12 ms·

The Importance of Surviving 40 more years

39 points by ypeterholmes 13y ago

eps 13y ago
This is all great, but where does the number of 40 come from? After all Kurzweil said it'd be in 20-25 years and he's got more street cred :)
- Udo 13y ago
  Kurzweil is just a popularizer of this idea, which is an important part of the road ahead. If nothing else, this article illustrates that more and more people are beginning to see the possibilities on the road ahead. However, neither Kurzweil nor anybody else has actually enough information to make a solid prediction as to the time frame. Your guess is as good as his.
- tluyben2 13y ago
  Kurzweill is 65, so he has 20-25 years to live probably in the currently system; figures he would say 20-25 years. The blog owner probably thinks he has 40-50 years more to live so is gunning for 40 years. I remember Larry Ellison mentioning 20 years for such a revolution in a speech some years ago. People are less likely to say 'in 100 years' if they won't make that themselves. 1000 years is easier to talk about than 'just' after you're dead yourself, but what would be the fun in saying 'in 1000 years' ; no-one would listen.
greeneggs 13y ago
Forty years is incredibly optimistic. But beyond that issue, I don't see how transferring my brain to a computer does anything for me. I don't want a copy of me to live forever, I want to live forever myself. Copying my brain won't copy my conscious self. (It can't; after all, if you can make one copy then you can make ten copies.)
- kelnos 13y ago
  If the computer can actually model the brain itself, copying your brain may well copy your conscious self as well. If true, this would raise quite a few metaphysical questions, to say the least.
- jaggederest 13y ago
  Ship of Theseus argument applies here - done gradually enough there's no perceptual difference between a brain running in a computer and on a biological substrate. You 'die' in that sense every time you lose conciousness - a different you wakes up. I think we have a much better chance of extending human life biologically in the next 40 years than we do running the brain in software. 100TB for a brain map is extremely optimistic - that's assuming a byte per connection, and I bet it's a lot higher than that. Like effective fusion power, it's always 50 years away, unfortunately.
  - 011011100 13y ago
    "there's no perceptual difference between a brain running in a computer and on a biological substrate" Who "perceives" a brain running? What do you mean? Is there some higher order process that can do a "perceptual" comparison between a brain running in the world and an identical brain running in a computer? Is the brain doing this comparison? It may seem like I'm "nitpicking", but I'm not sure if your statement is even well-defined.
  - tluyben2 13y ago
    Another instance of me is not me; everyone will think it's me (I will think so too, however I see a nice psychological Philip K Dickian mess coming up with you thinking the rest of your life that you are not you) but it's not. I wouldn't really care at all for that kind of 'immortality'. I don't remember which sci-fi book it was, but I read that book (or story) a long time ago where the brain itself was, in a flash (no losing consciousness), turned into a kind of 'plastic'; literally every part, so you are you and after that nano machines would create the new cells, destroy others and create connections from that plastic mimicking the exact way the brain works. Give me one of those.
    - k__ 13y ago
      I think the point here is, that even the you from "now" and the you from "a moment ago" aren't the same. Consciousness is an illusion.
      - 13y ago
- Udo 13y ago
  > It can't; after all, if you can make one copy then you can make ten copies. Just because you find a notion inconvenient to deal with doesn't mean it's not factually possible. It basically comes down to your view on the supernatural, and by extension the role of your brain. If you're a materialist, we can talk. Otherwise it's just about religion (which is fine if that works for you personally) and in that case a conversation isn't really possible. Much like space flight and killer drones, this will one day mature from science fiction to reality and we'll have to deal with it in some form. At this point, you have a choice to make: either hang on to centuries worth of convoluted ideas about the soul made by people who didn't know anything about anything, or move on to a new substrate that is much better aligned with the way our minds actually work and better suited for moving us forward as a civilization. And it's most likely not going to be a do-or-be-damned choice. Barring unforeseen social dynamics, nothing is going to prevent you from choosing to stick with a biological existence.
  - javert 13y ago
    > because you find a notion inconvenient to deal with doesn't mean it's not factually possible. That is a completely unjust accusation. Even from a materialist perspective, I think the guy was raising one of the most important questions.
    - Udo 13y ago
      I didn't mean it as an accusation. The argument was literally that this can't be possible because that would allow multiple copies of a person! > Even from a materialist perspective, I think the guy was raising one of the most important questions. I fail to see how that's even a debate at this point. Either you see that the mind is a process being executed on a certain kind of substrate, or you believe that something from outside the physical universe is making up the mind and the brain is just an actuator. Pretty much everything else derives from one of these points of view. If you think there is "special matter" and "ordinary matter", or that there is something special going on in the brain beyond its information theoretical content, that's not really a scientific/materialist position. If there's any defensible position in between, I'm genuinely interested in hearing it. Again, I don't mean to attack or upset anyone, please forgive me if I inadvertently gave the wrong signals.
- nostromo 13y ago
  If I made an exact copy of you, right now, you'd both swear you were the original. In fact, I'm not even so sure I'm not a copy, as most of the original stuff that made me is long gone.
  - ewoodrich 13y ago
    That made me think, what if technology was developed that allowed a portion of the brain's processing functions to be offloaded to an external system. So, you would copy most motor functions to a "brain emulator" first. And after you have acclimated, you would continue to the copying process (I have very little doubt that if properly done, the brain wouldn't be able to readjust to this, just like a prosthetic limb or "seeing" through stimulation of nerves on the tongue). And this process is gradually performed until the entire "consciousness" is running on the external artificial computer. I wonder how the perception of self would be affected by such a method.
- Fuxy 13y ago
  I don't know what consciousness is but I'll be the first to volunteer to copy my brain and find out. Screw theory lets just do it and see what happens.
- Houshalter 13y ago
  Forty years isn't optimistic at all if you allow for the possibility of smarter than human intelligences speeding up technological progress in that time. A copy of you IS you. If you change the atoms that make up your brain you are still the same person. It's not like the atoms themselves are sacred. Likewise if you replace the computational substrate your brain runs on it's still you. Why do you care if it's neurons or transistors? Consciousness is a pattern, an algorithm maybe, not a physical thing.
  - parasight 13y ago
    This has yet to be proven. The non-existence of something like a soul seems to be a general concensus but so far a person has never been copied.
    - Houshalter 13y ago
      Define "proven" as that discovery would contradict pretty much everything we know about the universe. You might as well imply that magic hasn't been proven to not exist.
      - parasight 13y ago
        I don't have to believe in magic or even in god to have my doubts. There is so much we still can't explain. Especially about the brain. But let's suppose we are able to copy a human atom by atom. Even then a copy of me is not me. Maybe it is identical to me on a atomical level for a tiny fraction of time. But then it would be a different person with different impressions and different thoughts just because it looks in a different direction.
        Houshalter 13y ago
        There is stuff that hasn't been explained, that doesn't mean you can therefore assume your hypothesis which is overly complicated, completely contradicts everything we know about physics, evolution, neuroscience, etc, has a non-negligible probability of being true. By your logic, the person who will call themselves "you" two seconds from now isn't "you" either. I'd still rather die with a copy of me with 1 second worth of different experiences then no copies at all.
JacobAldridge 13y ago
Good article series on the limitations of mice as research animals - http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_t... I also came here to say what greeneggs already stated about the digital brain - I want to live forever, not have a copy of my brilliance survive for future generations (though I'm sure they'd be grateful).
pmiller2 13y ago
I'm a little skeptical of this whole mind uploading business. How do we really know consciousness isn't in the brain, anyway? I prefer to achieve immortality by not dying, like Woody Allen.
- jferguson 13y ago
  Consciousness is in the brain; the idea here is to simulate the brain, resulting in the mind.
wbhart 13y ago
The human brain is designed to live inside an innervated body. It receives constant updates on how the body is doing, and unconscious processes, some of them chemical, control every aspect of our internal life, from homeostasis, to the perception of time, to breathing, mood and muscle tone. Upset one part of that balance and the brain goes into blind panic. Although the brain also has electrical activity, it is not just a sophisticated computer program running on a general purpose computer. For one thing, the hardware is unique in every individual! Secondly, what makes you you? And what is consciousness? We have no idea. Perhaps it is not possible to reconstruct the real you, rather than an emulation of you, without copying the exact quantum states of the atoms in your body. But this may require complete destruction of the old you and construction of an identical quantum copy elsewhere (teleportation), which is hardly an electronic download of "data" into a computer. You might be able to extract your memories and store them in a Von Neumann architecture, but the rest is a pipe dream.
- alexandros 13y ago
  Still beats dying.
  - tluyben2 13y ago
    Might not do. There have been experiments with people with mental issues or just general experiments abusing or cutting nerve endings in different ways and a lot of the more radical ones (like this would be, at least for the first 1000s of subjects) end up in insanity. And you would rather be dead I think.
  - wbhart 13y ago
    The exact "copy" of you would be you, exactly as you are now, i.e. equivalently mortal.
- jferguson 13y ago
  A computer with input and output, yes. Some representation of relevant neurotransmitters and sensory inputs and such seems necessary. Think whole brain emulation, rather than extracting the "mind information" while ignoring all the physical information.
011011100 13y ago
"Once the brain is understood well enough to be modeled digitally, it stands to reason that the complete set of data representing an individual person (at a particular state of time) could be copied or transferred just like saving a file." What exactly are you going to save to that file? Positions of molecules? States of atoms? Oh, so we're assuming we can abstract away from the physical system? Either we abstract or we save everything. Well, what's everything? Or can the abstraction be "good enough"?
- jferguson 13y ago
  Some abstraction would probably be involved; the idea is to recreate all the relevant activity that impacts consciousness while avoiding going any deeper, and most neuroscientists would (I think) speculate that individual molecules aren't necessarily the finest level of detail needed. Neurotransmitters, maybe, but I imagine a neuron doesn't have to be simulated as its constituent atoms to exhibit identical enough behavior.
- Udo 13y ago
  It's scientifically certain that we can abstract away from the physical system. In fact, we're already doing that today. We run simulations of molecular interactions all the time. We can even "do" a cortical column in incredible detail. The problem is not that we don't know whether it's possible. There are two issues concerning this development: we need to know what the right detail/abstraction level is for simulating a mind, and once we do we need to actually get that information. Doing the simulation itself is comparatively easy, though certainly not trivial. > What exactly are you going to save to that file? Positions of molecules? States of atoms? To be useful, it can't be just a file, it needs to be a database that can be executed. Positions of molecules seems to be the right detail level according to our current understanding. That includes the spatial configuration of proteins and their exact position in relation to another. But there might not be that many unique molecules to store, just a few thousand maybe. An interesting question then becomes how can we abstract these scans even further and still be able to have a high fidelity mind simulation?
  - 011011100 13y ago
TausAmmer 13y ago
That would be extremely boring to live endlessly. Farewell services must be introduced, exciting ways to go "events". :) then you wake up as a yourself from copy Would you be more afraid to loose it? Right now you will die anyway, we accept that(some more, some less). Some build fear based communities around death. Would everyone regress in preserving "life" instead of being bold and exploring where no man would go. What gives if I get deadly radiation poisoning, I might discover something. What gives if I drown in my new innovative diving gear, this shit is revolutionary. I rather do nothing on that sort if I can live forever, I will be as safe as possible, taking no risks? But, there is saying about crossing bridge when one gets there.
codeboost 13y ago
What's wrong with dying ? I mean, obviously people want to live longer for some (mostly selfish) reasons, but isn't dying part of the 'living' deal ? Dying is similar to being born - your whole universe changed when you transitioned from womb to this world and the same happens when you die. In other words, they have cookies and chocolate there :). The whole deal about spirituality is that one discovers that we are in fact immortal and that this life is a step of an infinity of other steps, before this life and after. The other thing one realizes is that each individual is actually a facet of an infinite whole (some call this God, but it is actually You), or in other words - We are all One. That's what all the religions and mystics have been telling us for millenia.
- Houshalter 13y ago
  What's wrong with dying? I don't want to die. I don't want to see the people I love die. It's not "part of life" or some other crazy rationalization to make us feel better about it. It's just ceasing to exist. There is no other life. We used to think there was some magical soul thing, but now we can look and see how the very neurons in your brain work. And when they stop working, that's it. I don't accept death. It isn't part of any greater purpose. The universe isn't optimized for human values. But we can change that. One day future humans will look back on ancient Earth and wonder how terrible it must have been to live for mere decades. If you were to try to convince them that dying was a good thing and they should give up their immortality, they would laugh at you.
- coffeemug 13y ago
  Isn't dying part of the 'living' deal? This is somewhat equivalent to saying "isn't dying from infectious diseases part of the 'living' deal?" It is, but antibiotics are really nice, and now that we have them, it's hard to imagine a world where people would happily give them up because getting infected is just part of living. Anti-death technology sounds really similar. If we were to have this technology now, it would be a pretty big stretch of imagination to picture a world where people would happily give it away because death is part of living. The whole deal about spirituality is that one discovers that we are in fact immortal We're immortal once you break down duality, but that's not what we're talking about here. People want to have the option to live forever in the conventional reality, not the ultimate reality.
fred02 13y ago
I find the simple-minded dogmatism that the mind = brain hugely amusing. The fact is that right now science has absolutely no idea how consciousness works. There is no proof that reductionist materialism can explain how a mind arises from bunchs of neurons. And yet some believe without proof.
- fred02 13y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
- Houshalter 13y ago
  Are you suggesting that intelligence can't be explained by neurons or physics as we know them? Seriously?
  - fred02 13y ago
    Yes, seriously! Look into the work of the philospher David Chambers. His position is called non-reductive functionalism. Instead of saying "the brain causes consciousness", he would say "it is not ONLY the brain that causes consciousness".[1] In other words "consciousness is a fundamental property ontologically autonomous of any known (or even possible) physical properties" of the physical universe. [2] I am amused by discussions like these where simplistic functionalist arguments [3] are taken as being proven. The whole area of consciousness is still side open, none of our current theories are adequate and it is simply wrong to assume that consciousness can be explained away. [1] - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/may/15/consciousness-and-the-philosophers-an-exchange/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/may/15/conscio... [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers [3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_%28philosophy_of_mind%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_%28philosophy_of_...
    - Houshalter 13y ago
      I am very confident that the human brain is responsible for all human behavior. That's the simplest explanation by far. You'd have to explain a completely new and different set of physics that no one has observed before, and explain how and why evolution found it and took advantage of it (and yet no one has ever observed it before), and how it interacts with the body, etc. It just makes absolutely no sense.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
lcedp 13y ago
This reminds me of 1900-1950 prognoses that by 2000 we should all have flying cars and apple growing on Mars. These prognoses were inspired by rapid advancements of the technologies of that time. Instead electronics happened which was not imagined or at least underestimated. Nowadays prognoses are inspired by current advancements but let's just spell out the one thing we can be pretty sure about - we have no idea what the next big thing is.

39 points by ypeterholmes 13y ago

eps 13y ago

This is all great, but where does the number of 40 come from? After all Kurzweil said it'd be in 20-25 years and he's got more street cred :)

Udo 13y ago
Kurzweil is just a popularizer of this idea, which is an important part of the road ahead. If nothing else, this article illustrates that more and more people are beginning to see the possibilities on the road ahead. However, neither Kurzweil nor anybody else has actually enough information to make a solid prediction as to the time frame. Your guess is as good as his.
tluyben2 13y ago
Kurzweill is 65, so he has 20-25 years to live probably in the currently system; figures he would say 20-25 years. The blog owner probably thinks he has 40-50 years more to live so is gunning for 40 years. I remember Larry Ellison mentioning 20 years for such a revolution in a speech some years ago. People are less likely to say 'in 100 years' if they won't make that themselves. 1000 years is easier to talk about than 'just' after you're dead yourself, but what would be the fun in saying 'in 1000 years' ; no-one would listen.

greeneggs 13y ago

Forty years is incredibly optimistic. But beyond that issue, I don't see how transferring my brain to a computer does anything for me. I don't want a copy of me to live forever, I want to live forever myself. Copying my brain won't copy my conscious self. (It can't; after all, if you can make one copy then you can make ten copies.)

kelnos 13y ago
If the computer can actually model the brain itself, copying your brain may well copy your conscious self as well. If true, this would raise quite a few metaphysical questions, to say the least.
jaggederest 13y ago
Ship of Theseus argument applies here - done gradually enough there's no perceptual difference between a brain running in a computer and on a biological substrate. You 'die' in that sense every time you lose conciousness - a different you wakes up. I think we have a much better chance of extending human life biologically in the next 40 years than we do running the brain in software. 100TB for a brain map is extremely optimistic - that's assuming a byte per connection, and I bet it's a lot higher than that. Like effective fusion power, it's always 50 years away, unfortunately.
- 011011100 13y ago
  "there's no perceptual difference between a brain running in a computer and on a biological substrate" Who "perceives" a brain running? What do you mean? Is there some higher order process that can do a "perceptual" comparison between a brain running in the world and an identical brain running in a computer? Is the brain doing this comparison? It may seem like I'm "nitpicking", but I'm not sure if your statement is even well-defined.
- tluyben2 13y ago
  Another instance of me is not me; everyone will think it's me (I will think so too, however I see a nice psychological Philip K Dickian mess coming up with you thinking the rest of your life that you are not you) but it's not. I wouldn't really care at all for that kind of 'immortality'. I don't remember which sci-fi book it was, but I read that book (or story) a long time ago where the brain itself was, in a flash (no losing consciousness), turned into a kind of 'plastic'; literally every part, so you are you and after that nano machines would create the new cells, destroy others and create connections from that plastic mimicking the exact way the brain works. Give me one of those.
  - k__ 13y ago
    I think the point here is, that even the you from "now" and the you from "a moment ago" aren't the same. Consciousness is an illusion.
    - 13y ago
Udo 13y ago
> It can't; after all, if you can make one copy then you can make ten copies. Just because you find a notion inconvenient to deal with doesn't mean it's not factually possible. It basically comes down to your view on the supernatural, and by extension the role of your brain. If you're a materialist, we can talk. Otherwise it's just about religion (which is fine if that works for you personally) and in that case a conversation isn't really possible. Much like space flight and killer drones, this will one day mature from science fiction to reality and we'll have to deal with it in some form. At this point, you have a choice to make: either hang on to centuries worth of convoluted ideas about the soul made by people who didn't know anything about anything, or move on to a new substrate that is much better aligned with the way our minds actually work and better suited for moving us forward as a civilization. And it's most likely not going to be a do-or-be-damned choice. Barring unforeseen social dynamics, nothing is going to prevent you from choosing to stick with a biological existence.
- javert 13y ago
  > because you find a notion inconvenient to deal with doesn't mean it's not factually possible. That is a completely unjust accusation. Even from a materialist perspective, I think the guy was raising one of the most important questions.
  - Udo 13y ago
    I didn't mean it as an accusation. The argument was literally that this can't be possible because that would allow multiple copies of a person! > Even from a materialist perspective, I think the guy was raising one of the most important questions. I fail to see how that's even a debate at this point. Either you see that the mind is a process being executed on a certain kind of substrate, or you believe that something from outside the physical universe is making up the mind and the brain is just an actuator. Pretty much everything else derives from one of these points of view. If you think there is "special matter" and "ordinary matter", or that there is something special going on in the brain beyond its information theoretical content, that's not really a scientific/materialist position. If there's any defensible position in between, I'm genuinely interested in hearing it. Again, I don't mean to attack or upset anyone, please forgive me if I inadvertently gave the wrong signals.
nostromo 13y ago
If I made an exact copy of you, right now, you'd both swear you were the original. In fact, I'm not even so sure I'm not a copy, as most of the original stuff that made me is long gone.
- ewoodrich 13y ago
  That made me think, what if technology was developed that allowed a portion of the brain's processing functions to be offloaded to an external system. So, you would copy most motor functions to a "brain emulator" first. And after you have acclimated, you would continue to the copying process (I have very little doubt that if properly done, the brain wouldn't be able to readjust to this, just like a prosthetic limb or "seeing" through stimulation of nerves on the tongue). And this process is gradually performed until the entire "consciousness" is running on the external artificial computer. I wonder how the perception of self would be affected by such a method.
Fuxy 13y ago
I don't know what consciousness is but I'll be the first to volunteer to copy my brain and find out. Screw theory lets just do it and see what happens.
Houshalter 13y ago
Forty years isn't optimistic at all if you allow for the possibility of smarter than human intelligences speeding up technological progress in that time. A copy of you IS you. If you change the atoms that make up your brain you are still the same person. It's not like the atoms themselves are sacred. Likewise if you replace the computational substrate your brain runs on it's still you. Why do you care if it's neurons or transistors? Consciousness is a pattern, an algorithm maybe, not a physical thing.
- parasight 13y ago
  This has yet to be proven. The non-existence of something like a soul seems to be a general concensus but so far a person has never been copied.
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    Define "proven" as that discovery would contradict pretty much everything we know about the universe. You might as well imply that magic hasn't been proven to not exist.
    - parasight 13y ago
      I don't have to believe in magic or even in god to have my doubts. There is so much we still can't explain. Especially about the brain. But let's suppose we are able to copy a human atom by atom. Even then a copy of me is not me. Maybe it is identical to me on a atomical level for a tiny fraction of time. But then it would be a different person with different impressions and different thoughts just because it looks in a different direction.
      - Houshalter 13y ago
        There is stuff that hasn't been explained, that doesn't mean you can therefore assume your hypothesis which is overly complicated, completely contradicts everything we know about physics, evolution, neuroscience, etc, has a non-negligible probability of being true. By your logic, the person who will call themselves "you" two seconds from now isn't "you" either. I'd still rather die with a copy of me with 1 second worth of different experiences then no copies at all.

JacobAldridge 13y ago

Good article series on the limitations of mice as research animals - http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_t... I also came here to say what greeneggs already stated about the digital brain - I want to live forever, not have a copy of my brilliance survive for future generations (though I'm sure they'd be grateful).

pmiller2 13y ago

I'm a little skeptical of this whole mind uploading business. How do we really know consciousness isn't in the brain, anyway? I prefer to achieve immortality by not dying, like Woody Allen.

jferguson 13y ago
Consciousness is in the brain; the idea here is to simulate the brain, resulting in the mind.

wbhart 13y ago

The human brain is designed to live inside an innervated body. It receives constant updates on how the body is doing, and unconscious processes, some of them chemical, control every aspect of our internal life, from homeostasis, to the perception of time, to breathing, mood and muscle tone. Upset one part of that balance and the brain goes into blind panic. Although the brain also has electrical activity, it is not just a sophisticated computer program running on a general purpose computer. For one thing, the hardware is unique in every individual! Secondly, what makes you you? And what is consciousness? We have no idea. Perhaps it is not possible to reconstruct the real you, rather than an emulation of you, without copying the exact quantum states of the atoms in your body. But this may require complete destruction of the old you and construction of an identical quantum copy elsewhere (teleportation), which is hardly an electronic download of "data" into a computer. You might be able to extract your memories and store them in a Von Neumann architecture, but the rest is a pipe dream.

alexandros 13y ago
Still beats dying.
- tluyben2 13y ago
  Might not do. There have been experiments with people with mental issues or just general experiments abusing or cutting nerve endings in different ways and a lot of the more radical ones (like this would be, at least for the first 1000s of subjects) end up in insanity. And you would rather be dead I think.
- wbhart 13y ago
  The exact "copy" of you would be you, exactly as you are now, i.e. equivalently mortal.
jferguson 13y ago
A computer with input and output, yes. Some representation of relevant neurotransmitters and sensory inputs and such seems necessary. Think whole brain emulation, rather than extracting the "mind information" while ignoring all the physical information.

011011100 13y ago

"Once the brain is understood well enough to be modeled digitally, it stands to reason that the complete set of data representing an individual person (at a particular state of time) could be copied or transferred just like saving a file." What exactly are you going to save to that file? Positions of molecules? States of atoms? Oh, so we're assuming we can abstract away from the physical system? Either we abstract or we save everything. Well, what's everything? Or can the abstraction be "good enough"?

jferguson 13y ago
Some abstraction would probably be involved; the idea is to recreate all the relevant activity that impacts consciousness while avoiding going any deeper, and most neuroscientists would (I think) speculate that individual molecules aren't necessarily the finest level of detail needed. Neurotransmitters, maybe, but I imagine a neuron doesn't have to be simulated as its constituent atoms to exhibit identical enough behavior.
Udo 13y ago
It's scientifically certain that we can abstract away from the physical system. In fact, we're already doing that today. We run simulations of molecular interactions all the time. We can even "do" a cortical column in incredible detail. The problem is not that we don't know whether it's possible. There are two issues concerning this development: we need to know what the right detail/abstraction level is for simulating a mind, and once we do we need to actually get that information. Doing the simulation itself is comparatively easy, though certainly not trivial. > What exactly are you going to save to that file? Positions of molecules? States of atoms? To be useful, it can't be just a file, it needs to be a database that can be executed. Positions of molecules seems to be the right detail level according to our current understanding. That includes the spatial configuration of proteins and their exact position in relation to another. But there might not be that many unique molecules to store, just a few thousand maybe. An interesting question then becomes how can we abstract these scans even further and still be able to have a high fidelity mind simulation?
- 011011100 13y ago

TausAmmer 13y ago

That would be extremely boring to live endlessly. Farewell services must be introduced, exciting ways to go "events". :) then you wake up as a yourself from copy Would you be more afraid to loose it? Right now you will die anyway, we accept that(some more, some less). Some build fear based communities around death. Would everyone regress in preserving "life" instead of being bold and exploring where no man would go. What gives if I get deadly radiation poisoning, I might discover something. What gives if I drown in my new innovative diving gear, this shit is revolutionary. I rather do nothing on that sort if I can live forever, I will be as safe as possible, taking no risks? But, there is saying about crossing bridge when one gets there.

codeboost 13y ago

What's wrong with dying ? I mean, obviously people want to live longer for some (mostly selfish) reasons, but isn't dying part of the 'living' deal ? Dying is similar to being born - your whole universe changed when you transitioned from womb to this world and the same happens when you die. In other words, they have cookies and chocolate there :). The whole deal about spirituality is that one discovers that we are in fact immortal and that this life is a step of an infinity of other steps, before this life and after. The other thing one realizes is that each individual is actually a facet of an infinite whole (some call this God, but it is actually You), or in other words - We are all One. That's what all the religions and mystics have been telling us for millenia.

Houshalter 13y ago
What's wrong with dying? I don't want to die. I don't want to see the people I love die. It's not "part of life" or some other crazy rationalization to make us feel better about it. It's just ceasing to exist. There is no other life. We used to think there was some magical soul thing, but now we can look and see how the very neurons in your brain work. And when they stop working, that's it. I don't accept death. It isn't part of any greater purpose. The universe isn't optimized for human values. But we can change that. One day future humans will look back on ancient Earth and wonder how terrible it must have been to live for mere decades. If you were to try to convince them that dying was a good thing and they should give up their immortality, they would laugh at you.
coffeemug 13y ago
Isn't dying part of the 'living' deal? This is somewhat equivalent to saying "isn't dying from infectious diseases part of the 'living' deal?" It is, but antibiotics are really nice, and now that we have them, it's hard to imagine a world where people would happily give them up because getting infected is just part of living. Anti-death technology sounds really similar. If we were to have this technology now, it would be a pretty big stretch of imagination to picture a world where people would happily give it away because death is part of living. The whole deal about spirituality is that one discovers that we are in fact immortal We're immortal once you break down duality, but that's not what we're talking about here. People want to have the option to live forever in the conventional reality, not the ultimate reality.

fred02 13y ago

I find the simple-minded dogmatism that the mind = brain hugely amusing. The fact is that right now science has absolutely no idea how consciousness works. There is no proof that reductionist materialism can explain how a mind arises from bunchs of neurons. And yet some believe without proof.

fred02 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
Houshalter 13y ago
Are you suggesting that intelligence can't be explained by neurons or physics as we know them? Seriously?
- fred02 13y ago
  Yes, seriously! Look into the work of the philospher David Chambers. His position is called non-reductive functionalism. Instead of saying "the brain causes consciousness", he would say "it is not ONLY the brain that causes consciousness".[1] In other words "consciousness is a fundamental property ontologically autonomous of any known (or even possible) physical properties" of the physical universe. [2] I am amused by discussions like these where simplistic functionalist arguments [3] are taken as being proven. The whole area of consciousness is still side open, none of our current theories are adequate and it is simply wrong to assume that consciousness can be explained away. [1] - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/may/15/consciousness-and-the-philosophers-an-exchange/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/may/15/conscio... [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers [3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_%28philosophy_of_mind%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_%28philosophy_of_...
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    I am very confident that the human brain is responsible for all human behavior. That's the simplest explanation by far. You'd have to explain a completely new and different set of physics that no one has observed before, and explain how and why evolution found it and took advantage of it (and yet no one has ever observed it before), and how it interacts with the body, etc. It just makes absolutely no sense.

deleted 13y ago

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lcedp 13y ago

This reminds me of 1900-1950 prognoses that by 2000 we should all have flying cars and apple growing on Mars. These prognoses were inspired by rapid advancements of the technologies of that time. Instead electronics happened which was not imagined or at least underestimated. Nowadays prognoses are inspired by current advancements but let's just spell out the one thing we can be pretty sure about - we have no idea what the next big thing is.