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Downloading The Mind
bluemug writes "The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's popular science radio show Quirks and Quarks aired a piece this weekend about Ray Kurzweil's ideas on downloading human minds to silicon. (The interview is available in MP3 or OGG.) Kurzweil figures we'll have strong AI by 2029 and be able to copy a human mind about a decade after that. Book your appointment now!"
Book your appointment now
Yeah, I'll go check it out on my flying car, while the robot takes care of things at home.
Does this mean that in a few years I can copy my thinking, work from home and have the computer do my work?
Time to invest in a better couch!
CC
All subjects will be forced to spend a day with themselves before they are allowed back in the general population.
I wish I had thought of copying an idea out of Neuromancer!
I have been thinking about this for a while now.. If you can download the mind - will we be able to upload it as well at some point in the future? I'm thinking along the lines of falling asleep in a body that's in its 70s, and then waking up in a body in its teens. It would certainly be interesting to relive my teens. A few things that could be done differently..
Stop the brainwash
...coming to a construct near you.
If glow-in-the-dark, striped track suits are good enough for The Dude, then they're good enough for me... and don't forget all the ultimate frisbee you can handle.
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Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
I actually read about half of the book. I could not finish it as I was unable to read cause I was laughing too hard. I am not saying he's TOTALLY wrong. There may be a time when we will have computers that will be smarter than we are. When we will be able to download our minds into the computer. All of that is fine, his timeline is totally unrealistic.
;-) ). There was a conference, where one of the scientists started making wild predictions. Something like Kurzweil. Computers are supposed to be able to see (image recognition) as well as humans in 20 years, think in 30, etc. One of the other scientists has asked that guy:
A couple of points:
1. The estimates as to how much processing power is in an average human brain vary quite a bit. Is each neuron a bit? It can have multiple inputs - maybe it's something closer to a byte or a word? How and where is memory stored? Just haveing the raw processing power does not mean we will have the knowledge to USE it. We are seriously lacking in the knowledge departament.
2. Social implications. How many good technologies are set back, or even stopped because the people are not ready for it? Do you really think that an average person will simply accept and approve of the ability to live forever in a computer? All the religions of the world are going to have a field day with that. Don't think so? We've had genetically modified crops for a while now. They're safe and far more efficient. Why are there still countries that will not allow such crops to be used for human consumption?
In the end it reminds me of a story I've heard of a long time ago. I'm going from memory so you'll have to forgive me if I get the details wrong.
It happens during the height of Artificial Intelligence (when a lot of people thought we will have talking, seeing, thinking computers in just a few decades
"Why are you saying this? All of those problems are quite hard. It is unlikely anyone will achieve those things in that time."
The first scientist answered:
"True, but notice that every date I've given is AFTER my retirement."
What a way to generate funding, eh? This kind of things simply hurt the field in general.
And that's my gripe for this week. I feel a LOT better now, thank you!
Step 2: Download mind onto computer
Step 3: Profit.
Well, it makes a change I suppose. But seriously, sentience on a computer is one of those ideas that always seems to be 30 years away.
Well, most people I know could put their minds on floppies, and it would still leave enough space for a nice copy of FDISK........... [fmind?]
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
Wow. A literal brain dump. Just don't use Eproms or you might loose your mind...
This is a really odd discussion. I'm surprised that no one here seems to have read any of Kurzweil's books. "The Age of Spiritual Machines" is a really fun airplane read. Even if not everything in it is entirely believable, he answers every single question raised here.
To give one example: he doesn't talk about downloading brains to real bodies, but to (believe it) swarms of nanobots that create a kind of virtual space in which artificial and "real" intelligences coexist. By the end of "Spritial Machines," the distinction becomes irrelevant.
The book makes heavy use of Moore's law, and in retrospect, written as it was at the height of the Tech Market Bubble, I guess the tone is one of rampant optimism and unlimited possiblities. But in any evemt, you can't diss this guy until you've read the book -- he has all the details worked out.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
In the year 2029 I'll be able to download and experience in first(inner?)-person the feeling that the AOL CEO had when he saw that 1 million of his cherished CDs had been bulk-mailed to his penthouse... :)
So sang Beck... "I got a devil's haircut in my mind".
Someday that'll be literal.
Oliver Sacks' "A Leg to Stand On" illustrates how great an effect the loss of a single limb can have on the psyche of the victim. What would be the effect of the loss of the entire body? Kurzweil makes no mention of it.
I don't know about Ray Kurzweil, but I sometimes pay attention to parts of my body that are below my ears.
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Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
Kurzweil argues that strong AI will preceed the ability to download minds, which does not seem logical. It has been reasoned (by Pinker and others) that AI will be developed by reverse-engineering the brain, and artifically replicating its processes. The evolution of strong AI is thus dependent on technology to copy, and trace the functions of the human mind.
Your essence is trapped within the electrical/chemical field of your brain. Simply compying what a brain knows wouldn't do. You have to copy how it reacts. Even then, your brain's copy may or may not be imbued with its own intentionality.
:-)
Metaphysically this is about as practical as putting your soul in a brass pot for storage until you get your new body ready.
Maybe as a backup - then in the case of brain damage, memories could be reinstated.
But for my money - I think I'd prefer to be a brain in a tank mounted on a giant robot.
Images of artifacts and /. discussions of the best codec or rate came to mind. Suddenly, people will be discussing whether or not the average person can identify a person as real or a copy - maybe a Heechee Turing Test or something.
Metaphysically this is about as practical as putting your soul in a brass pot for storage until you get your new body ready.
Just one little question: what do you do with the mind of that new body before installing yours?
May I use your sig please?
Copying the information would require an extremely sophisticated, as well as invasive, set of technologies. Nanotech would probably need to be used to get the proper connections throughout the mind. As far as simply linking the brain, many people have discussed 'plugs' and such that would intercept external sensory/control feeds, such as the optic nerve and spinal cord, and then allow that information to be manipulated/redirected. Thus signals to move a leg could be altered so that they would move a mechanical leg, or even something else entirely. In such a way people could transplant their brains into robotic/cyborg surrogates, not even necessarily human looking. A fighter pilot, for instance, might just transport his brain into the plane. Thus the command to 'run' or 'walk' might be mapped onto engine throttling or some such. External camera's would send a feed, acting as 'eyes', etc. However, none of this makes any attempt at all to actually access stuff in reverse, from the brain. We record memories and such in the structure of the main brain, and thus something would need to go into the brain to read those. And because the 3-D structure of the brain is so critical, preserving the meta-information of how the other memories and such were encoded is also critical. Otherwise, you might end up with a record of memories and thoughts, but no way to actually connect those to form the personality.
Heh, I seem to be ending up with a long post, but the last thing to deal with, assuming sucessful duplication (including the metainformation) is "what now?" A way would have to be found to basically create an artificial neural net that would be able to recreate the exact structure of the original brain. Who knows, it might be possible to do such a thing virtually, having different sectors connected to each other and thus having a person exist in cyberspace. That, however, is pure speculation.
I actually find a lot of the stuff going on very exciting. Brains seem to last a lot longer then the body supporting them does anyway, so being able to basically have your brain in a very strong container that could be moved from body to body would probably work pretty well, and could potentially be very doable. However, total artifical replacement seems a long ways off. In some ways, what he is talking about in this article is sort of like cryrogenics today. You can get yourself frozen, but for the time being there is no way to ever undo the process.
I'm sure that when I'm copying my mortal soul to the hard drive, that's exactly when the Windows box will blue screen. :-/
I wonder how tech support is going to field that problem?
Robert Silverberg wrote an SF novel back in the sixties To Live Again
It is about downloading your mind into a computer at certain intervals. After your death, the latest copy of your mind can be hosted by somebody else. If downloading your mind to a computer becomes reality, hosting a guest mind in your brain might become the next step. After all most of the brain is not used anyway. So why not share it?
Imagine sharing your minds on a filesharing network. Or have minds running in a distributed network, functioning as one huge mind. Or, why not downloadíng someones mind, select a small portion of it and download it to your own brain. Is it possible to make a programming language for the brain? :-)
Say you have a class of nanobot which can absorb and replace the function of a single neuron.
You inject yourself with a load of them, and it starts absorbing neurons and taking their place. Eventually, your entire mind ends up running on these replacements, each of which behaves just like the organic neuron it replaced. You've been concious all the way through.
Now, assume each of these is able to communicate it's inputs to a machine on the outside which is able to simulate neurons en masse. They start to disable themselves and telling those around them to get their signal from this machine instead of them.
Eventually, you end up with a load of simulated neurons which are running on this machine, linked to the nerves through whatever method they use to communicate and a bunch of these neuronbots.
The simulated one is functionally identical to the original organic brain, except now it's got the potential to be pysically a lot more robust. Continuity was never lost, and all that was destroyed was a few neurons at a time, who's function was replaced.
I'd rather think of this as a thought experiment. "What if?" This may not be possible in the time frame discussed, or it may never be possible, but it's more interesting just to say, if it was possible, what would that mean. We have a responsibility to discuss it before it happens, so we don't get caught with our ethical pants down like we did with human cloning (I mean fully fledged humans, not stem cells).
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
If you're interested, check out "The Ophiuchi Hotline" or any of his short story collections. Unfortunately, most of his older works are out of print, but can be found at used bookstores and half.com.
He has one hell of an imagination and I highly recommend him.
But the world ends at GMT 03:14:07, Tuesday, January 19, 2038!
Uhh, pencil me in for the 18th... just in case.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Completely map a huge neural network operating on the atomic level, copy it, put it all down on a silicon chip and voila.
Wow, for a second I thought they were talking about something hard...
You know, it's not like transferring the entirity of human consciousness would be difficult, there's that pesky heisenburg thing, that'll take about 5 years to crack. Then there's the copying. As it is, we still can't seem to copy files with 100% integrity, even the human body messes it up in the form of mutations... so that might take us 7 years or so. Storing it all in a usable form might be a bit of trouble, as to actually retain the consciousness you'd need to not only have a viable system for providing power to the 'brain', but a method of decoding and executing all those huge command chains characterised by conscious thought. That'd take about another 5 years.
Would you look at that, 17 years total, that puts us at 2029, wouldn't you say?
By reading this comment, you immediately waive any and all rights regarding it.
So now we have a braindump downloaded, what are we going to do with it? Before it does something it should be activated somehow right? Until then, the raw data is, well... raw data.
:)
Am I the only one envisioning people being emulated on some kind of 'Virtual machine', and responding *SLOOOOOOOOOOOWLY* ?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Ok, I can buy that you at some point in the future can take a "snapshot" of the brain, or scanning through it to get some kind of idea of the gridwork. But I hardly think you'll be able to understand the underlying processes going on in the brain, particularly how the brain evolves new pathways etc. Just my 15 øre (aka 2 cents).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Roger Penrose may generally be considered to have gone off at a bit of a tangent to reality since "The Emperor's New Mind", but whatever your position on whether quantum (gravity) effects can be important in the workings of a mind, his argument that Godel's theorem shows that a mathematician is capable of using his mind to accomplish a feat which a turing machine is mathematically incapable of replicating has not yet been satisfactorily answered. G.M.Chaitin's discovery of Omega and work on algorithmic complexity theory appears to lend even more weight to the idea that the mind is not simply an information processing device.
Many (most) objects which perform a task do not do so solely by processing information and often can only be approximately simulated by computers. Just because the computer is the only device we have so far constructed which is capable of complex, flexible behaviour does not imply that all objects which are capable of such behaviour are computers.
On a side note, claiming that we will have strong AI by 2029 is like predicting that Bin Laden will be caught at 12:49 PM on the 12th of June 2003. My horoscope carries more weight.
The key failure of both books, as described for instance hereis that Moore's Law hasn't made computers any more intelligent yet, and doesn't show any particular evidence of doing so. What's disappointing is that people are still giving the same argument credence twenty years on.
Additionally, Kurzweil clearly either doesn't understand digital encryption and quantum computing, or thought it acceptable to funge facts to make an argument. That kind of thing doesn't give me confidence in anything else the guy says.
I don't reject the possibility of one day doing brain dumps, or artificially intelligent machines, at all. I just dismiss the idea that the incremental advance of hardware technology is going to give it to us for free. We need fundamental breakthroughs from something else.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
We've been making partial brain dumps for years. They're called "Books".
I am a Karma Library.
I first came across this idea in Greg Bear's Eon, published in '85. It's some time since I read it, but I recall that it his ideas around this were well-developed, with such notions as "non-corporeal" persons having distinct rights; even the concept of new persons being "born" in a non-corporeal state and having to somehow earn the right to become embodied. Good read.
Don't fancy it myself.
No, I very much doubt these kinds of predictions (and it's got nothing to do with the issue of the transferrence step).
What counts as our "minds" are simply far too tied into the physical instantiation of our bodies. (Not that "mind" is too abstract, but that it's not abstract enough for separation from our bodies.) If I make a computer-based simulation of myself, will it get tired? Hungry? Thirsty? Itchy? Horny? Sick? If not, can it then get excited? Scared? Concerned? Bored? Will it have any emotional reactions at all, if all the standard physical stimuli are removed?
Even if all the "human" inputs are replaced or simulated -- you've still got an added problem of a new level of "hardware breakdowns" on whatever platform is running the simulation. Suddenly you've also got to deal with the various downtimes, pauses, glitches, etc., that will break the illusion of it being the same "mind" as in the original person.
People are simply too much a construct of their wetware to be able to remove their "minds" as a separate set of procedures.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
It would be cool to be just like Max Headroom, but I could live without the stutter.
Shot an arm strapped to a chair, pan out to LISTER tied down to a chair
looking anything but happy to be there.
KRYTEN: It's something we tried once on the Nova 5. It uses exactly the same science as generating a hologram. We wipe all your brain patterns and put them on a storage disk. Then we transfer the captains mind from his hologram personality disk into your empty brain.
LISTER: And you tried this on the Nova 5?
KRYTEN: Oh Yes.
LISTER: Did it work?
KRYTEN: No. But I'm pretty sure I know what went wrong.
AUTO DESTRUCT: 4 minutes to self destruct and counting.
LISTER: So the captain's mind will be in my body?
KRYTEN: Yes. Then, hopefully, the self destruct will think you're are the captain, and you can activate the override.
LISTER: But where will my mind be?
KRYTEN: (Holding up a very small cassette tape) On this.
And TV conglomerates will have taken over the world. Ratings will be everything. You will vote through your TV. Court Cases will be tried based on TV viewer ship. Not having a Federal ID will be a crime. Hmmm, this sounds familiar.
So, I don't think I'll bother. Ta.
Deleted
First of all this guy has no clue to how much information our brains hold!
And when I'm gone.. I want to be gone! I don't want to live on earth forever! No Way! When my years are up here, it will be time to move up to bigger and better things.
If we're going to do this after strong AI's have had a change to evolve themselves for ten years, then isn't it likely that we'll be doing it if they allow us, and probably only to provide them with the equivelant of Tamagotchi(tm) pets?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Great... we can look forward to a whole new slew of blonde jokes when this happens...
"Downloading" a brain is a lot more complicated than copying a harddrive. Even if we figure out how the brain works, and then figure out how this contributes to a mind (neither of which we are close to understanding at all), downloading a brain is just a duplication of you. You yourself wouldn't notice anything, but your copy's memories would depart from your at the point of the brain scan from which the copy is instigated.
Ugh, there are so many loose ends its hard to pick one to pull on. Someone mentioned before, but your body is more than just a bunch of neurons floating in fluid. Your mind, your person, your sanity rely on constant bodily feedback. Your mind isn't just the brain, its the entire nervous system, head to toe. (check out Antonio Damasio's books Decartes's Error and The Feeling of What Happens for a thrilling discussion of this).
George Dyson's book Darwin Among the Machines doesn't address the stupendously anthropocentric idea of human intelligence on silicon but does explore some possibilities behind the emergence of intelligent (not necessarily conscious) systems on their own.
I read Dyson's book after stumbling across it browsing at a bookstore, only to learn that he lived about 2 miles from me! I went down to his boat shop and introduced myself and have had a few chats with him. He talked about Kurzweil a little bit and he actually gave me a copy of The Age of Spiritual Machines. At the time I was a naive fanboy (as opposed to the seasoned fanboy I am now) and asked him if he could write something in the book (I had him sign the Darwin book earlier). He declined, asking me with the ever present Dyson eyesmile, "What am I supposed to say? Sorry this book isn't as good as mine?" It was very humble humor, don't read it wrong.
I read Spiritual Machines and enjoyed it, if for no other reason that it provided a fun exercise in saying "that's a nice idea, but it won't work for these reason..." It addresses a lot of concerns and the whole identity dissolution theme was rather interesting to play along with. Still, I don't think that his future is a likely one.
Bah, I'm just rambling. Short end to a long story: Kurzweil's ideas are fun to read and worth the time spent if you have time to kill, but are highly unlikely. Copying humans into computers is a much bigger problem than just raw clock speed, which is what he boils it down to.
Here's a link to a page about Kurzweilian Singularity. Its worth checking out if you haven't read any of this stuff before.
Etc, etc, ad nauseam, and so on and so forth.
You'd be very nice to it, of course - just like happy pigs have a better flavour than stressed pigs, a happy new body would be better than one that had grown up in a stressful environment. Lots of good exercise, nice food, etcetera. Wouldn't have to spend any money on schooling, though, because we are just going to slaughter this spare at about age 17 and overwrite it with the mind that paid for it to be born, of course. See? Utopia's easy if you try.
Eventually, there will be the capability of copying a mind, making clones (even modified ones) of the host body, downloading the mind back into the body (or bodies), and Voila! Instant Army!
;)
Now *Where* have we seen This one before?
I don't know the history of this idea, but the book Mind Transfer (1988) by Janet Asimov was about the exact same thing - building a robot to hold you "self" that lived on after your biological body died.
Turing proposed that the ultimate test for an AI was to behave in a human-like manner such that a human observer could not discern the behavior of the machine from the behavior of another human.
Still, there are many who argue that although machines may one day pass Turing's test, they will nevertheless lack the essential consciousness or awareness that humans possess. See John Searle's paper, "Chinese Room". Nobody knows of a good, direct test for awareness.
Still others (Roger Penrose) do not rule out the possibility of genuine machine intelligence, but think that we have much to learn about our own minds before we can consider it seriously. Penrose specifically argues that our current understanding of science is too weak too incorporate an accurate model of conscious thought. But our science may change and one day become sufficient.
In any case, 2009 sounds like a very optimistic (pessimistic?) estimate.
After reading this, the recent /. story about brain cells on a chip takes on a WHOLE different tone.
0 /1 7/1519202
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/1
Part of the solution????
-- Windows is not simply installed on a computer; it is inflicted.
I think this will eventually be possible but not until we've mastered nanotech and reverse engineered the entire human body. The mind isn't only the brain. It's the data stored in the brain, the various parts of your body that cause chemical reactions that affect your brain too. You need a machine capable of not only logic but also emotion if it's going to contain human intelligence.
:) When it does happen it'll shake humankind to the core. It's our next obvious step in evolution as we merge with our own tools but it'll cause untold moral battles. All the sci-fi of AI's fighting man and so on I think is wrong. Man will become the AI and Neo-Man and Man will try to destroy each other. Everyone could make the change (in theory) but many won't for religious reasons and those will most likely want to destroy the new evil. Neo-Man being like all species will defend itself. Obvious battle follows. Is there a movie plot here? :)
I do think it'll happen, as will 'brain hacking' and other related topics (a borg-like collective mind for example) but we have quite some time to wait.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
It seems every forward-looking science story has already been conceived by either Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke did this one in 3001 (HAL/Bowman downloaded). Asimov probably earlier, but I haven't read all of his fiction since there's just too much.
This is just an updated, high-tech version of the Cartesian body/soul dichotomy. It makes no sense. The idea that you can separate body and mind is an illusion. By definition, the mind is what the body does.
Time to cancel that order for the body-sized freezer and uninterruptible power source.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
LOSE LOSE LOSE LOSE LOSE! not loose!
It seems to me that the ability to copy a human mind is almost prerequisite to strong AI. Sure, the "great AI winter" is at least partially due to the crash government funding the field enjoyed in the late 80's / early 90's drying up as suddenly as it emerged, but AI has always been a field prone to too-early predictions. It seems that with each new metaphor we invent for describing the human brain, we also convince ourselves that our minds really are as simple as our metaphors suggest. But Turing thought that human-level mimicry would be possible by 1990 (while at the same time vastly underestimating the quality of hardware that would be available in 1990).
There's a real possibility that we just aren't smart enough to figure out how we work, and so the only route to strong AI is to make monkey-see, monkey-do copies. And while procreation is a time-honored method of doing that, the structure of the brain suggests that serialized output was not high on God's list of priorities, and the biological format rather resists studies. So, I often think that we might have to be able to emulate the brain in silico or some other more easily-studied medium before we have a chance of understanding what makes that brain tick.
You're forgetting that there are degrees of death. Let's go back to your example.
If you slowly remove one neuron after the other, your mind slowly loses it's ability to think, but you're still alive. Eventually, you'll have to put the person on life support, but their still alive. Eventually, you'll reach the last neuron. As long as you don't harm it and keep it alive, the person is still alive.
But are they? If you think of death as a binary 1 or 0, then the answer is yes, but most of us don't think that way. We'd say that the person is slowly slipping into death. We don't have a clear definition of death or life for that matter. Both are gradual and sometimes we make mistakes (people "wake up" in the morgue or even their own coffins).
All those extra replacement chips that you're talking about are just life support. The question is, once you remove that last neuron and all you have life support, do you have life at all? I don't think anyone can answer that question.
If you're claiming that we don't know that much about how the brain works, I'd agree with you. If you're claiming that it's going to be tough to figure out how it all works, I'd probably agree with you there as well.
However, if you're claiming that science can never understand the brain, I'd have to strongly disagree with you. As an atheist, I don't think there's anything so special about the brain. There's no soul there, put there by some random deity. There's no magic. It's just a lump of protein mixed with water, in essence. Sure, it's a marvellously complex lump of protein. but it's still a lump of protein. We've made a heck of a lot of progress understanding the behaviour of lots of other types of stuff using science. What makes this particular lump of protein any different?
Can anyone give me a non-religious argument why, at some stage in the possibly distant future, that the workings of the brain won't be entirely comprehensible to humans?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Duh, humans have infinite nonquantized storage of previous infinite quantized input. You won't be able to download (or copy) it anytime soon, in any universe. You really have to be dense not to realize this.
Cool. Then I can get the computer to generate pr0n images of my dreamgirl...
By 2039, you'll be able to download what's left of my mind into a potato.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
I mean, at the moment politicians and the **AA's have to struggle against reality to take away our freedoms... why would anyone want to move their mind into a reality where reality itself could be changed to prevent things like this.. and worse, make it so it never happened in the first place?
Sounds like Kurzweil spent his weekend watching Arnold Swarzenegger flicks all weekend. Wasn't 2029 a key year in the Terminator series?
Imagine the IP laws regarding a briefcase full of thousands of people's intellects.
It's all going according to
He concludes that physical continuity doesn't matter. He's got some good arguments (along the lines of some made in this thread) to back this up...
Grr! Arg!
Bring to mind this excerpt: "Before it blanked out for good, the ship would have to pass on those instructions, such as they were, to it's more primitive systems. It must also revive all of it's crew.
There was another problem. While the crew was in hibernation, the minds of all it's members, their memories, their identities and their understanding of what they had come to, had all been transferred into the ship's central mission module for safe keeping. The crew would not have the faintest idea of who they were or what the were doing there. Oh well." - Douglas Adams "Mostless Harmless" I read Kurzweil's "The Spiritual Age of Machines" were he talks about downloading the brain. It seems feasible, but don't erase the original when when we firewire our life's experiences into our new Microtium 500Ghz, Store-O-Comp sense-omatic pleasure box.
Kurzweil has yet to come up with a decent speech recognition system, something he's been trying to do for the last 20 years. Today's top speech recognition systems still are extremely limited in their capabilities. If he hasn't pulled that one off yet, his mind-downloading project, being probably orders of magnitude more complex (we have yet to understand how the brain works,) is fantasy, not even sci-fi.
This sounds, once again, like more propaganda and exaggeration from an exhuberant member of the AI community in order to obtain public mindshare.
I wonder how this would feel to the unique set of electical and chemical impulses that I like to call "me". Would I be aware of the change? I guess it depends on whether I am the neurons themselves, or the pattern of data exchange that these neurons perform. If all I am is the data, then I would suppose there is no change - the data transfer is gradually being shifted to a different platform, but remains the same. But if my conciousness, my sense of self, is dependent solely on the physical neurons and NOT on the data they exchange alone, then this could be rather nightmarish. and what would happen when the artificial neurons had taken over, for example, my speech and movement centers, but enough of my own brain still remained for there to be a bit of the original conciousness still in there, but unable to interact with the outside environment?
I'm the stranger...posting to
That humans consist of free will and infinite nonquantized storage of all previous quantized input going forever back in time. If not, then this Kurzweil is a small mind indeed. Perhaps this person is still getting blown away by multiplication, being such a small mind. What a waste of a book. Probably copyright, too.
There is a great SF book titled "Snow Crash" by Neil Stephenson that dealt with the oddities of programmer's minds, a computer virus for the minds of programmers, and brain hacking. A great read.
"I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating. And in fourteen days, I had lost exactly two weeks. Joe E. Lewis
You probably don't have many (if any at all) of the cells you had when you were born, so you've been mostly disintegrated many times, you just didn't notice it. Not sure if this is so significant in the problem of consciousness and its continuity, but after the age of 18 or so you do not make new brain cells.
This concept, while being a long time staple of sci-fi, certaintly has a lot of 'if's attached to it. A lot of 'if's that are themselves science fiction. If we can build machines with large enough capacity, and if they are capable of learning and adapting, and if... if if if...
But technical problems aside for amoment, what about the social, economic and spiritual aspects of doing this?
Are you making a copy of your consciousness, or transferring it? Is there going to be a 'real you' and a 'virtual you' wandering around? (Wierd!) If you believe in the 'soul' (in whatever form), what implications does it have on this technology?
Not only that, but some people can't even keep themselves occupied on a rainy sunday afternoon... what the hell are they going to do for the rest of their digital lives?
Even worse, just think of the kinds of people who would be able to afford the process... anyone else getting that Futurama 'head in a jar' image?
Physical immortality is overrated. Half the fun of life is the time limit!
=Smidge=
I think we would have the power (storage capacity) to download liberal Politicians ® now, judging by the size of their brains...
But _why_ would you want to copy someone like that? I don't know.
There are only 3 types of people who will have this procedure; People willing to jeopardize their health, people with alot of money, and people with no brains to start with. In other words, people from California... And as everyone knows, people in California are 50% silicon already. Besides, what use is it going to be to have Anna Nicole Smith on a chip? We already have that. Its called the Intel 4004---Slow, dumb, bloated, and easy to use.
I'm either smart, or bitter. Its hard to be one without the other.
Bowie J. Poag
I have read parts of Ray's Spiritual Machines and its only a matter of time before Joe Blow from slashdot can drop his mush between the ears to platter 1's and 0's. Lets just hope we keep the trolls out this time.
- Anonguy
What sort of rights would a sentient AI like a person's mind downloaded to a computer have? Would it be considered human? Could it vote? Or would it be considered software, and therefor property? Someone made a joke about Kazaa, but I could seriously see people (if this technology ever exists) trading the minds of famous composers/scientists/etc. and using them as slave labor for think tanks. What sort of protections would there be? As much as it pains me to admit it, I really think we need strong, secure DRM before this would be a useable technology. Oh, and we need to know how the minds works, how to program a brain emulator, etc.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Have you ever read the hardcore books on so-called brain science? Typically, one guy has been mulling over a theory about how the brain works for 10-30 years, then he writes a book about it. Other people do the same thing. All of the books contradict each other, or have nothing at all to do with each other, and there's no way of figuring out who's right. There are even books written simply to claim another book is incorrect ("The Mind Doesn't Work that Way," by Jerry A. Fodor).
The bottom line is that this is hardly a science at all, just a lot of conjecture.
I accept that you feel that way, but I don't accept this as a "non-religious" argument. Though I'm not claiming you believe in any type of a God, your argument is clearly based on the precepts of atheism, rather than on demonstration of facts.
Prove it. Until you do, you're simply making an argument that the fundamental unprovable assumptions of your way of thought are correct. And I can't help but view this as a religious argument.
No offense intended.
Jon Acheson.
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Were a few of the scifi authors who considered mind-copy. In Herbert's Dune series, minds could be copied into other minds by Bene Gesserit adapts of psychic abilities from mastering spice. The minds could be used as a reference library for consultation. Occasionally people would get lost in the stored minds and become "possessed" by a strong personality.
In Pohl's Heechee series minds were downloaded into computers much like Kurzwiel suggests. They lived virtual lives and formed virtual societies. He also explored the issue of "identity": what does it mean to have more than one copy of a mind active simultaneously (a favorite theme of star trek transporter accidents).
I heard this on shortwave, the station as a whole is pretty good.
You can find the various schedules including shortwave here, just keep in mind shortwave times are UTC/GMT/ZULU.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
Finally I'll be able to get my own dixie flatline equivilent for hacking into the kremlin, or better yet, my own Linus contstruct, for hacking kernel code. Possibly even my own Lessig construct for defending myself fom the MPAA. Cowboy Neal contruct anyone...? The possibilites are just endless.
Holy Mammoth Sperm!
In 2000, he announced his plan to wire electrodes into his median nerve. This would have two purposes, he could "record" the nerve signal when he moved his hand, as well as attempt to "play back" the impulse and make his hand move on its own.
He hasn't done it yet, his FAQ lists it as scheduled for September.
Greg Egan, one of the best hard SF authors, has written some great books with this idea. The best IMHO is Diaspora, mostly about the future of mankind after it splits into 3 mutually distrustful groups - the fleshers (of traditional form and all types of wild genetically altered variants), gleisner robots (artificial bodies, but still living in the physical world), and the polises (software entities). An awesome book dealing with huge ideas and very well written, I heartily recommend it. It develops the idea of migrating minds to software very deeply.
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
Would it really be possible to understand a human brain for another human brain fully?
;)
Doesnt mathematics outrule this?
If I theoretically could somehow input everything in my wifes brain, where the heck would I store it, Im already using my brain for personal usage
So I could only parse portions of it at a time, wouldnt this make it impossible to do a full analyse?
Disclaimer: Of course I know this cant be done for the moment at least, just speculating about if a human ever can take in all of another humans brain
For slashbots, anyway. We can download the contents of a slashbot's mind onto a single sided 400K floppy.
Blue screen of Death took on a whole new meaning.
The second article on the page is "Black Hole Sun." I like how it says 'Listen to an MP3 on this topic.' Anyone else see the humor in this? ;D
- vmfedor
I like my women how I like my sugar.. granulated.
Wonderful, that's all I need is a computer that comes out of sleep mode two hours after you press the spacebar, plays video games for five hours at a stretch and masturbates at 8 GHz. Who'd pay for that?
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
I had no idea our little CBC radio was using OGG. Doesn't anyone else think that a semi-major site using and (kind of) promoting OGG is surprising/good? OR has OGG been proliferating on bigger sites behind my back?
This guy is wrong. Deeply and completely wrong. Even if his ideas are technically achievable, he will be a step nearer death and destruction rather then achieving its goal of Eternity.
The ways he tries to achieve this goal are, by the most, static. It will be harder to modify a detail or change a component of such organism. Besides, such technologies are by too weak to external factors and demand much more energy inputs than a usual organic carbon-rich body. While it is hard for Nature, under Earth's energy balance, to create things with sources other than carbon, many organisms failed or were kicked into Evolution sideroads. Why? Because all these "solutions" were quite far from optimal. Do you know that octopus don't have hemoglobin but a magnese-based protein to fix oxygen in the blood? Or that there is a small vermin with teeth carrying more than 80% of copper? These things are exclusions, sometimes aberrations that the average conditions of Earth's habitat cannot support. These things lived isolated, in particular areas and cannot leave their environment.
Now how this comes into our problem here? Well this guy forgets more than 4 billion years of evolution and kicks us into a completely aritficial organism. But this organism lives uder what conditions? Human conditions! It is we humans that care for these silicon beings, model them according to our wishes and needs, we feed them with energy and data. Besides, till now not even Deep Fritz could approach the sensibility, reasoning and flexibility of a human. This is a machine that devores energy, that makes milliards of permutations to overcome the speed of the human brain in one single task, that is supported and developed by thousands of engineers. And someone considers this the Future? Give me a break. Dinos were a lot smarter and more autonomous.
IF something like Deep Fritz will be left alone on Earth it will meet something that even humans barely know about. The law that can be behind Thermodynamics (not the Second Principle, that thing is probably the consequence of this law) and which some biologists have been studying for several years. It is a law about how things interact. In a single system, in every moment there can be milliards of interactions between its components. Some of these interactions are antagonists, one can be successful if its antagonist gets weakened somehow. The state of equilibrium is merely a situation when these interactions meet something looking like an energetic "agreement" among themselves. However, this does not mean that interactions may disappear at all. Frequently some just turn more weak but more numerous as other components of the system "repel" these interactions, because of the more stable state they are in (this is where some people see the appearence of Entropy). However these stable states are not eternal. They may change globally or locally, and then, all other interactions may try to invade te castles of stability.
Why all this confusing bla-bla-bla? Well get a human and a machine. Make the human to improve the machine too look much like his mind. Now pick the human and shoot him, leave the machine alone in Earth. How long the machine will be capable to survive?
Even if someone achieves the feat to create an artificial mind much like ours, he will be only half-way. This minfd will need to be able to have a rational meal, to run from dangers, and to have a chance to go to toilet from time to time. Besides, this mind will have the big need to reproduce itself. Alone in the Universe does not give good chances for eternity...
go Johnny Mnemonic...
I want to be able to make jokes about deleting my childhood to make room for more crap upstairs....
No, *you* prove that God exists :)
There are lots of things I can't prove. I can't prove, in the logical sense, that evolution is the cause of the profusion of various lifeforms on Earth today. I can't prove that the world wasn't created in 4004 BC (or whenever it was). Heck, I can't prove the world wasn't created five minutes ago. Can you?
Nor can I prove that there's no supernatural soul in the brain, but I can suggest to you why I think it's highly unlikely. Ever since the dawn of science, scientists have had things that they haven't been able to explain with present knowledge. Therefore, they and others have invoked God's intervention as an explanation. Subsequent investigation, again and again, reveals a theory that satisfies most people by repeated testing. The use of God to explain the currently scientifically unexplainable has come to be characterised as "God of the gaps", and every time a scientific discovery fills in one of those gaps the arguments looks ever-sillier.
Alternatively, I could just invoke Ockham's Razor. The hypothesis that the brain is somehow God's supernatural work and impossible for mortals to understand requires far more assumptions than the alternative. Until I can reject the simple explanation (the brain is just normal matter organised interestingly) I will stick with it over your alternative.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
In real life I expect a pattern-based technology would be needed. Matter behaves more like wave functions than points, so I'd expect something like analog radio: microphone converts sound to complex electrical patterns, patterns are modulated on an electromagnetic signal of wider bandwidth, and then the process is reversed. At present we don't know of a way to read or convert matter patterns, much less move them.
We are learning some things. Bose-Einstein condensates fiddle with the wave functions of atoms enough that the visible condensate can be considered to be a huge atom (I think a condensate with only one atom in it would be same size as one with many atoms). However, this is basically the opposite of the "Heisenberg compensator" needed for an atom-by-atom transporter: this is "Heisenberg enhancement" (if the atom is so cold that it is not moving, its velocity is known to be almost zero, so its location must be very unknown).
A similar Heisenberg solution has been proposed in "black holes": The location of matter within a singularity is very precisely known (it's right there, in the location of that singularity) thus its velocity must be very unknown. But an infinitely small singularity causes an exactly known location, so the velocity is infinite and thus matter could escape even a black hole. The theory is that a singularity is impossible, thus the volume where the singularity would be is empty. Matter would refuse to be at that single point, which sets up a Bose-Einstein condensate situation. But because this matter is falling at very high speed...its velocity might also be very well known. Anything moving at light speed would have a known velocity, thus its location would also be unknown. So a "black hole" would actually be a shell of matter where the "event horizon" would be. The matter is forbidden both from leaving and from being at the singularity. Matter still occupies space, so as more matter is acquired the event horizon expands.
Perhaps it is impossible, but I think we still have more of the rules of reality to learn so we can't yet deny the possibility (I'm not being mystical, just aware of the fuzzy borders of physics).
On hearing the program, I'm feeling cranky about two things (and I speak as someone who was interviewed by Quirks & Quarks about studies in measuring brain activity).
First, I don't think Kurzweil has said anything that Hans Moravec ("Mind Children") and Marvin Minsky didn't say a long time ago. Minsky contemplated about machines transcending us, and Moravec long ago used Moore's law to predict when computers will be as complicated (he thinks) as human brains. Kurzweil is recycling other people's ideas.
Second, Kurzweil (like other MIT hardware guys) talks about the brain with the underlying assumption that it is just a collection of processing units (neurons) connected by simple electrical contacts (dendrites and synapses). In fact, the entire body of a neuron is chock-a-block full of calcium channels and tiny pores that are regulated by hundreds of different chemicals. Every year, new processes are discovered. Some chemicals are moved into the cell by active molecular transporters. Some chemicals may move between regions of cells by gaseous diffusion. Not only will you have to scan the connections between each neuron, but you're going to have to mimic the action of all this oozy stuff in real time using silicon.
And what about hormones and polypeptides that regulate all kinds of activities at short ranges, and also throughout the body? "Thinking" and decision-making involve lots of input from centres that excrete tiny quantities of chemicals -- all of this will have to be "scanned" (whatever that means) at a molecular level. It won't do to merely list the size and position of 100 billion neurons and their 100 trillion connections. You'll have to model the far greater number of wet chemical processes on every neuron.
In the 1940s some people thought everything would be "atomic" by 1990. Atomic rockets, atomic cars, atomic radios. Today, just substitute the word "computational" or "silicon" for atomic and you can blather about nonsense in the year 2040 without having a clue of what it means.
I think the brain's "wetness" is an integral part of it's operation, and this makes it a very dynamic and complicated thing. To simply see the brain as a collection of tiny silicon CPUs wired together is naive. It's a theoretical model straight from the 1960s or earlier, before we knew much about the brain at all. A real breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence will probably arrive slowly, and probably be stimulated by people who learned modern (i.e. post-20th century) physiology when they were young.
Hence, I think the term "an expert in computers and artificial intelligence" is an oxymoron at this time.
I seem to remember this book-series about "the Heechees" written by Frederik Pohl. The first book in the series came out in 1976. It's a SciFi book, ofcourse. There must be numerous others but this one came to mind first.
Say, did they actually DOWNLOAD the mind already or was this, too, science fiction?
Sigs for Nerds. Sigs that Matter.
Dear God.
Please tell me Microsoft will have NOTHING to do with this.
Think of the security issues! The hacking! The crashing!
Ooo. Gives new meaning to the term 'Psychocrash.'
-"I ate what?"
His predictions in TAoSM revolve around swarms of intelligent self-reproducing nanobots, who's function he NEVER EXPLAINS. Given that today we have problems co-ordinating 3+ processors, or making any small component without a large factory it all, seems _a_bit_ far-fetched.
The article is like 2 aritcles below the head backup article
We're going to have to copyright our own brains man!
I'm not the one claiming my religious viewpoint as a fundamental arguing point. If I argued a scientific point based on "God says so," I would be just as wrong as you are.
Ockham's Razor isn't a proof, it's a method of comparing unproven theories. To which I quote H.L. Mencken: "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Download of my (male) mind: SEX.
I could upload my mind at bedtime, have a nice restful night's sleep, and download it fresh in the morning. Finally, a cure for laying awake trying to figure out why the network isn't as fast as it should be.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
This is absolutely incredible! If you could make an image of your brain, there would eventually be peer-to-peer swapping of brain images (mybrain.iso). Plus you could enviably mount your brain's image and add stuff, so you wouldn't have to go to school or go to seminars or workshops; you could just download them and sync the image with your brain. Also, we could create a super-brain, combining all the best elements of the brain, and transfer them to robots to do our bidding, or use them as our processors (imagine Pentium 99999999999999), we would never have to work or do anything, we could create a whole society of super-intelligent beings that far surpass our own abilities in every way. The only draw back is when they create a world to imprison us in to use our bodies for electric energy and call it the matrix :) . We would need regulations and rules to obide by in creating these super beings. So, anyway, yeah, it would be pretty cool to be able to image your brain, back it up (for when you get Alzheimer's Disease), add to it effortlessly, swap your brain for Albert Einstien's brain, and an infinite number of other possibilities, but no matter what, we're going to need to have some regulations on what you can and can't do because otherwise, it'll end up just like the whole cloning situation. Oh, and kudos to CBC for supporting OGG :) .
Life is offtopic.
In the midst of a college "experiment" I once achieved this feeling: That moment-to-moment you are completely new, having inherited a complete set of memories, motivations, etc from a previous "you" that ceased to exist a moment ago. Both long and short term memories were unaffected, they just weren't "my" memories. It's enough to drive you half nuts - and swear off "expirementation" for the rest of your life.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Total Annihilation
*eek!*
Karma: \Kar"ma\, n. [Skr.] (Buddhism) One's acts considered as fixing one's lot in the future existence.
Rather than focus on the idea of creating a living copy of our minds, consider the consequences of creating a complete and perfect snapshot of the brain. The snapshot contains detailed information on the physical structures of the brain, chemical compositions, and electrical state. Such a model would be invaluable to medical researchers in developing new methods for the diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses. Perhaps we could find methods to prevent or even cure ailments such as Lou Gherig's disease, Alzheimer's, Bipolar disorder, Schizophrenia, ADHD, or multitude of phenomenon.
Much more likely, however, is that such a technology would first be used in the military arena. Perhaps a device could be developed to trigger a sleep response, or disrupt the mind in such a way as to incapacitate the enemy. An entirely new way to conduct battle would be devised, as the human mind would be too susceptible to enemy influence.
Of course, another very interested party would be drug cartels. It would be very useful to find a way to alter the chemical makeup of the brain such that, after a single dose of the product, the customer is hopelessly addicted.
Marketing agencies could use the result of the research to utilize colors and motions that elicit a happy response when the viewer sees their advertisement. Advertisers are already using this idea to some extent, but with a better model of the brain to research with, how will we be able to resist these perfect ads?
My point is, there are much more near term and realistic results of a perfect snapshot of the mind than the idealized prophecy of copying ourselves into new bodies. Many seam to put their money on HAL, but mine is on the next LSD.
> > Prove it. :)
> No, *you* prove that God exists
I'm an agnostic, so I don't have to prove either God exists or doesn't. If you want me to be an Athiest, you'll have to prove it. One thing that I am confident of is that *if* God exists, he/she/it isn't anything like what we imagine. To believe otherwise is to believe that a bacteria on the tip of your nose has any idea what you're like.
I read a significant amount of neuroscience literature. I can see more than a few problems with a 2039 goal of copying a human mind.
1. We are just beginning to understand simple neural circuits. Complex ones and interaction between neural systems are not understood. In fact, there is still debate about whether organic neural systems are completely organized by external sensory experience or whether the genetic code builds a system that is specialized for a particular type of learning (e.g., language, grammar, concept of self, etc.). Just check out Steven Pinker's new book.
2. Functional imaging is still in its early stages of growth. Temporal and spatial resolution must increase several fold for researchers to start analyzing anything other than things like "this brain region lights up when this task is processed".
3. Without #1 and #2 it is EXTREMELY difficult to put forth a hypothetical model of a brain. You would need this as a first step to even begin thinking of copying the brain onto computer.
4. Have you seen what passes for AI these day? It's a joke. This area of research has missed it's goal for the last few decades. I'm still waiting for something even close to target to emerge.
Please spare us the nonsense. If you've ever read Kurzweil's fluff before you'll realize that's it's always short on details and usually self-promoting bullshit.
It is clear that the Brain is not equivalent of the Mind.
But it is not clear that the Mind is a Product of the Brain.
People were here.
Then they Invented Computers,
Then, based on the thing they invented, they
assume that the Brain is the equivalent of something
they dreamed up.
Why do so many people assume that the brain is a Computer?
Just like the Eyeball is a sensory organ for Light,
The Brain is a sensory organ for CONCEPTS.
regards,
john
after downloading their brains, we'll be able to answer the two most difficult questions of the last decade:
"You want a toe? I can get you a toe by three o'clock... with nail polish."
There's a massive flaw in Kurzweil's Argument:
He assumes that Increased Processing Power (Quantitative Change) will somehow, automatically translate into a Qualitative Change (Logic will become Consciousness).
but it seems he doesn't understand that an increase in processor speed doesn't automatically get you a MIND.
What happens when the clock-speed slows down?
Consciousness is what persists BETWEEN clock cycles.
regards,
john
That'll be about as useful as an exact copy of one of Jimi Hendrix's guitars. Copy them as exactly as you want but the guitar can't play itself.
> Can anyone give me a non-religious argument why,
> at some stage in the possibly distant future,
> that the workings of the brain won't be entirely
> comprehensible to humans?
Actually Godel's Theorem says that there are some things that are knowable but unprovable (reality includes mathematics, doesn't it?). Could the mind be such an unprovable entity? Perhaps. Let's look further.
In the 19th century, people believed that nature was a clockwork mechanism and that if you understood all the parts, you could understand and predict the outcome of the whole. Then Quantum Mechanics came along and through a monkey wrench into it. It's impossible to obtain the exact state of a system. The best you can do is approximate.
If you can't obtain the exact state of a system, you can't know the system. Small things matter. A butterfly flapping it's wings in Tokyo may be the deciding factor on whether a tornado happens in Kansas. Chaotic systems work that way. The mind is far more complicated that the weather. The best you can do is make an approximation of the mind.
BTW, science and mathematics rely on faith too. It's faith is that certain axioms (so-called "self-evident truths") about the universe are true. Without faith in axioms, logic would be useless. I'd go far enough to say that logic would not even exist if we don't accept axioms.
As an atheist (as opposed to an agnostic), you accept certain axioms are true too. If you think that your **beliefs** aren't inspired by faith (i.e. they aren't axioms), then they must be provable. State your proof. I'd be willing to bet, you can't.
didn't anyone read "Harvest of Stars" by Poul Anderson? maybe in a few years Anson Guthrie will be running the space program :)
a book called 'the terminal experiment' by a Canadian author whos name escapes me, is fiction of the near future that mirrors this concept remarkably. set in toronto. pizza pizza has evolved to food food.
but sci fi is boring.
Now, most any kind of real-world transporter won't ever work this way, it'll be a copy and delete, not a real move, so you argument applies to the real world just fine. The benefit is that a copy-and-delete system can recover from the write errors that Star Trek cannot.
If we ever invent one, it'll probably be the most ethically challenging piece of technology ever invented:
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
A consequence of Godel's theorem (Godels's thm basically says no logical system can be both consisitent and complete) is that we will never be able to build a truly intelligent machine based an digital logic, it will never be able to 'think outside the box'. It seems as though we need a fundamentally new approach for AI, as there is more to it than RAM and flops. Some day we will have AI, but I do not think we have a vision yet of how we will get there, strong AI by 2029 sounds a bit ambitious to say the least. MM
so original!
makes an exact download theoretically impossible.
(it also makes a perfect clone an impossibility)
Tor
Since there is no way the scientists are going to get this right the first time, is it ethical to create intelligences that are (most probably) doomed to insanity.
Guys...
With the proper input/feedback, a massively parallel neural net will take care of most of your objections.
This also leaps over the philisophical issue of whether living organisms are greater than the sum of their parts. Science can break down the components of living organism, but we still can't arrange materials in such a manner as to 'make life' even the 'simple' structure of plant seeds has yet to be emulated. Untill Abiogenesis proceeds a good deal further there is a big assumption in simply saying we can 'copy' consciousness. To copy something we first need to grasp exactly what it is.
I read this great science fiction story by some Australian guy (can't remember who or when) that went something like this:
In the future, everyone has a `jewel' implanted in their brain at birth. It's an optical computer that receives all your sensory data, then tries to replicate the external results of your brain activity. When you're young, it's way off, but it trains itself to match the responses of your real brain. One day, in your thirties, when your real brain is going down hill, you go to the hospital. They hook you up to another computer that keeps an eye on how well the outputs of the jewel match the outputs of your organic brain. If they match up, then they scrape out your meatware, and replace it with non-sentient tissue that consumes just as much blood, glucose, etc as your original brain, and can produce hormones for the rest of your body, while hooking up the jewel to the rest of your body. At that point, `you' are the jewel.
The cool part of this is that there's no discontinuity between `me' and `it'; the jewel will think the same thoughts as me, it will be me; in fact, it will even worry about dying when the organic brain is killed, since it thinks it is the original.
The ending was quite a cool twist, which I won't spoil here. It was a really good story tho, hopefully someone will remember it and post details.
we can build a positronic brain!
Try it! Library of Babel
He even wants his girlfriend to shave his beard.
What next ?
The girl with toilet paper attached ?
Seriously, there must be a dozen shows where they mention the Heisenberg Compensator, an integral part of the transporter system. It's OK not to remember the arcane bits of technobable, just don't try to debate in an unknown fictional universe.
And to you point, the raw energy isn't used, the energy from each particle is simply excited, moved, and reintegrated. Each quark is preserved through an energy transition. The person is not digitized.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
But then Bill Gate's personality will be merged with Clippey's. Do you really want to see that happen?
Table-ized A.I.
Loads of people stated above something like "Well, I read Kurzweil's book, and I think it's bogus because blah, blah, blah." The thing is though, all their counterpoints illustrate that they weren't paying much attention if they indeed read the book at all!
/.
Example 1: several people said, "I don't think the brain could work if completely dissociated from the body." Well DUH! Who said that was the plan? If you're going to simulate a brain "on a chip", why wouldn't you simulate all the inputs as well? Sounds to me like somebody already dissociated their brain...
Example 2: several people said, "Kurweil's timeline is too aggressive. It won't happen that fast. Etc." I have to ask, did you miss the number one take home message of his book? Practically every other page reiterates that the progress of technology is not linear, it is EXPONENTIAL. This is not based solely on Moore's law, but applies equally well when you look at other measurements such as the increase in energy consumption despite the increase in efficiency, the increasing number of scientific papers published, the increasing average total distance travelled in one's lifetime, etc. And most importantly, when you sample a short portion of the early stage of an exponential curve, IT APPEARS LINEAR! The fact that you don't see it happening is not evidence against Kurweil's predictions, but rather evidence that you are unable to see the big picture. By the way, Kurzweil also shows that Moore's law not only applies to semiconductors, but also to EVERY TYPE OF COMPUTATION INVENTED SO FAR. This fact means that all the naysayers who argue that Moore's law will soon come to an end are also unable to see the big picture. Moore's law won't end - we'll just see another paradigm shift like we've seen so many times before in computation (first by hand, then by tables, by slide rules, mechanical, electomechanical, vacuum tubes, transistors, semiconductors, next?)
Example 3: some people said we won't be able to upload or create AI because we won't be able to completely understand how the mind/brain works. Well, I don't need to know how a car works to drive! This is the whole point of reverse engineering - You don't NEED to know how it works. You just scan it with sufficient detail and COPY it! While you're at it, you learn everything you can of course, but you don't need to know everything.
But most importantly, ALL OF THESE COUNTERPOINTS ARE COVERED IN THE BOOK! You couldn't have read the book if you are still arguing the same points which were rebutted so thoroughly therein! I'm not saying you have to agree with him, but you can't use such weak arguments! He's got you beat if that's the best you've got.
Lastly, I'm appalled that of all the naysayers, nearly nobody criticized Kurweil's main theme: that exponential technological development will lead to an explosively rapid increase in knowledge and capabilities (the Singularity). It seems to me that if you don't argue against this idea it means one of three possibilities must be true: either 1) you agree with it and hence you must admit that our near future capabilities will certainly exceed what you can come up with in 5 minutes of amateur speculation (and hence uploading may be possible), or 2) you disagree despite the evidence, but incorrectly thought that one of the weaker arguments would be a more efective rebuttal, or 3) you didn't really read the book and you haven't put much effort/time into researching these ideas, and therefore YOU ARE TALKING OUT OF YOUR ASS!
Well, what do I expect? After all, this is
In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the mice offer to buy Arthur Dent's brain (so they can dice it up and find the ultimate question, etc.) and replace it with a simple mechanism that will walk his body around randomly and ask for tea at 4PM every day. I'm convinced that most of humanity (Slashdotters excluded, of course!) could be successfully 'archived' with a similarly simple mechanism.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
..I want my brain downloaded to a gigantic cybernetic fight robot piloted by a cute 14-year-old japanese chick. A good way to spend eternity.
Thanks!
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I read one of Kurzweil's book and just couldn't stop wondering what the fuck planet HE was living on; mine certainly wasn't like that.
Well, I can speak to that--at least as far as it's true for me: one of the big problems I have with this kind of thinking is that it seems so one-dimensional. I think a lot of people have been pointing that out by bringing up different sorts of blind spots that Kurzweil in particular seems to be afflicted with. I was going to make note of the fact that his joyless brain-on-a-chip AI-friend utopia also does not address any of the socio-economic problems existing in the world today. What about the HIV epidemic? What about infrastructure for struggling third world nations, what about stabilizing the governments of Africa? Frankly I find it somewhat offensive that he could be thinking this way when President Mugabe of Zimbabwe is starving his own peoples, president Mbeki of South Africa doesn't believe that HIV causes AIDS, etc...Most importantly, what I think is really frustrating about Kurzweil and what really makes me angry about this kind of thinking is that it's not just that he does it, but a bunch of other people who should know better put him up on a pedestal as if he _really_ knows what he is talking about!
The "mind" or essence of ourselves is a concept, a tendancy, not of physical mass that can be taken out, and put somewhere else. Nor can it be copied/downloaded/pirated or otherwise. A map of Dublin is not Dublin. At best "downloading the mind", if it were to become possible, would at best provide us with a map. But it must be remembered "the menu is not the meal". Even if we were to get our tendancies/memories etc. (essences?) onto another medium, do we actually believe this to be of much use to us. I mean, yeah a map of a city would be helpful, but you aren't going to be able to look at the map, and assert having visited the city. Just as I suppose, the visualization of our own mind would not give you the mind, but maybe a cursory third person POV of your own mind.
Just my 2 cents.
This was a Cowboy Bebop episode. we'll have to purify your soul first ...
that we'll get star wars working by 2005, solve the P=NP debate by 2012, and acheive universal peace, tolerance and understanding by 2020.
`Cause, uhm, you know, Moore's law and stuff.
Some problems require more than just additional processing power. Strong AI seems to be one of these. So has Kurzweil made a fundamental breakthrough in our understanding of consciousness and the human mind, or is he just another crackpot who saw "Demon with a Glass Hand"?
I'm betting on the latter.
I want to be able to upload information to my brain!! or maybe have a hard drive in my brain, so that i can remember phone numbers ;)
--JonnyBlog
Anything can be explained by gremlins
Which is exactly the context I used it in, if you bothered to actually read my post carefully.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
However, in the past we have been very successful in managing complexity by dividing big incomprehensible problems into smaller comprehensible subproblems and solving those.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Kurzweil must be very out of touch with current research if he thinks there is any chance of that happening by 2039. Forget Moore's law. Look at how smart machines have been getting over the decades. It's nowhere near that impressive. Clearly intelligence doesn't increase in proportion with Moore's law.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Greg Egan's 'Permutation City'
Amazon
Also, he has a great site:
Greg Egan
why would I want a brain dump? I mean having another me around would be great and all
but as the old saying goes what do I care if I'm dead? Then again the human central
nervous system will accept just about anything so why not connect some form of hardware
brain / synthetic neuron / brain emulator and then just wait till your brain is no longer a
vital organ.
-troy
If these experimenters had put this circuit into a different type of FPGA, even if they copied every gate and connection.. It wouldn't have worked because of capacitance differences and other things. Now, realize that we are far more complex than this circuit was. Also realize that billions of years of evolutionary processes might have found and applied many things we haven't found. So, honestly I believe that for the forseeable future, this is pretty much going to stay in the realm of sci-fi.
Having said that, I think downloading my brain into a computer would be the coolest thing since sliced bread. Be immortal, shock and amaze your friends, etc. But it seems to me that a more attainable goal would be brain interfacing. As another post to this article said, the brain seems to last far longer than the body. Why not find a way to hook stuff up to the brain so you can be reasonably functional even though you no longer have a physical body. Hook you up to the net, let you share ideas, continuing to contribute to society. Or do a job that doesn't require physical activity.
Trees everywhere, and not a forest in sight.
An eternity with Paul Reiser... the horror...
"I am not a shrimp - I am a King Prawn! Pepe, "Muppets in Space"
no more forgetting important events now that I'll be able to back up my brain regularly & if i manage to destroy my brain with drugs i can always go back to the "last known working configuration".
You tried your best, & you failed miserably,
The lesson is:
Never Try
... dump core when you have a nervous break down. Won't shrinks love that.
There are several Anime series that are either based on or have raised this very issue.
The most prominent is one called Serial Experiments Lain. It is based on a girl who commits suicide to live in the "wired" world. She then sends e-mail to her friends, saying that she isn't dead, she simply left her body behind as she didn't need it to live on the wired world.
She then tells her friends to hurry up and join her in the wired world. One of these friends, Lain, then connects to the wired world (or the Internet) and she begins to explore this world and who she really is. Eventually she finds out the truth (along the lines of Neo in The Matrix).
Anyway it is an excellent series that has a lot of abstract thought and raises questions that make the viewer think about this very topic. This series was made in 1997 I believe, and just having watched it again recently, I can say that it must have been a big inspiration for the Wolchowski (sp) brothers for The Matrix (which also has similar themes to it but doesn't really raise these questions or challenge the users in the way Serial Experiments Lain does.
Another series called Neon Genesis Evangelion, while not directly related to this topic, does raise issues based on this, and it even has attempts at digitising a human mind and soul, as well as one character who is based on the dna remains of one individual who died earlier, as well as a digital copy of her mind, and in the finale it even has this "clone" questioning who she really is, whether she is nothing more than a false body with a fake soul, or whether she is a real person.
However Neon Genesis' main theme is based on finding out each person's truth, who they really are, what their value in life is, etc, etc, but it does raise this theme to an extent.
You can see one person (or production groups) thoughts on this very topic in Serial Experiments Lain, so if anyone is interested in this (or, if they enjoyed the Matrix), then this series is something I would recommend seeing. It wont answer the questions we don't have answers to, but at the very least you can come away with an interesting perspective on it.
You should check out the Fireball series by Paul Anderson. The main character in the first couple books of the series is a "download".
You can read up on them a bit on the product pages.
1) Harvest of Stars
2) The Stars are Also Fire
3) Harvest the Fire
4) The Fleet of Starts
My favorite of his books though is The Boat of a Million Years. It is about imortals living among us, and our history viewed through their eyes.
Cheers
I'm just shocked that not a single comment above even thought to mention the idea that it's possible that part of the mind is not physical at all. This idea is not new, and certainly not restrained to religious thought only - so it is hardly science-hostile. Very strange, I guess materialism is vibrant here. Oh well.
These incredible things have a tendency to be invented by people who believed in it to start with, even though many thought they were nuts.
That is how it always goes. The most superficial arguments are always the best in discussions like these: just because you can't imagine it happening (or don't understand it), doesn't mean that it never will.
Have faith and worry not about the dreamers in this society. If it weren't for dreamers, this society would suck a lot harder then it already does.
Would it be used as a slave, a backup? I can't imagine that the duplicated mind will wish to become a slave, and staying in backup, doing nothing, without being able to think, I hardly think the duplicated mind will give in to that either.
People think that the duplicated version will be exactly the same, but will submit to anything. If it is exactly duplicated, it would want to be the one on top, and you might end up being the backup / slave. Just think, every bad thing you do to the duplicate, you're causing _yourself_ pain.
Doesn't sound like something I want to be doing,
If I want eternal life I'll wait for heaven
Does he also predict in hoe many years I will be able to download my telephone book from the memory of my GSM to that of my new cordless DECT phone ?
I m shivering with excitement in anticipation of the groundbreaking technology advances that will enable this. ( Anyone for a RFC ? Or does all this *have to* be restricted to TCP/IP , C++ and other PC-related bloat )
beowulf cluster (then you could be smarter than that ann landers woman!)
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
hi you fucking islamic killer. you supressed homosecual, pedophillic baby raping ass philanderer. you disgusting death bringing everything2 motherfucker. death to your shit fuck religion. i piss on mohommed. i shit on him. i piss on mecca. i want to plague your medina and your mecca. i take pleasure in seeing islamic fundamentalist die. i want to harvest your kinds organs and blood. i want your livers and kidneys and hearts to put in real people. i want to grind you up into bone meal after i torch your remains and fertilize my flower garden, at least them you fuck face terrorists in disguise can be something useful. i want to attack your stinking mosques like you attack us. i want to crush you.
FUCK YOU SAND CREATURE DEATH!
what did i ever do to you? I'm peaceful, leave me alone.
I've read a bit about the infamous scientist Nicola Tesla, and one of his would-be inventions was a thought transmission machine. Now, it didn't involve storing information on silicone chips, but it did propose a projection system of sorts, where you would sit in a chair and a device would project your thoughts to a screen right in front of you. Kind of a cool idea, but it looks like we're closer than ever to realizing that dream. My only concern is that not only our privacy will be violated, but imagine a computer program that would simulate personalities. Could they be used to accurately predict what you are going to do with your life, and then possibly, just maybe, would we have a "Minority Report" like scenario on our hands? Where we are arresting people for what they think, instead of what they actually do? All this thinking makes my head hurt, maybe my computer will be able to do it for me later on down the road
denouce them. denouce the voilence. and cite an islamic leader that does. denouce the nigger islam snipers who worked with farakan[sic] that piece of shit doesnt deserve to be spelled right. denounce 9/11. denouce ossama. denouce chechnyans who took 700 hostange in moscow. denouce king Fahd, denouce Assad, denounce Hamas. do it.
serve up some rhetoric that makes it look like islam even pretends to be peaceful.
you are muslim. you are a pig. your kind kills my kind. and we are watching you. if you fuck up and break the law, i hope the judge shows you no mercy. and if you ever touch any of my female relatives against thier will, as it is common for islamic people to supress and violate and clitoris chop and put rags on womens heads, so help me god, youll see a white mohommad atta coming to fuck you and all your roach relatives up mother fucker. ill kill you and go be a serial killer in arab countries killing men and having pigs fuck your dead eye sockets.