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.
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?
Penrose speculates that since we don't have a theory that unifies quantum physics and relativity, it's possible that a complete theory could produce noncomputable results. He speculates on structures in the brain that might cause quantum effects to be involved in thought. However, he mentions that under current theory, someone has proved that quantum computers are still just Turing machines (albeit massively parallel ones).
So until someone comes up with a noncomputable physics, I'm keeping my consciousness right where it is!
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
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
The point (which the other followups seem to have grasped) is that the article was entitled "Live Forever: Uploading the Human Brain", when in fact it's not you that gets to live forever, but a non-homo sapien electronic duplicate. Making that point in a pithy way, instead of in a long draw out explanation like this, is generally considered good form.
The conclusion (compactly contained in the second sentence) was that I personally found the idea unappealing. Your milage, of course, may vary, but I sincerely hope we're not going to be facing a future where multitudes of copies of rather slow witted people roam cyberspace in search of things to misunderstand.
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?
"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]
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.
// ///#\)
______________________(
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.
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."
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!
~~
Consciousness and soul are two severely underdefined terms. Any reasoning about without defining them is therefore crap.
The lack of definition is very beneficial for religious people since they can adapt their own personal definition of the term soul. My guess is that the word soul will survive such an event as the copying of somebodies brain into a computer.
Now, it would be fun to hear the copied brain of a deeply religious person try to define the word soul since it would have to assume it has one. Concepts like soul sharing come to mind now (LOL).
Lets just drop irrational stuff like 'god', 'soul' and 'consciousness' from our language, OK? These words don't actually mean something (try to define them, you won't make much sense) they stand for things we cannot define.
Jilles
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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
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
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.
From all outward appearances, yes it is. Of course, from all inward appearances (that is, to the Captain) it is also. But is it? I guess it depends on whether you believe in a soul or not.
Another fun time with transporter tech: Remember the episode where Riker finds his clone living on the abandoned planet? A transporter malfunction had bounced a "copy" of him to the planet's surface. So who's the real Riker? Following the last example, neither of them are the real Riker, because the "real" Riker got disintegrated on his first day at the academy, at which time he was replaced by a complete duplicate.
What have we learned here? Star Trek has all the answers; you just have to look.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."