16 ms·

Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain?

102 points by andres 11y ago

nostomo17 11y ago
seems hardly worth the trouble. don't flatter yourself your brain needs to stay around - highly unlikely and very un-ecological to power up a machine to maintain a presence of virtualitzed shit for brains. -Just saying. Next Question?
- a3n 11y ago
  If we ever do get to the point of even attempting this, it won't be because the source brain is in any way special. They'll just be medical volunteers, and their best hope is complete failure, because any success will (I think) result in complete insanity.
  - RevRal 11y ago
    >because any success will (I think) result in complete insanity. Why's that?
    - anonmeow 11y ago
      Because brain is a highly nonlinear system, and these are hard to model. You cannot model every metabolic process in every neuron and astrocyte, you have to take computational shortcuts and use approximations. These approximations may have severe global effects. To demonstrate the nonlinearity of these models there was an experiment http://www.pnas.org/content/105/9/3593.full http://www.pnas.org/content/105/9/3593.full where researchers excluded a single spike from the large scale brain simulation. The global state of simulation has diverged after 100 timesteps, compared to the version where this spike was present.
      - RevRal 11y ago
        I'm trying to integrate your linked paper (thank you for that) to a discussion about philosophical zombies and parallel yet alternate behavioral heuristics but I'm afraid I don't quite have the energy. Thank you for your response.
- tim333 11y ago
  > seems hardly worth the trouble Assuming it works well why not keep in touch with the loved ones. Funerals are so gloomy. Why not an upload party? You could make the virtual environment like the versions of heaven in the various religious books and have that stuff for real rather than make believe.
  - drdeca 11y ago
    The beliefs I have would not be immitateable by such methods, even if brain uploading is achieved. It could not properly deal with the problem of my moral imperfection. Also, a computer would have only finitely many states, so it would only delay death, not prevent it, as having the same exact mental state an infinite number of times would, I think, be indistinguishable from having it only once.
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      > The beliefs I have would not be immitateable by such methods, even if brain uploading is achieved. Feel free to skip it, then, but many others want the option. > It could not properly deal with the problem of my moral imperfection. Morals depend on the ability to empathize, evaluate the effects of your actions on others, and act accordingly. So, you can indeed give yourself the tools to become far more moral. > Also, a computer would have only finitely many states, so it would only delay death, not prevent it, as having the same exact mental state an infinite number of times would, I think, be indistinguishable from having it only once. There's a huge amount of theory on how fun and novelty work with enhanced cognitive ability, with many potential solutions to that problem. Beyond that, long before we deal with the finite number of interesting mental states, we'll have to deal with the heat death of the universe. Given a few billion years to work on both problems, I think we'll manage a solution. I'm far more concerned about whether we can solve mortality before the next existential threat to humanity than about whether we can solve problems like the heat death of the universe in billions of years.
      - drdeca 11y ago
        Far more moral, perhaps. Perfectly moral? I doubt it. I don't trust ourselves to be able to perfectly resolve the difficulties between being and having choice, and not making any immoral choices. Also, I'm not a consequentialist; I don't think morality is entirely determined by what impacts the choices have on others. I'm not saying that it would be bad to extend life in this way, only that it would not be the same as what I believe is after life here. And it would not be an end to death. > There's a huge amount of theory on how fun and novelty work with enhanced cognitive ability, with many potential solutions to that problem. I am not speaking of becoming merely bored. Mere entertainment is nothing much. I am speaking of one's experiences ceasing to have an after which one can distinguish from one's before. I am speaking of death, of ceasing to be * . A finite state machine must either reach the same exact state more than once (in which case it cannot distinguish whether it is the first time it has entered that state or not, as that would be part of the state), or it must halt. And if it does reach the same exact state more than once, there is no difference for it whether it reaches a state a third time or not. If its experiences map 1 to 1 with its state, then its experiences have a finite length corresponding to something not more than its total number of states. (If you don't find this convincing, I expect I could provide a more convincing argument based on secret sharing schemes.) Current understanding of physics includes the Bekenstein bound. I see no justification for your apparent belief that a problem with the Bekenstein bound will be found. If the understanding of the Bekenstein bound is correct (and I see no reason to assume that it is not), then to have an unlimited lifespan in the universe, one's volume must increase without bound. This is of course, a very slow rate of expansion, with the lower bound being something like, your radius has to be at least sqrt(log(age × K_1) + K_2), where K_1 and K_2 are some constants. I see no reason to expect that the Bekenstein bound will be broken, and not replaced with something at least similar. * rather, ceasing to be/live in the universe as it is, which I think you would consider to be what death is.
- onewaystreet 11y ago
  So you don't use prescription drugs of any kind or ever visit a doctor? Since it would be hypocritical of you to waste those resources on yourself.
- anonmeow 11y ago
  If someone can pay for these computing resources, why shouldn't he do it? Also there is no physical law that forbids cheap brain-scale computing. 1 exaflops could easily fit in less than 1 cm^3, given sufficiently advanced logic technology.
jacquesm 11y ago
'When the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case's spine. `Do me a favor, boy.' `What's that, Dix?' `This scam of yours, when it's over, you erase this goddam thing.'
- kbenson 11y ago
  It's approaching two decades since I read Neuromancer. I think it's time to revisit, since I barely remember it. Amazingly enough though, I still have very distinct memories of the CGA graphics and some situations from the game. The coffin hotel, the diner, pawning organs. And I played that a decade before I read the book. How has nobody remade this game yet, with the indie resurgence of adventure games?
  - anonmeow 11y ago
    If you want a hard science-fiction novel about digital humans you could read Greg Egan's Permutation City, it's a masterpiece.
    - MichaelGG 11y ago
      Greg Egan is fantastic; I particularly liked his short stories. One should note that he says people shouldn't expect to just sit down and read a book, but should use a pencil and paper to help figure things out. Though that doesn't apply so much to Permutation City, it does to other stuff like Orthogonal and Incandescence. (From what I've heard Schild's Ladder, too).
anonmeow 11y ago
With modern ML techniques it looks feasible to recreate at least online behavior of an individual - facebook likes, comments etc. The datasets are here, in facebook/google datcenters, and DL models are already used to model conversation. It would be interesting to know just how many megabytes of logs of your online activities is really necessary to extrapolate your behavior into the future. Facebook AI research is probably playing with such models right now.
- pygy_ 11y ago
  There' a Black Mirror episode built around that very idea.
- astazangasta 11y ago
  Eh? Humans are not fixed entities, they adapt and learn. You can't extrapolate into the future based on my previous anything. Six-year-old me can't tell you who thirty-six year-old me is.
  - anonmeow 11y ago
    Given enough data and a good model (recurrent neural network can model arbitrary algorithms, for example) you can learn algorithmic regularities in data, including learning itself. There is a paper just about that: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-44668-0_13#page-1 http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-44668-0_13#... If this can be scaled to human-like learning remains to be seen, but training a conversation RNN model that remembers some details of past conversations and acts on them should be possible.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
tim333 11y ago
A couple of quibbles with the article: >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.) It's not so hard to estimate. Just extrapolate progress on scanning, computing etc. About 2050 plus or minus a couple of decades. We had a 20um scan in 2013 and you'd probably want to get that down to 20nm for a connectome so if you assume resolution doubling every couple of years that would be about 2035. (2013 scan: http://io9.com/see-the-first-ultra-high-resolution-3d-scan-of-the-ent-514395280 http://io9.com/see-the-first-ultra-high-resolution-3d-scan-o... Images showing neural connections: http://book.bionumbers.org/how-big-is-a-synapse/ http://book.bionumbers.org/how-big-is-a-synapse/) Of course as the article points out a connectome misses a lot of chemical detail. >It will almost certainly be a very long time before we can hope to preserve a brain in sufficient detail and for sufficient time that some civilization much farther in the future, perhaps thousands or even millions of years from now, might have the technological capacity to “upload” and recreate that individual’s mind. Or quite possibly we can do it just now for $30k or so by sticking the body in liquid nitrogen. (http://www.cryonics.org/membership/ http://www.cryonics.org/membership/ ). Maybe that won't work but maybe it will.
- epistasis 11y ago
  A couple of quibbles with this: microscopy technology doesn't advance that quickly, certainly not doubling every few years. A new, entirely different technology is far more likely than creeping improvements, as in semiconductors. However, these are far harder to predict.
  - tim333 11y ago
    I was thinking about the details. We have good enough microscopes already resolution wise but to cut up a brain fine enough and picture it with existing electron microscopes would take ages, probably centuries with current tech so it needs a speed improvement more than anything. Also a 20nm scan could produce an awful lot of data ~ a billion TB which could be an issue even allowing for Moores law. Still there's quite a lot of research money going it to this stuff.
roflchoppa 11y ago
i find it hard to imagine how to replicate the smaller connections of my brain, and the inter-connections that they all have. With that being said, i hope that it could be done, because i would be super down, and would want to be uploaded into the net.
- anonmeow 11y ago
  Small volume of mouse cortex is already successfully scanned at 3x3x20nm voxel resolution, with smallest synaptic details being visible http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(15)00824-7 http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(15)00824-7 The tool is called ATLUM. The process could be scaled up.
  - zyxley 11y ago
    Yeah, it's fundamentally not "this is impossible" but "this is very hard and expensive", and very hard and expensive tasks have a remarkable way of becoming cheaper and easier over the long term.
0xcde4c3db 11y ago
I think discussions around this are ill-served by the "upload" metaphor, as it somewhat implies that the new brain, the original brain, and the uploading process are all largely separate things. It seems much more likely to me that the new brain will take the form of an augmentation that survives the death of the original brain. The personality would be "uploaded" not by deliberately sampling parameters to feed a model, but by the new brain organically (heh) becoming a component and embodiment of the existing personality. I'm sure this isn't a new idea, but I don't know what it's called.
- anonmeow 11y ago
  They should just call it copying/copies. The prospect of having your copy managing your assets could be desirable, for example.
- nbadg 11y ago
  Agreed. Especially given our limited (read: virtually nonexistent) understanding of how, exactly, consciousness is created, it seems to me that this gradual transition through an organically integrated component is the most likely scenario by which a digital consciousness could be created.
  - tim333 11y ago
    Or perhaps a Siri like AI could try to imitate someone or 'be' them in a way that an actor does. That seems the kind of tech we are closest to actually being able to try to build.
    - nbadg 11y ago
      I'd say that's certainly what we're closest to, but isn't the point to actually experience the transition? If all you have is an imitation, then you're still dead. Though, it might be nice to create duplicates of yourself to get more done in the day.
      - tim333 11y ago
gwern 11y ago
http://www.brainpreservation.org/ken-hayworths-personal-response-to-mit-technology-review-article/ http://www.brainpreservation.org/ken-hayworths-personal-resp...
MichaelGG 11y ago
> We all find our own solutions to the problem death poses. No! No body does this. People make up excuses. People spin death to be a positive, often under some guise of Deep Wisdom. People come up with all sorts of ways to cope with death, but calling any of them a solution is just false. Death is a vile, atrocious thing, the biggest enemy humanity has. We don't say that slaves all found solutions to slavery. Or that everyone finds solutions to domestic abuse. Or solutions to dementia or Alzheimer's. Death is a far greater evil.[1] So how disgusting is it to say everyone finds a solution. I admit the author probably didn't intend to imply this, but it's exactly that kind of thinking that we should be aware of and fight. Just because it seems inevitable, we should not make it socially acceptable to give up and view death as anything but the wickedness it is. 1: Yes there are atrocities worse than death, but many of those involve death, or are worse because of the limited timespans caused by death. Apart from having your mind destroyed, I'm guessing most things would be healed by rather long periods of time, than sufferers would prefer a period of suffering+long OK life, vs suffering+death.
- rntz 11y ago
  No. Death is really not that bad; to be dead is no more evil than not to exist, because to be dead is to not exist. Dying itself is evil in that it causes grief to others still living; but while grief is painful, I do not think anyone would compare the evil of suffering grief to the evil of suffering slavery. One might argue that death is bad on counterfactual grounds: if a person had not died, they could still be alive and happy, and isn't that better than them not existing? But this argument leads to the Repugnant Conclusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox)! So be very careful if you take this line of argument that you understand what you are saying. I happen to be a total-happiness utilitarian, and do accept the repugnant conclusion. But ultimately all this means is that death is a mirror-image of birth - it ceases one hopefully-happy life; birth begins one. There is grief attached to death and joy attached to birth, but apart from that there is just as much imperative to maximize births as there is to prevent deaths - and one of these is far easier. This is, however, a deeply counterintuitive position that I don't expect many others to share. This isn't Deep Wisdom. It's just utilitarianism, taken seriously.
rl3 11y ago
The author seems to have written the article on the assumption that it will be humans figuring out a brain upload mechanism. While his time frame estimates might be sound given that context, I'd argue they're wildly inaccurate given a more likely scenario: such things will be brought into existence first via a super-intelligent agent, if at all. If that proves to be the case, the time frame for brain uploading becomes roughly bound to the advent of AGI. When that happens, the same entity capable of creating our brain upload mechanism would likely be capable of endowing humans with effectively immortal bodies just the same. In other words, technology like this is almost certainly going to be part of a post-singularity world (assuming there is a singularity in the first place), and who knows what that will look like.
- Retric 11y ago
  There is a huge range from slightly smarter than human AI vs the kind of 'magic' AI it would take to make the singularity happen. An AI that's 10% smarter than any human would probably not be that noticeable outside of testing, as it's not obvious who the smartest person in a room is. And it would take a decade of study to catch up to the cutting edge on just one field. 10x that and your doubling the rate of progress that a single person was making, but that's not really going to change much. Suppose we develop an AI that's 100x better than that, or 10 times as fast as any person as in they can do in 1 hour what it would take a highly trained and educated person 10 hours to do. Well, after a year or two they could probably be roughly as capable as a really good 20 person team due to lower communication overhead, but adding one more 20 person team is not going to change the world much. A million of them, might double the rate that the world progresses, but that's both a long time coming and probably not going to change things much. To really get the singularity type progress, you need an AI that can make it's self smarter though better software and hardware, which seem like a far harder problem than just building a working AI. After all what if the first thousand just want to sit around and read Fan-fiction all day.
  - MichaelBurge 11y ago
    Once the work of getting the first human-level or better AI is out the door, engineers are really good at mass-producing it or optimizing it. I could see someone investing in a factory to manufacture a billion of them within 10 years, once someone has demonstrated that it's possible.
mrdrozdov 11y ago
What would I do with an uploadable version of my brain? I'd send it off to an accelerated university where it can learn at a rate far faster than I ever could. Plus, if we could upload a brain, then there's a good chance that we understand how to manipulate the state of an existing brain. So after my brain has graduated, we'll simply upload that virtual brain's state back into my skull! All this would take about 2-3 min tops? But somehow I imagine this will still cause university enrollment prices to climb. It's student loans all the way down.
- kemayo 11y ago
  It's actually interesting to consider the divergent paths followed by a merge scenario presented here. If we assume that uploaded-you is put through a simulated "going to university" experience, then it's a few years older than you are. Even if it was _only_ simulating classes and studying, somehow turning off any "human" needs for social interaction and enteratinment, it's had years of time to think new thoughts, assimilate new ideas, and become a fundamentally different person. If it's completely overwriting your brain's current state, then you're replacing yourself with someone similar to you but who'll be _obviously_ different to anyone who knows you. If it's more a merge scenario, then you're (effectively) killing yourself and the copy, and maybe the copy won't want to rejoin you if it means losing its own distinct state. Continuity of consciousness is weird to think about.
mrdrozdov 11y ago
I sense this will be one of those articles that will be a perfect example of someone who had a very firm position against progress is clearly proven wrong. I wonder if we could automatically flag articles like these based on the number of tautologically negative arguments that appear...
geographomics 11y ago
An additional complication is the role of the billions of glial cells that are present in the brain. Their function of supporting neurons is quite well characterised, but they can also more specifically modulate neuronal function, so their place in a comprehensive connectome model shouldn't be ignored. Then there is the network of vasculature, the flow of cerebrospinal fluid, interactions with hormones, and just generally all the interfacing with other bodily systems. All this would have to measured and modelled somehow too, in addition to all the billions of neurons. I agree with the author, there's no way all this is going to solved any time soon.
comrh 11y ago
Permutation City by Greg Egan explores what it would mean if you could easily upload your consciousness but wealth meant access to better, faster, hardware to store it.
- ttctciyf 11y ago
  His short story, Learning to be me, is a really great piece exploring a related technology. Recommended!
nradov 11y ago
While I have no hard evidence for this, I expect we will eventually find that human intelligence and consciousness depends heavily on quantum effects. Thus it will always be impossible to scan and upload a human brain in a way that captures the essence of a person's mind. Even though I don't think it will ever happen I enjoyed reading the hard science fiction novel "Hegemony" by Mark Kalina. It presents an interesting vision of what life would be like in the far future with mind uploading. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/atomicnovel.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/atomicnovel.php
- qudat 11y ago
  > While I have no hard evidence for this, I expect we will eventually find that human intelligence and consciousness depends heavily on quantum effects. Agreed, seemingly simple processes like photosynthesis cannot be effective without considering the quantum weirdness at play. Certainly the human brain, one of the most complex systems known to us would also heavily rely on something so foundational as quantum majesteria.
- nevinera 11y ago
  > expect we will eventually find that human intelligence and consciousness depends heavily on quantum effects. Thus it will always be impossible to scan and upload a human brain in a way that captures the essence of a person's mind And you have a strong reason to believe that emulating or implementing those quantum effects in a structure other than the human brain is impossible? As a secondary argument - if an reacts to all stimuli and behaves in all ways exactly as the corresponding human would, claiming that it "lacks the essence of a person's mind" prompts a pretty obvious (and well-considered) question.. how do I know you're not just an essence-less entity that acts exactly like a Real Human would act? Or are you claiming that correct emulation of a human's behavior is impossible, because 'quantum'?
  - nradov 11y ago
    At some point in the far future we may be able to implement an AGI as a quantum computer. However I don't think we will ever be able to scan and upload an existing human mind into that computer; there isn't even any theoretical way to measure and store the whole quantum state.
bitL 11y ago
How would you program mind if you were writing a simulation?
anon4this1 11y ago
Assuming that the ability to upload our entire brain to a computer will not be available during out current lifetime, what about the idea of mass data collection of our experiences, storage of this data, then periodically run improving algorithms that combine all our experiences into a consciousness? This would maybe involve wearing a camera 24/7 to record everything we see and hear, and also some feedback on our own inner thoughts and our own recording of our emotional responses to things. When we finally die, a computer crunches all this data using neural networks to create a consciousness based on our life experiences and emotional responses. This would initially be maybe not fantastic, but as technology progresses the crunching of the source data improves and every decade a new iteration of our consciousness can be produced, hopefully coming closer and closer to the real us.
nshepperd 11y ago
So, to justify their "just accept death, guys" conclusion, the author makes broad sweeping statements like "details quite likely far beyond what any method today could preserve in a dead brain" without providing any specific arguments about the limitations of vitrification whatsoever. Not even a bald assertion that "cryonics fails to preserve structure X". Yup. Okay.
ryanmarsh 11y ago
When I look at efforts to synthesize the human brain within a computer I see an effort to make a synthetic bird rather than a machine that flies. If this analogy has any use as a model beyond a cursory observation then a focus on machines that solve hard problems will bear more fruit and earlier (maybe ever) than attempts to fully replicate the human brain. Today is it possible to build an (outwardly) anatomically correct and functioning sparrow (in all respects) out of synthetic materials? I don't know but surely it is hard. To make one certainly would have been impossible for the Wright brothers. Today we have things like the F22, A380, and little drones. Each is quite complex but the complexity accreted over time, each layer a pragmatic solution to a problem at hand. If we take the same approach what kind of "thinking machine" might we end up with in 100 years time?
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  The primary problem with the phenomenology approachieve to AGI is that we have so little understanding about the mechanism of general intelligence. Some aspects of intelligence, we understand, but as is analogous to flight it's nowhere close. Whereas with flight the Wright brothers and before them Richard pearce understood it well enough to make an approximation and thus working implementations, we don't have anything close to that kind of understanding.
- kr4 11y ago
  Thinking (or thoughts) are different from consciousness. A simple experiment can tell you this. Sit silently and observe your mind. You'd see thoughts keep on popping up, if you don't indulge with them, each would fade away quickly. If you do indulge, you get on a ride of similar chain of thoughts. This riding is termed as "thinking". IMO the neuron pathways that exist in our physical brain are determined based on "rides of thoughts" we have taken in our life so far. But there's no visual or physical proof to locate the consciousness that does this observation and takes the ride. So uploading brains means uploading only "the experiences" you have got in your life but as long as the rider isn't there, these are just mere memories with no further rides possible.
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
rebootthesystem 11y ago
Great Mambo Chicken and The Transhuman Condition http://www.amazon.com/Great-Mambo-Chicken-Transhuman-Condition/dp/0201567512 http://www.amazon.com/Great-Mambo-Chicken-Transhuman-Conditi... Very interesting book.
cosmez 11y ago
Upload my brain, so people in the future can use it as a DIY kit for Artificial Intelligence? This article sounds a lot like SOMA the video game. brain scans, uploading your brain, etc http://somagame.com/ http://somagame.com/
teekert 11y ago
TL:DR; The brain is very complex so it will take long, I don't know how long and I don't dare to make an estimate, but, as I'm getting older I am more and more at peace with dying.
kybernetikos 11y ago
So, my concern about uploading my brain, is whose cloud service do you trust to run your consciousness? Google? Microsoft? Amazon? Facebook? Apple? The level of trust that I'd require is pretty high. You could imagine it once again being relevant to check the pedigree of a company. Ideally there'd be a cloud provider already running now that is known for its trustworthiness. 'established 2013' might actually mean something one day. My main hope is for indistinguishability encryption to reach the level where I wouldn't really have to trust the provider, but as long as you pay a significant performance penalty you're going to end up massively disadvantaged. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

102 points by andres 11y ago

seems hardly worth the trouble. don't flatter yourself your brain needs to stay around - highly unlikely and very un-ecological to power up a machine to maintain a presence of virtualitzed shit for brains. -Just saying. Next Question?

a3n 11y ago
If we ever do get to the point of even attempting this, it won't be because the source brain is in any way special. They'll just be medical volunteers, and their best hope is complete failure, because any success will (I think) result in complete insanity.
- RevRal 11y ago
  >because any success will (I think) result in complete insanity. Why's that?
  - anonmeow 11y ago
    Because brain is a highly nonlinear system, and these are hard to model. You cannot model every metabolic process in every neuron and astrocyte, you have to take computational shortcuts and use approximations. These approximations may have severe global effects. To demonstrate the nonlinearity of these models there was an experiment http://www.pnas.org/content/105/9/3593.full http://www.pnas.org/content/105/9/3593.full where researchers excluded a single spike from the large scale brain simulation. The global state of simulation has diverged after 100 timesteps, compared to the version where this spike was present.
    - RevRal 11y ago
      I'm trying to integrate your linked paper (thank you for that) to a discussion about philosophical zombies and parallel yet alternate behavioral heuristics but I'm afraid I don't quite have the energy. Thank you for your response.
tim333 11y ago
> seems hardly worth the trouble Assuming it works well why not keep in touch with the loved ones. Funerals are so gloomy. Why not an upload party? You could make the virtual environment like the versions of heaven in the various religious books and have that stuff for real rather than make believe.
- drdeca 11y ago
  The beliefs I have would not be immitateable by such methods, even if brain uploading is achieved. It could not properly deal with the problem of my moral imperfection. Also, a computer would have only finitely many states, so it would only delay death, not prevent it, as having the same exact mental state an infinite number of times would, I think, be indistinguishable from having it only once.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    > The beliefs I have would not be immitateable by such methods, even if brain uploading is achieved. Feel free to skip it, then, but many others want the option. > It could not properly deal with the problem of my moral imperfection. Morals depend on the ability to empathize, evaluate the effects of your actions on others, and act accordingly. So, you can indeed give yourself the tools to become far more moral. > Also, a computer would have only finitely many states, so it would only delay death, not prevent it, as having the same exact mental state an infinite number of times would, I think, be indistinguishable from having it only once. There's a huge amount of theory on how fun and novelty work with enhanced cognitive ability, with many potential solutions to that problem. Beyond that, long before we deal with the finite number of interesting mental states, we'll have to deal with the heat death of the universe. Given a few billion years to work on both problems, I think we'll manage a solution. I'm far more concerned about whether we can solve mortality before the next existential threat to humanity than about whether we can solve problems like the heat death of the universe in billions of years.
    - drdeca 11y ago
      Far more moral, perhaps. Perfectly moral? I doubt it. I don't trust ourselves to be able to perfectly resolve the difficulties between being and having choice, and not making any immoral choices. Also, I'm not a consequentialist; I don't think morality is entirely determined by what impacts the choices have on others. I'm not saying that it would be bad to extend life in this way, only that it would not be the same as what I believe is after life here. And it would not be an end to death. > There's a huge amount of theory on how fun and novelty work with enhanced cognitive ability, with many potential solutions to that problem. I am not speaking of becoming merely bored. Mere entertainment is nothing much. I am speaking of one's experiences ceasing to have an after which one can distinguish from one's before. I am speaking of death, of ceasing to be * . A finite state machine must either reach the same exact state more than once (in which case it cannot distinguish whether it is the first time it has entered that state or not, as that would be part of the state), or it must halt. And if it does reach the same exact state more than once, there is no difference for it whether it reaches a state a third time or not. If its experiences map 1 to 1 with its state, then its experiences have a finite length corresponding to something not more than its total number of states. (If you don't find this convincing, I expect I could provide a more convincing argument based on secret sharing schemes.) Current understanding of physics includes the Bekenstein bound. I see no justification for your apparent belief that a problem with the Bekenstein bound will be found. If the understanding of the Bekenstein bound is correct (and I see no reason to assume that it is not), then to have an unlimited lifespan in the universe, one's volume must increase without bound. This is of course, a very slow rate of expansion, with the lower bound being something like, your radius has to be at least sqrt(log(age × K_1) + K_2), where K_1 and K_2 are some constants. I see no reason to expect that the Bekenstein bound will be broken, and not replaced with something at least similar. * rather, ceasing to be/live in the universe as it is, which I think you would consider to be what death is.
onewaystreet 11y ago
So you don't use prescription drugs of any kind or ever visit a doctor? Since it would be hypocritical of you to waste those resources on yourself.
anonmeow 11y ago
If someone can pay for these computing resources, why shouldn't he do it? Also there is no physical law that forbids cheap brain-scale computing. 1 exaflops could easily fit in less than 1 cm^3, given sufficiently advanced logic technology.

jacquesm 11y ago

'When the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case's spine. `Do me a favor, boy.' `What's that, Dix?' `This scam of yours, when it's over, you erase this goddam thing.'

kbenson 11y ago
It's approaching two decades since I read Neuromancer. I think it's time to revisit, since I barely remember it. Amazingly enough though, I still have very distinct memories of the CGA graphics and some situations from the game. The coffin hotel, the diner, pawning organs. And I played that a decade before I read the book. How has nobody remade this game yet, with the indie resurgence of adventure games?
- anonmeow 11y ago
  If you want a hard science-fiction novel about digital humans you could read Greg Egan's Permutation City, it's a masterpiece.
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    Greg Egan is fantastic; I particularly liked his short stories. One should note that he says people shouldn't expect to just sit down and read a book, but should use a pencil and paper to help figure things out. Though that doesn't apply so much to Permutation City, it does to other stuff like Orthogonal and Incandescence. (From what I've heard Schild's Ladder, too).

anonmeow 11y ago

With modern ML techniques it looks feasible to recreate at least online behavior of an individual - facebook likes, comments etc. The datasets are here, in facebook/google datcenters, and DL models are already used to model conversation. It would be interesting to know just how many megabytes of logs of your online activities is really necessary to extrapolate your behavior into the future. Facebook AI research is probably playing with such models right now.

pygy_ 11y ago
There' a Black Mirror episode built around that very idea.
astazangasta 11y ago
Eh? Humans are not fixed entities, they adapt and learn. You can't extrapolate into the future based on my previous anything. Six-year-old me can't tell you who thirty-six year-old me is.
- anonmeow 11y ago
  Given enough data and a good model (recurrent neural network can model arbitrary algorithms, for example) you can learn algorithmic regularities in data, including learning itself. There is a paper just about that: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-44668-0_13#page-1 http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-44668-0_13#... If this can be scaled to human-like learning remains to be seen, but training a conversation RNN model that remembers some details of past conversations and acts on them should be possible.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

tim333 11y ago

A couple of quibbles with the article: >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.) It's not so hard to estimate. Just extrapolate progress on scanning, computing etc. About 2050 plus or minus a couple of decades. We had a 20um scan in 2013 and you'd probably want to get that down to 20nm for a connectome so if you assume resolution doubling every couple of years that would be about 2035. (2013 scan: http://io9.com/see-the-first-ultra-high-resolution-3d-scan-of-the-ent-514395280 http://io9.com/see-the-first-ultra-high-resolution-3d-scan-o... Images showing neural connections: http://book.bionumbers.org/how-big-is-a-synapse/ http://book.bionumbers.org/how-big-is-a-synapse/) Of course as the article points out a connectome misses a lot of chemical detail. >It will almost certainly be a very long time before we can hope to preserve a brain in sufficient detail and for sufficient time that some civilization much farther in the future, perhaps thousands or even millions of years from now, might have the technological capacity to “upload” and recreate that individual’s mind. Or quite possibly we can do it just now for $30k or so by sticking the body in liquid nitrogen. (http://www.cryonics.org/membership/ http://www.cryonics.org/membership/ ). Maybe that won't work but maybe it will.

epistasis 11y ago
A couple of quibbles with this: microscopy technology doesn't advance that quickly, certainly not doubling every few years. A new, entirely different technology is far more likely than creeping improvements, as in semiconductors. However, these are far harder to predict.
- tim333 11y ago
  I was thinking about the details. We have good enough microscopes already resolution wise but to cut up a brain fine enough and picture it with existing electron microscopes would take ages, probably centuries with current tech so it needs a speed improvement more than anything. Also a 20nm scan could produce an awful lot of data ~ a billion TB which could be an issue even allowing for Moores law. Still there's quite a lot of research money going it to this stuff.

roflchoppa 11y ago

i find it hard to imagine how to replicate the smaller connections of my brain, and the inter-connections that they all have. With that being said, i hope that it could be done, because i would be super down, and would want to be uploaded into the net.

anonmeow 11y ago
Small volume of mouse cortex is already successfully scanned at 3x3x20nm voxel resolution, with smallest synaptic details being visible http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(15)00824-7 http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(15)00824-7 The tool is called ATLUM. The process could be scaled up.
- zyxley 11y ago
  Yeah, it's fundamentally not "this is impossible" but "this is very hard and expensive", and very hard and expensive tasks have a remarkable way of becoming cheaper and easier over the long term.

0xcde4c3db 11y ago

I think discussions around this are ill-served by the "upload" metaphor, as it somewhat implies that the new brain, the original brain, and the uploading process are all largely separate things. It seems much more likely to me that the new brain will take the form of an augmentation that survives the death of the original brain. The personality would be "uploaded" not by deliberately sampling parameters to feed a model, but by the new brain organically (heh) becoming a component and embodiment of the existing personality. I'm sure this isn't a new idea, but I don't know what it's called.

anonmeow 11y ago
They should just call it copying/copies. The prospect of having your copy managing your assets could be desirable, for example.
nbadg 11y ago
Agreed. Especially given our limited (read: virtually nonexistent) understanding of how, exactly, consciousness is created, it seems to me that this gradual transition through an organically integrated component is the most likely scenario by which a digital consciousness could be created.
- tim333 11y ago
  Or perhaps a Siri like AI could try to imitate someone or 'be' them in a way that an actor does. That seems the kind of tech we are closest to actually being able to try to build.
  - nbadg 11y ago
    I'd say that's certainly what we're closest to, but isn't the point to actually experience the transition? If all you have is an imitation, then you're still dead. Though, it might be nice to create duplicates of yourself to get more done in the day.
    - tim333 11y ago

gwern 11y ago

http://www.brainpreservation.org/ken-hayworths-personal-response-to-mit-technology-review-article/ http://www.brainpreservation.org/ken-hayworths-personal-resp...

MichaelGG 11y ago

> We all find our own solutions to the problem death poses. No! No body does this. People make up excuses. People spin death to be a positive, often under some guise of Deep Wisdom. People come up with all sorts of ways to cope with death, but calling any of them a solution is just false. Death is a vile, atrocious thing, the biggest enemy humanity has. We don't say that slaves all found solutions to slavery. Or that everyone finds solutions to domestic abuse. Or solutions to dementia or Alzheimer's. Death is a far greater evil.[1] So how disgusting is it to say everyone finds a solution. I admit the author probably didn't intend to imply this, but it's exactly that kind of thinking that we should be aware of and fight. Just because it seems inevitable, we should not make it socially acceptable to give up and view death as anything but the wickedness it is. 1: Yes there are atrocities worse than death, but many of those involve death, or are worse because of the limited timespans caused by death. Apart from having your mind destroyed, I'm guessing most things would be healed by rather long periods of time, than sufferers would prefer a period of suffering+long OK life, vs suffering+death.

rntz 11y ago
No. Death is really not that bad; to be dead is no more evil than not to exist, because to be dead is to not exist. Dying itself is evil in that it causes grief to others still living; but while grief is painful, I do not think anyone would compare the evil of suffering grief to the evil of suffering slavery. One might argue that death is bad on counterfactual grounds: if a person had not died, they could still be alive and happy, and isn't that better than them not existing? But this argument leads to the Repugnant Conclusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox)! So be very careful if you take this line of argument that you understand what you are saying. I happen to be a total-happiness utilitarian, and do accept the repugnant conclusion. But ultimately all this means is that death is a mirror-image of birth - it ceases one hopefully-happy life; birth begins one. There is grief attached to death and joy attached to birth, but apart from that there is just as much imperative to maximize births as there is to prevent deaths - and one of these is far easier. This is, however, a deeply counterintuitive position that I don't expect many others to share. This isn't Deep Wisdom. It's just utilitarianism, taken seriously.

rl3 11y ago

The author seems to have written the article on the assumption that it will be humans figuring out a brain upload mechanism. While his time frame estimates might be sound given that context, I'd argue they're wildly inaccurate given a more likely scenario: such things will be brought into existence first via a super-intelligent agent, if at all. If that proves to be the case, the time frame for brain uploading becomes roughly bound to the advent of AGI. When that happens, the same entity capable of creating our brain upload mechanism would likely be capable of endowing humans with effectively immortal bodies just the same. In other words, technology like this is almost certainly going to be part of a post-singularity world (assuming there is a singularity in the first place), and who knows what that will look like.

Retric 11y ago
There is a huge range from slightly smarter than human AI vs the kind of 'magic' AI it would take to make the singularity happen. An AI that's 10% smarter than any human would probably not be that noticeable outside of testing, as it's not obvious who the smartest person in a room is. And it would take a decade of study to catch up to the cutting edge on just one field. 10x that and your doubling the rate of progress that a single person was making, but that's not really going to change much. Suppose we develop an AI that's 100x better than that, or 10 times as fast as any person as in they can do in 1 hour what it would take a highly trained and educated person 10 hours to do. Well, after a year or two they could probably be roughly as capable as a really good 20 person team due to lower communication overhead, but adding one more 20 person team is not going to change the world much. A million of them, might double the rate that the world progresses, but that's both a long time coming and probably not going to change things much. To really get the singularity type progress, you need an AI that can make it's self smarter though better software and hardware, which seem like a far harder problem than just building a working AI. After all what if the first thousand just want to sit around and read Fan-fiction all day.
- MichaelBurge 11y ago
  Once the work of getting the first human-level or better AI is out the door, engineers are really good at mass-producing it or optimizing it. I could see someone investing in a factory to manufacture a billion of them within 10 years, once someone has demonstrated that it's possible.

mrdrozdov 11y ago

What would I do with an uploadable version of my brain? I'd send it off to an accelerated university where it can learn at a rate far faster than I ever could. Plus, if we could upload a brain, then there's a good chance that we understand how to manipulate the state of an existing brain. So after my brain has graduated, we'll simply upload that virtual brain's state back into my skull! All this would take about 2-3 min tops? But somehow I imagine this will still cause university enrollment prices to climb. It's student loans all the way down.

kemayo 11y ago
It's actually interesting to consider the divergent paths followed by a merge scenario presented here. If we assume that uploaded-you is put through a simulated "going to university" experience, then it's a few years older than you are. Even if it was _only_ simulating classes and studying, somehow turning off any "human" needs for social interaction and enteratinment, it's had years of time to think new thoughts, assimilate new ideas, and become a fundamentally different person. If it's completely overwriting your brain's current state, then you're replacing yourself with someone similar to you but who'll be _obviously_ different to anyone who knows you. If it's more a merge scenario, then you're (effectively) killing yourself and the copy, and maybe the copy won't want to rejoin you if it means losing its own distinct state. Continuity of consciousness is weird to think about.

mrdrozdov 11y ago

I sense this will be one of those articles that will be a perfect example of someone who had a very firm position against progress is clearly proven wrong. I wonder if we could automatically flag articles like these based on the number of tautologically negative arguments that appear...

geographomics 11y ago

An additional complication is the role of the billions of glial cells that are present in the brain. Their function of supporting neurons is quite well characterised, but they can also more specifically modulate neuronal function, so their place in a comprehensive connectome model shouldn't be ignored. Then there is the network of vasculature, the flow of cerebrospinal fluid, interactions with hormones, and just generally all the interfacing with other bodily systems. All this would have to measured and modelled somehow too, in addition to all the billions of neurons. I agree with the author, there's no way all this is going to solved any time soon.

comrh 11y ago

Permutation City by Greg Egan explores what it would mean if you could easily upload your consciousness but wealth meant access to better, faster, hardware to store it.

ttctciyf 11y ago
His short story, Learning to be me, is a really great piece exploring a related technology. Recommended!

nradov 11y ago

While I have no hard evidence for this, I expect we will eventually find that human intelligence and consciousness depends heavily on quantum effects. Thus it will always be impossible to scan and upload a human brain in a way that captures the essence of a person's mind. Even though I don't think it will ever happen I enjoyed reading the hard science fiction novel "Hegemony" by Mark Kalina. It presents an interesting vision of what life would be like in the far future with mind uploading. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/atomicnovel.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/atomicnovel.php

qudat 11y ago
> While I have no hard evidence for this, I expect we will eventually find that human intelligence and consciousness depends heavily on quantum effects. Agreed, seemingly simple processes like photosynthesis cannot be effective without considering the quantum weirdness at play. Certainly the human brain, one of the most complex systems known to us would also heavily rely on something so foundational as quantum majesteria.
nevinera 11y ago
> expect we will eventually find that human intelligence and consciousness depends heavily on quantum effects. Thus it will always be impossible to scan and upload a human brain in a way that captures the essence of a person's mind And you have a strong reason to believe that emulating or implementing those quantum effects in a structure other than the human brain is impossible? As a secondary argument - if an reacts to all stimuli and behaves in all ways exactly as the corresponding human would, claiming that it "lacks the essence of a person's mind" prompts a pretty obvious (and well-considered) question.. how do I know you're not just an essence-less entity that acts exactly like a Real Human would act? Or are you claiming that correct emulation of a human's behavior is impossible, because 'quantum'?
- nradov 11y ago
  At some point in the far future we may be able to implement an AGI as a quantum computer. However I don't think we will ever be able to scan and upload an existing human mind into that computer; there isn't even any theoretical way to measure and store the whole quantum state.

bitL 11y ago

How would you program mind if you were writing a simulation?

anon4this1 11y ago

Assuming that the ability to upload our entire brain to a computer will not be available during out current lifetime, what about the idea of mass data collection of our experiences, storage of this data, then periodically run improving algorithms that combine all our experiences into a consciousness? This would maybe involve wearing a camera 24/7 to record everything we see and hear, and also some feedback on our own inner thoughts and our own recording of our emotional responses to things. When we finally die, a computer crunches all this data using neural networks to create a consciousness based on our life experiences and emotional responses. This would initially be maybe not fantastic, but as technology progresses the crunching of the source data improves and every decade a new iteration of our consciousness can be produced, hopefully coming closer and closer to the real us.

nshepperd 11y ago

So, to justify their "just accept death, guys" conclusion, the author makes broad sweeping statements like "details quite likely far beyond what any method today could preserve in a dead brain" without providing any specific arguments about the limitations of vitrification whatsoever. Not even a bald assertion that "cryonics fails to preserve structure X". Yup. Okay.

ryanmarsh 11y ago

When I look at efforts to synthesize the human brain within a computer I see an effort to make a synthetic bird rather than a machine that flies. If this analogy has any use as a model beyond a cursory observation then a focus on machines that solve hard problems will bear more fruit and earlier (maybe ever) than attempts to fully replicate the human brain. Today is it possible to build an (outwardly) anatomically correct and functioning sparrow (in all respects) out of synthetic materials? I don't know but surely it is hard. To make one certainly would have been impossible for the Wright brothers. Today we have things like the F22, A380, and little drones. Each is quite complex but the complexity accreted over time, each layer a pragmatic solution to a problem at hand. If we take the same approach what kind of "thinking machine" might we end up with in 100 years time?

AndrewKemendo 11y ago
The primary problem with the phenomenology approachieve to AGI is that we have so little understanding about the mechanism of general intelligence. Some aspects of intelligence, we understand, but as is analogous to flight it's nowhere close. Whereas with flight the Wright brothers and before them Richard pearce understood it well enough to make an approximation and thus working implementations, we don't have anything close to that kind of understanding.
kr4 11y ago
Thinking (or thoughts) are different from consciousness. A simple experiment can tell you this. Sit silently and observe your mind. You'd see thoughts keep on popping up, if you don't indulge with them, each would fade away quickly. If you do indulge, you get on a ride of similar chain of thoughts. This riding is termed as "thinking". IMO the neuron pathways that exist in our physical brain are determined based on "rides of thoughts" we have taken in our life so far. But there's no visual or physical proof to locate the consciousness that does this observation and takes the ride. So uploading brains means uploading only "the experiences" you have got in your life but as long as the rider isn't there, these are just mere memories with no further rides possible.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago

rebootthesystem 11y ago

Great Mambo Chicken and The Transhuman Condition http://www.amazon.com/Great-Mambo-Chicken-Transhuman-Condition/dp/0201567512 http://www.amazon.com/Great-Mambo-Chicken-Transhuman-Conditi... Very interesting book.

cosmez 11y ago

Upload my brain, so people in the future can use it as a DIY kit for Artificial Intelligence? This article sounds a lot like SOMA the video game. brain scans, uploading your brain, etc http://somagame.com/ http://somagame.com/

teekert 11y ago

TL:DR; The brain is very complex so it will take long, I don't know how long and I don't dare to make an estimate, but, as I'm getting older I am more and more at peace with dying.

kybernetikos 11y ago

So, my concern about uploading my brain, is whose cloud service do you trust to run your consciousness? Google? Microsoft? Amazon? Facebook? Apple? The level of trust that I'd require is pretty high. You could imagine it once again being relevant to check the pedigree of a company. Ideally there'd be a cloud provider already running now that is known for its trustworthiness. 'established 2013' might actually mean something one day. My main hope is for indistinguishability encryption to reach the level where I wouldn't really have to trust the provider, but as long as you pay a significant performance penalty you're going to end up massively disadvantaged. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]