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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.)"
The estimate that it will take centuries is probably what is the farthest off.
The result is the same whether the brain is replaced a little at a time or all at once in a copy.
...or the copy, there's no way for them to tell
There's an old story about an axe that has it's handle replaced a few times. Eventually over the years it's used so much the head is replaced. And a few more handles after that. There was always a piece of the axe included when something was replaced. Is the current axe the same axe we started with? If not, at what point did it become a different axe?
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. It would be just the same as cloning a computer hard drive and placing it in identical hardware. From their perspective each computer is the original
You're probably thinking of a continuous point of view being the original, but human consciousness generally only exists in 16 hour spurts. When you sleep, is the 'you' that wakes up the same 'you' that went to sleep? There's certainly a gap in your consciousness which would be the same as being dead and coming back. Or the same as a copy waking up.
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
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.
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.
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
Its almost silly to think any advancement will take centuries based on the exponential nature of scientific discoveries.
I'd say progress has slowed significantly. I'm not sure how you'd defend the claim that our rate of progress accelerating, let alone exponentially.
We do have diminishing returns as far as applications go, but the rate of discovery is still increasing rapidly.
Lets say one area of discovery is doubling in sophistication every year. And lets say the next application of this technology requires one million times greater sophistication. This would take 20 years (2^20=1048576). So in this scenario, scientific discovery is still increasing exponentially even though the pace of application is only once in 20 years.
We are running out of low hanging fruit when it comes to engineering applications of scientific research. It now takes great leaps in discovery to give incremental improvements in technology. But sometimes these incremental improvements can still significantly impact how we live.
For instance, one incremental improvement we will soon see is speech recognition that is better than a human listener. This will take significant increases in computing power, natural language processing algorithms, and other advances. The difference between today's Siri / Cortana and this new speech recognition technology will be relatively minor compared to where the technology was 30 years ago, but the science behind the advancement will be light-years ahead.
This is how technological advancement will work from now on. Anything we guess will take 5 years will take 20, but anything we guess will take 100 years will take 30. IMHO that is.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The iPhone, for example, is very nifty but doesn't represent much progress over the personal computer
I think this statement doesn't give mobile technology enough credit. My father never had a use for computers at all until his mobile phone. Sure he owned a personal computer, and tried to find reasons to use it for two decades, but he never really did. Now he finds uses for it every day, and that doesn't count social media. My dad is not alone.
Personal assistants on our mobile devices will make computers far more useful to regular people than computers have been for the past 30 years (other than work-related uses). Speech recognition will give way to direct communication with our brains. Computers themselves will not be much different than those developed in the last century, but in practice it will open up a whole new world of applications.
Physical limitations usually give way to entire new ways of thinking about problems. Limits of vacuum tubes did not impede development of computers. Limitations of silicon will be solved by the next discovery just like transistors solved the limitations of vacuum tubes. While its true sometimes we will not solve these problems, it is not very likely any time people can make money from solving the problem.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Show a person from 715 the world of 1215, and your 500 years will not have covered much. As long as you don't span the Renaissance, and the last 100 or so years, you won't have as much amazement in 200 years as you think. It's just that a few groups of times have spurts of technology allowing the ideas of the past to come out all at once.
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