Uploading Conciousness

We may not be able to define consciousness very well, but we only need to know that it requires the passing of time to know a discrete computer cannot be made conscious. The problem of the "brain-scanning-uploading" will be that your consciousness is not transferred but copied. Your "copy" would probably be conscious and share your memories etc. but "you" will be still there, too. This is because consciousness is a "hardware" function and not only software (of course some software is involved, too). A better way to achieve true uploading is to replace all neurons in your brain without interrupting your consciousness by using nonobots. This upload will still be the same "you" because your consciousness has not been copied but has been transferred. Can consciousness exist in something as abstract as data? Could a static book that details a 2 second simulated episode in the brain be conscious? Is the passing of time required for consciousness? The problem is that consciousness is intrinsically tied to the causal properties of the matter in our brains. Reducing that causality to computational rules turns it into data. Space, time and matter, as well as they are causal interactions, are all meshed into the same medium. Removing the pattern from that medium removes it from each and all of these elements. The postulation of artificial consciousness is a ridiculous over-simplification of the very nature of time and causality -- both of which we only understand from a peripheral perspective.

I hope I could help

Once brain porting technology has been refined and fully developed, will this enable us to live forever? The answer depends on what we mean by living and dying. Consider what we do today with our personal computer files. When we change from one personal computer to a less obsolete model, we don't throw all our files away; rather we copy them over to the new hardware. Although our software files do not necessary continue their existence forever, the longevity of our personal computer software is completely separate and disconnected from the hardware that it runs on. When it comes to our personal mind file, however, when our human hardware crashes, the software of our lives dies with it. However, this will not continue to be the case when we have the means to store and restore the thousands of trillions of bytes of information represented in the pattern that we call our brains. The longevity of one's mind file will not be dependent, therefore, on the continued viability of any particular hardware medium. Ultimately software-based humans, albeit vastly extended beyond the severe limitations of humans as we know them today, will live out on the web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies in diverse realms of virtual reality, holographically projected bodies, physical bodies comprised of nanobot swarms, and other forms of nanotechnology. A software-based human will be free, therefore, from the constraints of any particular thinking medium. Today, we are each confined to a mere hundred trillion connections, but humans at the end of the twenty-first century can grow their thinking and thoughts without limit. We may regard this as a form of immortality, although it is worth pointing out that data and information do not necessarily last forever. Although not dependent on the viability of the hardware it runs on, the longevity of information depends on its relevance, utility, and accessibility. If you've ever tried to retrieve information from an obsolete form of data storage in an old obscure format (e.g., a reel of magnetic tape from a 1970 minicomputer), you will understand the challenges in keeping software viable. However, if we are diligent in maintaining our mind file, keeping current backups, and porting to current formats and mediums, then a form of immortality can be attained, at least for software-based humans. Our mind file--our personality, skills, memories--all of that is lost today when our biological hardware crashes. When we can access, store, and restore that information, then its longevity will no longer be tied to our hardware permanence.Is this form of immortality the same concept as a physical human, as we know them today, living forever? In one sense it is, because as I pointed out earlier, our contemporary selves are not a constant collection of matter either. Only our pattern of matter and energy persists, and even that gradually changes.similarly, it will be the pattern of a software human that persists and develops and changes gradually. But is that person based on my mind file, who migrates across many computational substrates, and who outlives any particular thinking medium, really me? We come back to the same questions of consciousness and identity, issues that have been debated since the Platonic dialogues. As we go through the twenty-first century, these will not remain polite philosophical debates, but will be confronted as vital, practical, political, and legal issues. A related question is "is death desirable?" A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and indeed often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we might find it hard to live without it. We consider death as giving meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time could become meaningless if there were too much of it. Check@.com

Let's suppose it is possible to copy your concious to another medium. The copy of my concious will think it is me, it has all my memories, including living in my physical body. The concious that carries on in my body will however consider itself to be me. It won't want to die knowing that a duplicate lives on, because it will still die.

well, that's my opinion :)

There's a fine discussion about this in Stanislaw Lem - Dialogues.

The dream of instantiating the properties and characteristics of living organisms in non-living artificial systems is almost as old as human thought. But ultimately there is going to be no clear boundary between the human world and the machine world. Conversely, we're going to is building our computers based on reverse engineering of the human brain. We see evolution as a billion-year drama that led to human intelligence, which is its grandest creation. If we could do that with hundreds of neurons, there is no reason why we cannot scale that up to hundreds of billions of neurons. Right now, we feel that our uniqueness--our "humanness," if you will--is simply a function of our intelligence. We have already been able to take clusters of neurons and emulate very precisely their input/output characteristics, creating an electronic device that exactly mimics the information-processing characteristics of a cluster of hundreds of neurons. We have cochlea implants, which replace the early auditory processing circuits of the brain. Increasingly, we're going to be putting machines, computational devices, in our brains to augment, replace, supplement, and bypass neural regions of our brains. In fact, scaling systems up from hundreds of something to billions of something is the type of task we do all of the time. To grasp something of the transcending nature of this remarkable phenomenon, imagine a jumbo jet, a computer, or indeed any machine ever conceived from the fantastic star ships of science fiction to the equally fantastic speculations of nanotechnology, being chopped up randomly into small fragments. Then imagine every one of the fragments so produced (no two fragments will ever be the same) assembling itself into a perfect but miniaturized copy of the machine from which it originated—a tiny toy-sized jumbo jet from a random section of the wing—and you have some conception of the self regenerating capabilities of certain microorganisms such as the ciliate Stentor. It is an achievement of transcending brilliance, which goes beyond the wildest dreams of mechanism. Uploading Consciousness

The cognitive system transcends its fixed algorithms by creating an awareness system meta to them-- a system that interprets aspects of its information flow as features of a real world. In turn, it transcends this fixation on a real world by creating subjective consciousness-- a system that reinterprets aspects of its real-izing capacity as processes within itself. In a sense these movements are opposed, but the essence and evolutionary advantage of each is the same. Both increase versatility and objectivity. If there is a need to relativize and subjectify experience and thought by disengaging its formal aspects, there is also a corresponding need to reengage on higher levels, to assert more adequate models, to reinvest in better metaphors and explore wider worlds. To leave a nest is to find oneself nested in a larger matrix of seeming reality, and the task of subjective consciousness is posed again on a new level. Neither creating nor dismantling worlds alone converges on objectivity. But these seemingly antithetical movements of mind participate together in a dialectical evolution. The limitation of a wired-in reaction pattern is its mechanical rigidity-- its stupidity. A global representation-- an image that is monitored by subsystems capable of variable responses-- is a synthesis upon which further analysis can be performed. Paradoxically, the greater flexibility it affords depends on the gap it creates between image and action, leaving indeterminate the basis for behavior implicit in the image. At the extreme, one would see the world dispassionately and have no response to it. Obviously, to be viable for an organism, detachment must be relative. The advantage of an image of the world is that it distances reaction, freeing it up to be more versatile and objective, but this is in fact a matter of reconnecting action to some higher domain or in some more effective way. Otherwise we are left with an organism that has no priorities, and is paralysed in its indifference. This problem appears in Eastern philosophy in the concept of Nirvana. When one frees oneself from all that has form and limit, being simply consumed in the Absolute, one leaves the cycle of existence never to return. The outer cosmic parallel is the collapse of the whole universe back into the dimensionless state of void before the Big Bang, as though the ultimate purpose of existence were simply to undo itself.

The days when the problem of consciousness lived quietly in the cloisters of academic philosophy, no trouble to anyone, are gone. These days, the redefined field of "consciousness studies" is a garden of delights, swarming with philosophers and scientists of every stripe. Debate is lively, sometimes strident--with the neuroscientists shouting loudest of all above their noisy brain scanners. How does the mental arise from the material? How can subjective experience be reconciled with that soggy mass occupying the skull? Most of them expect a solution. The chimera of consciousness rises like a vapour and entices them to believe that it is only a matter of time before a way is found to account for subjective, first-person phenomena in objective, third-person terms. Despite the intellectual energy currently pouring into this enterprise, philosophical and scientific, I think that the fly is still stuck in the bottle. If there is a way to untie the "knot of knots" problem of consciousness, perhaps the first move is to acknowledge that we are not only physically embodied but also embedded in the world about us. The mind may be local to the body and the brain but is also, in different ways, distributed beyond biological boundaries. The notion of the "extended mind" has been gaining currency in cognitive science, but ideas of a related kind were developed 50 years ago by the Russian neuropsychologist, Alexander Luria. For Luria, psychological phenomena were part of the natural world and so subject to the laws of nature, but he also recognised that the structure of the mind has a social aspect. He thought that scientific psychology should be aligned with the biological sciences, but believed that one could never fully understand the relationship between the brain and the mind by treating the brain as a closed biological system. The working brain has to be understood not only as part of a larger biological system (the rest of the body) but also as a component of wider environmental systems. What we refer to as "the self" is a product of biological and social forces. It arises from the interaction of individual, isolated brains. From this view, the search for the seat of consciousness within the circuitry of an individual brain can lead only to fool's gold. If, as Wittgenstein said, philosophical problems demand treatment rather than solutions, the distinction between the core biological self and the extended, narrative self may be the first part of the therapeutic formula.

Yes!

Someone mentioned earlier that when machines combine with humans there would be a loss of individuality.

“A popular pastime will be to plug in to someone else's sensory-emotional beam and experience that it's like to be someone else”

One has to wonder, is this necessarily a bad thing? The ability to "walk a mile in another's shoes" would enable us to finally feel true empathy for our fellow human beings. Pride, crime, poverty, war and endless other negative words would be a thing of the past. Ultimately, human beings would know the true meaning of the word morality instead of pretending to give a damn.

I am all for it! Individuality is a curse, not a blessing. If we can break down the walls of individualism and share thoughts, feelings etc., our technology, standard of living and other things will improve exponentially. I, personally, crave knowledge and would like to see this technology in effect before I die.

Here’s to the greater mind.

Your carrier of your psychological features is transplanted into another body, and your life-sustaining features are destroyed but those psychological functions that keep you conscious continue. According to the Biological Approach, that is the end of you. But no person ceases to exist when this happens. "Your" psychological properties -- the ones you are conscious of when you are conscious of yourself -- continues to live and think; it simply loses its own biological features. The first thing to notice about our conception of human freedom is that it is essentially tied to consciousness. We only attribute freedom to conscious beings. If, for example somebody built a robot which we believed to be totally unconscious, we would never feel any inclination to call it free. Even if we found its behavior random and unpredictable, we would not say that it was acting freely in the sense that we think of ourselves as acting freely. If on the other hand somebody built a robot that we became convinced had consciousness, in the same sense that we do, then it would at least be an open question whether or not that robot had freedom of the will.

Alcx

\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\* The phenomena behind nanotechnology's many promises nanowerk June 15, 2007 ************************* In a progress report on nanoscience concepts and applications, Dr. Gary Hodes from the Weizman Institute of Science has described some of the fundamental size-dependent properties that make materials change behavior at the nanoscale.... http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=6915&m=14757

Virtual Immortality for Virtual Eternity The Futurist July-August 2007 ************************* The National Science Foundation has awarded a half-million-dollar grant to the universities of Central Florida at Orlando and Illinois at Chicago to explore how researchers might use artificial intelligence, archiving, and computer imaging to create convincing, digital versions of real people, a possible first step toward virtual... http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=6899&m=14757

WK

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