An interesting article on both the physical and philosophical difficulties involved.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related, and sad: A young neuroscientist’s bet on cryonics.
3 thoughts on “Uploading Your Mind”
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An interesting article on both the physical and philosophical difficulties involved.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related, and sad: A young neuroscientist’s bet on cryonics.
Comments are closed.
Philosophical debates continue to be waged about whether mind uploading would actually transfer your consciousness or just make a copy of you, which might be nice for your friends and family members, but you’d still be dead.
SPOILER Alert, but in Chappie they did the whole mind upload, and I just didn’t understand why it had to be a transfer and not a copy.
Chappie was originally just a file, so why could the file not be replicated? The soul part wasn’t even known for certain, and really was handled poorly in my opinion (and many others). I can understand discrepancies between a copy of the mind ten minutes ago and now, as there are likely changes in knowledge in just that ten minutes, but isn’t that what most people really want? We want our mind as it may exist today, not after senility or other degradations occur.
It *is* a very sad story. But it was her death and her choice.
The whole mind upload idea well… This concept is all Vernor Vinge’s fault. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names
However I’ve always been partial to Rudy Rucker’s cover of this tune: http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2007/08/25/what-is-wetware/
…and the mind you get may not be all your own! Beware the unlicensed ice cream truck!
Once you can simulate the brain, you could uncover the rules governing how its neurons work to process and store information to greatly simplify and streamline the simulation, developing an automatic process to understand what the wetware encodes (or how its wired, mathematically) and generate a more optimized hardware version. Then, after scanning many brains, you could quit bothering with the 80 or 90 percent that’s going to be the same from person to person (basic functions such as vision, hearing, metabolism) and concentrate and the parts that are different from person to person. Eventually you get to something like The Matrix where you can install modules for language, particle physics, or flying a helicopter. Of course by that point the machines have taken over.