Will You Ever Be Able To Upload Your Brain? (nytimes.com) 269
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.)"
Very Probably Wrong (Score:3, Funny)
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
Re:Very Probably Wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Very Probably Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 mo
Re:Very Probably Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
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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.
All that demonstrates is that people tend to suck at predicting the future. And it isn't true that we are no closer to those things. Levitation via superconduction has improved massive since the 1980s. As well as working hoverboards we have magnetically levitated high speed rail entering operation. We have Soylent concentrated foods. We have Star Trek style computers that respond to natural language questions, hundreds of years before TNG said we would. Terminator predicted drones and eventually killer robo
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We had text based computer games that responded to a reasonable subset of natural language questions a few years before TNG was ever written, let alone serious academic work along those lines.
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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.
I disagree. All of those things were perfectly feasible 26 years ago as they are now. But not everything that's technically possible is also economically successful or needed. Flying cars are the perfect example, they have been technically possible for a long time but are expensive, not practical, not safe enough and require an expensive pilot license that not many people have. Similar things can be said about swimming cars, hover boards and re-hydrated pizzas.
As for the screen writers, I'm pretty sure they
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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 rate that technology advances has been on an ever increasing curve for far longer than what went on in the 20th Century. The more we learn the faster we develop new technologies. There is no indication that said curve will flatten out.
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I fucked up the quote. The last bit, starting with 'The rate...' is a response to the rest.
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If we were to snatch the screen-writers out-of-time, they'd be surprised that the world has changed so little
http://www.scribd.com/doc/1356... [scribd.com]
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Re:Very Probably Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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.
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Re:Very Probably Wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Re:Very Probably Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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My bike is made of the same metal as the airships back then - same alloy, same heat treatment to produce age hardening. Other stuff has changed a great deal but I think things like mobile phones would be recognised as the complex collections of radio transmitters and receivers that they are - an astonishingly good mutlipurpose radio and not some strange unfathonable thing.
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While that may be your religion it isn't based on reality. Progress isn't exponential in the real world. Progress will not be exponential in the future.
To take two examples of high-tech with a high rate of progress: metallurgy and semiconductor techniques.
Both of those aren't stalled, progress is still being made however both are near some fundamental limitations. The semiconductor industry have succeeded in incredibly level of purification of silicon and other process materials, they have succeeded in im
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The only discoveries that are centuries away are ones we cannot even fathom today
Fusion
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There is an exponential amount of scientific research, but there's a diminishing gain. Over the last 40 years we've expanded average life span here in Norway with less than a decade and the trend is slowing. Healthcare is exploding with new and advanced treatments that is extracting the last bits of life at an exponential complexity and cost. The Concorde is still the world's fastest passenger jet and it's not because people don't value time anymore. Every 10 mph you want to increase road speeds with puts i
Re:Very Probably Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Halting Problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is [...] impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Turing wasn't elderly, and he didn't just say it, he proved it.
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Locality of self. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Locality of self. (Score:5, Insightful)
I mostly agree, but will mumble a bit.
I'm not even sure that the incremental replacement method would "work".
Defining what we mean by "it worked" when it comes to something judged by subjective experience only is very squishy on whether it really worked, or you just think it worked.
Since we can't even define consciousness well yet, and good luck on The Hard Problem, I'd instead say it doesn't look hopeful, but the jury is still out.
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Re:Locality of self. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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?
Hence, why the discussion of the incremental change versus copying. The human brain is a perduring (for lack of a better word, see perdurantism [wikipedia.org] for my inspiration for the term) phenomenon like your example of the ax. Copying onto a completely different substrate with very different properties is a very considerable change which might be enough to void the property of perdurantism.
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Also, glancing at the video you linked, I counted five solutions, not five possible solutions. There is an implicit assumption made in the video that these solutions can't be simultaneously applied. However, just by the act of outlining each solution in turn, they are a
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The problem with your argument that a copy is you is that it allows for two copies of you to exist at the same time. Aside from the legal quagmire that leads to, the two copies immediately start to diverge as their experiences differ. If you were married, which copy is still married? Which one does the husband/wife continue to share their life with? Both? Which one has a moral right to your stuff? If you split it 50/50 then clearly the copying process has deminished you somehow. If a child is copied, would
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The problems you mention are all easy to solve. At least much easier than copying a brain. ;-)
The problem with your argument that a copy is you is that it allows for two copies of you to exist at the same time. Aside from the legal quagmire that leads to, the two copies immediately start to diverge as their experiences differ. If you were married, which copy is still married?
Both, of course.
Which one does the husband/wife continue to share their life with?
That's for him or her to decide. Probably the original rather than some machine.
Both?
Possibly, why not?
Which one has a moral right to your stuff?
Both, of course.
If you split it 50/50 then clearly the copying process has deminished you somehow.
Not you, just your possessions. Unless you're a selfish asshole...
If a child is copied, would the parents have a moral duty or emotional bond with both the original and the clone?
Of course they have the same moral duty. As for emotional bonds, you'd have to ask them.
The copy is clearly not "you", it's just a copy, otherwise how could two "yous" exist at once?
If you're the copy, then the copy is clearly "you". As you said, the experiences diverge after copying. How could two "yous" exist at
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If you split it 50/50 then clearly the copying process has deminished you somehow.
Not you, just your possessions. Unless you're a selfish asshole...
Practically though you both need a place to live, a bed to sleep in. It's clearly not the same as if your brain was simply replaced with a mechanical one and a single version of you continued to exist.
What about your job? You worked hard to get it and advance your career, but your employer doesn't want two of you. The fruit of that labour can only go to one of you. What if you were an author, who gets paid for for sales of books written before you were duplicated?
What about your identity? It clearly has val
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Yes, I totally agree that there are many practical problems that you and your wife, and possibly some lawyers, would need to consider before you make a copy of yourself, and I was admittedly skipping over some of them. My point is just that they are not very 'deep' problems.
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The deep problem is that a human life cannot be duplicated. You could create a physical copy of a person, but you couldn't duplicate all the non-physical things that make up who they are. Like the example of the Argus, what constitutes that ship is not simply the physical material, there is more to it than that.
As Satre says in Existentialism and Humanism, we start from nothing and define ourselves. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, the mere material of the body and mechanical operation of the mi
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The past belongs to you as much as it belongs to your copy. If you were a person before the copying, your copy will be just as much of a person. Think about it this way: Creating a copy of yourself is like a divorce. It is potentially painful, lengthy, and probably involves lawyers, and in the end you may end up estranged from your former wife with only half of your possessions left. But it's not a fundamental or deep problem.
I now have a monkey wrench for you... (Score:2)
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)?
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That's obvious, the copy is left with the wife. That's the whole point of the copy, someone to maintain the married life...I remember some Outer Limits or Twilight Zone like this, the guy copies himself so he can do other stuff; I think in the end somehow the copy ended up with the family and the original was an outcast.
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If you could faithfully copy the brain, then creating a sufficiently good simulation of the rest of the body would be a piece of cake.
Stroke plugs (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I always think glial cells are a great target for this sort of thing.
Your neurones have this vast support network of other cells that don't do any thinking. Replace them with high-tech nanobots that perform the functions of glial cells, but also network with each other, and watch the neurones to learn how to be you. Gradually permit clusters of them to actively participate in your natural connectome. You slowly transition to a being composed of mostly thinking nanobots with some squishy bits hanging around
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Me, I take a shortcut and embrace apathy. I might kill the prior body myself - I'd wire it to die in advance. I qualify that "I" am still alive and in place. I'm (we're) probably more comfortable with thi
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Really, what's the difference between making a copy of yourself, and going to sleep? It may seem like they're completely different concepts, but think about happens when you sleep. Your self shuts down, eventually you dream and than wake up, but for all intents and purposes it may as well be a new you.
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Sleep is not a full shutdown. There are measurable processes going on there - it's not like turning off your computer, where it's "consciousness" (RAM contents) are rebuilt entirely from long-term storage in the morning. There is no area of your brain that gets "wiped" periodically.
The closest analogy is that a somewhat reduced version of you is performing system maintenance processes.
Re: Locality of self. (Score:2)
I don't feel much kinship with the "me" of 20 years ago when I was 20. Nor at 30. Like... who was that person? what on earth was he thinking?
I imagine that uploading might be similar.
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Or possibly your software version of you would become another part of you. At that point it'd be easy enough to set you up with an implant that allows you to communicate with it, synchronize your memories and such. Except the software you would have much easier access to the online networks of information and might even be able to copy itself around for backup purposes and to accomplish more tasks simultaneously. Freed from the constraints of
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Obligatory: http://www.terrybisson.com/pag... [terrybisson.com]
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Another element that is frequently overlooked is that our brains are embedded in our bodies. Proprioception depends on all the real-time feedback from the stuff that's outside the brain. So without simulating the rest of us as well, the u
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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.
That makes no sense. Let A be the original and B be the copy. Even if you could not figure out which of them you are (an unlikely scenario), you would always be you, namely either A, the continuation of the original, or B, the copy of the original. The question as which one you end up is rather meaningless, because your self and your self-consciousness are copied.
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.
Of course, either a replacement body (robotic or biological) or appropriate sensory inputs and body chemistry simulations need to be provided, or
connectome soon, the rest much, much later (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Connectome will be done not in centuries but a decade or less,
It's only been 10 years out ... for the last 60 years and counting.
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Mine fits in the bracketed character: (Score:3)
Because #Concise
If the clickbait is asking a silly question... (Score:2)
Emulation (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Hans Moravec (Score:5, Interesting)
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"when you can't tell the difference"
Hey, on this toggle I don't feel hungry, thirsty, horny, or short of breath anymore, and the weed I smoked before surgery seems to have lost its kick.
Greg Bear (Score:3)
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.
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Except that it did and the owner of the consciousness was a very rich person experimenting with other people until it was right.
Some very interesting scenarios there.
I'll be looking forward to reading the one you have here - thanks for that.
You? No. (Score:2)
Eventually, probably yes, this will be a 'thing'.
Only 5 percent of the universe is visible to us (Score:2)
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 ali
Johnny Mnemonic (Score:2)
Start with storing data there.
Double every 4 years and it will take less than 50 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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 [wikipedia.org] 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, an
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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/ [xkcd.com]
Idiocracy (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Second (Score:5, Funny)
Second, we get distracted halfway through a small list.
wetware will have to do for now . . . (Score:3)
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.
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If that phrase refers to the human brain it is astoundingly wrong. Even using the term 'digital' is fundamentally wrong. The human brain is not digital.
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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.
Yes there is something wrong with our current hardware.
the math coproccesor is shitty, our memory is prone to bitrot, and the network interface is nonexistant. And worst off all I have no means of making backups. Oh and the uptime is negligable i mean we have to shutdown at least once a day or our program becomes unstable and bugs start cropping up.
One thing that always bothers me... (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org], 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
Maybe never (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Or, alternatively, assume that none of that is true. Problem solved!
Artificial superintelligence (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Bandwidth (Score:2)
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of brains hurtling down the highway.
Wrong question (Score:2)
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 c
Re: (Score:2)
An essential "spark", shall we say.
No, let's not, because it's still nothing that can't be mapped and simulated.
not everything is easy (Score:2)
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 expec
upload your brain? (Score:2)
even if you could upload the entire contents of your brain to a computer memory bank it wont be you
No (Score:2)
hahhahahaha "Connectome" (Score:2)
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 wh
True quantum copy (Score:2)
We'll get brain uploads (Score:2)
And the connectome isn't even half of it. (Score:2)
Re:Article also misses a major point (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
> The specific activities involved in the computer you used to type your message require quantum mechanics.
So is basic chemistry, looked at closely enough. The idea that something cannot be created or functionally replicated because it's quantum mechanical is, I'm afraid, a nonsensical one.
Whether the complex interaction of state and process between a brain and its senses, between physical layout of neurons and ongoing biochemical interatctions, can be replicated to an electromechanical system seems unli
Quantum mechanics != brain mechanics (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
A deterministic model may be a sufficient emulation even if not a perfect emulation.
After all, a lot of people take drugs, caffeine, alcohol, get smashed in the head in football or a swimming accident, get diabetes, and still are usually more or less themselves. The brain is designed to handle a degree of "noise" and damage, and this could very well include the "noise" of an imperfect model of itself.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
There are QM reactions involved when I use an abacus, that doesn't mean calculators are impossible. Just because consciousness is weird and QM is weird doesn't mean consciousness is based on QM.
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.
The only way that's true is if our consciousness is based on some continuous sequence of quantum events... and even then I'm sure there's a way we could meaningfully transition or preserve state.
Re: (Score:2)
Dear Future,
Please DON'T extract and emulate the trolls.
Thanks
-Present
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Again, someone makes the stupid mistake of thinking a computer system needs to be connected to the Internet just because its possible...
Re: (Score:2)
That reminds me of a Babylon 5 episode, "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars".
A far future (from the show's perspective) government creates holographic simulacra of the the characters from the show in order to make propaganda videos of them committing atrocities, only the Garabaldi simulacrum is a little too clever and causes some problems for them.
Re: (Score:2)