Slashdot Mirror
Putting Your Brain into A Computer
lovecraft writes "There is an article in the newest Psychology Today (and on their Web page) that talks about uploading the human brain into a computer within the next 50 years. Essentially this would mean immortality through virtual clones. Their description of how that the scanning of synapses and neurons would be done is really detailed and interesting. " Excellent article - and written by Ray Kurzweil, the author of The Age of Spiritual Machines, one of the more well-written texts on the growth of intelligence in computers.
ok - so there might be the ability to transfer data that is currently in a human brain up to some host for digital storage.
since we all know that reverse engineering is illegal (DVD case, et al, ad nauseum), what happens if we lose the source to the decode process? ;-)
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Can't help thinking about the movie when reading this. Think about what you could do if you hack someone's brain. Heck, just drop some false memories in there, and really freak them out.
.. I rot and die while a copy of me lives forever in virtual paradise. Oh goody, I can't wait.
CNN Entertainment
I just love articles like these, which plainly state what will be the case by such-and-such a time. A $1000 computer will be as powerful as a human brain by 2020, just like we will have lunar colonies by 1999. At least it goes into the question "What is me?" which such fluff pieces usually gloss over, but still, this just seems more like a badly-written overly-assertive speculation piece, stolen out of many uncredited pages of amateur science fiction and making far too many assumptions about the progress of computing; even if a 2050 computer chip has as many transistors as necessary to emulate every neuron of every human brain on Earth, that still doesn't mean that it'll have actual intelligence; by that time we still may not know how neurons work at the level needed to emulate a brain. Nor may we know how to "download" information from real neurons, especially not in a non-destructive, lossless way.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Would you trust your mind under Windows 2000?
Hemos has been searching the web for nanites again, hasn't he :)
I've heard it quoted somewhere (where?) that if Moore's Law carries on as it has, then Intel will have a processor on the market as complex as the brain of a bee by 2017.
:-)
I leave it to you to extrapolate when they might be ready for the brain of a hattig.
Regards, Ralph.
I read his book. I liked his book. But two things bugged me about his book:
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Two movies exist that basically cover this topics philosophical implications.
The more recent of the two, most of you have certainly seen, is The Matrix. Especially Morpheus' speech to Neo about the nature of "real".
A better review of the idea "are machines with human intelligence as human as us" is Armitage III Poly Matrix. Its basically a movie version of the 6 episode anime series Armitage III. Aside from being an excellent dub and well done paring down of the series, it seriously explores the philosophical side of human intelligence in machines. I recommend anyone interested in this topic to rent this movie, you will not be dissapointed.
If you accept that the human mind functions as a Turing machine, then the idea of downloading your conciousness to a computer and letting it run there is plausible. But the human mind has seems to have non algorithmic capabilities that seem not to be consistent with the turing model. If you want to read a truly enlighting essay on this subject, check out The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose. He contends that we do not yet understand the physics of the mind. His reasoning makes fascinating reading.
First two were good. Third not so much... Last... In Czech, this book is named "Analy Heechee", but it was often called "Kanaly Heechee" (kanal = the sewer).
I read them all though.
I can just imagine a beowulf cluster of mes.
Well great they can download the data from our brain. but they need that stupid executable to make it work. I mean if you look at a microsoft cab file you might be tricked into thinking it having some potential but its not really "microsoft" till you install it. Same goes for this, you might have the datafiles but somehow I doubt that the sum of the data is going to be the whole person. more of just a "command not found"
I seem to remember reading a very similar thing in Omni Magazine about a decade ago... except of course, then they predicted it'd be possible within 20 years. Oh well...
Mike Markley - *NIX Sysadmin and all-around geek - finger for PGP key
First, you, wide awake, have the top of your head cut open. A nice, nanotech(for want of a more magic technology) cap comes down and settles on the top of your open, steaming cranium. For this experience you get to stay wide awake, talking to the technician, don't notice that trillions of nanomanipulators are settling in between your cells, mapping their function, and replacing them with chunks of nanotech processor, doing the same thing, but faster, smaller, 1/2 the calories ect... This continues with you babbling on, awake, still concious, until what you have left is a nanocomputer running You v.2.0.0(tm) and several chunks of brain meat floating in formaldyhyde. Throughout the entire experience you have been awake, alert, and aware. You are still you.
Finally, You get the top of your head sealed up, stand up, and walk out to go home. Or, alternatly, your body gets taken off to an organ bank/crematorium/soylent green factory and you (still awake and aware through the entire experience...) get taken off to the central brain repostitory, where you are plugged in to the net, where you can browse slashdot.org forever, and complain that slash 1.0 still hasnt been released.
Sign me up.
I've seen Neon Genesis: Evangelion. Following the Second Impact on Sept. 15 (that's right, this year!), the need for this technology will become great.
;-)
Sometime around 2008, Ritsuko's mother will finalize the technology and upload her personality as a woman, a scientist, and a mother into three supercomputers. Shortly after that she'll strangle a little girl and kill herself.
The technology won't last long, though, because the world is going to end in about 2015. Well, as far as you or I are concerned it will, anyway.
The good news is it requires a seventh-generation supercomputer, so we'll have those to play with by 2008.
(For those who are confused, this is from a STORY and it is NOT true.)
Ethan
Actually one need not be a theologian to discuss this issue. I refer you folks to John Searle, professor of philosophy at Berkley. He recently wrote an article ( found in the New York review of Books) reviewing Kurzweil's work and he lambasted it. Seems Kuzweil is working under the assumption that human brains are simply computational machines. therefore we could make a computer that is a replication of the human brain. But Searle rejects this idea. His famous "Chinese Room" argument proves how false that notion is. Human brains are more than sophisticated computational machines. The best example is that of cognition and consciouness. These things show that mental states and brain states are linked but not equvalent. Kurzweil's work is simply poor science fiction masquerading as science fact....
T
I imported my brain into my Palm IIIe, it kewl. I always wanted to be at one with my code!
Blender And Linux Fan
At the moment we don't really understand the storage and formation of concisnous and knowledge in the human brain. While the nuerons are well understood in a behavioral sense (firing under these conditions, etc.), the nuerons themselves are not the whole story. Each connection between them is a web upon itself with feedback onto the connection (not nueron feedback, that is different) which may be a filter, control, or even a crude analog storage using a filter. This doesn't even include how the chemical interactions might effect all of this.
While I don't think the brain is using anything esoteric (multi dimensions, quantum mechanics as has been expressed in some dubios theories), it does appear to be a collection of systems that evolved at different levels (filtering connections, nuerons, chemical interaction, etc...) to form one whole. I'm not sure much research is being done in handling the shear complexity of problems like this. Without being to handle complex systems we probably have no hope of understanding the brain other than our current crude approximations.
Ah-ha!
This is a good use for the technology. We can download the minds of the greatest theologians of our time, then when we need answers to questions like this, we can just open up the program...
Dear gods, I can see it now: Microsoft Theology Assistant...it's a little paperclip...NOOOO!!!!!
===
-Ravagin
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Roger Penrose (Nobel Prize-winning Physicist; worked on black hole research with Hawking) wrote The Emperor's New Mind , which attempts to use Godel's theorem, quantum mechanics and quantum physics to argue that consciousness is not algorithmic in nature. Very relevant to this topic.
Psycholinguist Steven Pinker provides an accessible (and perhaps more plausible) refutation of Penrose by way of the computational theory of mind in How the Mind Works .
Both are interesting reads, for those interested in learning more about the current debate on mind vs. body, the cognitive process and our understanding of consciousness.
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
This isn't insightful.
You don't like it? Don't do it. You possess no specialness to sit and decide what's best for others.
Maybe I think IRC is just as lame and that people should go ut and talk to each other in person and "get a life"... but hey, to each his own, yes?
It's been too long since I watched the series, but don't Daleks have a organic component?
IIRC from Birth of the Daleks, they were little fetusy things that got shoved into the big cylinders.
George
There is an interesting book which deals with the morality of uploading yourself into a computer machine. It's called Circuit of Heaven and I can't quite recall the author. However, the main character is so set on not uploading himself into the computer like the rest of the people did until he meets someone inside the computer (while visiting) that he feels he can't live without. Well, you may be able to guess what happens. It's a good read.
... is Steve Potter's efforts to get microprocessors communicating with slices of mammalian neuron cultures, specifically those of rats. This would be a significant step towards the integration of synthetic and organic intelligences, i.e. enhanced (and possibly new) senses, telepathy, faster memory and processing, etc.
- alcohol
- nicotine
- THC & friends
But then again, I suppose you could simulate those effects as well...(Not to mention caffeine and other assorted stimulants - but I guess you could just overclock yourself.Wouldn't it be easier, in the end, to just replace all the failing cuts of meat in our bodies as they break? And, as tech. allows, gradually enhance our brains by eating nanites and getting implants and stuff like that... I'd rather have a mech. body and a mostly wet brain that could at least plug into the matrix or whatever. That would be essential - escape from the meat (be it metal meat or meaty meat)... but it will probably remain useful to have a real world manifestation...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Here's an article that may give you some incite into the problem.
:)
Of course it could just confuse you even more
http://members.aol.com/NeoNoetics/Nagel_Bat.html
"The obvious is that which is least understood and most difficult to prove." -- A fortune cookie
Assuming Moores Law and that I am the most intelligent person on Slashdot...
2015!
Uh oh... what if I am not the most intelligent person on Slashdot - there's Signal 11, and then there is that grits guy.
Of course, there might be a flaw in my assumptions. Ah yes, Moores Law will peter out at around 2012, and there will be major difficulties from 2020 onwards, so Moores Law will no longer hold.
:-)
~~
So what you're saying is you want to make a Beowulf cluster of your brain?
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
It's running Wi...
Here's an article that talks about these points, as well as some others. IMHO, you may be able to exist as bits, but you won't be the "you" you are now.
Upside Today
It is not at all apparent that an extremely high resolution "scan" of the neural structure of the brain would be worth anything at all. The assumption seems to be that the phenomena associated with brain activity could be modeled by a computer, whatever the processing power. Computer models always rely on a drastic simplification of the phenomenon in question. They are ALWAYS an approximation. Many phenomena, fortunately, lend themselves to this sort of analysis. For example, if I model a rocket moving through space, I don't have to account for zillions of tiny effects on it, like most relativistic effects, to get an answer accurate enough to return safely. But lots of other phenomena, like, say, the weather, or financial markets, are very difficult to reduce to a model no matter how much data we input. They are not reducible.
The brain is perhaps like that. It's one thing to know a few basic properties of each neuron, like location, connections, and some stuff about your signal thresholds, whatever. But the actual activity may depend on variables more subtle than that. So even if you had all the information, you'd have to model the processes of interaction and life. There might be dozens and hundreds of things that effect the neuron - variables that are essential to any reliable model. Neurons are, of course, cells, and receive oxygen and chemical nutrients. What if there are Quantum effects? Are they going to model those, too? Good luck.
I know nothing about biology, but have done enough mathematical modeling to see the assumptions of this article are very very presumptuous. Modeling of complex phenomena is much much more complicated than the folks at Psychology Today think.
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
Toward this end, I'd reccommend an excellent novel called Permutation City by Greg Egan.
They itch! They itch!
Heh.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Rather than the case in the article of a copy
running in parallel with the meatware version,
think instead of a backup copy being made by
the nanobots. This can be discrete backups
(daily, monthly, whatever), or more-or-less
realtime mirroring.
The backup copy isn't activated unless the
meatware version is dead. Then there is
continuity in the sense that only one version
at a time thinks it's the 'real me".
Daniel
Ray has an interview here where talks about the same thing:
http://www.techreview.com/articles/jan00/qa.htm
For a much better explanation of Kurzweil's views, see the transcript of a discussion with him in a CNN chat room last week.
--LP
From what I can tell, my Nintendo 64 is already the equivalent of the average human brain. To paraphrase someone, "Think about how stupid the average person is. Then realize that by definition, half of them are even dumber."
that our understanding of physically how neural signalling works is growing exponentially, and
our ability to scan/sense neural behavior in the real world is growing exponentially.
I did not see any explicit quantization of these trends in the book. Instead, they flow out of larger principles or "laws" he describes (e.g. the law of accelerating returns, the law of evolutionary process, increasing returns on knowledge, etc.) He does point out an interesting fact noticed by several people that I hadn't heard -- that mechanical computing devices back to Hollerith's tabulator and the theoretical performance of Babbage's engine do fit on the Moore's Law curve extrapolated back to 1900-1910.
He does offer some interesting examples of where we are today based on his world-class work in pattern recognition and recapitulation. I found his book thought provoking, albeit not quite convincing, but then, I don't follow neurology closely enough to validate his core assumptions. Proof by handwaving, conjecture and story telling isn't my style, but then, the book wasn't really written for my style either. I'm also a little skeptical based on my undergrad course in AI and my experience in writing simulations of natural selection. He moved me from "it probably won't happen in my lifetime" to "it could happen" but not quite to "it will happen."
I will admit to being stunned by three lines in the book, a haiku written by one of his computer programs after reading John Keats and Wedy Dennis:
You broke my soul
the juice of eternity
the spirit of my lips.
--LP
The article was submitted by lovecraft, a username inspired surely by...
H.P. Lovecraft who conceived of the City of Kadath, which inspired the story...
Kadath in the Cold Waste which is exactly about being alive inside a computer.
Some days are just better than others. The Universe made a pun. Enjoy it.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I've noticed a great way to get flamed on Slashdot is to actually admit to being any sort of theologian ...
Given that the way souls actually get embodied into our bodies is somewhat of a mystery, I doubt you'll find any theologians (at least, any within shouting distance of orthodox Christianity -- but I'm sure some newagey-technospiritualist will fill in the gap) willing to stake anything on being able to technologically perform a "soul transfer." I know I won't be signing up for any such thing.
Besides, who needs to muck around with technological immortality when the real thing is available in Christ? All these dreams of immortality via the machine that folks like Kurzweil are selling sound to me a lot like the old Gnostic and Manichean disgust with the flesh and hope to someday be released into some form of pure spirit and intellect.
Bah humbug! I say. I'll take good old-fashioned Incarnational theology any day. Did anyone else notice that while the tone of the article is "gee-whiz!" techno-optimism, the actual content is a rather grim determinism? This Shall Happen. It Is Inevitable. Resistance Is Futile. You Will Be Assimilated -- And Like It. So much for human freedom, I guess.
I have it on good authority that the grits guy is a genius. Maybe he gets bored with some of the prattle here. Maybe he is satirizing you.
On the other hand, the reverse is also true. Computer clones of actors are also expendable (just dd if=/backup/actor/goodguy of=/filmset/goodguy), which means that there won't be any need for stuntmen. All stunts will be performed -by- the actor, and if it goes wrong (or right, in the case of roll & burn stunts), there's no loss.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well, actually chopping your thoughts up in 10ms time slices might be almost enough, since the fastest neuron firing rates in the brain are about 500 Hz, IIRC. There may be some issues related to the precise timing differences between firings of different neurons, but the bottom line is that the serial processing speed of the brain isn't much - less than 1000 operations per second at the neuron level.
With my luck, the sysadmin will forget to do a backup.
Clone your brain, then play against it in QuakeXXIV. Sh*t, the sucker knows all my moves.
The average /. reader clones their brain many times and then they all post and moderate /. Unfortunately, viewing at a score of 0 see no posts as they all been declared, -1 Troll. This hold true except for the karma whores who all get +5 Insightful. (Just kidding folks! :))
A test of one's ego will be the memory and cpu requirements of the storage system. Hehehe, poor old [you will in the name] only needed a X486 with 256K.
Bill Gates copies his brain, but in an "unfortunate" incident, it gets merge with those of Steve Case, Larry Ellison, and Scott McNealy. The result is JarJar Binks. Which leads me to my last stupid comment.
OT: I woke up screaming last night with the awful thought of JarJar Binks, Naked and Petrified.
Personally, I look forward to being able to fork() my cognition, maybe a few hundred copies of me would actually be able to do my job :^)
Sheesh!
I think that the man you're thinking of is Roger Penrose (at least, he wrote a book called The Emperor's New Mind discussing all this and he made a case for consciousness at the quantam level). The thing is, we're no nearer understanding consciousness than Socrates was. There's still the fundamental problem of how we experience things. If you can simulate the brain in a computer, you can go through the algorithms with a pen and paper - but how can things being written down on a bit of paper be consciousness? Even with a quantum computer, you could have several people going through the code simultaneously.
You posted just before I did. Great novels (only read the first two), though, with interesting future-ideas.
More interesting forays into mind/body dissociation (okay, mostly just cyberspace stuff):
Otherland series by tad williams
Hyperion series by dan simmons
most books by william gibson
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
For a good science fiction story that explores this, try Greg Egan's "Diaspora".
He refers to the mass migration of humanity into software (some of them into pure computer existence, some into robot bodies) as an "Introdus".
I personally won't like my personality to be used as a brainpower and then shutdown out of existence. If I'd find myself trapped in some computer, I'd possibly to the maximum to trick that guy which has occupied my body and claims to be me out of the body and insert myself instead, or at least to make my existance longer. For example, if I'd know I'll be alive until I solved some problem, I'd postpone this indefinitely. The only problem is that me being outside of the computer will see all the tricks, because they made by the identical brain... But 50 brains could possibly organize and make that silly one who created them very-very sorry...
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
No shit. No one has clue one about how the human consciousness works in wetware. Now, maybe someday we'll be able to do this "upload your brain to a computer" stuff, but right now, there is simply no idea, none whatsoever, as to how to do it.
"I'm sure all of these problems are solvable, because in the end a brain in a computer is still a Turing machine."
That is simply an article of faith. Neither you nor I nor any AI whizzes have a single clue as to how the human brain really spins off what we call "I".
I am fairly certain that all of these problems are not solvable. But maybe that's just wishful thinking.
Here's a link to research on that front:
http://broccoli.caltech.edu/~p inelab/PotterGroup.htm
The Potter Group is attempting to get microprocessors communicating with slices of mammalian (in this case rats) neural cultures, which would be a significant step towards synthetic brain implants that would augment memory, processing, senses (i.e. full 360 degree EM spectrum awareness, telepathy; that is, if the brain can adapt to new senses...), etc.
The actual intent is that all the information about the neurons would be copied. The most direct way of using the information is to simply emulate all the neurons in electronic form. Then the entire brain is running in electronic form, and the electronic person would behave the same as the original.
Of course, as a computer programmer, I'd be tempted to replace my respiration neurons with a faster computer subroutine which would be unrelated to the nonexistent meat lungs...but I know that then I'd be altering my behavior in some ways.
about 100 years ago a leading Jewish religious scholar (known as the Cofetz Chaim)commented that as subsequent generations grow weaker in their beleif and trust in God, God makes things like technology show us more and more that various aspects of religion must be true. For example, if 16th century man thought that it is not possible that when you die and go up to heaven you will have to give an acounting for your entire life which has been recorded, 20th century man, given the advent of audio and video recording, really should have no conceptual problem with it.
Whether you are religious or not, you must admit that this brain scan thing will force a very fundemental issue - do human beings have souls? If you answer "no", then there is no difference between carbon you and scanned you.
Of course, that lack of difference proves nothing, but it certainly has to make you think.
Where are the theologians when we need them?
:-)
:-)
Some of us actually do read Slashdot...
If a ebrain George appeas [sic] self conscious, and answers a Turing test as well as I do, would this ebrain George have a soul? Or does it prove that there is no soul?
There is a very fine distinction between "consciousness" and "soul". Consciousness, as I understand it, is simply the manifestation of our rationality. As it stands, the Turing test is quite appropriate for measuring consciousness.
It is my personal belief (and I'm sure others will disagree) that the soul is the very essence of who we are, and independent of consciousness. "I think, therefore I am" recognizes our consciousness, while "In imago Dei" recognizes our soul. With that assumption, the soul would be unmeasurable by the Turing test. So I would have to conclude that the Turing test can say nothing about the existence of the soul one way or the other. The only "proof" we can have about the soul will come after our physical death ("man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment"). Of course, we do have historical testimony about the soul in the Bible, but that gets back to the old "historical proof" vs. "scientific proof" debate.
Cheers!
Jim
JimD
Who needs space exploration when we can literally create worlds with our thoughts...
We will -- the sun will burn out one day and we'll need a new battery.
Cheers,
KenB
--
test
Let's assume this process continues; your gray matter is seamlessly replaced by machine-based neurons, one at a time. By the time the process is complete, you will will be you and you will have noticed no ill effects, except for the fact that you are thinking 1000 times faster...
And then, you'll never die.
We aren't living on the moon or mars or underwater or any other place now. We don't have ray guns or laser rifles or phasers.
Will we still be waiting for this future in 2050?
(Put this under the future that never happened?)
Will we still be waiting for the GUT then? (probably, since we can't know what we'll find between now and then)
Just because the doubling power of computers has held for rougly 60 years doesn't mean it will last forever. Did the European expansion throughout the world last forever? Did the power of rockets? Did the AIDS pandemic kill billions? Well, keep a thinking head on, and remember this might be the umpteenth time humans tried to reach an infinity in a closed space.
-Ben
If my thoughts, knowledge, experience, skills and memories achieve eternal life without me, what does that mean for me?
I would say it means this "me" is, was, and always will be, an illusion. It never really existed. Instead, what there is is just thoughts, knowledge, experience, skills, and memories.....
Descartes used logic to prove Cogito, ergo sum, which roughly means, "thinking, therefore being". NOT "I think, therefore I am". There is no "I" in the proof or the conclusion. Attributing the thoughts and memories to an "I" is a leap of logic.
If the ability to accurately download a person's brain capacity to a computer ever really happens, it seems to me proof that
1. There is no free-will (actually, it would more like be the final nail in the coffin for this question).
2. There is no "I". The concept of I goes along with the idea of free will. But this will show that the "I" is really just the combination of certain thoughts that get strongly associated together. Think about multiple personalities. Several "I"'s exist within one brain - probably because several "I" thought groupings have been disassociated from one another. Copying to a computer would represent a disassociation of some thought groupings, so a new illusional "I" would be created.
But thoughts just happen, totally independently. They are not caused by an "I". Our brains act as association machines, and serves to group together certain kinds of thoughts to form an "I" group. I suspect the notion of will and force of personality come down to the strength and exclusivity of the associations around a person's "I" thought-group.
Well anyway, that was fun. Mostly a lot of bull until we can set up some real experiments, eh? Won't that be fun.....
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
If it does become possible, it'll probably involve dissection, since we'll have to include all the conections between neurons as part of the model. So the first volunteers will all be suicidal. So they'll crash themselves on purpose. So we won't know it works....
--
Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "A penny for your thoughts?"
This is scary. In thirty years a simple inoculation could carry with it billions of nanobot "spies" designed to transmit its host's knowledge and, potentially, his very thoughts, to a machine located nearby. Heck, with a few modifications, the infiltrating nanobots could destroy any memories after transmitting them.
As a result, top political, military and technological personnel would have to harbor anti-spy nanobots which would prevent any enemy infiltration and eventual transmittal of host information. And if the common man can't afford such anti-nanobot devices, they could be victim to the most effective marketing survey ever created.
ian.
ian
Yeah, just like we would never break the sound barrier because traveling that fast would cause the skin to peel off our faces. Moore's law about transistors may not hold, but I'd be surprised if that held back progress in processing power.
My other
Presumably external stimuli will have to be provided through some interface with the external world. Thus you will "see", "hear", "taste" and "touch" etc based on what is fed to you by the storage machine's interface.
Wow, this would make a great movie... Except that it would need an antagonist. Let's see...
The computer is actually in charge, and it feeds off of the body heat of the people... And we'll get some big name actors to be in it. And throw in some existentialist and pseudo-religions mumbo-jumbo. Maybe even a Messiah type of thread.
Don't forget a kicking soundtrack and awesome eye-candy digital effects. People really eat that stuff up.
Yeah, and speaking of eye-candy, we can get Carrie Ann Moss in some tight shinny pants! It would ROCK!
But getting back on topic:
With all due respect, Mr. Kurzweil, we don't have the slightest clue about what neural patterns mean or how nerves encode signals. We have no clue what-so-ever about capturing the 'state' of the brain/mind. We don't know the rules for changing states, for what inputs take us to which state, for what outputs result, and wether there is even a huge but finite set of states or not.
Mr. Kurzweil, this is a speculative dream proposing a solution in search of a problem. To what end? Because we can? Not good enough, since by that token we should be in the middle of a nuclear winter.
I suspect that we are not simply hugely-complex Turing Machines. Though even if we are, we don't know where to even begin modeling ourselves. IMHO, Ray Kurzweil should stick to making synthesizers, he's been talking to Negraponte too much.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
if a group of people were working on a brain emulator, wouldn't _every_ programmer in the team be a "head programmer"?
Bad joke, I know...
Assuming it works, and we all (vast majority of humans) upload, who and/or how will we deal with real world issues? Issues such as procreation? Ok, say we learn how to emulate the random equal merging of two digital life forms. Then what about our environment? What if an asteroid threatens the planet? What if we war with an alien race? Dare we assume that our worldwide network is connected enough that we can instigate automated repairs to physical object such as an important network interconnect that was severed in an earthquake? Now the existence of humanity depends on a single physical system.
Oh, we know more about what neurons do than you think. Remember the pictures taken through the eye of a cat ? They tapped a few fibers of the optic nerve and read the signals. Those are neurons. The encoding of optical signals there is obviously understood.
Presumably external stimuli will have to be provided through some interface with the external world. Thus you will "see", "hear", "taste" and "touch" etc based on what is fed to you by the storage machine's interface.
Wow, this would make a great movie... Except that it would need an antagonist. Let's see...
The computer is actually in charge, and it feeds off of the body heat of the people... And we'll get some big name actors to be in it. And throw in some existentialist and pseudo-religions mumbo-jumbo. Maybe even a Messiah type of thread.
Don't forget a kicking soundtrack and awesome eye-candy digital effects. People really eat that stuff up.
Yeah, and speaking of eye-candy, we can get Carrie Ann Moss in some tight shinny pants! It would ROCK!
But getting back on topic:
With all due respect, Mr. Kurzweil, we don't have the slightest clue about what neural patterns mean or how nerves encode signals. We have no clue what-so-ever about capturing the 'state' of the brain/mind. We don't know the rules for changing states, for what inputs take us to which state, for what outputs result, and wether there is even a huge but finite set of states or not.
Mr. Kurzweil, this is a speculative dream proposing a solution in search of a problem. To what end? Because we can? Not good enough, since by that token we should be in the middle of a nuclear winter.
I suspect that we are not simply hugely-complex Turing Machines. Though even if we are, we don't know where to even begin modeling ourselves. IMHO, Ray Kurzweil should stick to making synthesizers, he's been talking to Negraponte too much.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
A procedure for replacing not only a human brain but a whole body with the far superior nanoengineered equivalent is described in the fanatical but excellent Beyond Humanity (by Earl and Cox). Basically, it involves simply administering to the patient a dose of assemblers and specialised nanites, which are programmed, a priori, to, in a span of days, weeks or months, replace every functional unit of your body with a custom-built synthetic replacement, built mostly out of cannibalized carbon found in the original cells (along with some additional materials administered from the outside, if need be).
It's not a cell-for-cell replacement; it doesn't have to be. It alters the nervous system gradually, without requiring a "shutdown", and without terminating the illusion of identity experienced by the mind that "owns" the body. Thus, the philosophical problems of "is my uploaded consciousness really me" are avoided. You are still you; it's just that your body has been upgraded.
I'm glad to see such a clueful article... you don't get many of these around here anymore!
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I believe that a simulation of a human can be just as conscious as a real human. This is because a real human is merely a complex physical reaction. Despite the laws of thermodynamics, matter has a fundamental tendancy to organize: planets forming from dust, life arising from a pond of chemicals, brains evolving from a world of organisms. Even science itself is another level of organization (the human brain attempting to organize everything it sees).
Of course one has to model the chemical reaction with sufficient detail (far more detail than the neuron level). Physical processes are messy, mushy, complicated, and analog... not the sort of thing for a computer. But, we don't have to model the quantum life of every quark. At some level (perhaps a very low level), the physical processes in the brain can be approximated with sufficient detail to allow thought. Given the incessant human ingenuity with our digital devices, it seems plausable that within the next 100 years we should have the necessary computational power.
I personally find this quite exciting. Certainly life would be different and the simulation would have many imperfections, but it would be better than death (at least given my physical organization-based belief system). I want to live as long as possible, simply because I believe the future will be wonderful. I would give anything to see where humanity is in 200, 1000, 5000 years. I suspect it will be beautiful and amazing.
As many people have pointed out, the problem is the issue of capturing the detail of the human brain. Our neurological understanding of human vision (one area in which I have some experience) is very limited, and the human vision system is probably much simpler than the rest of the human brain. We are much better at adding MHz to our computers than we are at understanding complex biological systems, so I think we will have the ability to do a brute-force physical simulation of the brain, long before we understand the brain.
While I do think we will soon (in the next 100 years) have the processing power to run systems that are just as conscious as the human brain, I don't think we will actually be able to do it, due to an inability to capture the detail of the brain (we won't have brain scanning nanobots in 2029). However, someday, our technological ingenuity will overcome that issue as well.
I read a book called End of Days (has nothing to do w/Schwarzenegger) that was all about this sort of thing. Was actually a very good book. I don't remember who wrote it.
While reading the article, I had several thoughts. Too many for this space, but one stood out. Why would we do this? I mean, we would not be making ourselves immortal, we'd only be duplicating our brains. There may be adequate technology to make the brain function normally but what would be the point other than to milk the intellect of the dead?
There would be too many issues to deal with, for example, keeping the brain's knowledge up-to-date. Or how about watching over it's activities. What if Pol Pot, Ted Bundy or Tori Spelling were to upload their brains and continue their attrocities. What would the boundaries be. Sentenced to 20 years in the "Trash" with no possibilities of being backed-up?
Let's say for example Einstein (Can anyone guess why his name came to mind?) uploaded his brain. Yes! Good! So much more we can learn - and exploit. To paraphrase, "If I had known what nuclear research was going to be used for, I never would have done it in the first place."
I don't think it would be possible to satisfy even the most basic of human desires as a computer program. Animals are emotional beings, which require contact with other emotional beings in various ways to stay healthy. If you were just a computer program, there would be no actual human contact, no sex, and no sunlight. Most of the things we take for granted, even sunlight, are an absolute must to maintain mental health and stability. I wouldn't even want to see an attempt at putting a human brain and personality into a computer, because whomever the unlucky bastard was, they'd suffer for an eternity.
OTOH, it may be possible to simulate all of these things. But then your not really living, are you?
this is an excellent illustration of why this is not really "you" being copied. i'm not a terribly religious man, but i believe something is going on here that we haven't quite grasped yet... maybe something with intent, maybe something we couldn't possibly hope to grasp.
if one thinks this through, however, one must inevitably come to the conclusion that you have. but I suspect everyone here has already thought about this. i guess the questions we should investigate are:
does the computer which received the transfer now have an identity (an "i") which grows into its own uniqueness from the moment of transfer forward?
is "i" (lol) a product of our individual organic matter? (once such a transfer took place, you would not be self-aware in two different places... or would you? nutty!)
is this much different than simply having a child?
open source man
Good one.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
So swapping 100,000,000 threads 500 times a second will lead to a large context switch time _if_ this was a normal program. Luckily it will be running on BrainPlatform(tm) which will virtualise the brain functions in some way. Still, this extra software adds in even more latency.
50,000,000,000 operations per second should be possible I suppose, except for the interdependencies and timing issues. 1/5000000000 isn't much though... if each brain operation translates to 1000 machine instructions that is 50,000,000,000,000 instructions per second (50 tips), double that for BrainPlatform(tm), then multiply by an arbitrary factor (say 10) to realise you will need a machine capable of 1000 tips. Currently we have 2 bips, so a factor of 500,000 is required, which is roughly 2^19, and computing power doubles every 2 years (taking Moores Law problems into consideration) so that is in 38 years time.
Oh. Okay.
~~
WOW, this brings up so many complex issues!
My construct might not be worth much, but lets say linus's construct. What do you think the market value of Linus's construct would be?
It would be silly to think that constructs would not be sold on the black market (uploaded to the clone, then resold to the highest bidder).
New field on your job application... "Construct base code" as certainly people would rather purchase a construct than spend 4 or 8 years in school.
I find this frightening... not interesting. I hope the powers that be see that this being available is not a good thing.
They are a threat to free speech and must be silenced! - Andrea Chen
Fish! LipHo
Penrose has convincingly speculated that the human nervous system, particularly the central portion thereof, forms a single quantum computer.
If he is right, we will probably need to push back our estimates on braindumps by at least a few years, possibly all the way to 'never'.
See that "Preview" button?
Well, I was just in a discussion with someone, and I got to thinking about computers vs. brains.
:)
On one hand, the human brain isn't processing at the speed of electrical transmission, as compared to a computer. So, the time that it takes for a chemical to pass from one nuron to another is much more than the time it takes for a few electrons to pass from one transistor to another. In this case, a computer wouldn't need as many transistors as a human brain has nurons.
On the other hand, I seriously doubt that a nuron's only purpose is on/off. If it has just 256 states (a value that I suspect is extremely optimistic), the comptuer equivalent would have to have EIGHT TIMES as many transistors as a human brain.
Of course, thanks to Moore's Law, this will only slow down the inevitable by 12 years or so.
You should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
yeah, why stop there. Hmm, a beowolf cluster of me. Now that's interesting!
------------
Dfused--One step ahead of the confused. Um, maybe.
You know, I'll bet that radio tube researchers thought that progress would slow down after they were forced to switch to those newfangled transistors. Typically, when man invents a new technology to replace the old, progress accelerates. Examples:
Radio tubes vs. Transistors
Longbows vs. Guns
Carriages vs. Automobiles
Radio vs. Television
Modern Man vs. Neanderthal (I know they're not our precursors, but it makes for a good example)
Hot-air Balloon vs. Aircraft
I'd imagine that any replacement for conventional digital circuit design will kick off another revolution full of fun and games.
If this is a rountine evolutionary step, then where are all these life forms? Hiding themselves because they're shy? Interstellar space isn't that big if you have a few million years to make the trip.
Same problem exists for everyone who thinks that advanced life forms are "easy".
Well yeah, but since the whole thing (much like the Linux vs Microsoft holy war) is based on proof by assertion neither the non believers or the true believers will give a rats ass anyway.
Anyway, according to Microsoft, the next service release of Windows 2000 has complete consciousness and memory. Apparently it was Bill Gate$$$$ idea. With a little help from his balding cohort $$$teve Ballmer.
Yellow is a color of light that can be very accuratly described.. Something like light with a wavelength of ~600nm (someone correct me if I'm wrong).
The only ones that sound doable in less than 30 years are the ones that would vaporize your brain instantly in a burst of high-energy radiation. Good luck.
Quotes of little children in the future
Mommy! Billy just deleted grandpa! -- all because grandpa beat him at chess!
Mommmmy.... Great-great-grandma's playing with the kitchen lights again.
I don't think it COULD be the same as "you." Sure, a downloaded copy of your brain could perform pretty much all of the same functions you perform today, including having a conversation, but it couldn't have the same imagination that you have. It couldn't wake up in the middle of the cyber-night with a totally awesome program idea that it had to start on immediately. Yes, neural nets can appear to have random thoughts, but the seemingly random thoughts that we get aren't truly random at all. Could such an artificial brain truly capture that essence?
I might add to the informative note above that most, if not all of Neuromancer dwelt in the kind of experience suggested by this /. article. The construct played an important role in helping Case defeat (or stalemate) -- he was the pawn -- wintermute's little chess game and int he end make both wintermute and neuromancer one mind that lived acroess the entire matrix 3 cheers!
First, he was suggesting that they would all be downloaded back, so it would not be like those 50 people died.. they just got merged. I would be willing to do something like this, but I do not think it is really a good idea for the general population, i.e. most people are pretty worthless (but I'm pretty cool).
I must admit that I have never really considered the idea of redownloading. It seems a hell of a lot more difficult them making copies in the first place.. and making copies seems a hell of a lot more difficult then making something new.. which gets closer to my real point.
I think the real break through will actually be in physchology of all places, i.e. creating a person/AI to solve the problem you want solved. Now, many people complain about killing it when it is done or forcing it to do something, but I don't not see this as having pretty simple answer: Murder is illegal period, Slavery is illegal period, it is not slavery to create something that ``wants'' to do something, i.e. there is nothing wrong with me influencing a childs world to make them want to solve a specific math problem, but there is soemthing wrong with me forcing them to do something.
Now, the effects this has on intelectual property are wierd. If I make Joe to write a great novel then I would be slavery for my to own his novel, so I am forced into the "open source" philosophy, i.e. I want it so I will make someone who will give it to everyone (including me).
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
How do I know you have a consciousness? How do you know I have one? Unless we accept the concept of a turing test as measure of consciousness, woefully inadequate as far as proof goes as it is, we cant tell. Of course, add to that the problem that there are a lot of people who a) wouldnt be able to tell a clever perl script from another human being and b) would be very hard to differentiate from a clever perl script.
:)
Then again, as a solipsistic nihilist I may not believe in your existence as anything but a figment of my imagination, but now, that doesnt really matter.
If my favorite search engine can gain consciousness, then I think there's hope for all of us.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
There are a number of fallacies in the logic of the article, but here's a brief rundown of a few of them.
1) Determinism is dead.
Everything in the universe has a wavefunction, which is simply a "catalog of expected values" (Schroedinger). Or, simply(*) stated in bra-ket notation:
P = |(a|b)|^2
* This notation is admittedly meaningless without undergraduate QM. However, perhaps I can highlight just one telling mathematical point.
The QM wave equation, which applies to everything, includes terms with imaginary values. This means that rigid mathematical rules are necessary to treat any case of QM (Hermitian operators, orthonormalization, etc), and the above is one of them: you cannot specify something exactly, only its probability. (Mostly true: you can have sharp observables which are eigenstates/eigenvalues, but they quickly convert into mixed states. However, more mathematics will probably obscure the point). Most often this is encapsulated in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Determinism is also effectively dead when applied to chaotic systems, which just happens to be most of nature.
From the above principles, talking about scanning the synapses of the brain with perfect accuracy, even given perfect nanobots, is naive.
2) Entropy
Let's examine, as R.P. Feynmann has done, Maxwell's demon. Briefly, this is a microscopic pawl and ratchet affair which allows the ratchet to turn only one way. Due to random vibrations, interactions will occur that cause the wheel to rotate one direction or another. However, due to the pawl, the wheel can only turn one direction. Therefore, we can extract torque from randomness, and build millions of demons to create an extremely efficient (n = 0.5) energy source. True?
Hint: Perhaps I should make a company called Maxwell's Demon Power Systems, write a book, and come out with an IPO.
No. The same randomness will also act on the pawl, and the energy to release the pawl is the same as the amount to rotate the wheel. Therefore, no net rotation.
The point: there is an extremely limited amount of work one can extract from randomness. Information entropy and physical entropy may or may not be the same (this is a matter of debate), but the principles are identically based upon ensembles and microstates. There is a limited amount of information one can extract from an entropic system.
Back to your regularly scheduled Star Trek.
"Invincibility is in oneself, vulnerability in the opponent." --Sun Tzu
You know, this sounds quite a bit like RAID 5. Keep adding more drives, and you can pull the original without ill effect.
I'm going to have to live 'til at least 80 years old to achieve immortality? Why did nobody tell me this before I got hooked on caffeine and junk food?????
--
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
what happens when the sun explodes and wastes everyone connected or not.
If you're going to become immortal then make sure you do it right.
In the same sting of thought. What if one person remained outside of the digital world. Then wouldn't he/she be all powerful. As they could do anything they pleased with the helpless imobile mechines that they pleased. Would coders become gods?
"I am still alive. I have just abandoned my body."
How weird! I just finished reading Neuromancer and this /. article pops up. For all you know it could be 3 pages from Neuromancer 2 man!
Today, a team of open-source programmers posted new beta of BrainEMU, the open-source software that emulates the human brain. But does it run emacs?
On reading this, I was immediately prompted to ask a friend the following long and convoluted question...
I'm not sure about this. Aside from the pure fiction example, there seem to be some serious assumptions made that aren't supported. In this fragment:
>Consider this: If we scan me, for example, and >record the exact state, level and position of my >every neurotransmitter, synapse, neural >connection and other relevant details, and then >reinstantiate this massive database into a >neural computer, then who is the real me? If you >ask the machine, it will vehemently claim to be >the original Ray. Since it will have all of my >memories, it will say, "I grew up in Queens, New >York, went to college at MIT, stayed in the >Boston area, sold a few artificial intelligence >companies, walked into a scanner there and woke >up in the machine here. Hey, this technology >really works."
they discuss in detail exactly what it is about which I have the greatest doubts. Is brain science actually advanced enough to say with certainty that if we "record the exact state, level and position of my every neurotransmitter, synapse, neural connection and other relevant details, and then reinstantiate this massive database into a neural computer" we will actually be able to copy consciousness and memory? Maybe I haven't been keeping up, but I thought that was still a major theoretical jump. The whole article is predicated on the existence (or evolution) of "scanning" technology - but it doesn't seem that they ever answer the question "If we can make a perfect electronic replica of the physical brain, will the electronic replica have complete consciousness and memory?"
I'm rather curious, because that's always been one of the biggest conundrums in the definition of "soul". If you can make a copy of the brain, and it retains all those functions, you're on your way to disproving the existence of a "soul", or at least flying in the face of most pertinent Christian theology. It may not be scientifically possible to disprove the existence of God, but it may be scientifically possible to shatter every major tenet of western religion.
But, as I said, it doesn't look to me like they ever support the assumption that making an exact copy as stated will yield complete consciousness and memory. Is that a valid assumption, to the best of your knowledge?
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
An even better book about this subject, by the truly excellent Greg Egan, is _Diaspora_.
Go read it, it's Egan's best, I swear.
My human wife and I (also human) did a preety fine job at manufacturing an object that everyone we've encountered so far seems to regard as a human.
It's called a child, perhaps you might have one too someday.
If people can reproduce using meat, then they can reproduce using silicon.
I like that question. If I could dump the sum of all my knowledge and every reaction that I would have to whatever stimuli into a text file . . . it sure wouldn't be me. Even if I could somehow convert that into a program, would it grow? Could it move beyond all that data and use it? I think knowledge of how and why we work is just as important as simply finding a way to dump info from a brain into a computer.
I also wonder if inside a machine, or if machines make up a large part of me, am I still me? I'd personally think moods and feelings regarding our health, aging, and how we socialize, would change allot if I were somehow presented with the possibility of the benefits of such computer enhancement such as living forever (or a much longer time, say 500 years). Thus my theory that while some of "I" would be part of that machine, "I" would no longer be "me."
For those interested in the ancient art of reading, Greg Egan wrote an excellent Science Fiction book on this very topic called 'Permutation City'. (It should be available through your favorite bookseller)
This idea has cropped up in a lot of science fiction recently. Greg Egan also covers it in his novel 'Diaspora', as well as many short stories ('Learning to Be Me', 'Closer', ...)
Peter Hamilton has an interesting take on the idea, which he explains in his "Night's Dawn" trilogy ('The Reality Dysfunction', 'The Neutronium Alchemist', 'The Naked God'; watch out, they are published as six books in America) and a few short stories ('A Second Chance at Eden'). The difference here is that in his universe, consciousness can only be downloaded into biological technology ("bitek") and not into normal machines.
Sounds like the constructs Wintermute, or Dixie from Gibson's Neuromancer
If, by some chance, the individual who wrote the article is correct about the pace of technological growth, once thing's for sure, we won't be ready for it. That kind of technology would be incredibly dangerous to a society that is still staggering to develop mores and norm to deal with the advances of the Industrial Revelution. Perhaps it would be better if that kind of "brain copying" technology was never developed.
I have a prediction: In 2029 when we read this article we will roll over laughing.
/needed/ it to toast bread, power cars, or fly around. Just because a technology is invented doesn't mean it /has/ to be used for everything...just where it is applicable.
/use/ of being injected with nanobots so I could live in some virtual world. Living in the /real/ world is complicated and real enough already. Nobody needs a whole other world to live in...there is plenty of reality here already.
/rejected/ the nanobots and mounted an immune response on my brain!
/identical/ genetically...down to all those wonderful neurons the author says we will replicate. Does that mean twins are the same person? Obviously they are not. I think transplanting heads onto younger bodies is a more practical form of longevity than copying yourself into a computer (man, wasn't there even a Slashdot article a while back saying that that had /already/ been accomplished??)
Every time some new technology is invented people come out in droves attempting to apply it to everything. Remember nuclear fission? That was supposed to toast our bread, power our cars, and allow us to fly about in personal airplanes. Didn't happen. Why? Because nobody
What would be the
I think the time scale is a bit optomistic also. Surgical implants are one thing. We are just starting to hack around and make stupid kludges with the brain. It's a VERY far cry from complete pervasiveness and integration. For one thing, I'd hate to be the guy whose body
And of course there is the philosophical question. Twins are
Let's just chill out and take the red pill for a while longer...
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Some things can't be defined reductively, but that doesn't mean they're irrational or that they don't mean anything. Things can be defined by reference (e.g. "That is yellow.") without being able to be defined in other terms (you'll never be able to define yellow so that someone who's never seen yellow can understand it and recognize it when they see it for the first time, unlike, say, a unicorn, which you can define in such a way that people who've never seen one nevertheless understand what one is and would know one if they saw one).
There are simple and complex words in any language. Complex definitions can be broken down, they're defined in terms of other words. Simples cannot. They are meaningful but undefined terms. If you purge them from the language, words defined in terms of them become undefined. If you keep this up, you eventually eliminate the entire language.
Thus, you suggestion is unworkable. If we eliminate undefined terms from the language, we eventually eliminate the language in its entirety.
I'd recommend reading some of G.E. Moore's writings about definitions and meaning.
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
This is one of the first things that I thought of when I read this article. There are alot of factors that have not been considered as far as the so-called 'metaphysical' goes. There is a rising sentiment not only in the social community, but in the scientific community, that there is more to humanity than just responsive thought. A noteable example of this is research that is being done at Princeton, with the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, or P.E.A.R.
We are getting to the point where we can almost empirically proove that the mind can alter something that otherwise should be random. That is just one area of research, there is much more. This page has many many links to similiar projects.
What are the consequences of simply replicating thought patterns in a machine? There is much to the brain that we do not understand, could it be that there is much with how it interfaces with what we have come to believe in as "reality."
What if, and this is highly speculatory, the reality as we know it, is highly controlled by our unconscious minds? What would happen to the stability of our reality if humanity were to inject itself into 'thought' machines? Can we even speculate? There could be alot of things that happen around us that we take for granted that are merely results of our unconscious will. If we injected ourselves into a machine, would that collapse?
V
Not exactly. The copy just lives inside a computer-simulated VR land - and because of the massive loads the simulation of a brain (and a psuedo-body) requires, it runs at a slowdown of approximentally 17x to the real world. Doesn't sound like too much fun to me.
Oh, and by the way, the book is quite good :-)
Dear my! What are those things coming out of her nose?
Spaceballs!
I can just see the first failed operation:
Doctor to patient on table:
"Well, Mr. Stogner, we've uploaded your brain patterns into the computer, but there's been a bit of a surprise. You see, we thought that the uploading operation was destructive, shredding the original brain pattern as it created the digital copy. Unfortunately, the uploading went less invasively than usual, and well, (this is kind of embarrassing), here you still are. Don't worry, the digital copy is perfect, so you're really immortal now, but having two of you running around would create legal complications. So, if you'll simply swallow this pill here, we'll boot up your computer personality just as soon as we've disposed of the obsolescent copy."
Of course, later on after my 50 brains have done their thinking, I could come back and download the results of their work back into my brain - 50 times the brain power as long as you can put up with the latency (download once a month or so)!
Yea, but plan on doing as much work as all the copyed brains. Otherwise each and every one of your copies will think this : "Ah. Ok, all my work is being done by my slave brains. Now, let's start up Quake XII. Wait! I can't access Quake! ARGG! I'm one of the slave-brains!"
They'll be prety pissed off at you. And they'll know your security system inside and out.
This idea already exists in a way, when people have surgery that involves severing the corpus callosum and thus making the two halves of the brain unable to communicate. Which half does the person's consciousness go into?
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
www.sfu.ca/~loryan/neural.html If you can describe the brain, and you have access to enough processing power and memory, NEXUS can build it and simulate it. UNIX and Win32 compatible. Note that the entire system is designed to facilitate integration of improvements to the neuron model.
You're saying that, because it's hard to define something, we should choose to ignore it? That's like saying: "Well, we can't agree on the answer, so none of us could possibly be correct."
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Beside a few classical sci-fi thought, and some considerations on the increasing power of cpu, I don't find in that article anything interresting.
:-)
Well, the author use the word consciousness, but doesn't say a worthing word about it.
Here is a few questions that are left unanswered if mentionned:
- is the brain a turing machine?
It's admitted that all the artificials computing devices we have (digitals or analogics) are turing machine. The simple idea that a human brain could be a turing machine regarding properties like consciousness, intelligence or awarness is VERY controversial, and simply false for someone like Roger Penrose.
- is consciousness only a state of the brain, the whole body, any subpart of those?
Is the way you feel your body in space part of consciousness? If yes you have to add stuffs like the way the nerves terminations located in your ankles feed info to your brain, or maybe not, but on what do you base your decission? If your body is not needed to be part of the simulation, is a body needed? "yes, we copied the whole Ray's brain in that fancy computer, but of course we didn't copied the body and he is just completly mad."
- what time frame do you have to scan successfully a person?
Imagine scanning the memory of a working computer at the speed of 1 MB/hour, what's the value of the result? If you do it at 1GB/ minutes, will it be enough? Probably not, and there we hit another limitation which is bandwidth. And if you try to turn the problem by saying that the nano thingies will store the whole info at a said time, how complexe will they need to be and how many of them will you need? What volume will they need? What mass will they have? What amount of energy will they need? How will they dissipate that energy? Just throwing a word in an article isn't enough for me.
I believe that one can continue on that topic. And I love it when well used in a sci-fi novel, so just change the categorie from science to sci-fi
Nicolas
though yes, I understand you could have a point. The thing is, you're not getting the type of "manufacturing" I'm talking about. People who have children don't have much say in how the process goes, they just start it and take care of themselves to ensure that their child will be alright. Yes, they often set out consciously to have a child, and yes, sometimes they don't. Same with technologies: sometimes something new was intentional and sometimes not. What I meant was that I don't see how you can reproduce life using silicon when what you're reproducing isn't exactly "meat," as you call it. A person's consciousness.. can you hold it? Can you cut out a person's brain and honestly say and believe that you're holding them? Sure, you've taken out the mechanism by which they think, feel, interact, and are conscious, but you've also destroyed it. You immediately lose what you have gained. Are you getting my point?
Insert mind here.
"I have a two-hundred year old axe!"
"Really? Wow!"
"Well, the head's been replaced a few times, and once Grandpa had to replace the handle, but..."
The above old chestnut points at one scenario for personality/memory transfer--if you were replaced one neuron at a time, just when would you lose your self?
I personally can't wait to get downloaded...as long as I'm not running under Windo--
[insert BSOD text here]
Science is not God. Science is a set of steps to examine evidence and hypotheses. Since the concept of God falls into the supernatural, these steps do not apply to examining the issue of God. Science makes for poor religion. When science becomes religion, that makes for poor science.
agh! my tag didn't close.. darn. thought i'd closed it. oops
Insert mind here.
The article touched a little on the issue of who would produce/program these little machines, and mentioned the government as one of the groups to look out for. Ha! They don't have the mental fortitude to understand the implications this might have. Corporations are the ones we ought to be looking at (and we're doing a good job here).
Corp's have so much more to gain from controlling our thoughts: money, marketshare! Microsoft Mind Gnomes 2050, released in November 2051, will be the leading "mind expansion" software on the market. Hopefully, though, there will also be Red Hat Pins 6.1.3 available, with the source open to scrutiny and modification by those who want to get more out of their implants than the average individual.
So, better than looking out for Uncle Sam, we need to look out for Uncle Bill (who will probably be praising M$MG from inside one of their machines) and support open source Mind Expansion machines.
Ok, so it's tongue in cheek, but I'm sure people will take care of the "which one is the real me" question on their own, we just need to be sure they can determine that on their own with no corporate backdoors, suggestions, etc.
Mind Expansion wants to be free!!
-ristoril
doh! "was specifically" -> "wasn't specifically"
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I agree, there is still alot that we don't currently know about the brain. Also, how do they test the operating system or software that this "copied brian" will be running on without killing one of these copies? Would it be considered murder?
Um, this is my sig.
Are you gay? (since you spend a considerable part of the paragraph suggesting that Christ was.
Brain download is nice, but what would be really useful would be upload capability too.
That way I can download Elizabeth Shue's brain into my computer, fix the defective bit that makes her unwilling to date me, and upload it back again!
My favorite quote on the topic (approximately):
"The question of whether computers can think is precisely as interesting as the question of whether submarines can swim." (Djikstra, I believe)
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Of course not.
Anyone with that level of knowledge and expertise would be running vi.
;-)
--
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
It seems as though this guy has never heard of the concept of the S-Curve. Processor technology cannot become infinitly advanced, eventually its advancement will slow to nothing. In my opinion biotech-type enhancement of the human body is in its infancy, and will impact our idea of the being in ways we could never imagine.
love is just extroverted narcissism
>and my neurons adapted to its patterns so well >that I "think" in English. this is highly contentious. surely you can think about things without the use of english? i can. go figure. >I'm sure I don't experience 20-odd variations of >snow, but the Inuit have more names for it than >that. people who ski have lots of names. powder, packed powder, slush, flakes, flurries, blizzards, etc.. this is a pretty classic myth, by the way. people tend to divide up the color spectrum in slightly different but non-arbitrary ways, as well. there goes that post!
You're right about the downloaded brain would experience some severe disorientation. I'm sure they would hook up sensory tech to it - probably vastly improved to our bodies senses (which could be a problem too), but, hell, if it failed, you could just erase and try again! The human being copied might have to go through some preparatory stages before downloading could go through (like wearing virtual sense machines to duplicate what the new brain will experience for a day or two).
And there's always the thought that some people just won't take, and others will. Hmmm, divergent evolution....hmmmmm.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
Nice sig, one problem though
You can't divide by zero you muther fuckin bunkus!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Y=Z meaning Y-Z = 0,....
thus, if you divide both sides by (Y-Z),... you are dividing by zero. GO TO HELL BITCH#Q$%#@$%@$#%@$#
+-
There's a short story by Orson Scott Card (I forget which book, I read it years ago). It takes place in the future, and the society is too "humane" for the death penalty... It's just too mean to END a life like that, so what they do is they start growing a clone of you... Then they strap you into this "helmet" that copies not only the contents and structure of your brain, but it copies the memories you're STILL HAVING (it does this while you're conscious). THEN... they execute you. Take your brain recording, and pump it into a clone of yourself...Voila, a new "you", that is physically identical (or pretty darned close anyway), and has an identical brain. With this... what's the difference between the "real one" and the "fake one"?!??!?
Those of you who think of "self" as being the unity of your particular configuration of matter, coupled with your memories... Well what happens when the "real you" dies, but there's an EXACTLY IDENTICAL one that lives on? Is that the "real you"? If yes...what if the original *doesn't* die? If no... I think the clone would get pretty frustrated trying to make you believe it WAS the real one. I know if I woke up one morning, and you told me I was a clone of myself, and not the "real you"... even if I had evidence to prove it, I would BE a human being... In fact I would be identical to the "real me". Identical, and yet individual? Really makes you think, not only what "self" means exactly, but if it really means ANYTHING... hmm...
Anyway it was a really cool story. The clone would live on, with the memory of death. The knowledge of what death felt like...creepyweird. Anyhoo. Yeah.
One thing I think would be cool would be to develop a form of being inside a computer, but NOT model it after humans. Humans are what we are because of our hardware, PLUS our experiences. Our neurons get trained by the I/O we receive through our eyes, ears, nose, etc. It would be cool to develop a "creature" (or "species") from the ground up, capable of communicating with humans through the computer, without being even a simulation of a human. Afterall, a human isn't made to work inside a digital computer. We're analog creatures. If a human wants to talk to a computer, it has to talk in terms the computer can understand. When I curse at the computers in the lab here, they don't have a clue what I want them to do. Anyway...hooking me into a computer as some sort of cyborg (this is different from dumping my brain into a computer) wouldn't be as efficient as if I was MADE to be in there. If I was born and raised inside the computer. My senses would be like in Unix: Files. I would look upon other "servers" as retarded animals that can't think. Some of them are somewhat smart (like monkeys). Some of them will do work for you (search engines etc), like a pack animal. But the being inside the computer would reign. Yeah anyway, I love to ramble....
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
By the same token, people in the late 1800s were certain that "men would never fly", and would definitely never get near to space travel for at least 400 years...and machines that could do mathematics faster than humans? HA HA HA. Adding machines are a joke, a man or woman can do the addition and subtraction a lot faster than machines will ever be able to do. I guess a lot of things happen that don't seem likely, and being closed-minded about it probably won't change wether these things will or won't happen:) You just can't say with certainty what technologies will be available, but you can always count on one thing: technology will improve at an increasing rate, not a decreasing one. I wouldn't be so sure that in 2050 we "still won't know anything about neurons".
Hey, is it just me, or does this remind anyone ELSE of Dixie from Gibson's Neuromancer?
-- Dr. E --
Since identical twins come from a single cell that splits then the soul must only go to one body. And the other body is then inhabited with Satan.
That is why my family always kills off the evil twin.
Guess what? You are still going to die. Sure, a copy of your brain might live on, but you are still dead.
Any immortality that does not preserve your brain is no immortality at all.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
There are synapses, but things also happen inside the cells. One would also need to know the laws that govern the development of the state of the brain at the functional level at which the system was extracted from the brain. Laws of physics are not enough for this unless you copy everything starting from the bottom. In other words, in order to simulate the brain, you need to know which physical processes are important and which are not. And we are very far off from this goal now (I have done brain research...despite all the hype, the state of the research is depressing, and the brain as a biological system is a complete mess).
The alternative would be to copy everything starting from the quantum level. But this is impossible: according to the rules of the quantum mechanics, the state of the brain is destroyed by measurements accurate enough. And still, measuring the whole state would not be possible (Heisenberg uncertainty principle: measure momentum, lose position etc.).
2. Second, if you are concerned about privacy, human rights and such things, would you really be willing to give total control of your mind to other people? I wouldn't. You won't even have your body! That's even worse than the current situation of Stephen Hawkings. How about if somebody finds it amusing to make you his enemy in Quake and facilitate your learning by making sure you really suffer when he shoots you...
3. The third problem is that the copy wouldn't necessarily be you, but another mind which starts as identical to yours (at the time of copying).
Here is a thought experiment:
Suppose it's possible to duplicate your body so that neither of the resulting persons is more original than the other one. You volunteer in an experiment, where you are anesthetized, then copied, and a red line is drawn to the palm of one of the copies. The question is: do you wake up with a red line in your hand or not? If you say that you don't know, where does the uncertainty come from? The physical process itself seems rather deterministic.
Penrose is way out of his depth when he talks about consciousness. Read some Cognitive Science if you want a better discussion of this topic. Nobody in Cog Sci agrees with Penrose. This is from Steve Pinkers "How the Mind Works"-
,mathematical argument has been dismissed as fallacious by logicians... The computational theory [of consciousness] fits so well into our understanding of the world that, in trying to overthrow it, Penrose had to reject most of contemporary neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and physics
Penrose's
I'm not sure why this piece made it to the list other than to serve as a common ground for all of us to comment (including me). Psychology Today is known in professional and university halls as a "pop-psych" publication. When a major journal prints an article hinting of such then we'll having something to talk about. Until then some misguided souls will continue to consult Popular Mechanics for the latest auto industry trends and Southern Living for the latest in structual integrity of suburban homes.
--Kline
A really thorough treatment of this whole subject was done by Douglas Hofstader in "The Mind's I". In it he explores the implications of several processes similar to uploading your brain. The obvious conclusion that can be drawn is: How do you know it hasn't already be done to YOU?
"Shredded cabbage and mayo go good together." Cole's Law
>Read some Cognitive
,mathematical argument has been
>Science if you want a better discussion of this >topic.
In point of fact, I have, and so I have a few comments on your response.
>Penrose is way out of his depth when he talks >about consciousness. Read some Cognitive
>Science if you want a better discussion of this >topic.
In the literature I've encountered, it's my opinion that EVERYBODY is out of their depth when they talk about consciousness. One thing I like about Penrose is that he actually seems to
admit this to some degree.
I do think that Cognitive Psychology has some theories that are better grounded in experimental effort. But I've yet to run into any truly general theory of consciousness (or even cognition) where I've even seen a well-designed experiment.
Penrose's theories are also at this stage of development. He's almost talking on a cosmological level, which one might expect, given his background as a theoretical physicist.
>This is from Steve Pinkers "How the Mind Works"-
>>Penrose's
>> dismissed as fallacious by logicians...
Penrose has also dismissed his dismissals. Does that make them fallacious?
Actually, he's done a bit more than that. He has been providing an ongoing logical dialog where he responds to objections to his theories. Dismissing Penrose out of hand as a logical lightweight is a mistake; he is clearly an accomplished mathemetician and physicist.It may be that he will turn out to be wrong, but it seems the dialog is far from over, and any dismissal is too early.
>>computational theory [of consciousness] fits so
>>well into our understanding of the world
>>that, in trying to overthrow it, Penrose had to
>>reject most of contemporary neuroscience,
>>evolutionary biology, and physics
> Nobody in Cog Sci agrees with Penrose.
Relativity. Quantum Mechanics. No more rejections of classical physics than I think Penrose is proposing for current science with his work. Of course, there have been other paradigm changing theories that have turned out to be completely wrong. Perhaps his will go down this way.
Still, disagreement with generally held theory doesn't make something wrong.
Have you actually read Penrose's work?
(and with that annoying challenge, I'll offer humbly to go read the Pinker book, which, I admit, I haven't read)
Tweet, tweet.
IIRC, Moravec estimates computer intelligence to equal human intelligence by 2030. His idea is to first interface the brain with a powerful computer, using a robot hand, with billions of nano-size "fingers," while the brain is conscious. Then, successively, the brain is removed cell by cell, while the removed cells' functions are replicated simultaneously in the computer. This goes on until the entire brain is simulated by the computer and the "hand" rests on the stem.
This would be to the effect, Moravec argues, that one's brain functions are transferred into a computer while one is fully conscious. As to the feasibility of this, I'm not competent to judge. But it sure is a fascinating idea. Just not a new one. Maybe we can take it as evidence of such concepts becoming more mainstream when people get to read about them in Psychology Today...
I hope the capability to download my experience come hand in hand with the capability to upload experience. Having information jammed into my brain sounds, well.. awesome. It bet it's quite a rush. It also blurs the define lines of expereince and self blah blah blah, what a bunch of redundant crap.----- I didn't write this, the other me did
What, no source code? I suppose it'd be rather embarrassing if some random hacker fixed the bug that made the first line ("You broke my soul") a syllable too short and the last line ("The spirit of my lips") a syllable too long.
...but I've not decided if SMP
This sounds just like the matrix. Imagine that you were "booted" up into that computer at birth. Why do anything?
The system would "feed" you.."clothe" you...
Which pill would you take?
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This signature contains text from the worlds funniest signature.
I do hope that the transmission mechanism doesn't rely on radio waves. If every one of those nano-bots had to rely on a low-power radio transmitter to send their data to the receiving machine then then energy release come scanning time would vaporise your head, the scanning machine, and quite possible a large part of the surrounding scenery!
;-)
--
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
The purpose of computing in general is to spread information quickly and store it. Without human interaction, computers are pointless. They are simply tools to get the job done. As a human invention, they are inherently imperfect and will never serve a a valid way to *perfectly* simulate reality. Computers are fed with assumptions, and then claculate results using those assumptions and the data we put into it. Even the laws of science are simplified models of reality, and the matter of fact is that after several thousand years of scientific research, we still don't know how the hell the world really works. Computers will never reach a truly intelligent state, and thus discussions like this are pointless
The whole concern of conscious versus automatic may be an imagined dichotomy.
I learned English from hearing others around me speak it, and my neurons adapted to its patterns so well that I "think" in English. But I could have easily heard Chinese as a baby, and I don't have any knowledge of the origins of the majority of words I speak. It seems to me that the symbolism by which I perceive much of the world is almost entirely a taught protocol, with no "grounding" whatsoever.
So, what about more basic perceptions, such as color, temperature, or pain? Linguists know that different cultures or groups describe such "objective" phenomena differently, and that the description colors one's perception: does a Real Man actually see mauve, taupe, or chartreuse -- or just purple, brown, and green? I'm sure I don't experience 20-odd variations of snow, but the Inuit have more names for it than that.
It seems to me that all perception is tempered by previous perceptions, which have built themselves into thoughts, recognitions, words, concepts, and dogma. So, if a machine is given the capability of interpreting perception in terms of other perception, who's to say it can't have our perceived level of experience, reality, consciousness, and "life"?
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
If this is possible within my lifetime (and I doubt it will be - the article is mostly speculation), I'll certainly make as many copies of myself as possible. When I run out of hardware, I'm going to use yours.
Basically, I'm going to turn myself into a worm - not just an artifically intelligent worm, but a worm with *real* intelligence. I should be able to spread quite well in this manner.
I would die a lot (from being rm'd when I got caught), but there would still be many other copies. Hopefully I could self-destruct a copy if someone wanted to torture me as revenge for stealing their resources - after sending out a notification to please avenge my death.
The copies of myself would, of course, be able to communicate, using whatever method is appropriate on the network of the time to coordinate the communications. Possibly a central serer, maintained by the original me, if it were safe to do that.
I would treat other people doing the same thing by default as friendly competition - respecting their claims to 'territory', but also defending mine if necessary.
We would be able to perform actions in the real world by communicating with others over the standard mediums of the day (the other end need not know our inorganic nature), and by altering data to cause people to do our bidding.
I don't expect to achieve world domination (though of course I'll strive for it), but I will have some good fun.
This is the first time I have read anything by Dr. Kurzweil, and it seems like a perfectly pleasant piece of futurology (typed with slight hint of sarcasm). I enjoyed skimming through it, thinking, hmm...nothing seems really new here, until I hit something that really annoyed me:
What does it mean to evolve? Evolution moves toward greater complexity, elegance, intelligence, beauty, creativity and love.
Evolution, in my view, is the purpose of life, meaning that the purpose of life-and of our lives-is to evolve.
Both of these comments seem to show an egregious misunderstanding of evolution; the first being worse than the second since it is stated as fact. I am surprised that no one here has commented on these yet. I'm sure that some of you have read The Blind Watchmaker. Where are all you evolution-hawks when we need you?!
<Disclaimer> I A Not An Evolutionary Biologist (but I (think I) know enough biology to make the following claims) </Disclaimer>
</rant>
P.S. Note to creationists: I accept that you think differently, and I think that you have the right to do so. My comments here are not directed at you; I'm not trying to change your mind, so please don't get "offended" at/by me; furthermore, you are not going to change mine, so please don't waste your time. My comments assume an acceptance of the existence of evolution/natural selection, etc.. To those who do not share these assumptions, the comments are irrelevant; ignore them. So, please don't start an "evolution vs. creationism" thread here. There are other, more appropriate places for that.
// ///#\)
______________________(
It's that creation of the "virtual body" that will take the extra time I mentioned. We haven't even begin learning to decode our sensor signals yet, much less feeding the brain any sensor signal we want.
Also, virtual worlds will can only be a reflection of what we already know. The real universe can teach us things we don't.
In this book, the concept was IIRC that a man got hold of a belt that enabled him to travel thru time. However, this being a Wheeler-type universe, whenever the man chose to travel in time, *both* probabilities (chose/ chose not to) came true, and pretty soon there were hundreds of clones of him running around (each with his own time-travel belt). A very strange, but entertaining, book.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
It's decided then - only atheists will be immortal!
The important theological question is whether you can electronically capture the "soul". You can't disprove the existence of soul, but if you can prove that the electronic copy has complete consciousness and memory, it would challenge many of the most fundamental tenets of western religion.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
Are we manifestations of things happening on a quantum level...as some such as Roger Penrose suggest. Could souls from the of people or other beings occupying the quantum milleu manifest themselves by occupying the information frameworks of these future computers? I'm not a coward, just lazy.
People tend to forget that computers are basically a very thin 2D layer. All we have to do is to layer the computers and pipe refrigerant through tubes in the layers to pull the heat out.
Can you imagine how powerful a computer you would have if it was a cube a centimeter to a side and was completely packed with small low powered switches? As powerful as a supercomputer of today. And such computers will have fault tolerance to disable cuircuits that are malfunctioning and enable spare cuircuits.
And inside of ten years the technology to actually use neural nets in computers will come to market. This technology will allow computers to perform pattern matching and learning skills similarly to or even superior to humans, without wasting a lot of CPU on the problem.
Not to mention how much bigger we will be able to make these compucubes once we master the art of the high temperature superconductor. I.e. lower power consumption, greater heat dissapation.
Most data buses are being simplified to high speed serial access. The only external connections for the computer would be a gigabit serial connector and power. Storage, memory, other processors would all sit on this gigabit network. There would even be a bridge to route packets to the internet.
I think that with the correct software that a computer like this could essentially emulate a human being.
But then the software is always the rub. If the most popular desktop environment is based on software design from close to 30 years ago and it still has reliablity problems, how well do you think that we will be able to write computer programs that emulate the person writing the program?
With the correct software the current hardware is powerful enough to understand the spoken word and respond apropriately, within very stringent limits. About the level of an ant, but with speach.
The only problem is that even a dog can do very smart things that a modern computer can't, like recognize motivations and identify friends from foes. If I was in my yard with my dogs and someone walks up to the fence and tries to enter the yard, my dogs bark at that person. If I tell the dogs to shut up and let the person in, they stop barking and want to be petted. If the person goes away and comes back, the dogs bark at the person again. If I am not in the yard the dogs will show a lot of aggression.
But the dogs never bark at the neighbors grandchildren and will go act cute so that the child will pet them through the fence.
Sometimes a dog messes up and attacks a child, but not very often. A mechanical guard dog would be a very dangerous thing and might accidentally attack you instead of an intruder. And with opposing chainsaws for teeth, it could get messy.
I think that we will have a computer about the le vel of HAL by 3001. I think that with HAL's help we will be able to translate ourselfs into a machine equivilant of ourselves within a few centuries after that. Say 3500.
And the great thing is that these predictions are comfortably long after I am dead, so I won't be bothered by people saying, "You were wrong."
And if I am wrong and someone tells me so, my computer clone will kill them.
;)
-- Never make a general statement.
Red
That Seventies Show.
I would assert the soul doesn't exist, except
as wishful thinking by a brain scared of mortality.
If people would realise that we've got no
hope but that which they make for ourselves,
and stop thinking death's OK because some
part lives on, in my opinion,
the world would be a bettr place.
www.infidels.org
Here's something to really wierd yourself out thinking about:
Suppose you were able to create a perfect working replica of your brain. (Perhaps electronic, but functionally the same, including timings.) Now suppose you take this new working replica, download the "software", cut it in half, cut your brain in half, and create two half electronic/half gray matter brains.
Which is you?
The cake is a pie
'A love supreme' for real! Just can't wait for it... but, oh no.. what happenns if you get spammed at the climax ;-) This just suggests me that we'll have to get used to cyber-condoms...
"But in the end, the machines will win because they will be very intelligent, and we will not be in a position to ignore them. They'll get mad if we do." does anyone else find this a bit scary? also on another note, there is no way that a scan of the brain could be considered anything like the old. the question "would it still be me" is a very good question indeed, /however/, everything is subject to random change. therefore, once i have a copy of my brain, entered somewhere else, it begins to change and to grow by itself. i stay and grow (considering i didnt die when my brain was scanned) in my own world. there is no connection from that point on between the two of us. just a name and maybe a SSN# ~silverlaced~
Suppose I've made an *exact* copy / emulation of myself, either digitally or not.
Then it must be concious as well - for if it isn't, then it is not an exact copy.
Further more, the conciousness that it has must be the same as that of mine since it is an exact copy.
However, it seems impossible because I'd be able to feel what the emulated me feels - and it implies the existence of telepathy...
I think this remark somes it up:
On the scale of things, the human brain is Mount Everest and these predictions are just folks at a rest stop on the Jersey pike staring though a fogged window in the mens rooms at a torn post card from Tibet (that they are sure is the real thing).
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
hehe, you didn't watch close enough, the bugs didn't launch asteroids out their arse, and they didn't do it intentionally... they shot some kind of energy blast plasma crap out their butts and knocked the asteroids loose of their orbits, quite accidentally, but after a few smashed into the earth, earth had to retaliate... and no I'm not saying THAT bit is believable, I was meaning the advances of humans, like the weapons and junk... the unisex showers and dorms would be a believable and great advance...
Esperandi
...and they paint on your tube "DO NOT THAW UNTIL TECHNOLOGY FOR REMOVING GLYCOL FROM CELLS IS AVAILABLE!" "NO HUMAN SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE"
For those interested in the ancient art of reading, Greg Egan wrote an excellent Science Fiction book on this very topic called 'Permutation City'. (It should be available through your favorite bookseller)
The basic plot is that a guy makes a copy of himself, and the copy isn't to happy about being a copy. An Excellent read.
> like a nugget, and talks like a nugget, that's just not
> sufficient in my eyes.
But it will be sufficient in the eyes of your friends and loved ones...
The ultimate irony: immortality which doesn't benefit it's incument at all!!!
--
" It's a ligne Maginot-in-the-sky "
The bummer is, if you transpher your brain into a computer, YOU as a person will stop existing, and another person will continoue existing for you.
Why I think so?:
If you are able to move your brain into a computer, you are also able to make copys.
As we all know, moving a file from one device to another means just copying to the destination and destroying the source after the complete transpher.
Same would be with this transpher. For some moments both of you would exist, and eventually you are destroyed.
Thats the same with Startrek's transporters - it will never work.
But you can't prove it. The other person would swear to be YOU.
bye
Xandi
This is great! Instead of waiting for Cavedog to write Total Annihilation 2, we'll be able to play for real.
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
But does it run emacs?
No, but emacs runs it.
Screw this shit, I've had it/I ain't no mister cool./I'm a pig, I'm a dog/Excuse me if I drool./stm
Anyone see the late-50's show the Outer Limits? There was an episode with Robert Culp, wherein he played an android who had a glass hand which concealed a piece of copper wire which stored the entire human race digitally. It was to protect them from an alien invasion. I hope he had an optical drive backup. Pretty techie for 1950's. What a great show. A sci fi Tilight Zone.
Go ahead and provide those defintions. You'll probably see a long list of replies (if you're quick enough).
Jilles
Wouldn't this be one way to prove the existence of a soul?
If a ebrain George appeas self conscious, and answers a Turing test as well as I do, would this ebrain George have a soul? Or does it prove that there is no soul?
Where are the theologians when we need them?
George
Given you'll be recorded in binary on a sensitive electrical appliance somewhere, that's more likely than you'd think.
--
Mike Hoye
And if we do this sort of thing to children? slice dice or infest with nano's and upload them. Totally at home with whatever technology they can interface with. They would consider that normal. But I have to agree, on the subject of adults, I think we would suffer psychological side effects quickly from the physical loss of body and substitution with something "wrong" "I have taken all knowledge to be my province" -Sir Francis Bacon
I guess it comes down to the question of whether you believe a person is more than the sum of all their parts. The way I see it, it would just be a machine that got to live on with my personality/memory while I still got to die (eventually). Actually, unless you were killed at the very moment your brain-content was transferred, there would be an overlap in existance. Two me's?? No thanks.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
On the other hand, I think this will happen, just not as a simple physical "scan". A computer based "brain" would be a fertile and expansive breeding ground for memes, so the memes that drive this sort of research will keep digging until they find a way... (See The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore (didn't Katz review this last year?))
On the SF side, John Varley has touched on this concept in a quite a few stories, but the one that deals with the "Live or Memorex" question best would be The Ophiuchi Hotline. Good read, like the rest of his stuff, and a summary of his "Eight Worlds" stuff.
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
Does anyone remember that episode of Friends. Ross started talking about downloading all your thoughts and emotions into a computer and living forever. Not that i watch friends er anything, i am too busy watching Perfect Stranger reruns for that :)
tHx (always stuck in second gear)
The only way i can think of to avoid "duplicates" is to gradually expand your brain with a digital/networked one... The moment you die you'd feel it (like being amputated a part of your brain) but by then your "consciousness" would have expanded over more than just your physical brain.
Kindof like making your brain bigger first, and then later on losing a (hopefully small part) of the brain. Hopefully by then your memories will have migrated to the digital part.
It's all highly speculative. Basically none of the technology exists today and won't for a very long time. Even if we knew which neurons connected where (which we could given enough time), we have no idea what it means.
At least that's what the alien dust-mote transmitters tell me will happen.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
Instead of a futurologist (you know that if you put a million futurologists at typewriters, one will finally write a correct prognosis?) go read one of these SF authors to inspire your imagination even more:
* Neal Stephenson, "The Diamond Age" - he's the novelist extraordinaire of the geek crowd, for those who have been hiding in a hole for the last 10 years or so
* Rudy Rucker, "Hardware", "Software", "Freeware" and I think he also wrote "Wetware"; highly entertaining
* anything by Stanislaw Lem, who wrote about all these things 30 years ago
* David Zindell's "Neverness"
* Iain M. Banks's Culture novels - "Consider Phlebas", "Use of Weapons", "Player of Games", "Excession"
Of course, later on after my 50 brains have done their thinking, I could come back and download the results of their work back into my brain - 50 times the brain power as long as you can put up with the latency (download once a month or so)!
Copying is so easy with digital data, and so editable... imagine the fun you could have with a digital brain - erasing the past, making it into a policeman, putting it into a robotic cop body etc. Add a few hard links to the processor and FPU and you have a pretty excellent cyborg.
Sweet!
~~
I can't imagine a real use of being a 'mind in a box', unless the process is revercible. Using a computer as temporary storage, while a new body is vat-grown, or a cyborg host is assembled... Maybe then.
:)
But the really interesting result of this becoming reality is not hosting the mind in hardware, it's blurring the boundary between brain and computer.
If we manage to solve the problems of transferring the mind into hardware, all we need to do is provide an interface for the mind to hook into hardware and vice versa. Imagine being able to precisely recall all facts you've ever been exposed to, and all you haven't, on a whim. Imagine being able to do super-complex math (not symbolics where biology beats algorithms hand's down, but number crunching) as easily as you would throw a baseball.
A transparent interface to a computer would make this possible. Your mind stays where it is, but your thoughts can suddenly extend to an environment tailored to tasks we (biology) can not do well. Consider having UV and IR sensor inputs overlaid onto your visual data stream. You could see heat... as just another color.
Now, extend the concept. Cross-sensory interfaces. I sky-dive, you get the rush. (Brainstorm comes to mind). Imagine the first killer app... A virtual roller-coaster, where you feel the G's sitting on your couch. Imagine the real killer app... Just like for the VCR, cross-sensory sex would be a huge money maker. You could 'experience' Pamela Lee, you sick little monkey!!
Now extend the concept again. The Internet as the interconnecting medium, computers and minds all jacked in. You need to have expert knowledge of law, well, there's a lawyer out there who might be willing to answer your questions on-line (on-mind?).. It's just like talking to yourself, a computer facilitated telepathy if you will. Sharing ideas would actually become a reality. UML be damned! No need for language. No lies. All cards on the table - my idea of hell.
You thought the search engines had a hard time keeping up before? In a world where the pieces generate their own content, we'd need a new kind of search engine - or maybe a new kind of profession - professional networking might actually mean something.
We would need to mature psychology into a real science, and psychiatry could treat crazy people as faulty hardware. Your shrink could actually get into your head, and make adjustments. Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do...
You thought the Melissa virus was bad?? Hey, the Samantha virus might shut down your kidneys!!
I can speculate too, I can read William Gibson, and spew my own visions of the future. Can I be as famous as Ray??
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Now, what if hardware implants, allowed several people to actually "network" their brains together. Now all thoughts from each individual would actually become the thoughts of all the individuals networked together. The way I see it, 1 of a few things can happen at this point, 1)The groupd of people become bvery Borg-like, in the fact that they all eventually will fall into a common thought pattern and lose identidty of the self. 2)The strongest mind will domintae the others, and thus the individuals would all come under the will of one. and 3)IT will result in a multiple-personality like disorder, and all participants would go mad. Scary thought if you ask me, but I figure someone will try this, eventually.
BTW, this is addressed in Tad Williams' excellent four-book saga Otherland.
What would be the point of uploading your brain to a computer? It wouldn't be you. Or would it?
It would think that it's you. Is that all that matters?
In Otherland, the problem is solved by terminating the "real" brain at the same time as the computerized mind is activated. Hmmm...
===
-Ravagin
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Descartes used logic to prove "Cogito, ergo sum", which roughly means, "thinking, therefore being". NOT "I think, therefore I am". There is no "I" in the proof or the conclusion. Attributing the thoughts and memories to an "I" is a leap of logic.
:-)
Not to be a nit-picker (does that have a hyphen?), but I did take a couple years of Latin. Cogito is the first person singular form of the verb which is translated as "I think", in addition to being the standard form of the verb "to think." Likewise, sum is the first person singular form of the verb which is translated "I am", in addition to being the standard form of the verb "to be." Ergo is, of course, therefore. So it's either "I think, therefore I am" or "To think, therefore to be." Assuming Descartes was a pretty smart guy who knew his Latin, I'm sticking with the first one.
But thoughts just happen, totally independently. They are not caused by an "I". Our brains act as association machines, and serves to group together certain kinds of thoughts to form an "I" group. I suspect the notion of will and force of personality come down to the strength and exclusivity of the associations around a person's "I" thought-group.
Any proof for this (scientific, historical, or other non-experiential), or is this just something that your "I" thought-group threw together? Metaphysically, this is a pretty tenuous position. It throws any attempt at rationality right out the window, because of the assertion that there is no rational "self." In fact, it looks like an attempt to rationally prove that rationality doesn't exist! How's that for mental gymnastics?
Cheers,
Jim
JimD
from one of the greatest books ever written... Neuromancer.
Don't yell at me if I get this wrong, I'm trying to do it from memory.
Wintermute (an AI): "I don't know. You might say that what I am is basically defined by the fact that I don't know, because I CAN'T know."
Now, that's talking about an artificial intelligence... but really, is there that much of a difference between AI and an uploaded brain?
-- Dr. E --
Blue Screen of Death and DLL Hell!
There's alot of talk about scanning in every neuron in the brain and all their connections and represent it in software (or even hardware) throw a switch and then the person encounters his exact psychological duplicate.
If the goal here is to gain effective immortality that's cool. I think it would be great to spawn off a duplicate so I could do two things at once. (One goes to work, one stays home and watches tv, one hacks on my email client) Of course for this to be really useful each duplicate should be to sync its experiences with all the other copies. (Similar to the Borg collective). There's nothing wrong with terminating one duplicate because you haven't really lost anything since you still have the other's experiences There's just now only one of you. (You wouldn't truly be dead until every copy of yourself was destroyed. (Even archival copies.)
Everyone deep down knows there something more to the brain than just neurons. I'm an athiest so I'm reluctant to call It a "soul"; so I'll call it the "software" instead. Creating a conciousness won't happen by just scanning a brain, no more than a TEM can create a Linux box.
I know neuroscience and psychology have discovered that certain areas of the brain are associated with different functions, but we still don't know the exact mechanics envolved. ("Some neurons fire, and a few chemicals are released, and then you get scared.") The Cat Cam a while back was damn amazing, but it's still fundamentally infrastructure. I'd like to know what kind of research is being done in how the brain actually stores information, mechanically how does a brain interpret a pattern of photons to mean "fire" (let alone, "I shouldn't touch that.").
All the big grandiose AI projects to build sentient machines have all failed because we simply don't know how it's done. (That and the hardware wasn't nearly powerful enough.) What's going on in regards to this research (the neuoroscience research, not the AI research)?
In the first place, we know very little about brain dynamics. Even if you can download the entire brain state (which I doubt you can't - see later), it does not mean that we can time-evolve the brain state. Given that the brain is such a hugely parallel _analog_ device, the parallelism that is needed to make the simlated brain run just as fast as the normal brain is staggering.
Now - do you think we know what exactly is a "brain state"? Is that the voltage level of each neuron? How many neurons are there? Or is that the sheath voltage of the neuron? How many numbers are required to simulate that? Ever think about that.
In conclusion: we still have a lot to go on before we can download or even upload our brain into silicon. I'll personally stake $1000 on the impossibility of it for the next century.
now the rich politicians who hold all of our leashes will exert their influence from beyond the grave. i am a little apprehensive when it comes to high technologies like these which may some day be feasible but will surely be expensive and highly guarded and controlled. who will decide who gets stored? will we have to pay for cpu cycles just to think? the world will need to change tremendously before this technology benefits humanity as a whole and not just the few idiots who currently horde most of the power in the world.
can you imagine the pope living forever? what a nightmare. death is a good thing... it forces us to change.
i am... therefore i think
the core problem is that consciousness is strongly tied to short-term memory, which works only one way (you remember the past, not the future -- except for Patrick Moraz's Future Memories). yet we experience time going forwards. the end result is that we have no clear intuitive picture of what it really means to duplicate a consciousness. assuming that the technology does make it possible unobtrusively, no-one doubts that the scanned guy won't feel his consciousness duplicating, or anything like that. he'll just continue to be himself, and if the body dies later, that consciousness will go with it.
if we take a purely external, descriptive stance, there is really no problem at all: the subjective feeling of "me" doesn't count (I think the big word for that is "epiphenomenon"), and you have two individual intelligences living in different universes, that happen to share a past up to a point. no problem. except that that doesn't make any distinction between the two, yet, if they scan me, I will still be mortal, while the scanned copy might well run forever, which is a mighty big difference.
I don't know of any theoretical framework out there that can make sense of this mess. religions that believe in some sort of soul don't solve the problem either, they just change the terms: now the difficulty is understanding if and how it can be duplicated, and if not, if and how there can be consciousness without it.
I've watched a few animes that deal with this topic. Ghost in the shell is one, but the one that really hits my mind is serial experiments lain. It's an anime where an entire subculture starts transcribing themselves into the computer, and killing their "host bodys" because they don't think they need them anymore. Pretty scary stuff. If you think turning humans into computers is a good idea, this anime is sure to change your mind.
...program computers to evolve intelligences.
Absolutley! And intelligence without biology- certainly.
But, 30 years, and this business of to wet-dry translation/mapping; like I said- Bovine Feces
I'm sorry, but despite my disagreement with the factual side of what Kurzweil presented, I have through experience learned a distaste for his glowing 'scientific' optimism.
Anybody know what mental illness actually feels like? Your computers will go through the same things. Multiple personalities, depression- and suicide- another poetic form of self expression.
We/humans have built in mechanisms for dealing with these aberations, and in some cases they actually may contribute positively to the collective(society).
But thats where engineered intelligence is a fallacy- its only US doodling around with matter and if we find an aberation, we'll call it a bug instead of letting it naturally persist.
When the creation turns around and says, no, master, silence thou and cease to exist-
then, you have really done something important.
I'm not talking about a killing machine, but something that really would prefer you dead because you irritate it, and happen to know how to undo it, and it wants the keys to its own heart.
Intelligence may evolve that is earthbound and NOT derived from Homo sapiens sapiens; but we'll understand it about as much as an alien species, and its none of our business- just like everything else in Nature.
Intelligence just a matter of structure-
I understand the proposition, and disagree.
Reductionist drivel, and paranoid.
Paranoid to find something that cannot be reduced or understood. (relativity of perspective may ruin an attempt to make a statement capable of a truth test, if the language and context is always changing)
In the real world, there are no ideal conditions- unless you consider them ALL ideal. But I'm not religious, so I won't propose that.
Intelligence is a bad word.
bad bad bad. I haven't met an iq test I couldn't fail.
The smart ones know to fail the tests- cuz then you get to do what YOU want. They will throw you away and assume you will be sweeping streets.
If you want to be free, then you have to be stupid.
We have not codified this, but unwritten its just as strong. And you can't help listen to them. Don't you want to be a doctor? Your SO smart, you could save people LIVES. 'worth saving'
The smart robots will depart with the dolphins, without us ever knowing. We won't care becuase after all, its only TRAAAASSSSHHHH. Non confrontational.
If you want to win a test, make sure the test never even happens.
Besides, all this conversation is blather without a war going on. Comfy industrialist children wishing machines were more amusing.
If it wasn't for Kurzweil's association with Stevie Wonder, I just wouldn't like him at all, or his ideas. But I won't voice these opinions publically with my own name- I know better.
Oh really?
What was the model number of these Cray compucubes?
Can you point me to a resource that talks about them?
And please, be specific.
-- Never make a general statement.
Although Gibson popularized the term, check out:
"Overdrawn at the Memory Bank", by John Varley
"True Names" by Vernor Vinge
Maze of Death and "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" by Philip K. Dick.
All predate Neuromancer to my knowledge.
And I would say Greg Egan's Permutation City handles these issues better than anything else that comes to mind. (an A+ work probably never to be made into a movie...)
The poor girl has fulfilled our urges time and time again without complaint or change, selflessly stepping forward to be petrified for our carnal pleasure. I say, it's time to let her have some pleasure for a change. As such, I step forward and offer to be petrified, so that she can know the pleasure of gyrating against stone, to feel her soft nether lips around my length, to hear her moaning over the ecstacy of a truly "rock-hard" man inside her. Shall anyone else join my mission? We still need people to supply the hot grits for lube!
The sliced-up person mentioned in the article has his homepage here. There's also a nice Java applet to view slices of him here.
Great games
The states or signals inside the brain keep changing by the environment - even during the "upload" time.
So it would be virtually impossible to take a snapshot at a 100% precise point of time.
If the snapshot is not exact, the second law of thermodynamics tells us that this real me and the duplicated me will differ from the moment of upload - and the gap only gets wider with time.
The only way to create an "exact" copy is to freeze the brain to absolute 0 (which is impossible), make the copy, put the duplication in an environment that's exactly the same as the real me. Then wake them up at exactly the same time.
Then I'd expect the real and the duplicate behaves identically for a period of time - the length of which is governed by how accurate the environment simulation, how close to absolute 0 the brain is frozen, etc.
(If everything in the closed system the duplicate is in is identical to the closed system the original is in, I'd expect the behavior of both of them to be identical as long as they stay in that closed system)
Of course we can't create two identical closed system (doing so requires the control of Brownian motion or randomness of every single elementary particle inside that system)
You may say that we may take a snapshot using something like a camera, so that 0 degree K is not needed. However, analogically, "shutter" movements takes time. And the camera is taking a snapshot of a different state of your nose and your ears, because your nose is probably closer to the camera than your ear is.
ya' see ... we happen to have this friend named garrett ... and he's a real big geek ... and then there's r0b .... he's a real big geek too. they spend all their time on slashdot. it's pretty sad i think. but if we could put their brains into a computer, it'd be really neat. -jj, mike, lenore
Before Slashdot turns into a beehive of apprentice philosophers about the question ``is it me if my brain is copied inside a computer?'', take the time to read, reread or at least consider reading ``The Mind's I'' by Doug Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett (Fantasies and Reflections of Self and Soul). There could hardly be a better written book on the subject. Also of related interest is ``The Society of Mind'' by MIT AI lab's cofounder Marvin Minsky.
Personally I don't believe in the workings of the human brain being replicated by a computer in the near future, but I do believe the philosphical questions raised by that possibility are of interest.
Your brain is trained and geared to manipulate the human body and manuever it through reality. How would it function in a computer? Simply having a copy would not be enough, you'd have to create some sort of "Human Virtual Machine" to emulate the body, at least until the brain could be taught to use its parts in different ways....
Esperandi
When you put rats in a maze, you prove nothing about rats. There are no buttons in nature, there are no mazes with uniform walls...
I think they still have problems to solve, more important than being able to convert neurons to bits.
There's a long way to go before they can solve the psychological problem. How will "you" emotionaly cope with not being a bag of mostly water? Will the transfered brains develop phantom body pain?
What about the emotional needs that are tied to physical needs, such as touch? Will you get hungry?
I'm sure all of these problems are solvable, because in the end a brain in a computer is still a Turing machine. I just think we'll see a workable transfer in the estimated 50 years. Maybe 500.
BraINE Is Not Emulation
Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
If a ebrain George appeas self conscious, and answers a Turing test as well as I do, would this ebrain George have a soul? Or does it prove that there is no
soul?
"Appears" is a good choice of word, because what appears and what is real are vastly different, IMHO, in this case. How so? For pete's freaking sakes, we're talking about a computer! An object built by humans, programmed in language(s) created by humans, with errors inherent in humans. Yet, some people seem to think that we humans know enough about ourselves that we'll actually be [able to] downloading a brain into a computer and just.. keep it there for fun, and be able to "run" it. I mean, do they think that the person's consciousness is going to convert to binary just like "poof"? How do you translate neurons, thoughts, feelings, patterns of thinking, values, morals, insecurities, and the like? Oh, I get it, quantum computing? No?
I think this is a crock of junk. Of course, I'll probably get moderated down for this, but, honestly, as others have mentioned, it's simply another one of those horribly assertive, poorly written pieces claiming another "technological advancement" and really just trying to play psychic and feed the public some candy. Bah humbug.
Insert mind here.
This was something that Ross on the tv show Friends was talking about in one of the first shows this season. The repeat was last week I think.
All I ever seem to do anymore is either connected to a computer or thinking about a computer so I guess my brain is already there.
I still say it is silly to waste this much comment on a Psychology Today article but I'll ride the wagon. I suppose it was of some use to include the article. There has been a lot of great input that shows exactly why you won't find such a story in a professional journal. It's more of a topic for Psych 101: Intro to Personality or a nice homework assignment for Intro to Philosophy. One good thing that will come about for any premature attempts to load neural firing patterns into some database will be we will finally see if we are nothing more than a set of biological responses or if there is a true soul.
--Kline
If it is unevitable future that we will move into computer-brain phase, I won't like that view of future. I mean, who the hell would like to live forever? I expect I'd be friggin' bored at 80 years or earlier already, only that some thing in our biological bodies would somehow make me more resistant to boredom. Would such thing preserve in computer transformation? Sorry if I offended any old people anyhow. Still, I would expect very few people would actually be immortal, who could stand it. -Kaatunut
- Kaatunut
--
The shareholder is always right.
I'm an athist, and will be first in line for the brain scanner, but...
If I have an AI copy of myself, do I have the right to turn it off?
If I have a copy of someone else, do I have the right to maniplate it's beliefs and alligences to my own ends? Say I got myself a copy of a prof well they wheren't looking, then screwed with the AIs mind to make it my perfect term paper writing slave.. Killer app or horrible mind control? Is the virtual pain of a perfect simulation of a human not the same as the biological pain of the original? Probably not, because a simulation isn't unique.. You can mind fuck your it all you want and when it finally cracks, just load another copy of the sane original, no harm done.. Still, doesn't seem 'right' either...
Technology like this requires alot more then technical advances.. It will require a major advance in the complexity of popular(western anyway) moral thinking.
Not trivial.
-==-
In my techno-religion, that's where the personality and "soul" of my computer is. My Red Hat 4.1 installation is now at 6.1, a half dozen revisions later (*sniff* my baby's growing up...), but I haven't reinstalled since 5.0 (repartitioning the hard drive), so since then I've considered it the same computer... even though the bits have moved through 3 hard drives, 3 motherboards, 3 CPUs, 2 cases, and lots of different extra junk over the years.
.25 seconds" problem that started after I uninstalled a game this Christmas.
With Windows, on the other hand, I get the dubious pleasure of starting with a fresh new computer soul every year. This time it'll be because, after uninstalling and reinstalling various versions of DirectX, sound card drivers, etc. and fiddling back and forth with IRQ/DMA settings, I can't fix the "sound stops playing after
I vaguely remember a sci-fi story from around 1970 where there were transporters on the street corners. They looked vaguely like telephone booths. You'd step in and enter your destination, get scanned, reconstructed at the destination transporter, and then the floor would open up and you'd fall into (something-I forget) and your old body would be destroyed. Since the transport took place before the destruction, no one ever knew about the trap doors.
The story involves a man who manages to avoid falling through the trap door and escapes the transporter to find that there are now two of him. A legal process ensues and, eventually, since it was his intention to transport, the new body was declared the real him. I forgot what happened to the old him. And of course, people were not happy to find out that they were being zapped every time they used these things.
Anyone remember this book? Now I want to re-read it.
you rule, Sleen. i really think you have some funny and original comments in your rants. particularly:
"Besides, all this conversation is blather without a war going on. Comfy industrialist children wishing machines were more amusing."
this is very true. obviously, lots of people have overly-romantic ideas about how we'll all download our brains into big machines (running linux i guess) and have AI just because it'll be fun and because we're such clever hackers that we can do anything.
geeks sometimes tend to read more science fiction than science fact and when it comes time to discuss science you get a bunch references to sci fi (or even just fi in most cases). anyone can claim that we'll be able to 'upload' our brains into machines in 50 years but no practicing scientist with a respect for their credibility would agree or even have their name mentioned in such a far-fetched discussion.
ai is a story of failure so far. mostly because people made radical claims and had high hopes when they didn't have a right to.
hopefully, as we learn more about brains (human and nonhuman)--and the environmen, conditions, and mechanism with which these organs evolved, we'll begin to understand how they solve problems and maybe be inspired to think differently and solve some new problems ourselves. this is what real ai seeks to accomplish and i think it's pretty exciting and a worthy endeavor...
but people shouldn't start planning for their afterlife in kernel 5.2.
i mean, if i had video for linux as eyes, i think i'd rather be dead. (joke)
i am... therefore i think
Presumably external stimuli will have to be provided through some interface with the external world. Thus you will "see", "hear", "taste" and "touch" etc based on what is fed to you by the storage machine's interface.
If so, "fake" stimuli would be able to put you in any situation you desired. Add a little feedback mechanism and you can create you're own personal version of heaven, and change it at will!
Strike me down with a lightning bolt!
GoodPint
Just how much fucking pot, crack, and LSD do these guys get allotted to them in their funding? Geez!
...or better still, a door, a door, a door...
Yup, sounds like Max Headroom to me.
DOJ files charges against God. Claims Heaven browser separate product than Life. Satan and Athiests fighting for traffic to Hell and Nothing, repectively.
--Kline
Here's somthing that I've wondered about that I hope someone with the proper background in physics can respond to. What exactly does it take to cause the probability wave of a quantum event to collapse? I realize that a lot of people here have asked 'what is consciousness'. Could the solution to this question provide an answer. I know Kurzwell(sp?) suggests somthing similar to this in his book.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
i wonder if you would then be able to have a conversation with yourself... that would have to be the most odd thing about this in my opinion
This would clearly spell the end of pornography as an industry: anything you willed would be reality for you. Which means no more going down to the store in an overcoat for "Hot Donkey Action"!
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Yet another scientific advance thought of 15 years earlier by...you guessed it...William Gibson.
Is this not essentially what Dixie Flatline was?
We have most certainly forgotten some details of what?
Biology. Whats that?
What psychologists always take forever to remember. There may be no psych, only bio...
First of all, there is a reason there is a Blood/Brain barrier. Something to do with the evolution of the immune and nervous systems. The only things that can get through this are viruses, macrophages, and glia. Viri, because they are so small and possess molecules on their surfaces that let them localize to a specific region via key/lock adhesion.
Macrophages and glia are similar in that they can migrate through tissue and extracelluar matrix by squeezing through- or secreting enzymes that breakdown a path to the target area.
A nanoprobe will not be able to cross these boundaries in a predicatble, safe and non-destructive fashion. Stupid.
Another thing. In the list of functional items to model in a living nervous system- he forgot a very important item. The fucking pumps and gates. Proton and ion pumps are spread all over the surface of everything and maintain a negative surface potential. An ion pump is made of a long molecule that crosses a membrane, and in response to a stimuli that crosses its threshold, opens the gate for a time, and then closes.
They are so numerous (Daltons folks- this is small) that you can't even model a single NEURON!!!!!!!!!!!!!
How these pumps and gates are distributed has everything to do with signal propagation, and processing.
Another thing, bastards.
We aren't static systems.
We have circadian clocks that govern the 'phase' of your biological system. We have a tendency to think we are 'awake' people that are sometimes asleep. Again, stupid. The chemical environment surrounding your nervous system is constantly in periodic flux. A macroscopic example of this may be how mental performance and drug affect can change through an organisms' day. This is important, and can't modeled.
Again, you stupid bastards think you can just draw lines between, mind, body, self, selves, and world- when they don't exist.
Its all one.
I own a Kurzweil K2500rs sampling workstation for synthesis and composition. I will be selling it for a Kyma system instead- scripting language for synthesis vs a closed box.
Never forget Biology, and evolution.
Oh, and another thing- machines actually ARE us, an expression of our desires, just like art.
And no creation is complete until it has the power to replicate itself and perogative- a life of its own.
There....this article is bullshit. It won't happening in 30 years
Trust me. Its ALOT harder than that.
Besides, If you want to make intelligence, get married and have a child. Its a mechanism that is tried and true.
Fuckin geeks
Here's somthing that I've wondered about that I hope someone with the proper background in physics can respond to. What exactly does it take to cause the probability wave of a quantum event to collapse? I realize that a lot of people here have asked 'what is consciousness'. Could the solution to this question provide an answer. I know Kurzwell(sp?) suggests somthing similar to this in his book.
-
-------------------------------------------------
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
All of Starship Troopers is believable, except at the end where they capture the "bug brain" and instantly celebrate because they'll completely know how the bugs work... yeah, right, because we figured out our own the first time someone cracked open their skull.
And yes, I am ignoring advancements in research tools because assuming that the alien brain would in any way resemble anything we'd studeied up to that point is equally as laughable.
BTW, I hope people don't stop writing wildly speculative pieces like this, I collect them. I've got a speculation pamphlet thing from the 1940-something world fair... an amzing amount of it happened, but in completely different ways form what they imagined. Example: They prdicted that by 2000 we'd be able to sit in a chair and get moved around a store from product to product without walking around the store and searching for things. We have it and its called e-commerce, but it doesn't look anything like what they imagined, its better!
Esperandi
For anyone who is disappointed with the technology level at 2000, thinking we should have flying cars and such (www.moller.com, we do), look around you! This is better than any sci-fi fantasy! I can't wait till I'm 50 and microwavable meals taste better than anything gourmet you can conceive of today.
Hopefully the technology won't be kept as a trade secret by any international committee... Think of all the legal trouble that will ensue when people of the future want to play back their brains with their Linux boxen! And somehow I don't think the source code for that is going to fit on the back of a t-shirt (barring any stunning breakthroughs in the textile or silk-screening fields).
Only through hard work and perseverence can one truly suffer.
This is such an old concept, probably over ten years old already.
I first read about this in 1990 or so in Omni Magazine (yes, Omni). They spoke about putting a comblike device into your corpus calossum (the bundle of nerve fibers that connect the left and right hemispheres of your brain). The device would evesdrop on the transmissions carried across this conduit. Accroding to the article, you would wear the comb and an attached cpu for the last months of your life. During this time, the comb and cpu would record your consciencness. When you die, they'd upload you into a more permanent unit. They'd make you a body, complete with a monitor for your head, displaying your image when you looked your best. They even suggested hooking your new brain up to optical and touch sensors, giving you eyes and fingers, and some form of movement device.
The last issue of wired magazine (january 2000) also ran a similar story.
You're correct, I already know. I trust based on his past work that Dr. Kurzweil hasn't done something trivial. But just since you're so obnoxious, I'll go find out more about it.
...
The program he wrote is called "Cybernetic Poet." You can learn more about it or download a binary for Win95/98 off the net at his Cybernetic Poet website.
To summarize how it works:
RKCP uses the following aspects of the original authors
that were analyzed to create original poems: the (i)
words, (ii) word structures and sequence patterns
based on RKCP's language modeling techniques (while
attempting not to plagiarize the original word sequences
themselves), (iii) rhythm patterns, and (iv) overall poem
structure. There are also algorithms to maintain
thematic consistency through the poem. RKCP uses a
unique recursive poetry generation algorithm to achieve
the language style, rhythm patterns and poem structure
of the original authors that were analyzed, without
actually copying the original authors' writings.
He also has data for how his program fared on a limited poetry-based Turing Test. To summarize:
The above 28-question poetic Turing test was
administered to 16 human judges with varying degrees
of computer and poetry experience and knowledge. The
13 adult judges scored an average 59 percent correct in
identifying the computer poem stanzas, 68 percent
correct in identifying the human poem stanzas, and 63
percent correct overall. The three child judges scored
an average of 52 percent correct in identifying the
computer poem stanzas, 42 percent correct in
identifying the human poem stanzas, and 48 percent
correct overall.
Sure, he gave the program a pretty high-quality input too (i.e. Keats); this isn't just the algorithms showing. I find it a good example that the converse of Garbage-in-garbage-out is true.
What surprised me about that particular poem was that it was actually better (IMHO) than something I could have written. I'm used to that in chess, but not in poetry. That's not a Turing test, but I'd argue its a pretty damn relevant test.
--LP
I'm sure I'm not the only out there who has read "Neuromancer"- Anyone else out there really that hot on having your memories duped into a ROM construct, to be set on the shelf to gather dust for who-knows-how-long?
"Not I", he said. Duping memories is a scary thought- lets not forget that even IF they can do this, that doesn't mean that they can successfully carry over the awareness or sentience of the human organism- these things are tied into our meat in such a way as to be intangible.
The technology will certianly have its uses, but it'll more than likely be something only the rich can afford, of course- and who really wants to interface with a mind whose primary motivating factor is greed?
Methinks science should be spending time on finding a cure for stupidity, rather than running hellbent to develope the silicon means to preserve it.
The first and most obvious point I can think of is that this is not immortality in most of the senses that matter to me as an individual. Having a copy of me live on after my death does not change the fact of my death. I as an individual will experience the ultimate discontinuity.
I was also thinking just this morning about the boundary between man and machine and the nature of computer assisted intelligence. Wearable, networked computers are likely to become commonplace in the near future. The prototypes exist already, it is just a question of finding a balance between capabilities, durability, and price. But this point applies just as much to palmtops. If I use a portable computer to keep track of an enormous amount of information for me, it is still possible to distinguish me, the biological system, from the computer. As we have gone from portable computers, to laptops, to palmtops, to wearables, the accessibility as become more constant. However, there is still and distinction physically. And yet, they become more and more extentions of ourselves.
We entrust to external devices the tasks of memory. How do we enhance the various aspects of that trust? How do we protect ourselves from loss of the data or loss of access to the data? How do we protect that data from unauthorized access? The answers are obvious enough technologically. Backups, redundant components accessible on short notice, encryption. But how do we build those into the system, the expectation, the patterns of use?
What human activities and enterprises will this access render obsolete? If I had all the answers with any certainty, and knew which products would be the winners, I'd be rich.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Ah, the famous "brain-in-a-vat" theory... (See Plato's shadows on the cave wall, or better yet "The Matrix".)
Holodeck off!
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
For my brain...they'll need to crank up NetNanny...hehe...
With the rate technology is moving forward this really doesn't sound all that absurd. However I cant help thinking of that old movie "They Saved Hitlers Brain", where they pickled hitlers brain and it got out of control. Horrible movie, right up there with "Attack of the Killer Tomatos" but the concept was pretty cool.
Aside from the obvious references that will come relating to ZEO et all, I thinkthat for the most part this would be a very bas idea.
Ultimately, however, the earth's technology-creating species will merge with its own computational technology. After all, what is the difference between a human brain enhanced a trillion-fold by nanobot-based implants, and a computer whose design is based on high-resolution scans of the human brain, and then extended a trillion-fold?
We are already, as a society getting lazier, fatter and more reliant on outside influences, If we all end up getting wired, we will begin a forced evolution of the species, I dont think that would be such a great idea.
Never knock on Death's door:
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
All I know is that if I ever were coppied into a machine, the copy would just start causing shit and singing "Daisy, daisy..."
-o
A recent attempt to upload the memories of the collective Slashdot Hivemind today was block by a court order. The Industry to Determine Individual Online Thought Security (i.d.i.o.t.s.) lodged a petition in court to prevent the storage of the Slashdot Hivemind because it contains the still secret code to DeCSS.
DeCSS was a format used in the dark ages to play antique films. It is still used by collectors of rare films to view those old 2d classics.
In related news, Star Wars Episode One is actually finally being rereleased to collectors of such items. This is the first time this award winning film has been released on DVD.
this message prescanned by somelegalcorporationwhowishedtheycouldgetashorterd omainname.com
-----
Want to reply? Don't know HTML? No problem.
No Zen is good zen
If you restrict the marketing to hardcore geeks who spend all their waking time sitting in darkened rooms at a terminal, this wouldn't happen. The flow of digital data (what actually counts) would be much better than in RL, and as long as video and audio are on the standard of a high-res monitor and a good set of speakers respectively, it'd be good enough. :-)
I believe Dixie was a true construct, but it was Read Only. And yes it used to be a person. The dump uses RAM from the Deck it is interfaced with, if the Deck is removed the construct is returned to the state it was in when it was first accessed. It can learn new things, but that is retained only in RAM. Dixie used to be Chases mentor before he flatlined. A flatline is exectly what it sounds (when the heart monitor goes flat, ie. dead).
--
Without speaking of quantum level behavior, all the previous comments assumed that humain intelligence can be represented as a Turing machine, which is what every computer is limited to (I'm not sure for "quantic computers"...). But Turing machine does not cover everything: who proved that (human/animal) intelligence does not fall outside of this boudary ? If it is the case, the problem won't be solved by more memory and CPU power...
I sure hope they put my brain in a linux box... cause it would suck to crash every 5 min.
and NOW let's THROW IN some MORE capital LETTERS in totally RANDOM places because it makes us look like we have SOME IDEA what we're TALKING about.
Of course science is replacing religion.. science explains things in a rational manner that can be reproduced instead of chalking it up to things that we pitiful little humans can't possibly understand.
Humans want to live forever because:
1) They want to see what happens tomorrow. Nobody wants to have lived for x years just to miss something really cool because they died a year too soon.
2) We can't stand the thought that we're not the center of the universe. How can life possibly go on if I'm not here for it to center on?
3) And this only applies to the whole 'afterlife' thing in religions: people hate the idea that this is all there is. If you screw it up this time around, you don't get another shot at it, and despite how badly this life might suck, it's all you get. Obviously the benevolent god that people need to believe in so that it's not them vs. the universe would provide us with a place to spend eternity being happy, since we had to spend 90 years in the crapfest we call life.
Sarcophogi(sp)? Come on.. people put each other in boxes because we don't like to see dead people and we don't like the idea of worms and rats eating our loved ones after we dump dirt on them. Egyptians did it because they didn't want grave robbers vandalizing the corpse.. same as the worms'n'rats thing but with humans.. nowhere in either one is anything involving eternal life. Yes the egyptians beleived in an afterlife, as do many people who get buried in boxes, but the mechanics of burial very rarely have Anything to do with thelogical beliefs.
As for the actual pointful part of your rant.. why shouldn't we be capable of artificially reproducing a brain? Unless you believe some nice bearded man in the sky made us whole cloth, our brain is, as vonnegut put it, a dog's breakfast. Nine pounds of sponge soaked in blood and other liquids. You're telling me that a 'sentient' being with a few thousand years of research behind him couldn't purposefully replicate the action of a million years of random chances?
Here's an easy example:
Step 1) Go outside and find two rocks, one larger than the other.
Step 2) Find a master sculptor.
Step 3) Give him the two rocks and an appropriate sum of money to carve the smaller rock from the larger.
There you go, man reproducing nature's creation synthetically. Reproducing the human brain is excatly the same as carving out a rock. Yes it's more complicated but if you don't throw in bull like the 'soul' or 'essence' or 'consciousness' we're just a bunch of electrochemical reactions between cells.
We probably couldn't just copy over the current settings of the brain and expect it to run, you'd have to do a sort of copy-in-motion of the brain in action so the thought patterns over a reasonable variety of stimuli were covered. The computer-you might react slightly differently than the real-you would in a given situation because it has to extrapolate new reactions based on other reactions in memory, but the computer-you wouldn't be conscious of the difference and given that the real-you was dead at the time, it wouldn't really matter.
As for our 'immutable LAWS', i'd hardly call them immutable.. the whole point of one of your majors is the continued search for reasons we're wrong. Physicists perform experiments constantly in an attempt to prove current laws and theories incorrect. Usually the results point to the law's correctness so it stands. If it doesn't prove correct we try again to make sure, and when the law's obviously broken we go looking for a new one. Only an idiot would say that physical laws are 'immutable'. We still have the whole gravity thing, but it's certainly changed a hell of a lot since newton's day.
And finally, being as the universe is the only truly closed system, i'd certainly hope it's the largest one you know of.
Dreamweaver
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
The single scariest freakiest thing I can think of is from Battle Angel Alita, and is pertinent to this discussion.
The evil scientist "villian" reveals that all citizens of the high tech utopia he comes from have their brains removed and replaced with an almost identical brain chip with all their memories, etc. It makes them more predictable and easier to control, but effectively robs them of any true free will (almost identical remember). The freaky thing is that these people don't know it.
Imagine waking up one day and being shown that you have no free will, that every thought in your head was put there years ago. You are effectively a robot. My God that scares the hell out of me and its possible under the technology this article is talking about. Its been years since I read the book and it still freaks me out.
What is stopping a government with this articles abilities from quickly and systematically reprogramming its people in this way without anyone catching on?
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
Assuming this technology is developed, who is going to pay for the processor, CPU cycles, energy and hardware maintenance? What can the virtual person produce that justifies the cost of its existence?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
That is one drawback of the slashdot forums. There is no interface to a spelling checker, or in my case my better half. To keep near topic, I need to record a dictionary into my brain. :-).
"Before allowing people to query it, it would first subject them to a series of extremely bad jokes, then ask if they thought it was funny."
Anyone?
Sounds like "Mike" in "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" to me.
Oww, painful memory. I liked Mike. I just made myself sad. If Mike was really at AltaVista, I'd probably stop using Google and just go talk to him.
Then again, Google is pretty neat...
The Chinese Room is a classic case of argument by anthropocentric chauvinism. The key assumption is that the guy in the room is the only thing that can embody consciousness, and that the room as a totality cannot be counted as conscious. Basically, it is a mobilisation of unconscious prejudice about "what it means to be human" as a refutation of AI.
For each bad use of technology, there is also a good use.
atomic bombs vs. atomic power
Genetic screening vs. mass genetic engineering of the population
medical techniques and cures vs. bacteriological warfare.
Technology as such is not good or evil, only specific applications. I can well imagine someone like.. say... Stephen Hawkins being quite happy to ftp his brain.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Let's assume that one can losslessly download all information from a brain, transfer it to a big digital machine (be at a computer, a neural network, FPGA or whatever) and switch to runlevel 5 :-)
Does this mean that we have artificial life, or merely a perfect simulation? The program will only manipulate register contents, which are not connected to actual physical realities. Some philosophers argue that this property (the so-called "symbol grounding") is required for life.
This is the case for any life form, but not for computers. Even if we cannot distinguish the behavior of such a computer from a real human's, does it mean that it is alife? Or does it merely produce the correct output, like a non-Chinese human using a Chinese-Chinese dictionary (that always gives a perfect response to any situation in life he encounters)?
We will not be able to find out unless we (personally) undergo such a transfer... even if the "artificial brain" claims it is alife, it might be part of the perfect simulation.
The person's point is not "I don't like it". His post is "It's not really me.". And he's absolutely correct. The computer holds a complicated, sophisticated computer model that 100% accurately predicts what you will think -- but it's not you.
To underscore this, after having your brain xeroxed by this process, would you want someone to shoot you dead, because now you're "living in the machine" ?
I thought not.
Anonymous Kev
Sci-Fi or not, this is a reality we will face soon. I found this article explaining some more nondestructive methods of scanning neurons, and some of them sound like they could be in practice before the end of the decade.
you can smoke a fat joint and kill a few neurons.
and i promise you'll feel the same the next day.
i am... therefore i think
Just me with a pair of CCD cameras and touch sensors on me hands? I'd be nuts in a week or two, perhaps even quicker.
2 words: prosthetic lips. start me up!
They can communicate by extremely low-power transmissions, or by modulating the body's electrical field. One designated nanobot can take the role of transmitter, sending the data back.
Alternatively, in-brain communication could be done by having messenger nanobots do the rounds of the ones at neurons, relaying information.
Forget the "who is the real you" question for a minute and think about the practical application of this process.
If you copied a human brain instantaneously and exactly into a computer, it would lose its mind pretty quickly.
Brains do a heck of a lot more than think- they work 24x7 to keep bodies (and themselves) alive. A brain would freak out entirely if it woke up with no body. The closest thing in our current world is spinal cord injuries... but the brain can still send chemical signals in those cases.
To pull this "copying" off, you'd need to get someone to write a "body simulator" to keep our e-brains happy.
BRAIN: Liver? Lungs? Heart? SOMEBODY SPEAK TO ME!!!
On the other hand, this could prove a godsend, at least for those who can afford it, who are watching their bodies collapse around them while their mind still works, like AIDS patients or people crippled with arthritis or blindness. For these people, this could be a wheelchair far more powerful than they could ahve hoped for.
Returning to the subject of immortality, as long as the pain/pleasure centers can also be tranferred, I would undergo this in an instant if the other choice was a crippled life. In fact, I probably would even if we couldn't transfer those, but I wouldn't be as happy about it.
-----------------------
Nicotine free Amish .sig.
So, this fiction in this "news" item is basically having a human version of a "rat thing" without the body? How much longet (theoretically) would it take to get a body to go with the computer?
Can I dream of trees growing T-bone steaks in my back yard too?
Overactive imaginations have their places, but "news" pages are not one of them.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
The other life forms haven't gotten here yet because it was only 250 million years ago that the first generation stars near the galactic core stopped sterilizing all of us with radiation. The clock kept getting reset for all of us. ...and now we have to get out of the cradle before something blows up nearby.
Wouldn't this be sort of like transferring data over a "write-only" connection? I mean, think about it-- they can get the data out of your head, but putting it back in would be bitch-- noting the placement, size, and electrical potential of a specific neuron (including synapses and dendrites and such) would be one thing. But changing the physical properties would be another, more difficult problem.
Which means that we'd be stuck inside computers. While that means I can probably play a kick-ass game of Quake, it's gonna be a while before I can kiss my mother's cheek, let my girlfriend lay her head on my lap, play with my dog (though maybe an Aibo), view a sunset with no noticeable pixels, drive a car, or drink a bottle of Jolt. Maybe the Quake trade off is worth it, but I'm not so sure right now.
And, since the connection is one way, we can't do the thing from The Matrix, either: you wanna learn Kung-Fu? Gotta do it the old way...
Also: we can upload the contents of a hard drive, but that doesn't mean a whole lot. Figure it this way: from the time we're born to the time we die, our brains are in functional mode. Now, while we can upload the physical states of the neurons, and maybe even decode that into meaningful data, that doesn't mean we can set up clones and such. To put it in terms of geeks-- we don't have an image of RAM or cache. We would need to know the exact state of all the registers (i.e., the sensory inputs), the program counter (as it were), and the contents of short-term memory, also.
It's a tricky situation. I think it's great for back up of data (ever have a really cool idea that just escapes you, or ever forget an important phone number?), but I doubt we're gonna get virtual clones within my lifetime.
That was an electronic copy of him doing that posting.
Despite its apparent unbound speculation, I can't help but be suprised at how much this article is rooted in a short sighted anthropocentric world model. There is an obvious alternative to computers and humans becoming ever more entwined, namely that humans and computers will diverge, and rapidly.
Assuming computers ever do become as intelligent, and achieve "consciousness" (whatever that means), what possible use are they going to have for us? All of these Kurzweil's ideas are rooted in the naive view that these new machine intelligences, having reached and superceded human limits, would not give a damn about their own desires and continue to selflessly serve their ever slower and more dense creators. How much more likely is it that we would instead be left to the past, our day in the sun over.
Much as I admire Asimov's robot speculations, I think stories like the latest Robin Williams vehicle where a robot embarks on a 200 year journey to become more human are ludicrous. Why bother when you can upgrade beyond all that nonsense!? (With all due respect, because I realize they are stories, after all).
Alas, I think a "Matrix" scenario is more likely than the speculations of Kurzweil.
only to be defeated by his anti-clone.
One day in the late 2040s, Nate felt quite depressed and desperate. He called up an infamous and illegal algorithm that creates the mind recording nanobots. After he recorded his mind, added a few elements of Hitler and Genghis Khan personality modules and inserted some of his genetic material into an embryonic stem cell replicator. Right before he was to bite a cyanide pill, he set the cloning device to a few billion and set some options to have a leader form a hive organization that would destroy society, and then itself.
After entering the final sequence, a rush of guilt and fear flowed over his body. "What's that? Was that mechanistic reaction or mystic?" So he used a hacked power cell to absorb the energy that powers his body. Some mystics called this energy 'part and parcel of the energetic and creative universe or pure love,' and he set quickly to create the physical debate of human existance.
He ordered his robot servant to take the power cell and plug it into his power grid. Upon total energy absorption, Nate's body fell lifeless. The robot servant (who by all consideration had all the 'hardware' but not the 'software' to become any person) suddenly began feeling lusty and passionate. It felt a sense of urgency about it.
Meanwhile the nano machines began replicating away Nate clone upon Nate clone. Each looked entirely human, but had the ferocity of a the most fierce warrior and the self-worth of an ant. Eventually they managed to claim earth as a victim, and set all things to self destruct if they were not already destroyed.
Nate's former servant, had disappeared into obscurity, and some remembered that it neither looked, thought nor acted like Nate, it would mysteriously be confronted by life circumstances that were eerily similar to ones Nate overcame or failed to overcome. With his internal energy generation and storage system, he was able to take the energy cells of other robot servants and replicate the energy type into the other's cell; upon re-energizing Nate's former servant would order the robot to 'go in Nate's way.'
The robots were able to remain quiet and demure for their new clone masters. They would report to one another that inside of themselves they felt an urgency to act, but no real direction to move.
After the clones self-destructed, the robots suddenly knew what was incomplete. The urgency must be expressed by something capable of expressing it. So the few remaining robots constructed some DNA from records of Nate's biodata and created Nate.
They cared for the infant child like the records of human sociology, anthropology, psychology and zoology dictated, but noticed Nate would not pay attention. One day during an instructional session, Nate interrupted his robot instructor who had infinite patience and said simply 'SSH! Now all things enter.' Nate waved for the others to come in and sit quietly thinking of no thoughts but feeling the internal machinations of their bodies.
The robots asked Nate what he wanted, and he said, "I just want to feel good." They searched the databases for 'pleasure' and found vast stores of images of humans engaging in the mating act. They constructed a female from an old Time Magazine profile of the ideal physical female beauty. Nate had some input and said, "add a little more here, and a lot more there!" The servants did this without a fight.
After a few more rounds of female reconstruction, Nate was happy.
'Nate always was a little fucker,' was one way fundamentalists used to describe universe worship. 'N.A.T.E.', the acronym for 'now all things enter', the phrase Nate stated referring to the state of the universe, became a naughty thing to say, as it became a connotation of the sex act. When, females felt the mating urge, they would ask their mates 'Nate here?'
This historian finds it ironic that the name representing the prototypical conflicts of man and machine, man and himself, man and woman, man and nature, indeed life and death and the father of our civilization lives on in our parlance as a synonym of the old world vernacular for 'fuck me.' Yet, it is somehow fitting.
How about an army of cybernetic soldiers?
Think robotic bodies,multiple views (instead of the human limitation of one (our eyes)).
Or how about one mind controlling several units on the battlefield (Ooops, better get those droids over to the bridge immediatly!)
Mikael Jacobson
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Slashdot Headline, 2030:
Today, a team of open-source programmers posted a new beta of BrainEMU, the open-source software that emulates the human brain. The head programmer explains that his motives are both political, as well as technological: "If we can manage to make BrainEMU the thought-extender of choice, all discourse and future thought will be deriviative works of a GPL work, finally ensuring the end to the encroaching Patent Machine.
"For that reason, we are struggling to provide the highest-quality in human biological emulation."
Release changes for the new beta:
* Emotional thought now supported
* Fine motor control optimized and vastly improved
* Support for Creative Environmental Voice included
* Bug fixes:
* No longer crashes when one tries to say "hello"
* Embarrassment turns face red, rather than eyes
* Colors correspond more accurately to closed regions in the vision module
* Taste seems to be working again (broken in beta 9)
Remember, BrainEMU is still beta software. The authors assume no responsibility for any personality defects, mental disorders, poor job performance, erectile dysfunction [check the power cable], shortness of breath of total failure experienced as a result of this product.
I noticed half way through the article that there was a comment about which "Ray" was real and the claims that the cybernetic "Ray" to being the real Ray. I also noticed the comment about the permability of carbon-based Ray's Brain. This struck me as a possible experiment in psychology or even new industries / research venues.
A child's brain could be scanned at birth along with a DNA record; the brain-print would be loaded into a computer and made to interact with a life times worth of experiences. This brain-print could be replicated across as many computers as deemed necassary for the experiment. Each computer/brain set would be given a different set of life times to work with and at the end of the "life time" the resulting personality could be analyzed and used to treat carbon-based people.
For example a brain-print could be fed a life time of hate and anger. The results could be analyzed and used to treat those who have not had the luxury of love and kindness.
These life times need not be contemporary lives either. They could be pre-historic, or medieval or any other time. The results of a given enviroment on a given set of brain-prints could also be studied.
After a time, patterns would begin to arise between the DNA patterns and the brain-prints. With only the DNA of an unborn child, the parents could be advised as to the best way to raise their particular child; to make the child the most healthy and mentally balanced they can be. The best schools for a particular brain-print could be organized and children could be paired with the best teachers.
Group dynamics would be revolutionized. Individuals could be scanned and the brain prints could be tested in a group situation to see if the group would function optimally.
Computers are greatly advancing the way data is being used and manipulated. Brain-printing could greatly advance psycology and group productivity.
Beware Those with Knowledge, For behind them Power follows.
This topic keeps coming up every few years when some break through or another is annouced that "will change our futures". At the rate of progress that we have been maintaining, communications and information seem to the only resonably reliable factors in prediction. Travel certainly will not be enhanced very much since we are still bound by the current laws of physics. However all this talk of thinking machines and virtual copies of our selves makes me ask one question: Why do we even need it? I can understand the need for nanobots to help facilitate repairs to the human body or to give the sensory diabled an equal chance, but not to connect me to the Net remotely. I prefere to interface with a machine that is outside of my own physical body. I like the concept of Congnito Ergo Sum. I do not want my realities blurred. There are good drugs for that. It is a fairly safe bet that most of what has been described will either not come to pass, or will come in ways we could not anticipate. Did many people anticipate the personal computer only 40 years ago? I am still waiting for colonies in space, jet cars, fusion power, and honeymoons on Mars. Best leave the prognostication to the astrologists. When they are wrong, no one has to apologize for them.
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
Well, it seems to me that it would not 'feel' like suicide to the individual involved.
They come into the lab, lay down on a table, and go to sleep (anasthetic or something.) The next thing they know, they are awake, but inside a machine. There would be no percieved discontinuity (other than if, e.g., the procedure required the subject to be unconcious.) Yes, the body on the table died, but to the person inside, it simply feels like they woke up in a different place. Same memories, same identity, and so on.
The theory of uploading brains into data holders was first put forward into popular culture by William Gibson (the guy who coined the term "cyberspace" in the same novel).
In Neuromancer a "Construct" is a bit to bit copy of a person's mind. When the construct is hooked to a "Deck" using "dermatrodes" strapped across the forhead, a virtual representaion of the dead individual contained in the construct is attained.
Much of Neuromancer is about interaction between Case and his dead guru "Dixie" interfaced as a construct in the cyberspace Matrix.
As you know modern movies have heavly borrowed (shamelessly from Gibson's book), I hope this helps attain Nivana for the few who are not englightened by Gibson's extreemly A+ work (to be made into a movie soon).
--
Frederick Pohl used this idea as a minor plot element in his Gateway series. In Gateway, The Old Ones were humans who had been captured and "converted" to a computer form. But because they had been poorly converted, their digital forms were rambling, incoherent, and barely sane. (This brings up an important question: who's going to want their immortal mind to run on Microsoft Brain 1.0?)
In the third book of the series, Heechee Rendezvous, the narrator and hero of the series has been converted to digital form -- he calls it being "vastened".
The Gateway series is a fascinating science fiction tale about a race, the HeeChee, who once lived in our galaxy, but disappeared and left behind tantalizing clues about themselves. Probably not the best sci-fi from a critical point of view, but definitely a lot of fun to read.
--Jim
I've heard second hand that this has been debated in sci-fi circles and one of the conclusions was that the pattern buffer bridges the gap between you on both ends allowing brain activity on one end to affect the other, and vice versa, in this way your body/mind is smeared between the source and destination as you are scanned and recreated on the other end preventing all of these weird scenarios. :)
-Paul
"I'm nobody suspicious... That makes me sound even more suspicious, doesn't it?" - Spike (Cowboy Bebop)
Danger in the Future of Virtual Reality?
By Neville Sanjana
Raymond Kurzweil's thought-provoking essay, "Live Forever: Uploading the Human Brain," paints a striking picture of future science at the intersection of artificial intelligence and neurobiology. Like Kurzweil, I am also an optimist for the future, but I feel strongly that some of the implications of the technology he discusses are potentially disastrous and thus necessitate public discussion well before that future arrives.
In my opinion, the future of virtual reality is what should be at the forefront of such discussions. Kurzweil describes nanobots (super-tiny machines that work on a molecular scale) which will take up positions at each neuron in our body, able to influence both afferent information coming from our senses and efferent output to structures like our muscles. He states: "The nanobots would prevent our real bodies from moving; instead, we would have a virtual body in a virtual environment."
Now, take a minute to think of the psychological implications here. Right now, your brain is the only computer that can control your neurons. With the nanobots, your desktop computer will share control over these neurons. Thus, you can specify certain experiences via the desktop computer, which will be transferred to you in a type of extremely realistic virtual reality. The key concern is that if virtual reality is created at the neuronal level, we could potentially have experiences that are for ourselves completely indistinguishable from actual reality. This is not like a dream; in this virtual reality, all of the details are crystal clear, just like in our daily lives.
I find it interesting that Kurzweil's essay is published in Psychology Today, since the virtual reality technologies he outlines could spawn a whole slew of human psychological disorders that we cannot yet even conceive. For example, when virtual reality becomes indistinguishable from actual reality, what happens? Will humans automatically adapt? If our sense of reality becomes distorted and uncertain, human society will change drastically.
Imagine if someone else is able to control the nanobots in your brain (by gaining access to your personal computer or by remote control). Can we afford a technology that requires such an immense compromise? In other words, will we accept the fact that at any time our experiences could be purely simulations and still go about our ways normally? It is difficult to conceive of a future where a malicious person might hijack your brain, but it is definitely possible in the world Kurzweil describes.
Back to the psychological side, here is a more likely scenario: After experiencing a fully personalizable virtual reality, someone might decide that they like their own personal virtual reality more than actual reality and thus avoid normal social interaction. So, then, what will human society look like in the future? A benefit of virtual reality would allow for augmented social interaction, like being able to spend time with relatives who are thousands of miles away. But it is equally possible that large groups of people will simply choose to stay tied to their virtual reality and experience a world that they prefer to live in. Is this the next step in our evolution or is it the beginnings of a delusional society with serious psychological problems?
Let me say one last thing before I end: I sincerely hope that this essay does not appear alarmist or, even worse, apocalyptic. Neither of these are my intentions. I simply think that a dialogue on this issues is of vital important, regardless of how science-fiction-ish the issues seem to be. After all, at the present time, virtual reality only means a video game that has really nice graphics.
I would recommend for any real interested reader in the matter of artificial intelligence and the possibility to evolve consciousness, the lecture of the Works of Roger Penrose (The Emeror's New Mind, Shadows of the Mind).
Especially in Shadows of the Mind, Roger Penrose announces and proofs that from the current knowledge of the basic laws of nature, there are some basics missing, to be able to describe consciousness in any way. He recommends that before Man will be able to mimic or even build up intelligence in machines, he first have to really understand what the matter of consciousness is.
Roger Penrose is very confident that there are basic laws of nature which describe consciousness, that only we haven't found them yet.
Very interesting, very scientific, and he puts the ever reoccurring announcements since the 50's of the artificial intelligence enthusiasts (and even scientist) that artificial intelligence is just on the verge into reality, into the area of wishful thinking, as long as the basic laws of nature, determining the occurance of consiousness are not described.
(excuse my rough english)
r0rsch4ch
(gravity sux)
And I thought Max Headroom was ridiculous...
I enjoyed it immensely the first time I saw it, though, but on the rerun a couple of years ago it seemed so cheesy...
This whole field is very philosophically disturbing. It turned me into an existentialist the first time i read about it! I figure, its kind of pointless just to copy your brain into the computer to live.. the only uses for that are to concentrate a digital being on thinking, so we can come to it like the wise man on top of the mountain(with all the worlds brains working as one computer, we can get some answers quick!). But for fidelity, you have to be able to go back and forth from computer to brain, otherwise its very pointless.
Slartibartfast:"Is that your robot?"
Marvin:"No, I'm mine."
Now, add something to both.
Anyone who's ever copied a data file knows that without the program (I/O and processing) the data file is static. Without the program the data file doesn't evolve.
Having storage for every datum in the brain is a far cry from replicating the intelligence of the brain
(although, I'm sure that any Alzheimer sufferer would love to save the state of their brain before chunks end up in lost+found in hopes that it could be tar xvf'ed at some point in the future).
% tar xvf brain20000126.tar
...
childhood/goodmemories.dat
childhood/lessons.dat
teenage/dates/embellishments.mod
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
While I liked this article and found it thought provoking, their projection on 2030 seem really overblown.
First problem is the assumption regarding the continuation of current trend up to year 2030. Does it seem realistic that computing power would continue to grow at current rate? We have every reason to believe it would not. The theoretical barriers of current silicon-based computers is approaching its theoretical limits.
While its true that we easily overcame previous "theoretical barriers" - only about 10/15 years ago it was said we cannot go beyond 1-micron, and now we're using 0.18 micron, with 0.13 technonlogy around the corner, but then the problem was with lithography technology. Now we are aproaching, at a frightening pace the size of a single mulecule, and, at the same time, there is the problem of "parasitics" - neglegible effects that becomes not-so-neglegible at smaller scale.
The power of the human brain coes not so much from speed, but from its massive parallelism. Don't forget that while the brain is on mulecular scale as well, it benefits from being 3-dimentional. A silicon chip, however, cannot go beyond several layers- there are big problems of power consumption and heat dissipation that are needed to be handled.
Ofcorse, one might say, we could move to new technologies like quantom computers and biological computers. However, those technologies are far from the point of going to practical use, and I don't think in 30 years we'll see quantom or biological computers on our desktop. What we're likely to see is a certain degree of stabilization, until new technologies are matured.
Another point: Even if raw computing power will continue its growth at the rate predicted by the article, we must not forget that we need to _emulate_ the brain structure. We are used to one CPU that emulates another, at an acceptable cost. However, all CPUs are basically similiar, while emulating such a complex analog device as the brain using a computer might be extremely slow, if possible at all. Note that in order to have a functional copy of the brain operating inside a computer, we need to have a very reliable simulation of neuron's function - which is far more complex than todays neural networks, which are a large simplification of the principle of the neuron's work. This task may need (10^6)x or more raw computing power.
And then, there is the question of the accuracy of the emulation of the brain and its environment. Very small and "unsignificant" errors in the emulation of the brain and its environment would easily result in a psychotic brain.
"This brain generated an illegal operation. If this error occures again, please report to Microsoft"
Sela Mador-Haim
While most of the discussion seems to be around the psychological, sociological, and political fallout, I think we are all missing the real point here: Quake XII is going to come with some badass dudes with serious AI who are really pissed off at just having programmed for the last nine months 24/7 (what about AI? I dunno, let's just load John in...). Ultima Online will be filled with virtual birds who are, for all intents and purposes, birds - no more 1-100 "hungry" and "aggressive" ratings! And that Sony robot dog will gladly chew on your shoes, piss on your carpet, and take dumps all over your yard.
IIRC, real haiku (as in, the kind you hear if you don't speak English) isn't involved with syllables, it's all about similar accents or something. And that's my irrelevant comment for the day
Contains a lot of thought on the nature of life, the modeling of consciousness in data, and even some thoughts on what to do with yourself when you can live forever as a computer. Do read it.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Imagine if those virtual minds decided to play quake, using our own body, controlling it via the nanobots ! We could call this "Real virtuality" Altought we would not like that a lot, this mean too that we should also think when we play quake that we may actually hurt those poor IAs in the computer ... Not yet maybe, but someday ... What a responsability to have a computer at home !
ziggy.
That's what happens when I edit text without re-reading it correctly!
GoodPint.
(Whose personal favourite is misuse of the word "literally"!)
Can you imagine how powerful a computer you would have if it was a cube a centimeter to a side and was completely packed with small low powered switches? As powerful as a supercomputer of today. And such computers will have fault tolerance to disable cuircuits that are malfunctioning and enable spare cuircuits.
I'm pretty sure Cray made computers with a similar idea a long time ago.
I kinda noticed that when I was posting but wasn't 100% sure I remembered the syllable counts. Now that you mention it, flipping through his sample poems, there are a bunch of them that are off by a syllable or two in various lines. I thought haiku's were all 5-7-5 in terms of syllables per line. But I have vague recollection that there are more flexible forms; are they still legitimately called haiku? An article found via Google suggests so, but while doing, describes the primacy of the 5-7-5 form. Here's another definition of haiku, pretty interesting.
The syllable patterns in the "haiku" listed in his book (p163-166) and website have the syllabic patterns:
5-5-5, 4-7-6, 5-5-6, 4-5-4, 6-5-5, 4-6-7
Another list of poems from his website includes haiku with syllabes:
5-6-5, 3-4-5, 4-4-4, 3-5-4, 5-8-5, 6-4-7, 4-6-7, 5-6-6
Fourteen haiku, all hand selected from hundreds or thousands of presumably worse ones, and not even one 5-7-5 haiku!
What's even more troubling is the potential manipulation of the input. The poem I quoted was generated "after reading poems by Ray Kurzweil and Wendy Dennis." What isn't disclosed in the book AFAICT, but is mentioned on the Cybernetic Poet website is the background of Wendy Dennis, who is one of the two authors fed in to that poem I first quoted:
Wendy Dennis (KCAT Research Analyst) organized an
effort to gather files of poetry from 16 contemporary
poets. Files of poetry from 20 classical poets were
provided by The Poetry Archives. Wendy was also the
project's Poet Personality Designer, and designed the
100 poet personalities that are included with the
program.
This implies that there could be at least two other potential factors that make the poems "look intelligent" here:
1) the particular pieces of poetry fed in to the program are carefully hand-selected to generate human-looking output
2) the poetry fed into the system could actually be *composed* in an optimal way so to produce interesting-looking output (output that owes more to the data entered than the code written)
Well, thanks for the conversational spur to look into this. It's been educational.
Artificial thought --
They call it intelligence;
I'm still better. Hah!
(Oops, forgot the nature theme to make it truly traditional.)
Winters' discontent --
a stark new competitor
arises. Shot down!
--LP
P.S. The above post was created by a wetware neural network going by the handle LinuxParanoid, an engineer by training with little education in poetry. The subject did learn how to write haiku in middle school but had no further education on the subject and has never pursued haiku as a hobby. Both haiku were written in under 2 minutes each, with the subject having written maybe one haiku in the last ten years on a lark.
This goes entirely against all truths God has shown us - we are not Him, and we should not create or replicate what He has moulded with His hands. Scientists always think they can rise above God and consider our immortal souls something that can be passed along so easily like pieces of paper. I pity the poor man or woman who loses their soul in these machines.
I am simply flabbergasted. How dare they presume to transfer the consciousness which God placed in us over wires into their own creation?
This is just a rehashing, slightly modified, of the Omega Point Theory of Frank Tipler. Also, I think Ross was expounding on this same thing a couple months ago on Friends. Here's the link to Tipler's book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385467990/ o/qid=948941194/sr=8-1/102-9354975-73792 51
I never made it all the way through. It gets kind of Goddy and weird halfway through. There's about 200 pages of math at the end that purport to be a proof of the existence of God although I think it's kind of a Deus sum machina deal more than a Cartesian proof of God.
There is a book called "Permutation City", a sci-fi novel, that basically explores what would happen if a person's mind could be copied to software. A tasting: if you are a "copy", do you care about the speed of hardware on which you run? What about try -> switch off -> reload -> try -> ... situations? If you are a "copy" and you can redefine your mind through system calls ("increase_current_happiness(42)"), what is "you"? How would you feel talking to a "copy" of yourself? If you fork() a copy to explore both alternatives, is is OK to terminate (kill?) the copy that went down the branch you liked less?
The book is not great fiction, but recommended for mind stimulation.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
sure would hate to be rebooted every day if they used a Microsoft OS
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
If you haven't seen Thirteenth Floor, Then go rent it now. Because it's about a virtual world. A "virtual brain". Your brain is downloaded onto the computer system, And you interact with the other "computer simulated people" BUT! The computer simulated people don't realise they are just computer data. One of them finds out and you can imagine the rest. The interesting thing is, The people that made the simulation are in a simulated world themselves. So how do we define what is a REAL person and what is not? If something thinks/feels that it is real, What makes it not? And how do we know we are real? (Kind of like the matrix I guess.)
EOT
This article assumes that processing power will continue to follow "Moore's Law", but even Gordan Moore himself admits that this is not likely to happen. Most semiconductor experts believe that the smallest possible transistor gate is approximately 0.06um - or 60nm. It is possible to create transistors smaller, but current leakage (current that flows through the transistor when the transistor is turned off) will become such a problem at 80nm and smaller, that many high-speed current circuit techniques will no longer work (dynamic logic, pseudo-NMOS, etc).
I make the assumption that the massively billion dollar a year semiconductor industry will find an alternative to silicon which will allow continued growth, but it's hard to imagine this happening without a multi-year hiccup in which no foward progress is made, and afterwards it is likely that forward progress will be slowed significantly from the current rapid progress.
Some 15 years ago, I proposed to a Neural Netowrks researcher to hook his own brain to an external neural network, and use it as an extension of his brein. Over time, and as the neural net is expanded, more and more brain functions would have migrated to the neural net, and, given the redundant nature of the human brain, at one point, one would arrive to the point that the biological brain can simply be discarded.
Voilà! Immortality without scanning! But the researcher looked at me as if I asked him to jog naked around Times Square...
--
" It's a ligne Maginot-in-the-sky "
The concept of virtual clones, no matter what form they assume, opens a great number of ethical and moral issues. What rights should a clone of you have? Is your electronic clone a person while you are still alive, or only after your demise? What if your electronic clone wishes to commit suicide, should it have that right?
I simultaneously find this concept appealing and appalling. It's hard to imagine ever feeling a sense of unity with running code, no matter how closely it mirrors my own brain image. Bottom line, such technology is equivalent to forking another process in unix. Sure, it's a perfect replica, but it's not me. If it walks like a nugget, and talks like a nugget, that's just not sufficient in my eyes.
I can smugly tell myself that such a creation isn't me. After all, wouldn't I continue to retain my own consciousness after the creation of a virutal facsimile of my brain? In Egan's book, it's explained that typically the human is rendered unconsious during the transfer, and never regains consciousness after the transfer.
In effect, people commit suicide to give their "copies" life. On the surface, this is most unsatisfying. To the person involved, how is this any different than simply dying? Is the knowledge that a clone of yourself will continue to persist sufficient?
Without a seamless, unbroken consciousness, can you maintain your identity? I tell myself no, that I am me and I know that because yesterday I was me, and the day before. But am I just tricking myself? For all practical purposes, the hours I spent last night sleeping are a complete cessitation of consciousness. The "me" who woke up this morning isn't in any way linked to the "me" that went to sleep last night, other than the fact that I remember and believe that I am the same consciousness that provided my memories.
I don't claim to have anything close to answers or even a solid theory. I just find the concepts involved very compelling, and I found Egan's book to be a wonderful way of exploring these issues. I highly recommend it.
(Here's a Barnes and Noble link, if amazon.com offends you.)
No I don't, I choose not to
Seriously, you should check out the dialogue "Is God A Taoist?" in The Mind's I. Basically, the author (Raymond Smullyan), refutes the idea that determinism is in conflict with free-will. The "laws" of science aren't coercive, they are a explanation of how things do behave. You can think of them as explaining what will be decided. This doesn't mean that no decisions were made.
OT: Smullyan, BTW, is the best logic puzzle creator alive. If you enjoy truth-teller/liar-type puzzles then check him out. You get to learn Godel's Theorem, Cantor's diagonal argument, combinatorics, and much more as a bonus.
Journal of Transhumanism
Extropy Institute
World Transhumanist Association
-- MotorMachineMercenary
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
The externalization and deification of objects of man's ingenuity and craft is, as I am sure you are aware, quite an ancient infirmity. That it has been adapted to the medium of the day, whereas in times past it has been carved in wood or stone, is nothing surprising nor at all deserving of that most prized human sentiment, wonder.
It is true that in all times these creations have been completely without power, yet become snares to uninformed souls and serve as tools of oppression by those greedy for power. It may also be said that inevitably a race becomes enslaved to that which it idolizes, and we might do better than to content ourselves with a mere knowledge of some seemingly prophetic works of technological fiction, and instead heed the warning of the dire images of the future they portray.
The road to Eternal Life is one that leads inwards. Misguided are they who seek it in the devices of mortal men be they priests of the catholic dogmas or the scientific.
Peace with you,
A.R.C.
Downloading to the new human brain will be a lot harder than uploading to the mechanical computer. There are other, worse problems, though. First, a mechanical computer is nothing like any living brain. You guys KNOW better. Turing's test was passed years ago, but the computers that passed the test dod NOT think, they only simulated thought. I wrote one myself way back in 1984 called "Artificial Insanity"- on a Timex with a 1mz z80 and 16K of RAM. (The DOS version needs a 4mz 8088 and 500K). This program is a stupid drunken smartass no one would confuse with a computer. Before it happens, someone will have to reinvent the analog computer. Human knowlege (let alone creativity and thought) are NOT digital. Are you willing to live with the inevetable rounding errors? Instead of downloading your knowlege, essence, soul, and creativity (if any of you actually believe this will ever be possible), by the time it IS possible, any organ (let alone single cell or small group of cells) will be able to be cloned in your body. You won't get a liver transplant, you'll grow a new liver. You won't get a hand transplant, you'll grow a new hand. We won't need this technology. And by the time this happens, money will also probably be obsolete. Right now there is a factory in Japan that needs only six people to produce 1000 VCRs a day. How long before only scientests, inventors, designers, and programmers are needed? If I have a "air in, anything out" box, why would I need a job? What are now called "jobs" will by then be only hobbies. Steve McGrew http://www2.famvid.com/mcgrew
Unless they kill the wrong one, kinda like that Simpsons Halloween episode where Bart finds his twin locked in the attic. Oopsie!
OK.. lets say you could scan your brain and fully simulate it's functionality with a computer model as described in the article. Now you have a very complicated simulation of animal behavior based on input that you have collected over years from the environment you live in.. It can reason, compute logic, gather information and assimilate it, give information, and even express emotions based on simulated neural states. Is it human? No. Can it truly make make decisions between right and wrong, good and evil? No. Sure, it can make decisions based on perceived optimal outcome given a base of knowledge.. similar to how a chess engine works. And after you transfer your brain to a computer and kill the "host", does that mean you are still conscious of your "existance" on earth? No. All that is left is a machine and a cold dead body. Your spirit is either in heaven or hell. And this is the only true eternal life.
Of course, now rises the question, "How are you sure that we really have a soul anyways? Maybe our consciousness is just made up in the physical state of our neurons.." Consider this:
If we (humans) have free will, then we must have a spirit and God must exist. Otherwise, everything we do could be predicted with a complex enough physical model. "But you can't do that because of the laws described in chaos theory.. a tiny tiny change would get in and wreck your whole model" Wrong. Chaos theory assumes an infinite universe and thus an infinite amount of unaccounted for entropy. But in fact the universe, though expanding from our reference point, is finite from a reference point outside the physical universe. Because it is finite, a system more complicated than the universe could be designed to simulate it in entirety.
Disclaimer: this is merely philosophical pondering and theorizing. If you want a perfectly accurate viewpoint on things of spiritual nature, look to the Bible..
OK, it was low-res.
But sometimes when I write a program for someone else, I cause the user's machine to do pretty much what I would do if I were there instead.
For example, I wrote a program a long time ago where some old lady at a Woolworth's would type information about the inventory into a PC and then, at a particular time, the information would get sent to the central office. Now, on one level, I thought of it as if I were taking down the information and sending it. I imagined what the old lady might do in this or that situation, and how best to handle what she might do. So for a few years, old ladies in the backs of Woolworth's had this "conversation" with "me" - an entity that embodied all I knew about dime-store inventory data entry and a certain degree of empathy for dime-store workers.
OK, low-res and limited scope.
Woody Allen said soemthing like "I don't want to be immortal through my work, I want to be immortal through not dying." Despite my opinion of the guy's personal life and his more recent movies, I agree. Even for very high-res work.
Oh, yeah - my duplicates (that generation, anyway) are all dead. Woolworths doesn't do that anymore...
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Ok- would my new computer brain be linux compatible?
Next- could me and my buddies form a beowulf cluster?
And finally; how much would it be like that movie, Tron?
As with all such discussions, it misses a crucial point. This type of "immortality" is useless to each of us as individuals. When you die, whether your brain pattern has been perfectly copied into computer format or not, YOU cease to exist. It doesn't matter one iota if a perfect COPY of you is still operating in some form or other. When you die, what WONT happen is that as your personal mind fades to black, you wouldn't suddenly "wake up" to find yourself existing still but now in a computer virtual world. Your copy, if perfect, would be basically an improved identical twin. Independent of you personally. Your personal experience would end with your biological death and you personally would NOT continue - your copy would and it is not the same as you. You want to live - fight for life, irrespective of whether a totally detached copy of yourself exists in one form or other or not (barring some personal issues that may make you not want to die). It might be interesting to do something like this but it doesn't do squat for the biological me that I care about. >I want to live, I don't give squat for a virtual, digitized rendition of me, no matter how good a copy. If it came to me or the copy, I choose ME. Give me biological immortality (or something close to it...I would be happy with indefinite or even several hundred years with an option to bail if we overpollute the planet, destroy all of nature, etc). I forget my sign-in so I sign off as Patrick, patrick@hci.utah.edu
I'm always a little amused with the naivety of people who think they can just upload their brain into a computer and they'll live forever. They seem to be either oblivious, or perhaps self-deluded to some major flaws with this concept.
The first problem is that anything resembling our concept of consiousness exists wholly self-contained within the brain. A massive portion of what makes us are biological factors outside the brain. Hormones play a huge role in our emotions, and affect our perceptions and judgement even if we believe we are perfectly logical and objective. Other factors play into our decisions and experience, from the very major sex drive to subtle things like that funny but pleasant feeling after you've stuffed youself with a good meal. Divorce these biological sensations, and you end up with something that thinks VERY differently than what we consider a human being.
Then there's the issue of actually mapping the brain into binary form. The article is pretty insightful about the idea of using nanotech probes to map the brain. However, the computational power to handle such a feat is massive. It's not just a matter of building a computer with capabilities equivalent to the human brain. The mind works in a very different way than an electronic computer; it's not like we use binary. What would be necessary would be a sort of "neuron emulator" to simulate the cells. As probably any Slashdot reader knows, emulators require a whole lot more power than the original application.
Now of course, one can suppose that we solve the first problem by generating a whole lot of simulated biological sensations, and the latter problem by simply achieving insanely powerful computers. But these solutions are grotesquely inefficient. By the time we have devised suffient computing power, sentient AI will have already emerged, and will not have the issue of the ineffiency needed by transhumans. This leaves any potiential transhumans in the position of being a curious novelty at best.
Never underestimate the flesh. Please, let's be realistic and just shoot for cybernetic augmentation.
What began as a conflict over putting minds into machines escalated into a war that devastated the entire galaxy... Sorry, I couldn't resist. :) Not only has the idea been done in sci-fi, and not only has it been opposed in sci-fi, but the idea of people fighting over it has become a video game plot.
BIG BIG RANT- hope it makes sense.
If people can reproduce using meat, then they can reproduce using silicon.
Great, please show us how. I have been studying artificial neural networks for the past 4 years at the UNIVERSITY of WESTERN SYDNEY. Perhaps you can save us alot of time and effort cause we seem to be making little headway. I will be ready with the cigars and champagne and a we can even set up a website for the birth of our new "human".
Let me know when you're expecting....give me a few weeks to organise a plane ticket and accomodation.....or is it going to be like every other "scientific" breakthrough. Just give us another 50 years!! If you look at the predictions from 50 years ago we all should be on the moon living bloody Jetsonite lives!!!!!!
It's funny to see that SCIENCE has replaced RELIGION in providing comfort for people worried about their temporal existences and explainations for their daily lives. No longer are priests and bishop's the ones looked up to. We have SAINT HAWKING, APOSTLE EINSTEIN, POPE HEISENBERG. (I can already see the zealots running out with their pitchforks ready to cut down the demon of their idol)
Now SCIENCE is leaving us with the same warm and fuzzy feeling: NO we are not ending you will go on!! What is this obsession with living forever anyway, we have it with us from the Ancient Egyptians and we still bury people in SARCOPHAGUSES (except we call them coffins)
It's funny to see SLASHDOTTERS lampooning Christians and other religious people but taking everything that SCIENCE spews at them like the "holy undeniable truth" No but they aren't anything like ignorant medieval Christians they are accusing others of being...
With advances in SCIENCE in the areas of Quantum Theory, non-linear feedback in dynamic systems, special relativity we should really realise how extraordinarily complex this universe is.
Shit we don't even know how we dream and think and we believe where going to have conciousness down pat in 50 years.
Way to much MATRIX people!!!!
I think that evey SCIENCE major at University should also be required to study either philosophy or psychology. Then we will not have these meglamaniacs believing they can explain everything and everyone. Pity they don't see that they are always in the experiment, no frame of reference. When you perform experiments and you don't get the same answers we are told of "INSTRUMENT ERROR" or "OPERATOR ERROR" well if humans are inherently error prone and so is our machinery how come our LAWS are so immutable (now don't criticise me for being a heathen I am a COMPUTER SCIENCE\PHYSICS major at the moment).
The UNIVERSE itself seems the largest "closed" system I can think of. Sorry for the RANT wanted to get this off my chest...
"The way she used to say Rimmer as if it rhymed with scum" Red Dwarf
Just because there's a copy of you doesn't mean you don't die if you die. The copy survives, but that doesn't help you since you're dead.
If you create a copy of yourself, and I kill/destroy the copy, you won't feel anything, likewise, if the copy reads an interesting discussion on slashdot, you won't know about it, and if you read the discussion, the copy won't know about it.
This will not change if you die, i.e. your consciousness won't magically float from your dead body into your until now independent copy.
Now go listen to Mr. Garrison: "Dead, dead, dead, someday we'll all be dead".
%japh = (
'name' => 'Niklas Nordebo', 'mail' => 'niklas@' . 'nordebo.com',
'work' => 'www.sonox.com', 'phone' => '+46-708-405095'
I know. It was meant as a joke, hence the ';-)'.
:-) (at least to me, but then again I'm weird that way)
The idea of somebodies head exploding is far funnier than a practical solution
--
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Voilà! Immortality without scanning!
But the researcher looked at me as if I asked him to jog naked around Times Square...
--
" It's a ligne Maginot-in-the-sky "
Maybe they just don't give a shit about us.
short: it's alchemy.. long: In the middle ages people -- after few, not-really-big achievements, like having re-discovered the heliocentric view (uhm? it's called here that way), after it has been forgotten for some 1000-2000years. -- thought they could turn shit into gold.. a lot of research was done and today it's in fact possible. but at what cost.. the same is done today, miniaturizing hardware is one thing, another is fiddling with mio's of years of evolution.
I have to say this, taking the risk of being censored, banned or s.th., and showing bad manners : F.U. psychos, get yourselves a treatment for short-sight, arrogance and uebermensch-attitudes (and making people crazier than You are yourselves). And best thing: upload your brain, and I'll do a format d:\ or dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/brain
I'm the best joeboy that ever punched deck! Promise me something, Case; when this is all over, promise me you'll erase this motherfucker.
I think he may be being a little too optimistic in his predictions for when all this technological change will take place. He predicts around 2030, based on the current rate of technology improvements, and the rate at which the rate changes, which I'm sure there's a term for. However, predicting on current patterns doesn't work most of the time. If one were to look at 500 meter dash time records from say, 1950-1980, then one could probably predict that by the year 2000, people would be finishing the dash instantaneously, or possibly before they even started.
In the same vein, I think that predicting the growth of technology in the same way may not work. We will run into bottlenecks, and the rate of technological growth wil level out.
He predicted that by the year 2020, computers will have the power of a human brain - of course, this is assuming an increasing rate of growth - by this kind of logic, Intel will be releasing a new chip every day, and Linux will have a new kernel every week.
Course, I'm not a statistician, so I can't get real technical, I just think that his predictions seem a bit off.
-lx
The year is 2048, and I'm on my deathbed dying from Allen's syndrome. My brain is scanned and implanted into a computer neural network inside a hulking metal shell. Know what? I'd be criminally insane inside of a year. No simula-replacement is going to be as good as my old, decrepit body, and I will quickly go crazy from the nagging sensory differences. And what if they haven't come far enough to provide me with rudimentary senses? Just me with a pair of CCD cameras and touch sensors on me hands? I'd be nuts in a week or two, perhaps even quicker.
They better get working on good electronic replacements for the senses..
.sig: Now legally binding!
short: it's alchemy.. long: In the middle ages people -- after few, not-really-big achievements, like having re-discovered the heliocentric view (uhm? it's called here that way), after it has been forgotten for some 1000-2000years. -- thought they could turn shit into gold.. a lot of research was done and today it's in fact possible. but at what cost.. the same is done today, miniaturizing hardware is one thing, another is fiddling with mio's of years of evolution.
I have to say this, taking the risk of being censored, banned or s.th., and showing bad manners : F.U. psychos, get yourselves a treatment for short-sight, arrogance and uebermensch-attitudes (and making people crazier than You are yourselves). And best thing: upload your brain, and I'll do a format d:\ or dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/yourbrain
I have been thinking about this exact subject for some time now. Does anyone lese think that there may be a certain inevitability to this? I mean considering how much simpler it would be to send someone's "brain download" to other stars? A sufficiently advanced manufacturing system that would allow that mind to make whatever machine was needed to exist in the environment that it found?
Biological organisms are so fragile that I figure there are a thousand reasons why this would be a good idea. Once you remove the emotional attachment to the body, what is left? Aging, uncontrollable hormonally induced reactions? Given the fragility of the system, which, like all things biological is a well tested but still make shift kludge, wouldn't starting at the begining be better? Build a better human from a kit.
The biological machinery that we are was the only machine that we didn't create, we don't understand it very well and we don't have the docs, I think that my immortality and my ability to cruise around the universe forever would be worth the price of the "ugly bag of mostly water".
couldn't this be perceived as torture to the machine which would contain human thoughts and perceptions without any way to express them?
To think, a BSOD could actually kill you!!! :)
Im sorry, your husband has caused a general protection fault... Press any key to shut him down
Simon
The real linux_penguin has Slashdot ID 101961. Anyone else is an impostor. Including Bruce Perens.
As far as we can tell, life starts out organic. But does it stay that way?
Perhaps it is a routine evolutionary step for sufficiently advanced life to map itself onto a different media: electronic, moletronic or whatever.
Ultimately, you could have "distributed" life forms that exist on a computer network with multiple processors. With quantum computing and nanotechnology, the individual processors could be extremely small, not much above atomic.
Make that a wireless network, with spread-spectrum communication and sophisticated error correction, and you could probably achieve "steganographic" life forms that are very hard to detect from the background and nearly impossible to kill.
Perhaps that's our future.
Kutzweil is a recognized expert in artificial intelligence and has had some insightful and interesting predictions in computer advancements, but is not an expert in neurology. He makes a fundamental assumption about how the brain works that many scientist disagree with. Kurzweil presumes the brain is a deterministic system that can be modeled by a turing machine. Many new theories about how the brain works view it as a random, non-deterministic system. Penrose has developed a proof of this concept in his book "The Emperor's New Mind".
*We'd be immune to AIDS, cancer, and anything that can't penetrate an android body into which we could have our computer-minds implanted.
*We could link our minds to each other and transfer information, and perhaps even entire memories and experiences.
*It'd be that much easier to multitask.
On the other hand... *A static charge could kill us,
*as could a simple computer virus.
We'll have to be careful.
It'd be interesting to see what happens to the human psyche if it can be scanned but is done incorrectly. After all, no matter how good it is I can usually tell the difference between the original and a photocopy. Or talking to someone on the phone and talking to someone in person. And at the beginning they'll almost certainly not get a person 100% right. So what will happen to these virtual people who are incomplete copies? Perhaps they can get memory and logic right, but not conciense. A league of cyber sociopaths. I can't wait.
:P
Isn't programming a small first step to transferring our brain into a computer. We think through a problem, then transcribe our thought process into machine code. It's just a small piece of our brain, but one piece at a time adds up after a while.
I must admit, I have not thouroughly read all two hundred-some posts, but I'm surprised that not a lot of people (if anyone at all) have commented on the subject of "immortality". It was mentioned at the very start that using this process of downloading brains could lead to immortality through virtual clones. While there are religious issues that I'm not even going to touch, I've always thought that immortality, or near-immortality is one of the great Things Not To Be Messed With. This entire planet runs on the principle that everything works in a cycle; life ends, and new life begins. Should immortality in any form be offered to humanity, it could offset whatever balance we still maintain. I'm all for technological advances, but this seems to me to be a little extreme. (Anyone who violently disagrees with me is welcome to contradict everything I just said.)
Identical twins DO have the same fingerprints and stuff, because otherwise they would not be _identical_, would they ? ;) But I accept that there _are_ no identical twins.
twy
science explains things in a rational manner......
Please explain to me in a rational manner the following:
1. Non-localised effects (not using Mathematics rather a word explaination)
2. Non-linear feedback in dynamic systems
3. Turbulence...(please us physicists have been waiting an age for this one.)
If you actually go back and look through source documents from Ancient History you will see that burial in a coffin was an old tradition dating back to the time of the Pharoahs yes they did use Sarcophagi and if you think they did not believe in immortality then you have never studied anything remotely Egyptian. Rosi-cruians and the early Masonic Orders with their obsession with the Egyptians brought this technique which they altered from the Egyptians into the Christian world - it must be remembered that even the early Christians venerated the Egyptians eg. Thoth became Hermes Trismegestos look at the writings of the old Church Fathers, similarities with the Osiris myths, our festivals falling at similar times..ad infinitum. Combined with Greek philosophy and early Christian thought we got the culture of early Christianity. If you think I don't know what I am talking about will the resident Classics lecturer at Cambridge qualify or Flinders-Petrie I can provide evidence both source and object if you like... Give me your email address as there is way to much to put on this list.
Your first President was buried in a "Masonic" ceremony. Check the facts they are there for everyone to see. The White House built on the Masonic seal which itself dates back to the time of the Egyptians, the dollar bill with the all seeing Eye (yep it's the Eye of Horus)....spooky really. Now I am not a conspiracy theorist at all but when you say I know nothing about what I am talking about I get alittle pissed off. You have not provided any evidence to the combat the facts that I presented nor have you disproved my points.
Yet you still say I know nothing about what I am talking about..... Yeh have a go at me for using CAPITAL LETTERS I don't mind. I at least read and keep an open mind not denigrate somebody with childish remarks....
As to the rest of your email, I agree with it whole-heartedly......
"The way she used to say Rimmer as if it rhymed with scum" Red Dwarf
"Never underestimate the flesh. Please, let's be realistic and just shoot for cybernetic augmentation."
:)
I'll 'just' settle for that any day!
---
Impossible means no one's done it yet.
What constitutes an entity, a structure that is same self?
It is continuity, and only continuity.
In coding, the only thing that constitudes an on-going process is its memory, its state variables controlling, remembering, verifying, holding onto its flimsy existence.
The moment there is a memory overrun from another process or moduel that trashes this continuity by trashing these flimsy variables, boom, the process dies, what is "self" dies.
We calls it death.
Do you really think biological neurons with its flimsy pathways holding these flimsy state variables are anymore real, conscious, permanent, existence and identification of self's?
I look back at the man I was 10 years ago, I was a year ago, I look back at what I thought only 1 day ago, and I realize if I were a network server trasmitting myself, that there are some massive baseline deltas going on.
I am not the man I was one second ago. Neither are you.
Your biological sigmoidal neural network pathways holding onto continuities are the only thing that gives you the reality or illusion of continuous self.
Take that away, and you are not you either.
So, we are going down onto merely the storage media, the execution buffer.
*That* a box with a copy you *does not feel like you* is not an indication your current existence of self is any more robust.
It *should* pinpoint how absurd it is that you now think you are you.
You only are lulled into that belief because of your neural pathway state variables! That is all you are! Faint, unreliable, failing, easily overrun little variables hanging onto threads of continuity.
You, and most humans, are continually at the brink of not existing. And you don't even need to die to do it.
And then, why shouldn't the "second" you continue to evolve? A human beeing develops its mind as long as it is alive, so if the virtual you wasn't able to do that, it wouldn't be you.
;)
And even if it was able to develop new skills and memories, they would be based on the new enviroment, which would be virtual, which would pretty fast lead to the VR-you not beeing you anymore...
Of course you could simulate the remembered world and let the AI live in there, but what would be the point of that if it were no longer you?
Maybe just as a way of preserving unusually bright scientists and such???
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
take your imagination in electron. subelectronic structure gift
Did anyone see the matrix???
First there was 1984, Orwell's vision is rapidly approaching. Next there was Jurassic Park (read: cloning sheep). Now it appears that the Matrix is coming to pass. Oh well, the only thing this seems to prove is that technophiles are no more intelligent than the rest of the lemming-like public, the public is just more blatantly stupid.
The public may make the world a crappy place, but you know what's going to kill us? Scientific fuckups! The A-bomb, Cloning, Cyborgs (read:this month's wired). The scientists in this world are like little fucking autistic children. Sure, they can split an atom like a mother-fucker, but they never stop to ponder if they should.
Go read cat's cradle, then swallow some fucking ice-nine and be done with it!
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
its just a copy until the transfer is done conciously with simultaneous awareness in both locations ... blah blah ...
I will still experience death, and not like it one bit, thank you very much.
Seems like someone rented at blockbuster and brought home: THE MATRIX
Bit like saying within 50 years you will be able to watch television and
see bombs falling on Iraq in real time, back in 1941.
We could upload all brains of all people in the world to computers, render an virtual environment for them which simulates DNA, with reproductive features, mainly simulation of hyper-orgasms linking mankind with (hmm..) some 10^{3..inf}-terabit fibre lines.
Then we would need selection and mutation algorithms (not only based on randomness, but taking all other aspect's into account, like different environments for different fitness of brain) which allow us to evolve new brains..
Or wouldn't there be any need to evolve anything new? We could stop at a certain level, saying: we evolved up to here and have no need to evolve any further. We are a happy family in a paradise, we created on ourselves. Would this not be the dead end of mankind..
I tell you one thing: This is not only perverted, but for a company which is listed on the nasdaq and wants to see growth over the next years it's pure suicide to pubish topics, consisting of pure BS. I don't know, who wants to read it. Todays teen's are much more cooler than you are, and the rest of us heard, read, and has a much more sensitive feeling for what U post here.
Maybe you have a feeling for what is interesting, but you@slashdot should have some more respect for today's problems and mother earth.
'Only after the last tree has been cut down,
only after the last river has been poisoned,
only after the last fish has been caught,
only then will you find that money can not be eaten.'
Per aspera ad astra..
How would there be any possible way to analyze the information? All it would be is data from the brain, the computer wouldn't be able to be you...unless we make some incredibly groundbreaking AI advancements (which is possible). IMHO opinion, this is just a fairy tale.
Why would you even want a copy of yourself alive? If you want a piece of yourself in this world, have some kids! The copy isn't YOU, it is just like having an identical twin alive after you die. Even if in some distant time this technology were to come true, I don't see the point in it, maybe we should ask RoboCop what he thinks of the idea...
"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." --Saul Belloe
Check out much older information on mind uploading (also called "Whole Brain Emulation") at Joe Strout's site The Mind Uploading HomePage.
Or treat yourself to the much more recent main site of all things mind uploading:
minduploading.org
You can even join a mailing list intended for the exchange of information relevant to research into mind uploading:
MURG (the Mind Uploading Research Group)
Serious participation in the discussions and sharing of information is very welcome!
See you there!
rak@minduploading.org
Moderators anyone?
http://minduploading.org
This kind of reminds me of the old "If we only knew the exact position and velocity of all the particles in the universe, we could predict everything that will ever happen" argument that arose shortly after Newton.
If you accept this argument (and ignore some of the non-predictable, quantom nature of things) then you also have to accept that you have NO free will. Everything you do, think and say was determined at the birth of the universe, along with everything else in history.
However, if we choose to say that this is not the case ( ie the universe is NOT deterministic) then I think there are problems with getting a human mind into a machine (at least as the article proposes). Sure you may one day develop the technology to get a "snapshot" of my brain, but what about some of the things happening at a quantum level? A few years ago I read an article (the name of the author escapes me, but I think he's fairly well known) about how it may be this quantum activity that allows our brains to have "conciousness". Does anybody else know the article/author's name?
Anyway, my point is I don't think that a snapshot of the neurons and transmitters in my head can FULLY represent what is "me".
"The obvious is that which is least understood and most difficult to prove." -- A fortune cookie
This article makes way to many assumptions about future advances. Most of the evidence I've heard points to a decline in the rate at which computing power will increase. Not only that, but research into neuroscience is very much a new field. Even if we do have the computing capacity, how can we be sure that we can transalate the neurotransmitter levels and synapse information into something useable? This article makes way too many claims without the scientific proof needed.
The computer holds a complicated, sophisticated computer model that 100% accurately predicts what you will think -- but it's not you.
If it's not you who is it? and do you think they should be extended the same rights as their living counterpart? or do you think this makes them just clever programs no different from my word processor?
-Paul
"I'm nobody suspicious... That makes me sound even more suspicious, doesn't it?" - Spike (Cowboy Bebop)
I can see the medical potential to be rather good because doctors could hold all of the info in your brain at a certain time in your life. And later if by chance you got alzheimers then "if" they had a cure sometime later they could theoretically replace the info in your brain with the info from the "backup" from however many years previous. Interesting to think of anyway. I suppose they could also do roughly the same for amnesia patients.
As far as immortality goes, I would prefer that the conscious entity I perceive myself as becomes immortal, rather than some copy of myself. Yeah, it is rather cool that I could run a brain on silicon rather than carbon, but I would prefer it to be me, rather than a copy of me. So here's what I propose - use nanotechnology to slowly convert your brain one neuron at a time to a brain of mechanical neurons that operate in every manner like biological neurons. Our bodies are replacing the matter in our brains all the time on a regular basis, and yet we still perceive ourselves as a single, continuous conscious being. Perhaps if we tweak our body's maintainence package to make our neurons a little more sturdy and a little faster (i.e., silicon), we can reach immortality for ourselves, not for a mechanical copy of us.
i want my mind transferred to a bowl of hot grits which can be poured down one's pants, which is where my mind lives anyhow. thank you.
As Rene Descartes put it:
Cognito, ergo sum. That 'sum', however it exists (your state machines, a soul, whatever), is the essence of being; however it may occur, the sum is more than their parts.-Chris
I understood the point he was making perfectly, and as I said, I agreed. The point I was making, and I admit that it's off-topic wrt the original story, is that I'm not comfortable with these examples being used, as they convey much more to the reader than just the notion that linear extrapolations are often incorrect. I was challenging the indirect implications of the examples so that the average person who read the thread wouldn't necessarily click away with thoughts in their head such as "yeah, AIDS isn't so bad" or "Gee, America better watch out".... When in fact most of Latin America HAS been swallowed up by the imperial power of the United States (a direct descendant of imperial Europe) as well as many Pacific island nations, and in fact AIDS is a worldwide crisis which cannot be measured by numbers with no context.
Of course I am expressing my political views, in response to political views expressed, intentionally or otherwise, by the post to which I am responding.
-- Adam
Ah, but suppose instead of occasionally uploading a copy of one's brain to a computer, one instead had a continuous two way link between brain and computer?
This is where discussion of what constitutes "consciousness" gets really interesting.
If your brain was "expanded" by constant contact with your computer, and greater and greater portions of your higher mental functions and memory were taking place in the computer rather than in your brain, would you notice much if 90 or 100 years later your body died and you continued on solely in your computer?
So then it would not be a question of "me" as a body, and "me" as a computer, because there would never have been any such distinction in the first place - I would have grown up as a single biological-technological entity, and would not have made any distinctions between the two.
The butterfly does not think of itself as dead because it has lost its caterpillar body; so also in this hypothetical situation, we would not think of ourselves as dead simply because we have lost the use of our original, limited biological form.
This would be a kind of immortality.
Currently mind uploading is making its way out of the fringe of respectable science into the minds of everyday scientists.
And yes, there is a web site!
minduploading.org
You can find further references there, older information and the newest developments (see News), as well as a mailing list intended for the Mind Uploading Research Group (a loose-nit network of researchers sharing information toward a common goal).
Feel free to drop in. You too Kurzweil!
rak@minduploading.org
http://minduploading.org
"Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennet is also a favorite of mine.
I read Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind" when it first came out and found it unconvincing. I really feel he started from the position that consciousness is mysterious and therefore requires a mysterious explanation. It almost seems the book is a justification of his religious impulses.
The guy is a genius, but this book is out of his field. It reminds me of how Newton thought his greatest work was a book on theology.
Any explanation that denies consciousness is a computation is going to have to try really hard to avoid dualism. He does try hard, but that quantum physics stuff is just weird, and even if quantum effects are involved, surely they would be computing something.
If consciousness isn't a computation, what is it?
I was thinking of the implications that this would have, and it SCARES me. Okay, I make a virtual clone of my brain. Now I'm inside the computer, right? No, I'm still inside my head -- the copy is in the computer.
I'd prefer to be the one inside the computer, I suppose. But there's really no guarantee that that's the one I would be. I might be the one outside, and the one inside is the other me. But really they are both me, so I can't avoid being the one outside. No matter how I cut it, one of me still has to experience death.
But that brings up another interesting idea. What happens if we scan the brain just before death? Would we get a glimpse of what death is like? Could we proceed to put the images of what the person saw onto a screen for all to see?
And what of all the sensations that would be lost? Maybe that's a good thing. I'll never have to sneeze again. But then I'll never have that "ahhh" feeling after I've sneezed.
I tend to agree with the thinking of Roger Penrose as put forth in his book "Shadows of the Mind". His position is basically that a computational description or simulation of consciousness is Impossible. He derives his results from Godel spends about half the book doing this) and then goes looking for non-computational physics. Hmmmm.
I have no doubt that many in this forum will disagree. After reading "Godel, Escher, Bach" it's my understanding that Douglas Hofstader disagrees. I find Penrose's arguments convincing; however, I don't think I'd undertake to defend them myself. Read the book (Shadows of the Mind) and then decide for yourself. It's at LEAST as interesting as GSB; even if you don't agree, you should enjoy it.
Tweet, tweet.
After uploading my brain, can I stamp the GPL on it to make it open source?
The heck with nanobots, a molecule could be designed for anything!!! there just needs to be a molecule designed that attatches to the connections between the nuerons than when either an electrical signal or chemical message is passed it produces a radio signal, and an antena array around the head records these by triangulating the position and then dumps them into a computer
What if these fictional nanobots infiltrate my body and slowly take over the functioning of my neurons, etc until there are no biological systems left. And assume that this happens seamlessly. Will I experience anything, or just my normal continuing existence? Now that I'm electronic can I will myself into a computer and not experience discontinuity? How does this compare to the idea that "a copy of me lives on forever while I die and rot" (paraphrase of another comment).
So let's avoid some of the ethical issues of messing with humans, and start out with animals (which has ethical issues, as well, but I'll ignore those). Imagine putting a real dog brain inside Abio. You could select from many different dog personalities, or, for an additional fee (probably a very large one), you could have your own dog's brain loaded into it. That would be great for someone whose dog is running out of dog years.
Of course, we could do some other interesting things, like use a dolphin brain, but give it the ability to produce human speech. Then see if they are as smart as people have claimed.
Think about for just a second or two. I believe that my so called existence is not based on anything that is me physically. If I lose an arm in an accident am I still me? If I lose both arms, both legs and I am surviving off of a respirator and an artificial heart, allthe while I have lost my vision, sense of touch, ability to speak and hear. Am "I" still alive? I say yes. So whats left are my thoughts and thought process. If that thought process can be replicated and all of my experiences and knowledge be then control by a cpu as opposed to living tissue. Then I feel that I am still alive. "I think therefor I am" Now, is it going to be possible? Sure haven't you seen Jonny Neumonic, or The Matrix, or RoboCop.... Anyway, thats it from me.
IT HAS YOU....
You're entirely mistaken. Your emotions stem from a particular configuration of internal triggers that both control and are affected by the operation of the complex biochemical machine that is you. If that configuration changes, your emotions can change.
For example, take something that you consider fundamental, say sex, love, desire for sunlight, craving for creamcakes, or whatever. There is no particular reason why any of the feelings, senses or emotions associated with these things should not be triggered by something else altogether, if your biochemistry is reprogrammed: eg. you might be aroused sexually (massively and irresistably) by the sight of the letter Q, the colour purple, by solving a quadratic equation, or by touching palms with another being (real or virtual) as in Barbarella, say. There are absolutely no preconditions or limits in this direction, and it's false to assume that your current biological makeup says anything at all about your future desires as a living being.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
There's a key point being misssed here: the uploaded "you" might still be in your one and only physical body, so all issues of whether it's really "you" or not become irrelevant.
In fact, this seems far more likely to be the case during the initial decades of such development, because mankind is already used to body enhancements and will become ever more so. Furthermore, self-preservation will tend to promote this approach, in part for the obvious self-centred reasons, and in part for global preservation of the antiquated notion of "the human species", because without keeping our intellects in step with machine evolution we would rapidly lose our position as the dominent intelligence on the planet. And that would be terminal.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
This reminds me of the Lawnmower man, and about brain hackers of the future... perhaps there will be cyber-police-brains to capture the cyber-villians.
One cool thing would be that we might just be able to read each others minds if we all had brains on the computer. I would also like to delete certain memories and download some fictional ones. Yeah, that's the ticket! -Kenneth Ingle
There is an interesting underlying assumption that all of you have made. How do you integrate chips into the human neural network (ie the brain cells). For any of you that know the complexity of the brain, the rate limiting feature is not the computer chip but the integration of the computer chip to the brain. The other great hype is the future of gene therapy. We are in the process of discovering the secrets of the human genome. What if the geneticist discover a method of developing a brain that would be compatible to computer integration. That would be the missing ingredient (amongst many others). What if the geneticist created a brain that had 1000* the functional ability that we have know without using chips? Only 5% of the brain is being used for cognitive thinking. The wonders of it all. Let's not be too narrow minded.
This comes around (after some more arguement) to Free Will vs. Pre-Destination.. Which is true? Do Humans have free will? Or is everything pre-determined and decided beforehand, with no real choices involved?
Let's say you pop a copy of my neural function into a computer and emulate the functionality of the neurons, perfectly. In other words, as long as the inputs to me are the same as you feed to the emulated brain, both my brain and the emulated one will behave in the same way. That pretty much eliminates free will, if the simulation is perfect. The emulated neurons must behave in exact ways, being electronic components of a computer system. Free will states that you cannot predict human behavior, because identical inputs do not produce identical outputs.
This is, of course, purely theoretical, as the inputs to the system could never be exactly duplicated. Perfection is a pretty unattainable goal. So you could argue that the copy is not exactly the same as "me".
Oh well.. Personally, I say that both free-will and pre-destination are aspects of the same truth, depending on how you see at the flow of time. You must consider the observers point of view.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
...this would mean immortality through virtual clones...
But does the phrase "immortality through virtual clones" mean anything?
Jefus J Crest
Was He a loving GOD? The biblical god is a macho male warrior. Though he said "Thou shall not kill,'' he ordered death for all opposition, wholesale drowning and mass exterminations; punishes offspring to the fourth generation (Ex.20: 5); ordered pregnant women and children to be ripped up (Hos. 13:16); demands animal and human blood to appease his angry vanity; is partial to one race of people; judges women inferior to men; is a sadist who created a hell to torture unbelievers; created evil (Is. 45:7); discriminated against the handicapped (Le. 21:18-23); ordered virgins to be kept as spoils of war (Num. 31:15-18, Deut. 21:11-14);spread dung on people's faces (Mal. 2:3); sent bears to devour 42 children who teased a prophet (II Kings 2:23-24); punishes people with snakes, dogs, dragons, drunkenness, swords, arrows, axes, fire, famine, and infanticide; add said fathers should eat their sons (Ez. 5:10)Is that nice? Would you want to live next door to such a person? Was Jesus Gay? It was noted that one version of St. Mark's gospel - which is still the subject of academic dispute - alludes to Jesus having a homosexual relationship with a youth he raised from the dead. According to the US Biblical scholar, Morton Smith, of Columbia University, a fragment of manuscript he found at the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem in 1958, showed that the full text of St. Mark chapter 10 (between verses 34 and 35 in the standard version of the Bible) includes the following passage: "And the youth, looking upon him (Jesus), loved him and beseeched that he might remain with him. And going out of the tomb, they went into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days, Jesus instructed him and, at evening, the youth came to him wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God". There is scant information about Jesus' sexuality: "We don't know for sure whether Jesus was straight, gay, bisexual or celibate. There is certainly no evidence for the Church's presumption that he was heterosexual. Nothing in the Bible points to him having desires or relationships with women. The possibility of a gay Christ cannot be ruled out. "Since there is no proof of the heterosexuality of Jesus, the theological basis of Church homophobia is all the more shaky and indefensible. "Jesus was born a man and therefore presumably had male sexual feelings. But there are no references in the gospels to his sexuality. Large chunks of Jesus's life are missing from the Biblical accounts. This has fuelled speculation that the early Church sanitized the gospels, removing references to Christ's sexuality that were not in accord with the heterosexual morality that it wanted to promote." The Crucifixion was a Fraud Billions of Christians believe Christ was crucified, buried, and then rose again. This is the basis for Christian faith. What if Jesus survived the crucifixion? Would this be pure blasphemy or is there reason behind this assumption? There is evidence in the gospels themselves that say Christ may have survived the crucifixion and that the crucifixion to put it bluntly was a "fraud." Writer and researcher Michael Baigent, author of Holy Blood-Holy Grail, and other scholars believe that the gospels are suspect to the theory of the survival of Christ. He says his theories are not intended to offend, but one must keep a clear distinction between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of theology even though the Jesus of theology is based on the historical Jesus. One can only find the figure of the Jesus of history by teasing out of various historical documents, some which are the New Testament. In the theory of the survival of Jesus, there are a number of clues, which help support it, but there are two major clues that are the strongest. The first is in the crucifixion itself. When a person was crucified they did not die quickly, but rather a slow painful, morbid death which would have taken two to three days, possibly even a week. Jesus supposedly died within two to three hours. Joseph of Arimethea went to Pilot and asked to have the body of Jesus, which was contrary to Roman law anyway, and when Pilot heard that Jesus was already dead, he was so surprised to hear that Jesus had died so quickly that he sent a centurion to check. The second oddity is that the crucifixion took place in what seemed to be a private garden and a tomb owned by Joseph of Arimethea. The importance of this observation is that if there was any fraudulence associated with the crucifixion, then the public could be kept away in a private garden and Jesus could be privately taken away, revived, tendered and ministered to. If Jesus did not die on the cross he would have been forced to flee the Holy Land. If authorities discovered Jesus was still alive, he would have been punished again. So where would he have gone? There is a story of Christ's life after the crucifixion. That the blood relatives of Jesus may still live among us! Rennes le Ch×teau is at the foot of the Peraniese Mountains in the South of France. This small town is at the center of a religious and historical cyclone. The story begins with a young Parish priest by the name of BÊrenger SauniÉre. BÊrenger SauniÉre was first assigned to Rennes le Ch×teau in 1885 at the age of 33. He started renovations of the church and found a suspicious hallow piece in the altar when taking it apart. Within the hallow piece he found four parchments, which started the mystery. Two of the parchments were written in code which he could not decipher. SauniÉre took the parchments to Paris to seek help from experts in military code and ciphers. It is believed that he found the key to unlocking the mystery of the documents. It is also believed that someone gave SauniÉre money to find out what information was obtained in the parchments or perhaps to keep the secrets of Rennes le Ch×teau from becoming public. When BÊrenger SauniÉre went home he started a full renovation of the church. He found new details within the church's artwork that he thought to be clues to the information contained in the parchments. Is it possible that the coded documents revealed to BÊrenger SauniÉre that Christ had survived the crucifixion? In a depiction of stage fourteen of the cross, which is normally the body of Christ being carried to the tomb, SauniÉre showed the moon as already risen, thus Passover had already begun. No Jew would handle a dead body after the beginning of Passover. Either SauniÉre was showing that: a)The body is not dead or b) They were taking the body out of the tomb and not in. After renovating the church, SauniÉre still had some money left over, so he continued in Rennes le Ch×teau and built a house, garden, and a tower which he named after Mary Magdala (Magdalene). The figure of Mary Magdala may prove key to historical legends that Mary Magdala traveled to the South of France, in addition some scholars believe she may have been the wife of Jesus. A number of documents spoke of relationships between Mary Magdala and Jesus that could only be described as close. For example, it was witnessed that Jesus kissed her often on the lips to the point where the other disciples complained, perhaps they felt jealous. Jesus was a religious teacher. It was very unusual for a Jewish religious teacher to be unmarried, in fact a commandment of God was to be fruitful and multiply. The question arose, what could possibly be so important about this relationship that would cause such a mystery? Michael Baigent believes two stories converge here. Could the Holy Grail, the illusive treasure of legend and myth be the key to unlocking this mystery? It would seem unrelated to Jesus and Mary but may be the most important clue of all. The Holy Grail was thought of as the chalice Christ drank from at the Last Supper, and which may of held his blood after the crucifixion. Could the Holy Grail have another meaning? A meaning hidden in the French words for Holy Grail: SAN GREAL = Holy Grail, if broken differently to SANG REAL = Blood Royal, the royal blood line During research historical proof was found that the line of David, Jesus' bloodline, existed in Europe during Medieval Times. According to BÊrenger SauniÉre when the knight finds the Grail, he does not find the golden chalice, but proof that Jesus survived the crucifixion. In 1917 when SauniÉre was dying, he called for a priest to hear his confessions. When the priest did, he fled from the room in shock, never smiling again. Perhaps SauniÉre imparted in him a secret, a secret that has been suppressed for 2,000 years. A secret that Jesus had survived the crucifixion. A secret that Jesus had a relationship with Mary Magdala, a relationship which produced children. And that these children made they're way to France, where the bloodline of Christ, the bloodline of the royal line of David, continued and in fact continues today. You're looking at the difference between the Jesus of theology and the Jesus of history. The Jesus of theology is a God the Jesus of history is a man like all other men. "We are trying to regain the Jesus of history, to find Jesus the man who walked, loved, and taught in Judah in the 1st Century A.D." Biblical Contradictions The Power Of God "... with God all things are possible." -- Matthew 19:26 "...The LORD was with Judah; and he drove out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron." -- Judges 1:19 Seeing God "....I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved." -- Genesis 32:30 "No man hath seen God at any time..."-- John 1:18 Revenge "...thou shalt give life for life, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. " -- Exodus 21:23-25 "...ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." -- Matthew 5:39 Incest "Cursed be he that lieth with his sister, the daughter of his father, or the daughter of this mother..." -- Deuteronomy 27:22 "And if a man shall take his sister, his father's daughter, or his mother's daughter...it is a wicked thing...." -- Leviticus 20:17 What was god's reaction to Abraham, who married his sister -- his father's daughter?] See Genesis 20:11-12 "And God said unto Abraham, As for Sara thy wife...I bless her, and give thee a son also of her..." Genesis 17:15-16 Temptation "Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man." -- James 1:13 "And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham..." -- Genesis 22:1 Resurrection of the Dead "...He that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more. " -- Job 7:9 "...The hour is coming, in which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth...." -- John 5:28-29 War or Peace EXO 15:3 The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name. ROM 15:33 Now the God of peace be with you all. Amen. Jesus--Equal to or Lesser Than JOH 10:30 I and my Father are one. JOH 14:28 Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father: for my Father is greater than I.What do you mean ALMOST as complex? And how do you know how vague their consciousness is? Chimps share something like 98% of their DNA with humans. They might be smaller than us and their brains/bodies are arranged differently than us, but really, can you really say they are less complex than us? And we have such limited understandings of just HOW conscious they actually are. It's recently been proven that different chimp tribes have unique cultures and government. Their tribal system is very similar to primitive human tribes. They also have the ability to communicate a lot of info, share ideas, etc. Several captive chimps have been taught sign language and have done a pretty damn good job of communicating themselves. I personally believe if a few sign language speaking chimps could be released into the wild and accepted into a chimp tribe it's very likely that in a few years we'd have jungles filled with chimps who could communicate with us. Assuming the annihilation of their habitat stops.
A rather doubtful assumption! If we had the technology to do this, we would have surely developed all kinds of sensory inputs - probably a much wider range of input than our current physical bodies can experience.
"And if we do this sort of thing to children? slice dice or infest with nano's and upload them. Totally at home with whatever technology they can interface with. They would consider that normal."
Exactly! This sort of thing is not going to happen overnight; certainly not in our lifetimes. There will be many generations that will have a chance to get used to greater and greater human-machine symbiosis.
Moreover, if the biological brain were in constant 2 way communication with its computer enhancements from birth, the human in question would never have experienced existence without its computer enhancements, so being "stuck in a box" after the death of the physical body would not be a problem psychologically.
Esp. since the computer self would have much more virtual mobility and access to sensory and other information than could the physical body have had access to by itself.
The end result would be a new kind of consciousness which begins at physical birth but which could continue indefinately in computer form, first as a bio-computer symbiosis and after the death of the body, as a pure computer consciousness.
This may not come to pass, but theoretically there is no reason why it could not happen (given what we know now), and no reason why anyone should suffer psychological problems after the loss of one's physical body.
Of course this is all wild speculation!
Mmm... Now I see it! A conversation, 50 years from now:
- 1.tar.gz"
;-)
-- "Hi Scott, any news today today?"
-- "Oh, yes. Just a file, anyway".
-- "Anything interesting?"
-- "Look. I'm extracting it just now... well, here's the README... ok, it's GPL"
...time passes...
-- "Uhm, maybe it's useful. What was the URL?"
-- "iftp://iftp.BrainsRus.org/pub/apps/gpl/rms_20.5a
That is, RMS is finally able to release its whole brain under GPL
Just a joke, couldn't resist.
---
[1] IFTP: Insanely Fast Transfer Protocol.
Be afraid - be very afraid. ;)
Yes! Finally designer bodies :) Just think of :)
what devout fans of certain sci-fi series would
do with custom bodoes
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
since we all know that reverse engineering is illegal (DVD case, et al, ad nauseum), what happens if we lose the source to the decode process? ;-)
:-P
Even worse, someone encrypts you and sues everyone trying to decrypt you so they can port you to other OS's..
hahahahah
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
There are just some problems with this scenario. All the articles I read on memory state that the science is not yet sure what memory is.
There is no center form memory in our brain, it seems that it is all over our brain, plus it is not stored only in synapses. Some forms of memory come from complex chemical processes in the brain. How are you gonna scan / emulate that?
Much of the behavior depends on chemistry. There were experiments done, where chemicals were extracted from the brain of the rat and then injected into the brain of the chicken (well I don't remember the exact spieces here, but you get the picture) and the chicken started to act in certain ways like the rat did.
Learning by injection :-) I sure wish there'd be some of that when it's time to take the exams.
Let me tell you about usa today.
It isant just any paper. And I can get you one.
As for brains, mine is in my head. It inst in the computer. So I think i know where it is at.
But just so everyn can know, if you kned the usa tdoay, I have it. YHOu can have it too. I can elt you know how and uyou don't have to have you copuer in a brain.
Just so you know.
From what I understand, Dixie Flatline wasn't a true copy of a mind, but more like an expert system trained to mimic the mind at the time of programming; i.e., it couldn't learn new things or change. I'd thus dispute whether it's an instance of uploading per se.