Will it be possible to upload your mind?

The concept of digital immortality might seem like the stuff of science fiction, but the idea of uploading one’s mind is gaining traction in the real world. A number of philosophers, neuroscientists and futurists believe that a safe form of mind transfer will be possible one day. But is it a philosophical trap? Olivia Willis takes a look.

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no

unless you count rants on the internet

I hope so as its what I want to do, or have an accelerated clone body grown and have my mind downloaded into it.
I’d prefer not to just fade away

Perhaps someone could start the process themselves.
Once you get old enough you try to record everything you see, think, feel etc and combine it with ongoing psychological assessment combined with your genetic profile. Its then recreated in a digital form

A cloned mind project would be interesting

we could start cloning the best minds around the world

CrazyNeutrino said:

A cloned mind project would be interesting

we could start cloning the best minds around the world

Its a huge lose to humanity when the best of us die with all that knowledge and skill lost forever

>Here, Cappuccio highlights a blatant contradiction: we want our mind to be something that is free from material character

Um, I don’t. I want it to be what it is: an experience generated by my brain (or entire CNS). And possibly in the distant future, the same experience generated by a machine.

I’ll read the article properly later, but I’d imagine a mind upload would require:

a) An artificial consciousness machine that can duplicate the various functions of the brain.
b) An organic/electronic interface that would enable you to plug the brain into various components of this machine.
c) A transitional period in which your mind is generated partly by your brain and partly by the machine, gradually transferring more functions to the machine.
d) A convincing experience of “continuity of self” throughout this process, ending with the brain being able to be switched off.

Here’s a short story on this topic: Greg Egan’s Learning To Be Me

Read Blindsight.

Might not be the utopia we think

Dropbear said:

Read Blindsight.

Might not be the utopia we think

I can imagine it being misused very easily

It would be interesting to be able to replicate the senses ( taste, hearing, smell, feeling and sight) and to be able to turn each one on and off

and create new ways to sense things that humans cannot now, and build that capability into the mind machine

Cymek said:

Dropbear said:

Read Blindsight.

Might not be the utopia we think

I can imagine it being misused very easily

Hitler could have had cloned Nazis

not a good thought

Has Dennis Potter’s Cold Lazarus been mentioned yet?

doubt it’d be like the real experience, given it’s wetware, fleshy, blood flowing around (which is probably are bigger part of the experience than commonly appreciated), and it’s very much about homeostasis (in the broadest sense).

transition said:

doubt it’d be like the real experience, given it’s wetware, fleshy, blood flowing around (which is probably are bigger part of the experience than commonly appreciated), and it’s very much about homeostasis (in the broadest sense).

what might be interesting is uploading your mind to another species like an octopus which has more genes than a human 33000 to our 25000

CrazyNeutrino said:

transition said:

doubt it’d be like the real experience, given it’s wetware, fleshy, blood flowing around (which is probably are bigger part of the experience than commonly appreciated), and it’s very much about homeostasis (in the broadest sense).

what might be interesting is uploading your mind to another species like an octopus which has more genes than a human 33000 to our 25000

I wonder if we could cope with it, as it’s a very alien mind compared to ours

Cymek said:

CrazyNeutrino said:

transition said:

doubt it’d be like the real experience, given it’s wetware, fleshy, blood flowing around (which is probably are bigger part of the experience than commonly appreciated), and it’s very much about homeostasis (in the broadest sense).

what might be interesting is uploading your mind to another species like an octopus which has more genes than a human 33000 to our 25000

I wonder if we could cope with it, as it’s a very alien mind compared to ours

well, that is the science challenge, a human / octopus interface that can grow with more dna / genus information over time

or a dolphin / human interface, or a whale / human interface

It’s a wanky idea selling technology, the wizards are a bit embarrassed they haven’t developed machine consciousness yet

transition said:

It’s a wanky idea selling technology, the wizards are a bit embarrassed they haven’t developed machine consciousness yet

it has to start somewhere

US researchers grow first ever brain from human skin cells in laboratory

An almost fully formed brain has been grown in a laboratory for the first time, scientists from Ohio State University say.
The unconscious brain, the size of a pea and comparable with a five-week-old foetus, could speed up neuroscience research into conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
The model brain was engineered from adult human skin cells but the method is largely under wraps because of a pending patent.

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SOON

CrazyNeutrino said:

Cymek said:

Dropbear said:

Read Blindsight.

Might not be the utopia we think

I can imagine it being misused very easily

Hitler could have had cloned Nazis

not a good thought

a rubbish strewn street, a doll’s head with a missing body is rocking gently to the booms of artillery fire

there is the sound of machine , shiny black boots goose stepping to some robust militaristic tune step forward from the smoke

now no one could stop them and the world was lost

if only they had listened to wookiemeister and hit the boot polish factory in the very beginning of the war

no boot polish, no boots, no war

they sent the psychologist around after one of my creative writing tasks

Just popping in.

This thread led me to:
A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF DOUGLAS HARDING

via:

The Incredible String Band – Douglas Tradherne Harding

Hope That Helps

pops out

The article doesn’t really discuss my kind of proposal – a “mind with content” (the mind generated by your personal CNS and its accumulated neural structures and habitual dynamics) interacting with a “blank” CNS capable of acquiring those structures and dynamics.

I read the link.

Not very impressed. I see that either-orism is still alive and well.

But thanks for the thread because I’ve spent half an hour listening to some excellent Incredible String Band songs, and I have also dug out my old copy of “The Mind’s I”, where I find a chapter entitled “On Having No Head” by none other than Douglas Harding (whose middle name apparently was not Traherne).

So I’ll have a read of that now.

Good to see you peeping in again, Rev :)

To be honest I did not bother reading the article.

I guess this is the Traherne to which the song refers:

Thomas Traherne

(Thanks Bubblecar :))

>“mind with content”

Would it be a mind if it it had no content (even that structural one’s born with maybe that has the potential of experience). And doesn’t mind have about it the self-reflective workings , some awareness of, that too related of _ internal mental states_, the feel of them.

transition said:

>“mind with content”

Would it be a mind if it it had no content (even that structural one’s born with maybe that has the potential of experience). And doesn’t mind have about it the self-reflective workings , some awareness of, that too related of _ internal mental states_, the feel of them.

In the tv show Humans a scientist reduces sentience and emotional capacity down to 3000 pages of code, not sure if this cheapens the entire experience or makes it wonderful that you can do it so easily and give that “gift” to another species

transition said:

>“mind with content”

Would it be a mind if it it had no content (even that structural one’s born with maybe that has the potential of experience). And doesn’t mind have about it the self-reflective workings , some awareness of, that too related of _ internal mental states_, the feel of them.

This is an apparent problem with plugging a brain into an artificial consciousness machine with a view to gradually transferring one’s “self” to the machine – the machine presumably already has its own “self”, even when it’s first switched on. Although there’s nothing necessarily wrong with two “selfs” being generated by the one device. We already experience what seems like multiplicity of self in normal human consciousness.

Bubblecar said:

transition said:

>“mind with content”

Would it be a mind if it it had no content (even that structural one’s born with maybe that has the potential of experience). And doesn’t mind have about it the self-reflective workings , some awareness of, that too related of _ internal mental states_, the feel of them.

This is an apparent problem with plugging a brain into an artificial consciousness machine with a view to gradually transferring one’s “self” to the machine – the machine presumably already has its own “self”, even when it’s first switched on. Although there’s nothing necessarily wrong with two “selfs” being generated by the one device. We already experience what seems like multiplicity of self in normal human consciousness.

Perhaps it can bring rationality to the often chaos of a human mind

Cymek said:

transition said:

>“mind with content”

Would it be a mind if it it had no content (even that structural one’s born with maybe that has the potential of experience). And doesn’t mind have about it the self-reflective workings , some awareness of, that too related of _ internal mental states_, the feel of them.

In the tv show Humans a scientist reduces sentience and emotional capacity down to 3000 pages of code, not sure if this cheapens the entire experience or makes it wonderful that you can do it so easily and give that “gift” to another species

Did the scientist in question actually produce any evidence that his code worked?

I think the brain you are born with is full of content. How could a mindful brain develop if it wasn’t.

All this comes out of a very limited volume of code of course, but clearly minds generate much greater complexity over their first 9 months.

The Rev Dodgson said:

Cymek said:

transition said:

>“mind with content”

Would it be a mind if it it had no content (even that structural one’s born with maybe that has the potential of experience). And doesn’t mind have about it the self-reflective workings , some awareness of, that too related of _ internal mental states_, the feel of them.

In the tv show Humans a scientist reduces sentience and emotional capacity down to 3000 pages of code, not sure if this cheapens the entire experience or makes it wonderful that you can do it so easily and give that “gift” to another species

Did the scientist in question actually produce any evidence that his code worked?

I think the brain you are born with is full of content. How could a mindful brain develop if it wasn’t.

All this comes out of a very limited volume of code of course, but clearly minds generate much greater complexity over their first 9 months.

In the series most androids were just mindless helpers but some of them had the code implemented into their programming and were as human as we are, when their minds were combined they had the capacity to give all androids this ability. It didn’t say how they became individuals.

I wonder if scans of newborns babies brains have been done to see what sort of activity is occurring

Lot of wanky stuff on this subject, in large part it comes from the entertainment industry (movies and those selling gadgets), and in a sense what is being sold is people. They have penetrated minds, and the enthusiasm projected sells stuff. It starts very young.

It seems that you can read all about Douglas H’s views on Having no Head even if you didn’t buy the book:

On having no head