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Will You Ever Be Able To Upload Your Brain? (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader points out this piece in the Times by professor of neuroscience at Columbia and co-director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience Kenneth Miller, about what it would take to upload a human brain. "Much of the current hope of reconstructing a functioning brain rests on connectomics: the ambition to construct a complete wiring diagram, or 'connectome,' of all the synaptic connections between neurons in the mammalian brain. Unfortunately connectomics, while an important part of basic research, falls far short of the goal of reconstructing a mind, in two ways. First, we are far from constructing a connectome. The current best achievement was determining the connections in a tiny piece of brain tissue containing 1,700 synapses; the human brain has more than a hundred billion times that number of synapses. While progress is swift, no one has any realistic estimate of how long it will take to arrive at brain-size connectomes. (My wild guess: centuries.)"
If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
- Arthur C Clarke
Locality of self.
The problem with almost all "uploading" schemes is that it creates a copy of your brain structure, so it's a copy of you, rather than you. Externally, there might be no apparent difference to an outside observer, but internally, you're kind of dead, if that 1 cubic foot of meat space is no longer functional.
The only hope of an upload of the actual "you" would be an incremental replacement of brain structure, such that you lived in both meat-you and electronic-you at the same time, until the electronic-you completely replaced the meat-you, without a loss of continuity of consciousness.
Otherwise, you're just building pod people. Which could be useful, if you wanted to embed one of them in a starship (or more likely, a tank or other weapon of war), or if you wanted to make a lot of duplicate copies of a particular mind, and didn't care about their locality of self, either.
Connectome will be done not in centuries but a decade or less, really that's problem to be solved by automation and computing
However, the 2nd reason, left out of the quote but in the article, has to do with the function rather than physical configuration of synapses and neurons. We don't understand that well at all. And that is probably where the "mind" is.
This viewpoint is false. Not only is quantum mechanics part of the universe, but the specific reactions involved in the brain require quantum mechanics.
As such, the concept of a physical copy or uploading is nonsensical. It can not be done. The best we can do is make a poor copy - one that will NOT react the way the real you would.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
We wouldn't try to dissect the individual neurons, measure the amplification (a chemical trait for the synapses) and upload the whole lot to a database. Because you can't reconstruct that exactly anyway.
Instead, we would build a neural network to simulate a brain (which can be done now), we would feed inputs into the real brain and measure the outputs, and use that to stimulate the neural network till it performs the same way.
i.e. Google Deep Dream approach, use a neural network, train it by stimulating/measuring a brain. Once its the same outputs, there's your mind defined in neural network form.
The actual micro detail of the brain doesn't matter, its a machine that turns inputs into outputs using past lessons, and the neural network would be the same.
[ - ]
Because #Concise
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Just give it up already Samzenpus, nobody believes that this anyone other that you and your deluded brain.
All you need is the unique data. Most of the basic "functions" such as eye sight or hearing could be emulated in software via Dynamic Recompilation while the specific learned functions for the individual could be interpreted. (Actually, language could be DynRec'd if it's a common one.)
Emulating the hardware is nice and tends to make better results, but it's slower and MUCH more processing intensive. (Just ask the devs behind bsnes.)
Oh, and before anyone starts groaning about souls, non-copyable, etc....
In the end there is a DATA component to the human mind. The real question is just how much of it is data and how much is hardware. You can emulate the hardware as much as you want but, you still need the software to make it do anything. Your personal opinion on the matter of religion is irrelevant to that fact. (Personally, I think the motivation behind going the hard route of emulating the entire brain, rather than developing a method to inspect the contents of one first, is an attempt at bypassing the issue of religion and finding out exactly what makes a human tick.)
One more point, perhaps its not obvious:
You realize that when you've defined your brain in neural network form, you have a functioning clone of the brain. The key word being 'FUNCTIONING'.
While we can't make neurons and connect them exactly the way the map tells us, the Neural Net is completely within our control and would be *alive* as such while we train it. At the end it would not just be a definition of how your brain works, it would be a working copy too, and a reproducible one.
Perhaps we'll be Bittorrenting famous peoples brains in future, and applying their brain to problems..... oh I can't get this to work, lets try "Rob Jone's' brain on it, he knew more about these minimization problems than me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The primary problem with this recurrent geek fantasy is that at best it's not really a copy; it's an emulation on different hardware. And that means a different added layer of possible breakdowns, bugs, glitches, etc. "All abstractions are leaky", per Joel Spolsky I think. Will the person feel hungry, thirsty, sleepy, horny, too cold/hot, react the same way to their favorite booze/weed/drugs, etc.? Probably not. Will there be outages due to power, networking, input/output devices? Likely so. And it's really hard to pretend that in the face of those radically changed experiences of the world that it's the same person.
This thought experiment serves as a pretty good case study that the Western attempt to cast a hard distinction between mind and body is not really tenable. You are your body, and your body is you.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Man the more I think about this, the more I hate it.
IP rights finally WOULD be Intellectual Property! The definition of your brain would need to be carefully kept and controlled and owned by you, because it would be used against you.
1. Job interview means hand over your neural network copy to corp for interview by corp neural net.
1a. Corp no longer wants you, it just wants your neural network map.... didn't you read the small print for the job interview?
2. Were you there at the crime scene? Instead of asking you, they'd probe your neural network definition. There would be no inner self. You think search is invasive now?... Wait till your brain can be cloned!
3. Control of people: "how will President Bob react to speech X, lets test it using his Neural Network till we get the words right that will manipulate him"
4. The rise of the Generals, there's always a calm man in a uniform that will decide that, for the good of the nation, everyone's minds needs to be stored in a database in Utah.
5. Even insurance, what kind of insurance risk are you? Why ask YOU questions, when we can plug your neural network map into our risk-e-mator!
Its a brave new world..... yuck.
In Mind Children, Moravec described a fascinating scenario. A probe equipped with molecular-scale surgical tools, encloses a few brain cells and simulates them in software while you lie on a table. You have a switch in your hand; as you press it, you flip back and forth between the simulation and the working cells; when you can't tell the difference, the cells are removed. The probe continues to work its way through your brain until no real cells are left. You have been slowly, gradually uploaded into software. This is you, your continual awareness, not a copy of you that takes your place after you've died.
Suppose you have a stroke, and it damages a small section of your brain.
The (cerebral cortex surface) brain is made up of a repeating pattern of cortical columns, which is a structure that connects vertically among it's 6 layers, but not laterally beyond the column boundary. There are connections out the top to the higher order layers in the brain, and connections into the bottom from lower layers, but it's an independent function(*).
As far as anyone can tell, the cerebral cortex is composed of a repeating array of these columns.
Suppose you have a synthetic "plug" that can take the place of a number of cortical columns. You remove the damaged part of the brain and replace it with the synthetic plug.
The plug contains processing units which then learn from the existing connections. The human helps to train the connections by giving feedback: as the plug tries out the connections and actions, the human can tell whether the output is right or wrong, and act accordingly.
For example, if the plug was within the speech centers, the human would have to relearn that part of speech which was damaged, but he would have all the rest of his experiences and knowledge as a basis. His environment and other humans (family, friends) would also help support the learning process.
Eventually, the plug would learn the correct responses to any of the inputs, and it would be a replacement for the damaged part.
Now suppose you have another stroke, and it damages another part of the brain.
Continue the process to its logical conclusion, and you migrate the essence of the person from the biological into the synthetic. This is possible because the information in the brain is not stored in one place, but distributed over many areas. If you lose one area, the information can still be reconstructed from information in other areas.
I can well imagine when the technology gets advanced enough, that rich people might be able to get "stroke plugs" implanted, and over time completely replace the biological portions of their brain.
Is this not a sufficient definition for uploading?
(*) Yes, a glossy, simplistic description.
plus it would be a COPY of you, not actually you. You are still you and there is another you that acts exactly like you and thinks it is you, IT has been uploaded but YOU have not. You're essentially killing yourself and creating a perfect copy which no one else can distinguish. Maybe that is fine, but maybe it is pointless.
Neither you, anyone you know, or your grandchildren, or anyone they know.
Eventually, probably yes, this will be a 'thing'.
Even if that was possible, it would be a crazy thing for anyone to do. Essentially, anyone can have access to your thoughts. The public would know of your intimate and naughty bits, can anticipate your next action, etc. In short, you will be predictable to all.
The entire concept of uploading/duplicating is based on a deterministic view of the universe - one without quantum mechanics.
We don't understand quantum mechanics, and we also don't understand how the brain works ...however, that doesn't mean that the brain is quantum mechanical.
Two things that have similar characteristics sometimes turn out to be quite different, and relying on "we don't understand this" as the similar characteristic that makes two things equivalent is dubious at best.
The ultimate interface will be when we enable the human brain to build an interface itself.
Every attempt to upload is fundamentally an exercise in reproducing creation through force of will on our environment.. through code, through tools, through hands.
But when the human mind and effect change with thought through a kind of tool that allows molecular interface at the speed of thought.. we won't have to understand it.. it will simply be.. anyway the human mind can.
Everything is an extension of thought and thus of our minds.. its only a matter of time.
The electronic device that we can use to simulate the connectomes are FPGAs, and the time frame largely depends on the r/evolution of FPGA (and the derivatives) that we can come up with, in the future
Since the connections of the connectomes are dynamic, what we need is a type of 'FPGA' which can adjust its connections dynamically without having to go through the re-programmed process
The 'FPGA' in the future does not have to be in silicon, it could be in any other material, so long as it is capable to function in dynamic fashion
If we are able to come out with something which I describe above, we wouldn't have to wait for centuries
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
What other as yet unguessed effects go into making life, a consciousness, a mind? I'm not talking magic, I'm talking about science and the description of the physical reality.
We're talking about modeling what we see as the physical structure of the brain. I suspect the actual cloning of a consciousness is quite some distance away, after we're able to fully explain just what is consciousness and the mind. Heck, just describing what makes something alive is beyond us right now. A potato is most surely alive, but without a mind as far as we can tell. We can quite closely describe the structure of the potato but not so much why it's "alive".
We are capable of seeing about 5% of the universe, the rest is dark matter and energy. I suspect there's plenty more going on with the brain and mind as well.
Great. I can upload my brain. What fucking good is that? When I die, I'm still dead. Having my brain archived somewhere is about as much "me" as a photograph in a photo album is "me". I still suffer the pain of death and the eternal non-existence of not existent.
Alan Turing said in 1936 that it's impossible to construct an algorithm that generally solves the halting problem.
So who's wrong: Clarke or Turing?
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
So what? It's the 5% that matters. Just like mankind: there's only a 1% that matters, the rest can be shoved into a furnace.
Start with storing data there.
If the scale required is your only argument you have made a very common error regarding the speed of change in exponential processes.
What can we do now?
What is the rate of technology doubling, D?
How many times, X, do we need to do it to get to the required magnitude?
It will take D*X years where 2^X = one hundred billion
And that is without anything radically new being discovered in that time period, so 20 to 30 years is actually possible.
Imagine what a large scale 3D quantum computing array would be capable of. We have just seen silicon based quantum logic fabrication developed and we already have 3D silicon based memory arrays.
If we can reduce the number of synaptic connections in the average human brain while we are working on improving the technology, we ought to get the two to meet much sooner than the few centuries that TFS predicts.
Have gnu, will travel.
Second, we get distracted halfway through a small list.
At the bottom of the
OK, so we're mostly software geeks here who have a vague idea how the underlying digital hardware works. It's not surprising that we think of 'uploading' a mind into our limited area of expertise. But why?
Is there something wrong with biology and existing brains? We can grow brains. We are learning the first steps toward interfacing with them. Let's do what we can with real brains while adventurous explorers probe the distant frontier of digital brains.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Isn't the job of the nerves in the brain supposed to be to communicate?
Shouldn't we just have to play the role of a nerve, and just 'ask' the brain nerve to tell us its contents, and those of its close neighbors?
I mean,there's parasites that do this to an extent, such as toxoplasma gondii, seems odd that we haven't created an interface to work with nerves and just get them to communicate to us, as nerves logically have to do, in order to act like minds.
Even if the process is slow, we should be able to do it at lots of locations simultaneously, so long as it's non-destructive communications. Sure, we'd be reinforcing connections by doing the queries, but so long as it was even-handed, it would be *nothing* compared to acts like dreaming or most of regular life.
Worst case, even if we couldn't recreate a living landscape of a mind completely right away, we could at least save the long-term memories, and have something better than the complete destruction of being that happens with death now.
Even if it would be embarrassing by conventional standards, I'd actually like the idea of my complete memory set continuing after I'd dead, rather than the feeble methods we currently use to leave something of ourselves. Add a query system to it, could be very odd, but really neat too - real life information ghosts.
Far better than nothing, for my preferences at least.
Ryan Fenton
Uploads, being infinitely replicable have a reasonable likelihood of being treated as tools or toys, and if stored digitally for long enough there is a good chance your intellectual likeness will end up in the hands of sadists or religious nutters anxious to give you the hell treatment (See Iain Bank's "Surface Detail").
Fuck that.
You lose control of your existence with uploading. At least in meat-space you can kill yourself.
Horrifying thought about hypothetical future teleporters (old idea I probably read somewhere): They only transmit a full, perfect copy of you, and the original you is disassembled in the process. In other words, you are executed when you step in the teleporter, and a copy of you opens it's eyes for the first time at the other end. Unless of course the future teleporters actually transmit the matter to other end. In any case, I'll never step in one of those things :) Futurama's suicide booths come to mind..
It's a roundabout argument but hear me out:
Fermi's paradox more or less says that we should have seen alien intelligence by now, if any existed and interstellar travel is practical.
The obstacles for transporting a a living conscious organism across interstellar distances are prohibitive, even in some kind of suspended state. The most likely practical means of getting to another star system and exploring / colonizing / etc are either automated robotic vessels or digitized consciousnesses commanding a robotic vessel that is off during the voyage and turned on at the destination. The latter is infinitely preferable (albeit with possible moral questions) because of the flexibility a conscious mind would have in evaluating the situation and making appropriate decisions.
Ergo, the fact that none have been arrived in the solar system or been observed traveling between other solar systems means that consciousness can't be digitized or consciousness cannot be digitized in such a way that makes packaging it into an interstellar vessel more efficient than carrying living organisms, which is inconceivable.
(Yes, I am drunk. Why do you ask?)
I'm certain it's possible to meaningfully upload my consciousness. But that doesn't mean we're smart enough to do it.
Assume the smartest mind possible by the laws of physics has an IQ of 1000, and assume to make an artificial brain you need an IQ of 2000. Although there's a solution to the puzzle it's not a solution that will ever be found.
I stole this Sig
Lol, so are you one of the 1% that matters? I'd wager 99% probability that I am not. Ironically, that same lack of egocentric-perspective is the source of the mental illness that makes my estimate generous.
We seem to be off to a good start there at least.
I recently read that a fairly large swath of top AI researchers were polled about when we may be likely to see human- and superhuman level artificial intelligence. The median was around 2060. It seems to me that once computers are perhaps millions of times smarter than we are, seemingly insurmountable problems such as this one will be rapidly solved. When that happens I question whether humanity will even remain biological as there are clearly disadvantages to this format.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of brains hurtling down the highway.
The question is not whether we'll ever be able to "upload" a map of a neocortex, but rather whether we'll be able to transfer the will and sense of self that makes us who we are.
Perhaps at the time technology is able to upload a map, we'll discover that we really are nothing but meat machines. But I believe there is an extra "something" in the specific timings of how your particular neurons fire and interact with each other that makes you you. Not really a soul, per se, but a "something" bound in the chemistry and biology that we haven't even begun to measure or analyse. An essential "spark", shall we say.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Not everything is as easy as we'd like, or works out the way it logically "should."
The bottom line is that with all of these "revolutionary" technologies, what should be possible and what can actually get done right now are often very, very different things. When an expert says it's going to take "centuries" to solve a scientific problem, it's because it might take many generations to do the necessary re-formations of the approach, the culture, the interface with other scientific disciplines, and the expectations of the public.
Neuroscientists may not know how to frame their problems, and they may not know how to accept help with that from people outside of medicine. It may be 20 years before mainstream neuroscience gets that far. I'm a nanotechnologist. It took us 10 years to figure out we weren't doing mechanical engineering, another 20 years to figure out how to talk with chemists, and another 10 to start talking effectively again with engineers. Some of this stuff is just slow.
Most of you don't have minds worth saving. Slashdot is chock full of pseudo-intellectuals that could be given 5 lifetimes and still wouldn't produce an idea worth hearing.
On finding the answer the partial would signal the originating consciousness that it had completed and was ready.
At death, you consciousness was available for restoration to either reality or a simulated environment. Which didn't help if your body ended up in some inaccessible place.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
No, you won't. It's a stupid question.
Moore's law doesn't really describe a consistent and straight forward "technology doubling". CPU frequency, power consumption and single core performance have almost flat-lined. And that's without considering the bandwidth and latency delays you face when attempting to scale problems to multiple cores.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
There will never be such a thing as "brain uploading" simply because there's much more to mind than just what goes on in the brain. You'd think those notions of primitive materialism and its false dreams would be abandoned after the Renaissance, but this myth still rears its ugly head even in the modern age.
Alan Turing said in 1936 that it's impossible to construct an algorithm that generally solves the halting problem.
He found it impossible to halt his gay tenancies.
Perhaps if his brain was uploaded to a computer it could have been fixed
You forget the simple fact that no exponential growth can be sustained forerver. Moore's law will come to an end (in a few years, btw), simply when the required size for transistors is smaller than a single atom (or a single sub-atomic particle if we manage to do that; the idea is the same). Dennard's scaling has already hit the wall. Networking will never send data using less than a single photon per bit (actually, the limit imposed by quantum noise is around 15-20 photons/bit) or a single electron/bit, and the amount of them is limited by transmission power. So no, there are some achievements which we won't obtain, because of simple phisical limits. You cannot simply sit and wait.
..I like the post in two ways:
First, it has all the information needed.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I doubt he has, actually. But in any case your argument is circular by the very definition of an exponential function.
Right, because past performance is always an indicator of the future.
https://xkcd.com/605/
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
not without a bonesaw :p
even if you could upload the entire contents of your brain to a computer memory bank it wont be you
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Every decade or so, someone thinks they've learned all about the brain. A decade later, we know that most of what they thought was at best hilariously incomplete. Lather, rinse, repeat. The "wiring map" in your brain is only a part of the puzzle. You have to have a good snapshot of the state inside of each neuron as well. Think of a network of computers. The connections are just the network. It enables work to be done, but the work happens inside of the neurons. If you don't know what they're going to do when they get a signal, then knowing how they're connected isn't going to do anything for you. If you loaded that into a human without the state of their neurons you might get their reflexes but you wouldn't get them.
One of my FB friends posted that they thought they knew how to preserve the entire connectome yesterday. I just lol'd and didn't comment. This is why. Even if they are right, though they are almost certainly wrong, they still wouldn't have succeeded in preserving consciousness.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Which one has a moral right to your stuff?
Both, of course.
I now have a monkey wrench for you... what if the copy was made involuntarily, against the will of the person being copied? Which one now has the moral right to "your stuff" (in which I include the relationship with the wife, and so on)?
A real solution would be some tech that copies your brain at a quantum level, basically destroying it as it copies due to collapsing wave functions. Therefor, a true copy can never have duplicates.
At the same time we get teleportation. Both require fast, wide and deep scanning. We're on the teetering edge of that now.
This is one of the things that everyone always gets wrong.
This won't be you. It will be a CLONE of you.
This will be like making your mental twin.
This could be INCREDIBLY useful for many reasons, but the original person will always be the original person.
You could continue a conscious forever, but you will not continue that person.
The way I like to think of it is like this:
We have a computer. We have its hardware and software.
When you reboot that computer, everything remains the same (it doesn't always, but let's say that for the sake of the discussion)
Visually, functionally, everything is exactly the same.
However, we KNOW that it is a different session.
To an external observer, everything would be the same, but you will always be you and the mental clone of you will always be a clone.
That is your consciousness, that is your self, you are a session of a computer, an abstract concept.
Whether or not we will ever truly figure out consciousness is for another time, but that is what we know for sure right now.
Who knows, maybe when we do get to the point of being able to upload consciousness, maybe it COULD end up extending your consciousness to the digital form as well, we simply don't know yet.
The concept of the conscious self is just something beyond us right now. It could be even weirder than we think. We still haven't even fully understood quantum entanglement, or dark matter, or dark energy, or hell, even neutrinos to be honest. Higgs Boson was just found (maybe).
We still have a buttload of things to learn about the universe.
It might be beyond us forever, it could be as fundamental as the concept of existence itself.
It could all boil down to "we just are", and that is that. Funny world we live in.
There is more to a brain than just it's connectome. It is going to be a long time before uploads are possible.
One does not need to be part of the lucky few to accept the fact that there are lucky fews.
The Bible, which is the voice of God, tells us to actively seek out immortality, and to raise the dead, and to preserve vital information inside of us until the resurrection. The Bible tells us that God's ultimate goal is to defeat death, and that he has prepared us to defeat death for him. Our powers of reasoning are the tool God gave us to defeat death for him.
The Bible tell us that the righteous will live forever on earth, but that the righteous will comprise only a small fraction of humanity. The righteous are those who 1) help to raise the dead; 2) preserve vital information inside themselves even while dead, until jesus returns; and 3) actively seek out immortality through deeds....those who sow immortality will reap it. God helps those who help themselves.
More here: Do You Need To Freeze Your Head In Order To Be A Good Christian? http://churchofthebetterresurrection.blogspot.com/
"Will You Ever Be Able To Upload Your Brain?"
Sure, I have mine on a floppy disk.
Not just that, people are forgetting a very recent research platform being built that had like, a million ARM processors in a single server cabinet with a stupidly high bandwidth backbone for it to simulate a mouse brain.
People overhype how capable we are in terms of computing performance, but in reality, we actually do have pretty god damn powerful computers being built these days.
It won't be long before we start to see AI breakthroughs on a whole different level.
We are only maybe a decade or two away from a huge breakthrough. That isn't that far away.
We are getting better and better at designing high-bandwidth systems, and this new super ARM computer is another step towards those goals.
We are also understanding parallel processing techniques better, and are designing much better algorithms for dealing with huge amounts of data being thrown around systems.
It is only a matter of time. It will happen within most of our lifetimes for sure, but it will also be pretty much around the corner.
Maybe the very last thing we should want to do is duplicate the human brain. Obviously humans are not so good at thinking. We have nuts who run into public places and shoot people, people who live stoned or drunk and people with all kinds of behaviors that self defeat themselves. Maybe machine thinking is the right way to go and perhaps make the human brain more like a computer. For those that think machines are not smart enough try any of the major chess programs. They actually do play unique games of chess and they do it with radical skills. Yes, the rules of the game are programmed in as are the methods of "thinking" but the actions of the machine are creative and blunders can be quite rare. Humans no longer can compete with these machines and all too soon this will transfer into systems that are better than you are for managing your own life.
A connectome could be done quite quickly within a decade -
freeze the head, shave it (plane off a slice through bone and brain) in thousandths of a mm increments and record the connections visually.
It probably will not be doable non destructively for a lot longer, but destructive should be quite easy.
http://www.livescience.com/52453-rat-brain-reconstructed-in-computer.html
decades?
No, probably not.
The untangled mess my and most other peoples thoughts and emotions are most of the time isn't really something that is worth downloading.
I do have experience and wisdom, after having lived for 45 years on this planet, amoung other humans - but most of that would fit into a series of 2-5 books.
The rest is made up and driven by all those desires and drives that make us human: Need for sex & love, for recognition and respect, meaning in life, etc. I do not want the mistakes I've done in the past to fulfill those to be downloaded into a computer. Not really, no.
What might be useful or at least interesting is a machine, that takes all those insight, extracts the garbage and keeps the good stuff. ... But then again, I could be wrong.
There's an artform/science that does that, and it's called stoic philosophy.
I don't see machines joining in on it too soon.
Then again, philosophy is such a fun thing to do, I wouldn't want to hand it of to machines.
That would be like having two robots doing the sex for me and my girlfriend.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
That's good. It's nice to know that the "little people" who carry me through life are aware of my existence.
"As to whether an exact copy of you is actually you, I would say yes, unless you're going to argue something supernatural like a soul"
No you are confusing same subset of object with identical object. This is the same as with the teleporter dilemma. If you take somebody then construct a copy of all neurone and then murder the original, nobody may even tell the difference. But from the perspective of the person you murdered : they were killed, life stopped. To hold that that person would continue in the copy is to hold belief worst than supernatural. This is the difference between identical subset of object (same copy of you, same copy of a basketball), and same object (if i take a basket ball or human, copy it atom by atom and destroy the original).
The problem is that many (most?) people do not care that an identical clone continue in their place, what they want is that they continue forever. And THAT is why the complete upload in an instant do not achieve the same goal as the bit by bit hardware replacement and integration with the system. In fact think of it as this : imagine the upload system is non destructive. You have essentially the hardware copy working while the human is not dead. See the problem ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
What if, instead of focussing on moving the mind to a new vehicle upon death the focus was in gradually moving into a new one before death.
Scientists are already making progress in connecting to a few neurons here and there for the purposes of controling artificial limbs or bridging severed spinal chords. What if may connections were made, not to motor controlers but rather to a very large neural net. Would the plasticity of the brain allow it to incorporate this neural net as a part of itself?
I've heard it said that if a person could be kept alive long enough they would be sure to succumb to Alzheimers or at least some form of Dementia. As the natural brain dies a little bit at a time would that simply cause it to move completely into the artificial one?
This could be more of a life-long process rather than a last minute ditch effort to survive. It would certainly change a person but this way the change is gradual. There is no definitive moment where you are no longer you but rather someone/thing else. That seems kind of natural anyway because we are always changing throughout life already. If my mind is dumped all at once is it me or just a copy? What if my biological mind isn't quite dead yet? Then is the new one a copy? This method gets around all of that.
Also, I see this as being more than just a means to life extension. As a lifelong implant it could serve other purposes, maybe direct mind to mind communication via other's implants, built in calculator, calendar, surf the net in your head, etc... How about telepresence robots that interface to the 'external brain'. Could I leave one at work and never commute again?
Don't get me wrong. I don't think this way is any more likely to be available in our lifetimes than the "Die'n Dump" method. The net required would be unimaginably massive. It would probably require a complex starting structure and algorithms that haven't been discovered yet in order to make it compatible with our wetware. But.. maybe some day for some future generation...
I remember reading somewhere that mind uploading may not be possible because consciousness is connected at a quantum level. Only a brain emulation expirement would prove otherwise.
Also, if anyone is interested in mind upload thought expirements, read Greg Egan's "Permutation City".
because I'd be dead by the time the technology main lined.
People here say, with reason, that we ought to be able to simulate every physical system, given a good enough model, enough time, bandwidth, resolution, memory and computing resources.
This should be by and large true, but consider this: computational fluid dynamics with turbulence is still an open problem. For instance, smooth solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations are not known to exist.
Yet, turbulence seems like a really easy problem compared to thought and consciousness. We even have a mathematical model that describes it. Sure, with enough computing resources we can do a good enough job of simulating turbulence in most regimes, but not all. For instance, Computational Fluid Dynamics with magneto-hydro-dynamic elements is really hard. Yet this is required for developing for instance nuclear fusion, a topic with a huge economic importance. Still, these simulations require the best supercomputers that we are able to muster at present. The race to build still-better computers to run better CFD simulations is still on. and is likely to go on for quite a while.
So total brain simulation or brain upload is not likely to occur anytime soon. We are much more likely to develop increasingly sophisticated AI based on learning and bottom-up strategies that do not care much about how the real human brain works. These strategies basically work: we can now beat the best humans at chess. Computer vision improves all the time. Soon we may have self-driving cars. Perhaps in the future a long-term sustainable and stable economy will be achieved thanks to AI progress.
However this teaches us next to nothing on how the brain works. Perhaps one day we will have the Singularity that Kurzweil keep talking about, but the resulting super-strong AIs are not likely to care about us poor inefficient meatbags that we are. Why should they? Simulating us would simply take too much resources.
Long before we upload into silicon or whatever mineral construct we use for computing machines at the time I think it is more likely we will be able to grow new brain tissue to replace old and the transfer of consciousness would be gradual. OK it may not be uploading in the sense we normally think of but it may well be that the only way to keep a recording of a brain is in another brain. In the end the goal is immortality.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
Even after mapping out all those hundred trillion synapses, that still does not get you close to understanding the brain/mind or close to "uploading".
How can I say that? Because we have the complete "connectome" for at least one model organism, the tiny marine roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, and we still cannot "upload" its behavior or accurately model its nervous system. C. elegans has 302 neurons in 118 distinct classes, 6400 chemical synapses, 900 gap junctions, and 1500 neuromuscular junctions, and we have mapped every single synapse and junction, but it is still not enough data because we do not understand the behavior sufficiently well of a single isolated neuron (in any of those 118 classes).
When we have a good computerized roundworm THEN all we have to do is scale up 100 billion fold, in a non-destructive manner. (You don't think we mapped those worms by noninvasive scanning did you?).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNiZP2G-nEM
Sigmoid curves are easy to mistake for exponential curves when you are half way there.
If you upload my brain, it still won't be me even if it's a perfect replica that behaves just like me; it'll be a copy of me, that thinks it's me. That doesn't make me feel any better about me dying.
"Don't kill me!"
"It's OK, we'll clone you first"
"Oh, then go ahead"
that being the case why the hell should I involve myself? If i wanted to make a copy of another human being, the first person I choose wouldn't be me.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.