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it isn't feasible. here is why: imagine that we create a perfect copy of a person who is alive. there is now person A, and person B, who are identical. but b

it isn't feasible. here is why: imagine that we create a perfect copy of a person who is alive. there is now person A, and person B, who are identical. but being identical does not imply shared sensations. if you pinch person A, person B won't feel it. the reverse is true. they're two separate entities, even if they behave similarly. if person A dies, person B is very similar to person A -- but they're not person A. that person is dead. same goes for "mind uploading". the copy could, hypothetically, exist. it is extremely unlikely that this is technologically possible. but even if it was possible technologically, the original would be dead.

kelnos 9y ago
All this does is get you into a philosophical debate of what constitutes "you". We don't know the answer to that. There's a similar conundrum around the idea of teleportation: if it were to work by recording the quantum state of every particle in your body, transmitting that information elsewhere, and then simultaneously creating a new copy of "you" at the destination while destroying the original, is the new copy actually "you"? No one really knows. And no one really knows if the answer to that actually matters in any real sense.
- cryoshon 9y ago
  well, let's just cut the philosophical debate in half here. "you" have a chain of consciousness that is unique to your body. you destroy that body, and that chain of consciousness ends. re-assembling it elsewhere perfectly doesn't re-start that chain. it creates a new chain which from inside of its own perspective is consistent with the original chain. and it is. but the original chain has no further consciousness, as it was destroyed. this isn't a "nobody really knows" situation so much as a "we know, but people refuse to accept what we know" situation. the semantics of what is "you" really don't matter when faced with reality.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    Says who? That's just your opinion on what consciousness is. Even if I agree with your interpretation, again, I'm not sure it matters. Perhaps my physical body dies and my brain becomes digitized and I "wake up" in a computer simulation, or perhaps in an artificial brain attached to a replacement body. Even if the new me has a new consciousness that isn't just a continuation of the old one, perhaps that's an outcome I'm ok with and welcome.
ashelmire 9y ago
I'm so glad that you have solved one of the major problems of philosophy and neuroscience in a handful of poorly-constructed sentences. This is a matter of much debate in philosophy, neuroscience, and other fields. You accidentally touch on identity theory (bundle, substratum, etc), philosophy of mind, etc. The Ship of Theseus is an interesting problem - what if I gradually replace parts of someone's brain with artificial ones, so they are integrated with the rest?
- Retra 9y ago
  It's not so much an interesting problem as it is an obviously irrelevant one. Our day-to-day conceptualizations were not designed to handle intricate philosophical matters, and trying to force resolution in such plain language is often a source of confusion involving 'problems' that nobody ever seems to face.
- cryoshon 9y ago
  ship of theseus isn't relevant to nectome's claims or any claim regarding "uploading". "uploading" is just creating a copy in a different media. it doesn't preserve the conscioussness of the original media, it merely creates another. i think you'll find that the problems of philosophy and neuroscience operate at a different level of abstraction than what they're discussing. furthermore, academic concerns aside, there's no disproving my original comment in the context of technical feasibility. it's literally bulletproof; one person does not share the sensations of another person. postscript: i took a philosophy of mind class and a philosophy of cognition class and a systems neurobiology class in college plus a few others that are tangentially relevant. i'm not appealing to authority here, just stating that my simplistic objections are actually the result of an extensive amount of diving into the details of those disciplines. sometimes the details build a picture that's simple from afar.

kelnos 9y ago

All this does is get you into a philosophical debate of what constitutes "you". We don't know the answer to that. There's a similar conundrum around the idea of teleportation: if it were to work by recording the quantum state of every particle in your body, transmitting that information elsewhere, and then simultaneously creating a new copy of "you" at the destination while destroying the original, is the new copy actually "you"? No one really knows. And no one really knows if the answer to that actually matters in any real sense.

cryoshon 9y ago
well, let's just cut the philosophical debate in half here. "you" have a chain of consciousness that is unique to your body. you destroy that body, and that chain of consciousness ends. re-assembling it elsewhere perfectly doesn't re-start that chain. it creates a new chain which from inside of its own perspective is consistent with the original chain. and it is. but the original chain has no further consciousness, as it was destroyed. this isn't a "nobody really knows" situation so much as a "we know, but people refuse to accept what we know" situation. the semantics of what is "you" really don't matter when faced with reality.
- kelnos 9y ago
  Says who? That's just your opinion on what consciousness is. Even if I agree with your interpretation, again, I'm not sure it matters. Perhaps my physical body dies and my brain becomes digitized and I "wake up" in a computer simulation, or perhaps in an artificial brain attached to a replacement body. Even if the new me has a new consciousness that isn't just a continuation of the old one, perhaps that's an outcome I'm ok with and welcome.

ashelmire 9y ago

I'm so glad that you have solved one of the major problems of philosophy and neuroscience in a handful of poorly-constructed sentences. This is a matter of much debate in philosophy, neuroscience, and other fields. You accidentally touch on identity theory (bundle, substratum, etc), philosophy of mind, etc. The Ship of Theseus is an interesting problem - what if I gradually replace parts of someone's brain with artificial ones, so they are integrated with the rest?

Retra 9y ago
It's not so much an interesting problem as it is an obviously irrelevant one. Our day-to-day conceptualizations were not designed to handle intricate philosophical matters, and trying to force resolution in such plain language is often a source of confusion involving 'problems' that nobody ever seems to face.
cryoshon 9y ago
ship of theseus isn't relevant to nectome's claims or any claim regarding "uploading". "uploading" is just creating a copy in a different media. it doesn't preserve the conscioussness of the original media, it merely creates another. i think you'll find that the problems of philosophy and neuroscience operate at a different level of abstraction than what they're discussing. furthermore, academic concerns aside, there's no disproving my original comment in the context of technical feasibility. it's literally bulletproof; one person does not share the sensations of another person. postscript: i took a philosophy of mind class and a philosophy of cognition class and a systems neurobiology class in college plus a few others that are tangentially relevant. i'm not appealing to authority here, just stating that my simplistic objections are actually the result of an extensive amount of diving into the details of those disciplines. sometimes the details build a picture that's simple from afar.