This is cross-posted from my blog and is written more for a general audience rather than LessWrong people who will be more familiar with some of the relevant concepts.
Robert McIntrye is an all-around smart and interesting dude, and he’s the CEO of Nectome, a startup devoted to preserving the human brain.
Last year, I wrote a summary of Robert’s brain preservation talk at the Long Now Foundation:
He later read it and reached out to me about discussing our thoughts. I asked if I could record it as an interview and here we are!
We dive into topics such as brain preservation, personal identity, life extension, AGI, Rick and Morty, and why he’s worried about the current state of cryonics.
Our interview went for over three hours and we weren’t anywhere close to exhausting our conversation (but we did exhaust my bladder capacity).
A lot of time was spent on personal identity and the teletransportation paradox.
We talked a lot about things we don’t actually disagree on, but I’m glad we did because it will help clear up confusion for listeners who aren’t on the same page.
The crux of our actual disagreement is as follows: I wouldn’t destructively copy myself, as in the case of the teletransportation paradox, and he would.
If you’ve read the Three Buckets, you know that I care about my own utility and the utility of my loved ones.
Imagine someone made a perfect copy of me.
If my copy’s hand was pricked, he would feel the pain but I wouldn’t. If that copy was eating a double-double animal style from In-N-Out, he would be enjoying the taste of that goodness but I wouldn’t be.
While I’d prefer for my copy to be feeling pleasure rather than pain, if I had to choose, I’d prefer to be the one eating In-N-Out and not getting his hand pricked.
It’s not that I don’t care if my copy is enjoying life. It’s that I don’t care as much because I’m not experiencing it. This seems intuitive and obvious to me.
Personal identity is a messy concept. We didn’t evolve for our intuitions to handle complicated and messy scenarios such as being perfectly copied. There was no transporter to Mars in the ancestral environment.
I don’t want to be destructively uploaded because “I” (which, yes, is a messy term) would not be experiencing anything anymore. Yes, in some sense “I” would still exist because my memories would still be in a different copy. But that copy is the one enjoying Mars, not me. And I care about the John who is experiencing my qualia more than another John.
Robert values his memories surviving and the algorithm that is his consciousness running somewhere, so he is fine with his current self being terminated as long as other copies are around with his memories.
Do you agree with Robert? Would you be fine with having copies of yourself and then destroying your current copy?
Let me know your thoughts, what questions I should ask in the future, and who I should talk to next in the comments below! Thanks!
Timestamps below with links to see what topics we covered and where:
Interview with Nectome CEO Robert McIntyre
Covid, moving his lab, and his new human brain banking project
00:01:54
Recommendations for spots in San Francisco
00:02:23
Danny Hillis, Connection Machine, and Jurassic Park
00:03:16
Human brain bank - storing brains donated to science
00:03:29
Preservation methods: fixation vs fixation + cryoprotection
00:04:57
Why does it take so long to preserve brains? How does brain donation work?
00:11:14
Why there may not be a good window in most cases to preserve a brain
00:15:50
Is it hard working outside the Overton Window?
00:16:45
His thoughts on the falling out with MIT
00:18:25
Most people don’t really understand they’re actually going to die
00:19:48
We could have done similar work to what he’s doing in the 1960s
We can act now, we don’t have to solve all the problems
When do you know enough to make an argument to take action?
00:22:58
How well can you preserve a brain under ideal circumstances?
00:23:54
Interesting surgery and implications for preservation
00:28:10
Why should we be worried about current cryonics protocols?
00:30:07
What should places like Alcor do?
00:34:04
What do we know well? What type of stuff is left to learn?
00:36:20
If you were in charge of Alcor, what would you have them do differently?
00:39:11
How much do you disagree with Alcor’s object-level preservation techniques?
00:41:05
Are you signed up for cryonics now?
00:41:47
Have you talked to anyone at Alcor? Would they disagree with you?
Is some information better than none?
Information theory: levels of resolution/quality
00:43:47
What are your thoughts on personal identity?
Teletransportation paradox
00:50:42
Bike Cuck Comic
How do we differ in our thoughts on personal identity?
01:01:24
Why not just record people with your phone?
01:02:22
What is the value of other people’s memories/brains?
01:05:32
What are your thoughts on AI/AGI?
01:08:11
Are you concerned about AI safety?
01:08:38
Why don’t you work on AI safety?
01:09:19
Can the most powerful AI get back lost information? Laplace’s demon?
01:10:30
Do I believe a simulated person could be conscious?
01:22:28
If a copy was being tortured or you were, would you care the same way?
01:32:08
Do you have siblings?
01:32:34
How close does someone have to be to be the same?
How valuable are your memories?
Would you give up the last minute of your memory for $1000 dollars?
How much of your memories do you have to lose to be severely injured?
How much of your memories have to be lost to be considered dead?
01:36:37
How old are you?
How important are different memories?
What determines you being down to be terminated?
01:42:12
Another way of framing this is by causality
01:44:37
What do we disagree on?
I wouldn’t take the teleport to Mars and he would
01:48:28
I don’t care about which “copy” is “fake” or “authentic”
01:49:00
What does being killed mean if a copy exists?
01:53:40
How should you relate to yourself?
What are adaptive aesthetics?
01:55:08
In most scenarios wouldn’t we be doing the same thing?
Not being able to travel fast is a huge loss
We are born into twin prisons: gravity and time.
01:56:20
Would you get into the experience machine?
01:57:58
What pathways to flourishing are damaged and what ones are enabled?
02:02:01
You already live in a world divorced from the physical world
02:02:46
You wake up, someone tells you “While you were asleep, you were teleported?”
02:04:55
Do you think it’s bad if people in cults kill themselves?
02:07:25
Philosophical problems will cease to be problems because everyone will do them
Social Media Questions Q and A
02:08:22
Giego Caleiro:
How is he doing? When will we have brain preservation?
Is most of the hurdle legal/regulatory or the science?
02:09:49
Chris Mcaulay:
Is there a difference in therapeutic approaches between preservation and augmentation?
02:10:52
What do you think of Neuralink?
What makes it worth getting an invasive brain implant?
02:13:28
Tony Fatica: What percentage of personality needs to be preserved to be “them”?
Would you trade a million dollars for 1 IQ point?
How much money would you trade off to lose memories?
02:15:13
Beloved Aristocrat: Have you read Fall by Neal Stephenson?
02:15:25
What do you do in your spare time?
YouTube video he mentioned:
02:16:10
Do you identify as a rationalist?
02:16:18
What do you think of effective altruism?
Most of the world is “ineffective selfishness”
02:16:48
Peter Singer among others has written a lot about this.
Reminds me of that scene from Schindler’s List of how much should we sacrifice for others.
02:17:54
What’s your favorite movie of all time?
What would a real alien visitor be like?
02:19:40
Who do you think is the smartest person of all time?
02:21:30
Who is the most capable human to solve problems?
02:23:12
Have you done psychedelics? Are you interested in psychedelics?
Have I gotten any insights from psychedelics?
Doors of Perception altered experiences model
02:26:05
His memories before his first words
What did it take to invent language and spread it?
How did writing develop?
02:30:49
Technological deflation
02:31:51
Where did you grow up?
How was it being a kid?
02:33:10
Was it hard being gay in Kansas?
2:33:58
What did your parents do?
Brothers who win the duck stamp competition
Paying his mom to teach him how to draw
Genetic differences in skill
02:38:41
Montie Adkins: What about memory limits over hundreds of years and possible augmentation?
02:43:13
DJ Grossman: Knowing what you know about the current state of research in brain and memory science, what are your expectations of those preserved now?
02:44:00
Do you think we’ll hit LEV (longevity escape velocity) in our lives?
02:45:45
When do you think we’ll develop AGI?
02:48:15
Are you optimistic about the future?
02:48:25
Do you like Rick and Morty?
02:49:38
Are you familiar with the Qualia Research Institute?
02:50:11
Who are you inspired by?
Patrick Winston
I later realized he was talking about this professor who has a great talk about how to speak:
02:52:44
Have you talked to your parents about preserving their brains?
02:53:29
If my parents died in five years, would you be ready to preserve their brains?
02:54:20
Back to continuity of consciousness
Thinking in terms of objects
02:59:26
Why do you value your own memories over others?
03:01:49
The Torah is Not in Heaven
03:04:46
If there was a lifeboat or spaceship, you would still prefer yourself on there rather than a stranger, right?
03:05:39
Why do you care about preserving your own memories vs someone else’s?
03:07:02
There will be a new type of bigotry for uploaded people.
03:08:11
The legal implications of uploaded copies
03:10:12
Why he hates the book “Thinking Clearly About Death”
03:12:21
How important is something you can’t perceive?
03:12:55
What is the difference between being destructively uploaded, and killing everyone if they wouldn’t be around to suffer?
03:22:13
What if I put you in the transporter and I just kill you?
03:27:15
Where does this intuition come from?
03:34:33
For people that want to follow, what do you recommend?
https://nectome.com/