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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!"
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.
The example Kurzweil uses is his "Spiritual Machines" book concerning this, goes something like the following:
It has been shown that people can live and be conscious with only the right side, and only the left side of the brain. No imagine if you split your brain in half, and put your left brain in China and your right brain in the US. Then imagine you could some how connect them wirelessly. Then imaginbe you connect your brain wirlelessly to additional pieces.
The point being: who says you consciousness has to exist in a single location. Many would argue that concsiousness is formed out of the complexity of thwe whole. If this is the case, maintaining consciousness through the whole upload / download transitions, is the same problem as having a distrivuted mind. If you can do one, then you can do the other.
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
Um. Yeah, this is true as well. Quite a bit of theory over in the liberal-arts side of the campus suggests that subjectivity (The sense and meaning of self among other things) is quite largely socially constructed.
Lacan , a french psychiatrist dude (hotly contested as to his value as kook or genius), suggested that in the developmental stages the child sees itself as a shattered assemblage of body parts and functions. Then the child goes through a a stage("the mirror stage".. excuse me if I get this wrong , it's been a looooooong time for me) where the child starts to assemble a single sense of self that it can coherently call "me".
As the subject continues thru life, it starts putting it's sense of self , through negotiating the symbolic interactions of itself and the world around it. In effect, the self and the body while coherent is embedded in the language and social structures of the world around it. It's more than it's mere physical self. It's a conversation with the environment and the socius. And we can just "download" that?
(Sorry if the arts-speak is a bit heavy there folks, but its there clearest way to put it)
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
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.
Genetic algorithms are useful for some very specific trial and error sorts of problems. But using them to random walk...
Then you do not understand genetic algorithms. If you are a programmer I recommend you read up on them, they are far more powerful than a simple random walk. Mathematical analysis shows tremendous implicit parallelism. You aren't merely working on X individuals, you are working on X individuals times Y schema, where Y is a monsterously large number. Mutation is the least signifigant thing going on in the evolution process.
Unfortunately it is to complicated and mathmatical to explain here, but if you are up for it try this Google search on "genetic algorithms" "implicit parallelism".
Remember, this is the process that created humans. When people hear "evolution" they usualy think "mutation". Mutation is almost insignifigant. The power lies in recombination and immense implicit parallelism.
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