4 ms·

I'm curious as to why you think this

• pmontra 10y ago
  Because even if our brains share a common general design they grow and become different. Synapses connections are created or destroyed according to our personal history, the experiences we had etc. To upload your mind into my brain would mean to rewire my brain at least down to the synapses. There could be some excess neurons left or not enough neurons for you to be there. Not to talk about possible preexisting damages that would prevent recreating the exact structures that let you be you. Plus, all the connections with the rest of the body and the influence that my other systems (endocrine, hormones, etc) could have on the way your mind is allowed to perform. In the best case we should have to find an alternate configuration of my brain that would produce your mind. That configuration would be different from the configuration of your brain. I concede that's not impossible, but it's not how we're doing it with computers and I wonder how we're going to test that. Make the two copies talk together for a while until they agree they're the same person? Compare that with computers which are built from standard parts. Every processor of the same model is the same down to the nanometer scale, every RAM, bus, HDD or SSD are the same. Reboot with a different OS or image and you get a totally different system. Boot two equal systems (because they can be equal) with the same OS and you get two exact copies. After all we've built general purpose computers to be general purpose, didn't we?