This is such an intriguing concept (the main story above) mainly due to our ignorance: we know very little about how the human brain works. And, of course, there is the fantasy (ie; having digital doubles do lots of work and upload their results into the main--"you," right?...like "knowing Kung-fu" without the sweat) of ease and continual progress. However, the relatively unconscious assumptions of the writer of the magazine article we're all commenting on aren't necessarily supported by the empirical evidence on the cognitive operations of the brain. Even if, by the year 2020, a $1000 computer can "outprocess" a human brain, for the purposes of transferring memory, identity, "consciousness," or any other fictional scenarios that means so very little. A handheld calculator can outprocess the human mind right now but that doesn't imply that the calculator could be "given," somehow, human understanding of mathematics. Computers process exclusively by algorithms. The cultural assumption infesting the popular article (mainly because of the general romance over mathematics and logic) is that human minds operate the same exact way. We owe the beginning of this assumption to early researches like Turing, von Neumann, and those of 1st generation cognitive science. These researchers did not consider the empirical study of the brain, a cross-cultural investigation of how the brain works, to be relevant whatsoever. This is partly due to the additional assumption that intelligence (something necessarily rational and obviously logic-based) is a disembodied structure, part of the overall metaphysic of which humans alone share (at least all white males). Look back to Decartes; this assumption has been hard for us to shake, even in areas traditional thought of as technical, "hard" science and "non-philosophic." So, could we store memories? Yeah, probably, but what would they be? The symbols used in the algorithmic processes would have to be programmed and therefore interpreted by human beings doing the transfer. What would we appeal to in order to be sure we got the transfer correct? Frankly, we'd probably have to turn (eventually) to the empiricial findings of 2nd general cogsci, that the brain works using things like FRAME SEMANTICS, BASIC CATEGORIES, CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR to make the images or memories, digitally stored, at all recognizable or understandable by those who would reference them. Here's the kicker though: none of those mechanisms of the human mind work without embodiment. That is, all of these mechanisms illustrate that the supposedly transcendent rationality of the human mind is very well grounded in the bodily experience of human beings in the environment. Without that base of understanding to reference (imagine watching an agent-centered-view video clip of an organism who's primary mode of sense, like snakes, is taste)the memory is just a set of uninterpretable algorithms running really fast. So, computer's capability, though totally impressive, is an apple to the human's orange. I haven't the ability to express the complex argument well as those who i reference so... look at George Lakoff's "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things," "Philosophy in the Flesh" for good discussion and references to the research. Also, see H.Dreyfus' "What Computers Can't Do," and "What Computers Still Can't Do" as well as the (though problematic) classic arguments by John Searle against strong AI. thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
This is such an intriguing concept (the main story above) mainly due to our ignorance: we know very little about how the human brain works. And, of course, there is the fantasy (ie; having digital doubles do lots of work and upload their results into the main--"you," right?...like "knowing Kung-fu" without the sweat) of ease and continual progress. However, the relatively unconscious assumptions of the writer of the magazine article we're all commenting on aren't necessarily supported by the empirical evidence on the cognitive operations of the brain. Even if, by the year 2020, a $1000 computer can "outprocess" a human brain, for the purposes of transferring memory, identity, "consciousness," or any other fictional scenarios that means so very little. A handheld calculator can outprocess the human mind right now but that doesn't imply that the calculator could be "given," somehow, human understanding of mathematics. Computers process exclusively by algorithms. The cultural assumption infesting the popular article (mainly because of the general romance over mathematics and logic) is that human minds operate the same exact way. We owe the beginning of this assumption to early researches like Turing, von Neumann, and those of 1st generation cognitive science. These researchers did not consider the empirical study of the brain, a cross-cultural investigation of how the brain works, to be relevant whatsoever. This is partly due to the additional assumption that intelligence (something necessarily rational and obviously logic-based) is a disembodied structure, part of the overall metaphysic of which humans alone share (at least all white males). Look back to Decartes; this assumption has been hard for us to shake, even in areas traditional thought of as technical, "hard" science and "non-philosophic." So, could we store memories? Yeah, probably, but what would they be? The symbols used in the algorithmic processes would have to be programmed and therefore interpreted by human beings doing the transfer. What would we appeal to in order to be sure we got the transfer correct? Frankly, we'd probably have to turn (eventually) to the empiricial findings of 2nd general cogsci, that the brain works using things like FRAME SEMANTICS, BASIC CATEGORIES, CONCEPTUAL METAPHOR to make the images or memories, digitally stored, at all recognizable or understandable by those who would reference them. Here's the kicker though: none of those mechanisms of the human mind work without embodiment. That is, all of these mechanisms illustrate that the supposedly transcendent rationality of the human mind is very well grounded in the bodily experience of human beings in the environment. Without that base of understanding to reference (imagine watching an agent-centered-view video clip of an organism who's primary mode of sense, like snakes, is taste)the memory is just a set of uninterpretable algorithms running really fast. So, computer's capability, though totally impressive, is an apple to the human's orange. I haven't the ability to express the complex argument well as those who i reference so... look at George Lakoff's "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things," "Philosophy in the Flesh" for good discussion and references to the research. Also, see H.Dreyfus' "What Computers Can't Do," and "What Computers Still Can't Do" as well as the (though problematic) classic arguments by John Searle against strong AI. thanks.