Great example! Failure modes are really important. Brains and dwarf fortresses might both be computers, but their different physical instations give them different ways to break down. Sometimes that’s not important, but sometimes it’s very important indeed. Those are the sorts of things that get obscures by these dogmatic all-or-nothing arguments.

I’m just cautioning against taking things too far in the other direction: I genuinely don’t think it’s right to say “your brain isn’t a computer,” and I definitely think it’s wrong to say that it doesn’t process information. It’s easy to slide from a critique of the computational theory of mind (either as it’s presented academically by people like Pinker or popularly by Silicon Valley) into the opposite–but equally wrong–kind of position that brains are doing something wholly different. They’re different in some respects, but there are also very significant similarities. We shouldn’t lose sight of either, and it’s important to be very careful when talking about this stuff.

Just as an example:

That is all well and good if we functioned as computers do, but McBeath and his colleagues gave a simpler account: to catch the ball, the player simply needs to keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery (technically, in a ‘linear optical trajectory’). This might sound complicated, but it is actually incredibly simple, and completely free of computations, representations and algorithms.

It strikes me as totally wrong to say that this process is free of computation. The computation that’s going on here has interesting differences from what goes on in a ball-catching robot powered by a digital computer, but it is computation.

Pondsmith is making up excuses to keep “wheelchairs make you evil” in his game instead of recognizing the notion for what it is and discarding it.

At this point as I understand it his take is “alienation/isolation, trauma from a violent society, and denial of access to necessary medical care can eventually break someone, and someone who can bench press a car and has a bunch of reflex enhancers jacked directly into their spine is more likely to lash out in a dangerous way when their back’s to the wall, they think they’re going to die, and they panic,” with a whole lot of emphasizing social support networks as being important for surviving and enduring trauma like that.

It’s still not as good a take as “cyberpsychosis isn’t real, it’s just a bullshit diagnosis applied to people pushed past the brink by their material circumstances, acting in the way that a society that revolves around violence has ultimately taught them to act, who then just double down on it because they know they’re going to be summarily executed by the police who have no interest in deescalation or trying to take them alive, compounded with the fact that they can bench press a car and react to bullets fast enough to simply get out of the way, at least for a while” would be, but it’s earnest progress from someone who’s weirdly endearing despite being an absolute galaxy brained lib.

Weirdly, Cyberpunk 2077 seems to have had a better take on it than Pondsmith himself, with “cyberpsychos” mostly being just people with an increased capacity for violence dealing with intolerable material conditions until they fight back a little too hard against a real or perceived threat, with one who’s not even on a rampage and instead is just a heavily augmented vigilante hunting down members of a criminal syndicate that had murdered someone close to him. The police chatter also has the player branded a cyberpsycho when you get stars, reflecting the idea that it’s more a blanket term applied to anyone with augments who’s doing a violent crime than a real thing.

And people survive all of that stuff, and are still people. I really don’t understand what you’re getting at here.

I didn’t say “you are perfectly happy and have no material problems whatsoever dealing with a traumatic injury and imperfect replacement,” but rather that this doesn’t represent some sort of fundamental loss of self or unmooring from material contexts. People can lose so much, can be whittled away to almost nothing all the way up to the point where continued existence becomes materially impossible due to a loss of vital functions, but through that they still exist, they remain the same ongoing being even if they are transformed by the trauma and become unrecognizable to others in the process.

And would an upload be a person, legally speaking? Would your family consider the upload to be a person? That’s pretty alienating.

If you suffer a traumatic brain injury and lose a large chunk of your brain, that’s going to seriously affect you and how people perceive you, but you’re still legally the same person. If instead that lost chunk was instead replaced with a synthetic copy there may still be problems but less so than just losing it outright. So if that continues until you’re entirely running on the new synthetic replacement substrate, then you have continued to exist through the entire process just as you continue to exist through the natural death and replacement of neurons - for all we know copying and replacing may not even be necessary compared to just adding synthetic bits and letting them be integrated and subsumed into the brain by the same processes by which it grows and maintains itself.

A simple copy taken like a photograph and then spun up elsewhere would be something entirely distinct, no more oneself than a picture or a memoir.

Aight I think we might be stuck in a semantics disagreement here. I’m using brain to mean the actual brain organ plus whatever other stuff is needed to support brain function - the endocrine system, nervous system, whatever. The physical systems of cognition in the body. i do not mean literally only the brain organ with no other systems.