember what I had done at ALL the day before, which is why I generally wake up confused and wondering what day it is, and I've never gotten back the last bits before sleep. I've never remembered going to bed the night before, although my parents (and later my wife) did.

To me, I just..wake up. Suddenly and totally. I'm talking like adreneline straight to the heart wake up. One instant "nada", next instant total (if confused) conciousness. I've woken up to find myself in a different room (post seizure wanderings), on the floor (fell off the bed), and at least twice with EMT's leaning over me (first time I had one, and then the time I apparently went right out of the bed whanging my head on the way down). I've been told I even gave (incorrectly) my SSN to the EMTs and answered questions with almost sensical responses.

So I'm not too concerned with altering my state of conciousness by, say, merging a different set of memories with mine. I alter it in that way every day, as I process input, and any continuity stuff gets set aside by the big giant lurching gaps I have from seizures, and the smaller, gentler ones from sleep or anesthesia. Combine them both -- take me, copy me, destroy me, recreate me elsewhere -- that's a little more iffy. I have no experience with that. If, however, conciousness turns out to be a process or whatever that is no more truly 'interrupted' by that than sleep, or head injuries, or whatever...I'd stop caring.

In Accelerando-verse, I wouldn't mind forking off virtual selves and reabsorbing them. I'd be a little more worried about, say, stored copies of me waking up -- but since I'd probably be dead and they'd be backups, kinda moot.

I'm not talking about a Sci-Fi book though, I'm talking about how it would work if we had the technology to do this.  It's not you.

And by continuity I don't just mean moments of consciousness.  While many of the molecules in my body aren't the same as  ten years ago, there is a continuity from moment to moment.  There are brain cycles which happen in our sleep.  I've been under anesthesia, even had that wonderful drug which makes you completely unable to remember events even though you're away prior to surgery (the name slips my memory ;D).  It's still you which wakes up.  Your body and mind have not been replaced.

Seizures might be considered a reboot, but it's still the same hardware and software running the show.  It is not the same thing as creating another person wholesale that happens to be identical.  They are another being, regardless of who thinks they are whom.  They may both have the same claim to the Bob identity at that point, but there is nothing mystical linking the two together.  One doesn't have any more moral right to decide what happens to the other than I do with you.

Now your mental makeup might be quite fine with doing things such as wiping one another out to generate a new copy, but that doesn't magically make you anything but clones who rationalize that because you think alike you're the same person.

What you are doing that is declaring that the data which constitutes Morat is the person, and not the physical being.  Lantyssa Prime disagrees and won't be stepping on that deconstructor.  (And she feels sorry for the Lantyssa Clones which are descended from her when she finally relents.  But hey, not her problem anymore.)

I don't think we really grasp the mechanisms of conciousness well enough to say that "Me" is either the data that comprises me, or something else. Am I the software? The interactions between software and specific, unique, hardware? Or something closer to a vector -- the culmination of a lifelong process? Or more like a wave, altering and moving but not collapsing until death?

I suspect, long before we're scanning people into computers or transporters, that we'll have a better idea of it. Mostly, I would imagine, from people dying who figure "what the hell" and go first, and give us some valuable data in the process. And possibly by uploading lobsters.

We have plenty of data.  Identical twins are not the same person.

Identical twins aren't even identical. Not even at birth. They're not even clones, much less forked versions of the same conciousness.

And identical twins say nothing about the nature of conciousness, of personality, of what makes a person "them". They run on similar, but not identical, hardware -- hardware that diverges more each day, and their software processes were never merged -- their software (and heck, their underlying hardware) developed long after they split apart, and developed differently. (Being an identical twin makes you identical on the rough scale, but not the fine -- the way genes work and activate, the way growth and development occurs, you get physical differences from the get go.

Even on the rough "I can eyeball it" stage -- how do you think parents and close friends tell them apart? Freckles that don't match, minor changes in how hair behaves, slight differences in eye color.....

Compared to, say, a cell-by-cell, molecule-by-molecule, exact copy of a person --- twins might as well be different species, theyr'e so far apart.

My identical twin is gay.

I am not.

Discuss.

One of you has issues :awesome_for_real:

So if there are five exactly identical copies of you running around, is it murder if I only kill four?

Yes!  Yes!  Go, thread go!  Into murky waters!

The Hitchhiker is strong in this one.

It's like the creature that Dent has killed dozens of times through the wonder of reincarnation and time traveling.

It depends entirely on how it works. Frankly, once you've got copies around like that, the law is in for some serious changes.

Fully killing someone would be a bit more difficult, at least. If the copies are simply there to do jobs then merge or not merge back in at the end of the day, per the owner's whims --- destruction of property is about as far as it goes.

Greetings citizen! The benevolent computer has generously determined that the asking of such questions is above your security clearance. Now proceed to the food vats and begin your work.

But before you do, stop by R&D - they've been asking for a few troubleshooters to test some new inventions.