Excerpt for understanding the human viewpoint on persistent self-identity
Begin excerpt:
1.1: What is Anastasis' "Safe Rebirth" package?
Anastasis' flagship product, the "Safe Rebirth" package, is the most reliable* way to ensure that you return in a digital form after your corporeal form has passed.
With more than a 99.8% success rate*, it's the best choice for those who want the strongest engineering and legal teams to stand behind them.
The package includes the following:
1.2.1: Will it really be me who comes back?
The easiest way to answer this question is to talk to some of your friends who chose Anastasis. Almost everyone walks away from these conversations convinced that they really spoke with their friend!
You can also see our list of famous politicians and phyle leaders, streamers and ractors, engineers and entrepreneurs, who have all chosen Anastasis!
1.2.2: But how can it be me, if you never scan my brain?
It was only in the last fifteen years that the necessary breakthoughs occurred which allowed humans to return to existence from their lifelogging records.
As you probably know, lifelogging hardware records many things, including:
The insight which allowed digital rebirth was that, just as your friends know who you are from your actions, we can get a very accurate view of who you are by recording enough of your actions. Such an accurate view that according to almost every* scientist and philosopher, it is you.
Through the now well-established cross-disciplinary field of Functional Mindstate Reconstruction (FMR), your memories, thoughts, desires, and habits can all be derived with great accuracy from a lifelogging record.
Note: The "Safe Rebirth" package works with any PDR-21000-compliant lifelogging hardware, with the exception of the LiveNootic 2b, LiveNootic3, or any model MemoryHelper. See Appendix 2 for further details and exceptions.
1.2.3: But someone I know said that after his friend was reborn, his personality changed and he seemed really, really different. How is that possible if it's the same person?
Well, although you will still be you, a lot changes.
Imagine if you could live in any beachside house you wanted, anywhere on Earth; if you could eat any food you wanted, from the best chefs in existence; and if you never needed to worry about any sickness or injury in your body. It wouldn't be surprising for your personality to change a little bit then, right?
Well, in your digital existence, you'll have all these things! It's easy to live perpetually in a chalet in the mountains, a perfect tropical resort, or a luxury penthouse in a city. And that's only the beginning of the possibilities!
What if you could have anything you could imagine?
So you see that it's natural that some people find that their personalities change somewhat as a result. Your personality would change too, if you found yourself in a virtual paradise!
Note: See Appendix 2 for discussion of personality-alteration risks to which uploaded are subject, among external risks. These internal dangers include but are not limited to: volition spirals, growth fracture, distal and proximal looping apraxia, and others. We strongly recommend that all uploaded clients install one of our Stable Desires volition balancing exoself packages. You must sign and initial each page of the mandated consent form (Appendix 1a) before purchasing any rebirth package.
1.2.4: I only started wearing a lifelogger 5 years ago. Can I still sign up?
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1.2.5: How do I know you aren't just saying it will be me?
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1.2.6: What about this person I heard about, whose resurrection didn't work?
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1.2.7: My religion teaches that my soul won't survive the resurrection process.
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1.2.8: Can I sign up my pet?
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2.1: How does Anastasis' Full Recollection process work?
The complete process is pretty technical, but if you want you can read the Full Recollection whitepaper here.
In summary, though: All mindstate recovery processes start with what you can call a "mind-seed." This mind-seed is a representation* of a human brain without any* particular experiences, although it has been pre-formed with the kind of experiences humans have in general.
The sights and sounds from the lifelogger are fed into the mind-seed. The mind-seed in turn starts to try to predict your actions, which were also recorded from the lifelogger. At first the mind-seed does very badly at doing this, but after looking at the actions which you did do, it starts to get better.
The task of predicting your actions, however, starts to produce a reconstruction of your thoughts, feelings, and memories -- you can't predict how you'd act in a given scenario, without knowing what you are like! So this prediction-task produces an initial, fuzzy notion of what your thoughts are.
This initial, fuzzy notion of thoughts in turn allows us to more accurately understand how sights and sounds impact you! We understand a little better what you'd think about on seeing certain things, or how you'd look at other things. This allows a more precise prediction of the actions that you did, which in turn makes the fuzzy notion of the thoughts you were having less fuzzy.
The process continues iteratively until it converges on the only unique solution -- you!
Full Recollections improves on other mindstate recovery processes in several ways. It incorporates:
Note: Although Full Recollections captures the vast majority of individual personality in almost all cases, it is not guaranteed to capture every specific thought and memory, and in fewer than 1% of cases fails to converge entirely. All purchasers must read and initial each page of the mandated consent form (Appendix 1b) acknowledging this.
2.3: How can the Full Recollection recreate me, even though it cannot rediscover my complete neural connectome, like destructive brain-scan based rebirth processes? I heard that only a connectome scan would really be me.
Think of a novel translated from English to French. The sentences are of different length, with different structures; the words are different; all the paragraphs and sentences line up on the page differently. But it still tells the same story.
It's the same with mindstate recovery. It's true that Full Recollection, like other lifelogger-initiated mindstate recovery, doesn't reconstruct your connectome. But your connectome is only one way to instantiate the pattern that is you. A book translated from English to French is still the same book; and the pattern that is you, translated from a biological connectome to a functional digital form, is also you.
2.4: Can the Anastasis mindstate recovery process fail?
The Anastasis mindstate recovery process fails entirely for fewer than 1% of clients.
Of these failures, most come from clients who have worn a lifelogger for less than the recommended twelve years or who have set recovery hyperparameters outside of established bounds.
Although Anastasis recovers clients with as little as seven years of lifelogging data, failure rates are much higher in such cases. This is true for all mindstate recovery services, not merely Anastasis.
2.5: What about the cases of the "fake" successful upload recovery, and the resulting aggressively violent entity?
In a few widely publicized cases from very, very early in the development of the mindstate recovery process, the mind-seed grew into an entity which conventionally "pretended" to be the uploaded individual (the innaccurately-named "demon process") but had in fact acquired very different goals and values.
The Full Recollection process checks exhaustively for this failure mode through numerous well-established and legally mandated methods. Neither Full Recollections nor any other mindstate recovery process is at any risk of such a recurrence, as the law requires a chance of less than ten-billionth of this happening per upload.
2.6: What is the difference between the "Manually set Full Recollection hyperparameters" and the "Choose pre-bundled Full Recollection hyperparameter package"
There are a lot of hyperparameters -- options -- that can be set for the mindstate recovery process. Many of these have a small effect on the outcome; a few have a large effect.
Looking at all of these is overwhelming for most people. If you don't want to manually set them, we recommend you choose from one of our three hyperparameter packages:
Conservative Recollection. This package is designed to give you the highest* chance of a successful recovery, when balancing the stability of the recovery process against fine-grained recollection of your life.
Expansive Recollection. This package is designed to give you the most accurate recollection possible, when balancing fine-grained recollection of your life against stability of the recovery process.
Transhuman Futures. This package is designed to give you mental space and clarity in your new world, at slight cost to personal fidelity and stability.
Note that all of these packages have a greater than 99% success rate! If you're extremely risk averse, we recommend the first package. If you're really worried about personal identity, we recommend the second. And if you want to be maximally able to adapt to your new circumstances, we recommend the third.
On the other hand, if you want to choose from all the options, we also do allow you to manually set hyperparameters.
Note: To manually set hyperparameters, you must sign and initial the form in Appendix 1c. Certain hyperparameter mixes risk raising the odds of reconstruction failure above 5% to arbitrary amounts. We recommend that no one unable to read and understand the Full Recollections whitepaper manually set hyperparameter mixes. Transhuman Futures only comes with 190 days of subjective compute, due to the greater cost of running entities with larger global workspace sizes.
2.7: What are all the hyperparameters that can be set?
2.7.1: What does the "Minimum acceptable fidelity" setting mean when choosing options for the mindstate recovery process?
2.7.2: What does the "Use model-aware, demographically-typical pre-artifact fill" setting mean versus the "Use model-free, best fit pre-artifact fill" setting?
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2.7.22: What does the "Global Workspace Size" level mean?
Global workspace size (GWS) controls the number of things that you'll be able to think about clearly in your new state. It also influences your mind seed during the recovery process.
The Conservative Recollection and Expansive Recollection set global workspace size to 1.025 of the size inferred from your DNA; Transhuman Futures sets it to 1.8 times this size. See this guide for more information on how the baseline is calculated.
Some people believe that larger workspace sizes result in less accurate recovery. Other people believe that larger workspace sizes make you more "you" after recreation, by allowing your to process a greater number of previously time-isolated experiences at once. The issue is complex and most people agree there is ultimately no determinate answer.
We strongly discourage global workspace sizes larger than 2.3x larger than standard, which can result in sharply increased instability during mind seed recovery. Nevertheless, in response to immense demand, we permit global workspace to be expanded up to 3x. Workspace sizes larger than 3x can result in a chance of failure greater than 5%.
Anyone setting the global workspace size above 1.8x must have passed the Full Recollections literacy test. Larger global workspace sizes increase cost for running your digital form. The 500 days of subjective compute provided by Full Recollections is for a global workspace size of 1.025.
2.7.23: What do the "Clip Reconstructed Memory Backpropagation" levels mean?
2.7.24: What do the "Coherence Regularization Baseline" levels mean?
2.7.25: What do the "Experienced Music Enhancement" levels mean?
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2.10: I read that the process of reconstructing a mindstate hurts the person being reconstructed. Is this true?
End Excerpt
Tags: History and Historical Reconstruction; Preparation for Alien Contact; Evolution-Derived Mesaoptimiztion; Memetically-Fit Cultural Practices; Items with estimated 0.01-0.0001 chance of future relevance according to 0x72a32e
See Also: Animal Beliefs about Identity; Pre-Henotic History; Standard Model of Pre-Recollection History; Sufficient Conditions for Henosis