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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!"
It wouldn't work like that. Imagine that the copy of your mind is uploaded into a new body before you die. Do you think your consciousness would suddenly transfer to the new body? All the copying could do is create a new consciousness in the new body, your old one (ie, you) would still grow old and die in the old body, never to return.
This is also the argument against Star Trek transporters. You die each time you use one but a new person is created at the other end that thinks it's you. You don't know anything about this, of course, you've just been disintegrated!
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Why would it just create a new consciousness? What is consciousness more than some electrical signals running through a certain configuration of brain-cells (and influenced by chemicals from the blood). What's in there that cannot theoretically be copied, stored or emulated?
0x or or snor perron?!
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.
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.
Probably the best way to look at it is like a fork statement in a Unix program. Suddenly, one program becomes two, with different PIDs, etc. And you could make the case that the one with the original PID is the original program, and I suppose that in many ways you'd be right, but the fact remains that the new PID begins with EXACTLY the same memory and EXACTLY the same register states. The only thing different is where that memory is located. Clearly, the programs are seperate entities, yet they'll follow exactly the same patterns (ignoring their different data input) and we might argue that, from the program's perspective, the PID is entirely artbitrary and it has absolutely no way of knowing which one was not the original program, since they start off in identical states but respond to different stimuli. I actually think that twins are a very good metaphor, only you have to imagine that the twins both have common memories for a certain number of years.
I honestly don't think words like "dual consciousness" or "death" even apply in situations like this; we need some new vocabulary.
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.
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
The problem with depending on hardware and network advances to drive his vision is that software engineering simply cannot keep up with the pace of advances on the hardware front. Anyone who has ever read the "Mythical Man Month" understands this at a basic level. Humans simply cannot organize themselves well enough to tackle software projects of the magnitude that Ray envisions, at least not by 2029.
Ray dismisses this argument by saying we'll have software that writes the software. Well, there's a tautology for you. If you can't write the software you need because it's too complicated, how can you possibly be expected to write the software to write that software? Genetic algorithms are useful for some very specific trial and error sorts of problems. But using them to random walk our way to a billion lines of debugged, functional AI code seems a bit of a stretch.
My money sure isn't on Ray's pony...
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
Thought experiments like that are fun, and yours is convincing, but consider some of the implications...
During the transfer from inside to outside, suppose you use a machine that has redundant circuits. Each nanobot is replace by a trio of simulated external neurons, so that they can check each other for errors. (If the presumably-binary output of the three disagree, the majority wins and the disagreeing unit syncs to the final result.)
Ok, up to now it's exactly the same situation that you describe, but with additional reliability.
But after the transfer is complete... The trio-links are broken, resulting in 3 perfectly synchronized systems.
Which one is you?
I'm not sure that "continuity" proves anything. Maybe your original consciousness would die slowly, neuron by neuron, as the new consciousness comes to life. If it even does come to life.
Honestly, I don't think the human race yet has the terms to describe the problem, much less speculate about the answer. It's fun to talk about, but so was "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"
Understand anything?
.sid Saturday morning.
My Windows 2000 SP2 Athlon doesn't understand HFS+. My OS 10.2 iMac needed alot of help understanding a
And niether of them know anything about the cordless phone, nor have they met my washer and dryer or the sexy new fridge just 3 meters away.
As for all the awareness coming to the desktop near you, I'll state here and for the record, each new CPU from Intel and AMD will be brought to thier knees by the new versions of Gnome, Windows, and Quake, leaving the desktop user with the same number of free cycles as before.
Now for this mythical AI thats coming surely by 2040, I say poppycock! My stance towards such "advanced thinking", and "futurists" is the same stance I have towards people telling me the World is ending right after the World Series.
I didn't buy this whole Strong AI nonsense a while back, but I did read one of his books. I was left with a sense of wasting my time then.
I popped over to Ray Kurzweil's site and poked around. This bit got my attention.
"If we can combine strong AI, nanotechnology and other exponential trends, technology will appear to tear the fabric of human understanding by around the mid 2040s by my estimation."
Those are alot of "Ifs". Strong AI, which is a buzz word. Nanotechnology, which is something that is built 1 or 3 or 10 at a time and photographed, but does nothing at this point. And my favorite "other exponential trends" In other words this whole idea of a Bowie-esque Savior Machine depends on crap he doesn't understand or can't put in words, but he is sure is coming.
Poppycock.
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.
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=
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.
Our bodies are just as much a part of ourselves as our brains are. Also, don't forget that the makeup of brains is neurons and nerve cell connections. Well, surprise, surprise--we have nerve endings all over our bodies, and I'm willing to bet that they're used, albeit at a low percentage perhaps, when we think and process the world as well.
As far as I understand it, we haven't yet developed the ability to remove a brain and find out what it's thinking -- it only works when it's inside a human body. And unless I'm out of the loop, brain transplantation has not yet been done on humans. So far, "brain transplants" has meant inserting healthy cells into Parkinson patients. In this case, the individual cells are simply subsumed by the whole brain and used as dopamine factories.
The brain is not a hard disk or cpu. It's not running linux, windoze, or even (despite Steve Jobs' assertions) OS X.
Our understanding of the brain organ, and by extension, the "mind" -- which may or may not overlap 100% with the brain -- is so woefully inadequate as to make any talk of uploading or downloading anything on it silly at best.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
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...
The capacity for thought we have is an intensely complex combination of the neural processes of survival and reproduction, with all those billions of years behind it, plus the geologically recent development of a whole lot of extra cognitive juice in the frontal lobe department, plus a couple of million years of tweaking this wetware system in the context of social, tool-using behavior, plus several tens of thousands years of social behavior combined with the meta-social instruction of language, art, text and such...
We have some bare inklings and theories of how we acquire language, intelligence, social functioning. The barest inklings. We're working on it. There is still a helluva lot of controversy on what exactly intelligence is, and no end in sight.
At the dint of enormous effort we have computers that can take a stab at interpreting meaning of isolated phrases based on context and a whole lotta cultural and semantic training by humans. The most powerful computers built for the job can hit-and-miss beat the finest human chess players... a game with a fully mathematically limited scope which is almost entirely susceptible to a brute force approach. "Seeing" computers can be trained to make some decent interpretations based on heavily patterned information. Voice recognition still has to be tuned to every individual, and it's pretty damn iffy for all that. Nowhere near to a computer that can hold anything resembling a conversation.
So where in hell do we get an estimate like "Strong AI by...?" As far as I'm concerned science has barely framed the question of what that would mean... and only in qualitative terms at that. So I'll tell you where these pointless predictions come from: ballpark some meaningless figure about biology - numbers of neural gaps, firing rates, impulses per second, whatever. Connect it in some arbitrary manner to some measurable function in a computer, extrapolate based on some law of technological development with far less than a century of statistical evidence and no basis mechanism whatever behind it (statistical evidence without an explanation is ALWAYS suspect in interpretation) and - viola! - you're a futurist. Or, as I like to say, a worthless dumbass.
ANd how do you get from there to the process of downloading consciousness, despite the fact that there is not even an inkling of a glimmer of the slightest valid theory about how an active and continuously shifting neourochemical proccess of personality and intellectual template, stored memory and present cognition (not to even touch the primal, the emotional, the glandular, the spiritual) gets translated to something that can be interpreted by a machine or stored in a meaningful sense or caused to be active outside of a biological framework? Well you just pull that one right out of your ass because it doesn't have even the flimsiest basis in the "reality" of doodling with a few facts and figures on your scientific calculator.
I'm not sure exactly why but the idea of people making carreers based on this bullshit makes me so mad I could kick puppies.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
No, the slightly younger argument: what is consciousness?
Or, as I believe, we are simply programmed to believe (I Do not necessarily mean this in a literal sense) that we have a consciousness and in reality we are simply complex organic machines governed by various electrical and chemical processes.
Well, I don't see what that has to do with it. What is doing the beliving in this model if it's not the mind?
. If you copied yourself, quantum particle for quantum particle (simplest theoretical case but hardest to pull off unless we discover some neato trick of physics)
In fact, totally impossible unless we find a way around Heisenberg so this seems to be a totall invalid approach right from the start.
you would have two of you which both believed they were you, and each would be just as right as the other.
Except one has a discontinuity in their existance which the other does not.
The bottom line is no one knows what causes "mind" but pretending it doesn't exist is not a great step forward (unless you're George Bush Jr, in which case it's the best bet).
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
This just shows that conciousness is a function of organised matter - you make the assumption that cold virii don't infect and affect neural tissues in the brain.
The cold was just an example. There are many other physical experiences which affect the way you think that have absolutely no direct physical effect on the brain itself. For instance, I find that my thinking dulls and I feel depressed when I have to pee real bad -- why, I don't know, but whatever is happening in the brain is not *directly* connected to my physical experience, but rather indirectly related.
I don't disagree that the brain is the "center" of the nervous system, but that's "all" that it is--the center of it. My point is not that we don't use our brains to think, just that they aren't the be-all and end-all of consciousness.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.