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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.)"
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.
The entire concept of uploading/duplicating is based on a deterministic view of the universe - one without quantum mechanics.
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.
What?
The specific activities involved in the computer you used to type your message require quantum mechanics. Perhaps that explains whey the poor copy that appears on my screen seems somehow incomplete or off-base.
It's possible that quantum activities in the brain make the processes of consciousness somehow non-classical and incapable of replication, but not only is the jury still out on that, I'm not even sure we've finished arraigning the suspects.
Indeed. It's certain to take much longer.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Show a person from 1815 the world of today, where we were barely starting to comprehend our own solar system. Show him pictures of other planets including a closeup of a planet he doesn't even know exists in his own solar system. Show him flight, and then spaceflight. show him one of thousands of Hubble's images, explain how far our understanding of the sciences has come and how far we have yet to go. Show him your cell phone with a world's worth of information at your fingertips. Tell him about dna sequencing, genetic therapy. The world of today is practically an alien world compared to 200 years ago... Will we be able to download our brain in such time... the fact that we can imagine it now means that it's probably going to happen.
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
The estimate that it will take centuries is probably what is the farthest off.
Indeed. It's certain to take much longer.
Its almost silly to think any advancement will take centuries based on the exponential nature of scientific discoveries. The only discoveries that are centuries away are ones we cannot even fathom today. Comparing today's technology to 2115 technology is not like comparing today's technology to 1915 tech. It is like comparing today's technology to bronze age tech. In a hundred years our current technology will seem as primitive as the first metalworking tools.
Honestly, these scientists may be correct that the method they are using to model the human brain will take centuries to develop. In truth their specific method will probably never work at the scale of the entire human brain. Instead the future technique to accomplish this will make the task seem trivial at its inception.
Another likely possibility is that we advance our knowledge of the brain far enough to improve upon it long before we can recreate it. Similar to how we don't have flying cars yet because there simply isn't a good enough reason to have them, we may never model the human brain digitally because we find such as exercise to be pointless. We may create a far better way to extend consciousness beyond our current physical limitations.
When you try to predict what will happen in 100 years at our current progress, the only silly opinion to have is that there are any limits at all to what could happen.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The 20th century was an amazing time. What makes you think we'll continue to progress at such an alarming rate? More directly, what makes you think this particular avenue, which has made so little progress, will enjoy the same rapid advancements we've seen in other areas?
What you're expressing is your deeply held faith in continued technological progress. You believe that progress is accelerating and that there is no upper bound. How would you defend those beliefs?
the fact that we can imagine it now means that it's probably going to happen.
I just watched the Back to the Future movies. It was fun to see what someone from 1989 thought our world would look like today. The 80's were filled with the same kind of technological optimism you've expressed here, and I'll bet a lot of people thought it was both an exciting and perfectly plausible vision of the future. The reality, of course, is that we're no closer to flying cars, hover boards, or re-hydrated pizza than we were 26 years ago. A hard-truth is that those things may never happen. If we were to snatch the screen-writers out-of-time, they'd be surprised that the world has changed so little.
Just because we can imagine it, doesn't mean it's going to happen. It certainly doesn't make something more plausible.
Will we be able to download our brain in such time...
The attraction to the belief that brain uploading is just around the corner essentially identical to the attraction to a belief in the afterlife. You're seeking a kind of technological salvation either from the world and/or your own mortality. It's very religious. I'm guessing you're a follower of the holy profit Ray Kurzweil (peace be upon him). He's been promising you a video game after life for a long time now. Are we any closer to the fulfillment of that prophecy now than we were 20 years ago? What makes you think the connectivist approach is correct?
Required reading for internet skeptics
"If we were to snatch the screen-writers out-of-time, they'd be surprised that the world has changed so little."
I'm not sure about that. It's just that the things they imagined are not the same things that have changed. They thought we'd still use Fax-machines and their idea of our video communication and display technology was ludicrously pessimistic. The reality is that they picked funny and visually entertaining ideas of progress. I doubt any of them thought we'd actually have re-hydrated pizza the way it appears in the film, it was just a funny idea that would give the viewers a laugh.
Instead of these ideas we have the WWW, Smartphones, insanely pixel-dense displays, wifi, Viagra, etc. The Internet, while it existed in some form as "Arpanet", was nothing like what it is today and the script writers, if they had even heard about it, surely would not have thought about it much more than as a research tool, as evident by their use of fax machines.
> Show a person from 715 the world of 1215, and your 500 years will not have covered much.
We say that, but is it *really* true? I mean, it's not medieval historians saying this normally, is my point, it's technological futurists. How many monarchs worldwide can you name between 715 AD and 1215 AD? Is your conclusion that they probably had about the same kings over that time period, because you aren't an expert on them?
Plenty of places in the world went from the bronze age to the iron age in that time. If you had a sword from 715 AD, it would have changed dramatically by 1215 AD. The 1215 AD sword would, in Europe have gained the cruciform pommel and benefited from much better metallurgy. Gunpowder would have gone from being invented in China with not many uses, to have changed the face of warfare and would have just been around the time the Mongols were using it as a seige weapon. Windmills would have gone from being an absolute rarity, and horizontal in nature, to a modern vertical form and much more common. The population would have doubled.
The other piece of the analysis is that you are sort of only counting the top of technology. So if a huge tech growth happens in South America, but doesn't top what China did a hundred years prior, that doesn't get counted right.
Anyway, I don't dispute that a lot of change, usually including technology, has happened in small periods throughout history. But I would dispute that the past was as unchanging as it appears from our vantage points.