Download Your Brain

Nicholas Roussos writes "Futurologist Dr. Ian Pearson predicts that death will be avoidable in the year 2050 by downloading your brain to a computer. Unfortunately, he is also predicting that the process will be only available to the wealthy for years after its release. I guess we should all start saving our pennies now."

Comments

The mind is not dis-embodied

[Anonymous Coward]

People who say things like this don't understand how the brain works. It is intimately tied to the body.
It is NOT like a hard drive.

Look up some readings on embodied cognition and neuroscience.

You'd have to "download" the state of every cell in the body to effectively save the state of a person such that it may possibly be re-simulated sometime.

Hes about 5 years late...

[Momoru]

Ray Kurzweil predicted this in Spiritual Machines (not affiliate link) 5 years ago.

Re:The obvious question...

[tech49er]

But the transporter in star-trek doesnt make a copy - it actually converts your mass into energy, transmits that energy, and reconverts it into solid matter. You know, energy is mass. It falls down though because e=mc^2 which is a hell of a lot of mass for a tiny piece of matter ...
I'm not sure how different this would be from just making copies but at least it solves the problem of two consciousness at once.

Re:Meh.

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

He says 2080 for the poorer segments of populations. My apologies for being unclear.

Xerox it is.

[Colin Smith]

As a humanist I don't believe in any sort of a supernatural soul, so your premise is incorrect. I do firmly believe however that my conciousness is firmly attached to the physical hardware that is my brain.

If you would like to prove me wrong, you could perform a simple scientific experiment involving a large rock and your brain.

Re:It's a copy

[Tlosk]

I can't speak to other cells, but the neurons in your brain and the nerve cells in your spinal column are all you've got. They do not regenerate. I suspect that there are other cell complexes in other organs that are probably one-timers as well (ova for instance).

That was the common consensus ten years ago but the last few years has seen that turned upside down.

For example with neurons:

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro00/web1 /Wall.html

and ova:

http://pharyngula.org/comments/484_0_1_0_C/

Re:It's a copy

[Mr. Slippery]

Every now and then individuals get a clue: the Buddha, various monks in following in his footsteps, Jesus, etc. We've seen a rash of people in 20th century america who came to understand what it means to be human: Edgar Cayce, Jose Silva, etc.

If you're mentioning the Buddha in the same paragraph as Edgar Cayce, you're confused about the teachings of one or the other. (Jesus, it's hard to say through all the conflicting historical bullshit - it's hard to separate the political from the spiritual.)

The Buddha was concerned with the problem of human suffering, and offered a program of mental exercise and discipline to help allieviate it. While Sidhartha was a product of his times and soaked up some cultural beliefs, and various metaphysics were added in by some of the Mahayana sects to make things more palitable to the peasants, the core teachings are pretty metaphysically agnostic. Consult any Zen master for further enlightenment.

Cayce beleived in psychic powers and the existance of Atlantis, and made a bunch of failed prophecies.

The Buddha used meditation and intuition to explore the subjective world of his own consciousness, a method that works pretty well. Cayce used meditation and intuition to try to determine facts about the "objective" universe, which just doesn't work.

Future Incomprehensive

[danila]

It's interesting how the media works. Here we have the head of futurology unit of British Telecom. He isn't some random guy and he clearly did some studies about the future. He makes a speech (was it at Futurex), where he, no doubt speaks at length about the future, about likely developments, about his work, about BT plans, etc. But the media takes two soundbites and rehashes them endlessly, without analisys or as much as a second thought. As a result, we get a bunch (hundreds of, to be more precise) of identical articles titled "Download your brain by 2050" and the text centering around "The other prediction was talking yoghurt by 2020".

This is pathetic. The average reader/viewer/listner has no chance to form a coherent picture of the future, or even our current ideas of it. But sadly, this is typical for news coverage of all topics. And it's actually one of the problems - that we treat such items as "news", where you get a notable person speak, then a few hundreds of nearly identical articles appear, then silence. In the best case the meme of "Playstation 5 will be as powerful as a human brain" will spread and settle in the brains of the public.

Instead of starting a decades-long discussion of all the implications of the future changes, instead of purposefully changing our societies to adapt to the scientific and technological advances, instead of basing our research budgets on the goal of achieving the most desirable of all possible futures, we just live as if nothing important is happening. This is beyond sad.

I don't know how you can change that, may be it's impossible in the world of corrupt democracies and commercialised mass-media, but if you personally want to understand where we are heading, check out the links in the end of this post.

Ian Pearsen is late. I remember the idiotic 21st century forecast that BT produced five years ago. Only now he starts to get things that better thinkers realised a decade ago. For some people the idea of mind uploading is not new and they already managed to present a much more comprehensive picture of the future.

Here are some of the resources outlining it:

• World Transhumanism Association
• Singularity Institute
• KurzweilAI.net
• Extropy Institute
• Transtopia
• Better Humans

• Anders Transhuman Page - a comprehensive directory of transhumanist resources
• Transhumanism at del.icio.us