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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
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!
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...
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.
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?
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!
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Time to cancel that order for the body-sized freezer and uninterruptible power source.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
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.
However, the brain can adapt around the loss of portions of the brain, to regain functionality. This doesn't leave a person identical to before though. I guess today's story about a guy becoming a paedophile due to a tumour, and recovering on it's removal is relevant.
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?)
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?
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!
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
And worse, what if the can copy the brain, but don't have the emulator completely bug free? I can see the update list now:
0.61
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What's new:
* Fixed bug in BrainFlip function. Left handed people no longer horribly confused.
* Complete rewrite of the subconsious subroutines
* New macros have been added to declare common callback functions and enforce naming conventions.
We think we've got all the major bugs out now, but if you start studdering or crashing, have someone send an e-mail to debug@EmuBrain.com. Please include the conditions of your thinking process at the time of the error.
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
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=
Just don't use Eproms or you might loose your mind...
LOSE LOSE LOSE LOSE LOSE! not loose!
At least this is one case where the word loose almost makes sense.
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
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.
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.
Blue screen of Death took on a whole new meaning.
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"?
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...
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?)
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.
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?"
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.
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!
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.
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
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
Hmmm.... Yeah and no. Certain sections of the brain do have a degree of redundancy, but like if I rip your medula out your fucked either way. There are some limited cases of what *appears* to be co-opting of other parts of brain for function in cases of brain damage, but it really depends on where the damage is. If one part is doing symbolic reasoning at the end chain of vision, and it goes silly than it is feasable that perhaps another part that is heuristically capable of similar tasks can take that over. But if edge detection goes awol for instance , dude your eye sight *aint* coming back in any sane form.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
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)
We also need a THAN_NOT_THEN! guy
makes an exact download theoretically impossible.
(it also makes a perfect clone an impossibility)
Tor
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.
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)
It's impossible to obtain the exact state of a system. The best you can do is approximate.
The question is whether the approximation will be say 99.9 percent accurate, or "usable", or whether something more like 30 percent.
As far as I know, there is no evidence that significant processing power of the brain is on a scale smaller than the "typical" chemical level. IOW, there is probably no quantum-level processing going on.
Table-ized A.I.
While we're on the tack of old science fiction, I vaguely remember a short story from my middle school years, so let me paraphrase:
Old Man "Bob" is wheelchaired into the waiting room of the hospital, where we find the rest of his family dressed in black, obviously in mourning. "Why is everyone so sad" he asks. "We just came from your funeral."
You see, "Bob" had a stroke, and died, however thanks to recent technology, he was able to save a copy of his brain about 3 months prior. The doctors cloned his old body, reloaded the brain. Of course the tech doesn't copy that well, so the life expentancy of the replacement is about a month because of cancers, but its enough time for the family to "bring back the dead", so they can all say their goodbyes in a way they couldn't the first time around. The only problem is that "Bob+1" didn't know he was only a copy, destined to die (again)...
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?)
I suppose they'd be like matter and antimatter--they'd mutally annihalate yielding a torrent of high-energy flames. :)
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.