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Why Our Brains Will Never Live In the Matrix
destinyland writes "Professor Athena Andreadis answers the question, 'Why Our Brains Will Never Live in the Matrix,' contrasting "mind uploading" predictions with 'the major stumbling block to personal immortality' — namely, that our biological software is inseparable from our hardware. There's practical problems. ('After electrochemical activity ceases in the brain, neuronal integrity deteriorates in a matter of seconds.') But she also argues that what we call 'the mind' is also an artifact of a specific brain, and copying it 'is an excellent way to leave a detailed memorial or a clone-like descendant, but not to become immortal.'"
"I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.
Microscopic spiders had woven a fine gold web through my brain, so that the jewel's teacher could listen to the whisper of my thoughts. The jewel itself eavesdropped on my senses, and read the chemical messages carried in my bloodstream; it saw, heard, smelt, tasted and felt the world exactly as I did, while the teacher monitored its thoughts and compared them with my own. Whenever the jewel's thoughts were wrong, the teacher—faster than thought—rebuilt the jewel slightly, altering it this way and that, seeking out the changes that would make its thoughts correct.
Why? So that when I could no longer be me, the jewel would do it for me."
Greg Egan, "Learning to be Me" (1990)
Reading Doctorow's 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom' to my daughter as a bedtime story when he published it, I recall that somewhere around the middle of the book she started asking me how it was that restoring from a backup to a new body, no matter how fresh the backup, would result in a continuity of awareness for the individual involved. Not my girl's words exactly, but that was her meaning. I had been struggling with this question since almost the beginning of the book, and to some extent had been for years earlier whenever the question of immor
Apparently what this means is not that there can be no backup of the brain, but that brain transplants are not possible, and no mind transfers between people's brains. (You and your dog cannot switch bodies. You will not be able to wake up in the body of your mother. And Kirk can keep his captaincy.)
The way I see it, if the state of the brain and indeed the entire body can be measured to sufficient accuracy, it can be copied. William Gibson described something like that in Neuromancer, mentioning knee jerk reflexes on a chip. Cory Doctorov's Down And Out neglected the possibility of duplicating oneself.
As for the lack of continuity between transfers: If it has the exact same properties, it is identical. To say there is no continuity of identity between uploads is to say that you are not the same person that got out of bed this morning. The Star Trek Transporter raises the same philosophical issues: How do you know you are still yourself? You are always yourself, you schizo!
And who said you need to copy brains to computers?
Replace the brain with more efficient cells that don't degrade as much as our crappy human cells, inject some chemicals, let the other braincells make connections, bham.
Now for the next 100,000 million...
But it could work if you do it all one-by-one is what i am saying.
During this process, there is no brain being shutdown, no (major) destruction, just the brain rewiring itself to Braincell 2.0
We have already made BCIs (brain computer interface) before, we know how it all works.
And speaking of braincell 2.0, exactly that, you don't even need to build a computer-based cell, just re-engineer our braincells to deal with free radicals better, rerouting damaged cells, replacing damaged cells, etc.
The brain can be remarkably dynamic in structure, unlocking this would be like a godsend for neurology.
captcha: prepare.
See, even the system agrees!
There's always the problem of continuity of consciousness. Even if you make an identical copy of your brain, another consciousness emerges. TFA states:
> This is an excellent way to leave a detailed memorial or a clone-like descendant, but not to become immortal.
I don't buy that at all. Couldn't you say that the new emergent consciousness would be identical? That wouldn't be a copy, but a fork.
But what is so special about consciousness in the first place? One could say that the emergent thing, the consciousness, is always the same, regardless of its constituents. conscious-ness is a property of the conscious entity that is shared with all conscious entities. It's not the thing that makes us different.
I'd say that I am not my consciousness. And are we really sure that consciousness is ever continual? If I freeze and then manage to restore you, would you be another person?
Nobody tell Ray Kurzweil!
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Since the brain makes little distinction between hardware, instructions, and data, perhaps the crux of the problem is that it wasn't designed with any way to do a read-out from the big squishy mess. If an "upload" of any sort ever becomes possible, I think it will require a brain engineered from before birth, to contain specialized features that will enable a dump.
Perhaps it'll be in the form of some little chemical tags that will accumulate in cell bodies, produced in varying mixes whose profiles reveal what the cell did when it was still alive and who it was connected to -- stable enough to be scanned out of diced sheets post-mortem. Or maybe they'll pulse out their secrets encoded in bio-luminescent flashes. Or maybe they'll be a mesh of nerve fibers splayed across the brain of this new human, bio-engineered to output something a computer can understand, with characteristics to help mitigate problems like requiring precise electrode placement, or incompatibility with artificial materials.
In any case, there would be immortality, but not for us...
If the brain is irrevocably connected to the body, then simulate the body alongside the brain on your supercomputer.
Sleep. Your stream of conscious experience stops when you go to sleep, and resumes when you wake up. Sure, there's some brain activity during sleep -- but during the deepest phases, there's nothing like "consciousness". In fact, given the consolidation processes and whatnot that happen during sleep, you could make a very convincing argument that the person who wakes up in your body tomorrow morning will not be the "you" that falls asleep tonight.
Sweet dreams!
My real concern is that early transfer techniques will be piss-poor and not copy all synaptic connections, leading to early transfers not being themselves, and people dismissing the whole technology as evil and worthless.
Some will. But think about people who suffer traumatic brain injury. They're "not themselves" afterward, they often suffer horribly, and they might face impairments for the rest of their lives -- but the majority of them are still grateful to be alive. Most people -- not all, but most -- would choose continued life with some impairment over certain death.
Some people will be "early adopters" for this kind of pseudo-immortality, and some people will never accept it. But I imagine the largest class will want to wait as long as they can, risking the chance of death, to let the techniques advance as far as possible. I think that's the class in which I'd find myself.
that you would go 'crazy' without the neruological stimulus from your 5 main senses. People who loose one or two of their senses in accidents have had their personalities greatly altered. The biggest impact is sight, second is touch. In essense, starving your brain that is hardwired for sensory input could drive it mad within days and weeks. Not to mention, how would your intuition, sense of reason and rational work in an artifical environment? How could you day-dream?
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
So, here's a thought experiment, say you made an artificial equivalent of a neuron that behaves the same way externally. Now, you swap out the neurons with the artificial ones, while you're still conscious. You wouldn't know if one neuron was replaced, but at some point all your neurons will be artificial, you've just transferred your mind to a different platform. In reality, we'll likely develop machines which can behave like the brain and interface with the brain. Once we start getting augmentations, they will become part of us. Just like the brain changes as the child matures into an adult. Eventually, majority of the brain could be composed of the artificial components, and losing the old hemispheres will be no different than shedding a toe nail.