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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.
The estimate that it will take centuries is probably what is the farthest off.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Second, we get distracted halfway through a small list.
At the bottom of the
"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.