Certain comments deserve special recognition

Like this one:

The usually-unspoken problem with the “download my brain” idea is that YOU STILL DIE. So you make a copy of yourself? Big deal! The copy laughs at you as your organs fail, then goes off and makes love to your spouse: this is progress?

I don’t hope to live forever, but I DO hope to live long enough for the aliens to show up. Maybe they’ll zap me into atoms, but I’ll be on top of the skyscraper with the exotic dancer, waving the “Welcome Aliens” flag. And if they’re not of the “Independence Day” variety, I’ll hitch a ride and never look back. I mean, where better to die beneath a naked girl avalanche than on the distant pleasure-planet of Orgasma-7?

Wurd.

 

Comments: 53

 
 
 

Wow, I rock! Go me!

 
 

Hey, that sounds pretty nice. Can I come, too?

 
josephdietrich
 

Many of the believers of the “download my brain” idea are also believers of the “ghost in the machine” idea: that there is some magical soul or spirit which you can transfer unaltered from one medium to another. Not that this is actually true, but there you go.

It might be pointed out that Albatoss’ comment is also true for the “raptured to heaven” hopefuls.

 
 

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

 
 

How come Sadlyno is laughing at moronic strawmans of what are much more complex issues?

It’s not at all clear how “downloading your brain” would work out and to what extent one would remain oneself. This is a question far from fully understood, and acting as if you knew that the “copy would laugh at us” is idiotic.

If you think about it differently, the concept of being able to transfer one’s consciousness seems more realistic: Imagine tiny software chips being added to your brain over time, taking up some of your old and new memory as time pases. Over the years, you might achieve a gradual shift of your memory (and consciousness) from biological to purely technological devices.

Sure, you ain’t going to be the “same”. But hell, I’m not the “same” I was with 10 years, but I certainly feel the continuity and prefer it to dying a hundred times over.

 
 

strawmen, I mean.

 
 

How awful would the world be if the wingnuts could clone themselves (you know they would if they could). Ugggggggggh.

 
 

Indeedy! Conscoiusness—”me”-ness—is an emergent property of the functioning of the umteen million neurons (allegedly) in my brain and all the reactions therebetween, plus the information therecontained. To download just your information would be more akin to a printout than a functioning replica or replacement.

And then, downloading all the information about the neurons, their functioning, and their relationships would still only give you a “set of directions” about how it all works… which you could then use to build a computer model of the whole system, but that’s then just a program running on a machine, albeit one that could replicate some of the visible functioning of “me” fairly well. But that’s still just a simulation, not an emergent property. And even if there were such emergence going on, the neurons/chemicals/interactions etc. are absent. So whatever “me” it would be would certainly not be ME at all. I am still in my head.

What’s needed is emergent property transfer, which is about as impossible -sounding a thing as I can think of. Since even an exact flesh-and-blood replica of “me” would still be SOME OTHER dude who’s JUST LIKE me. Different neurons, different spacetime coordinates, etc. Not the same.

There can be only one.

 
 

Holy shit! I rebutted the transhumanist’s comment before I even read it! Whoa.

 
 

I am not afraid of death.

Should be interesting, or not. If it is, cool and if it isn’t, I won’t be able to care.

 
 

Hokay. But what kind of dip would you enjoy with your tiny software chips? And are they baked or fried?

mikey

 
 

Obviously, if you take all the magic, religion and generall “woo-woo” out of it, human conscienceness – the so-called “me-ness”, is a function of the device hardware, the file system, the operating system, the database and the application layer. Once we figure out what it is, and develop a representative language, data access and processing algorithms and appropriate hardware to build it all on, then if you loaded the totality of data and meta-data from a person, did it correctly and completely, there’s every reason to think that the result would be a perfect emulation of you.

But we have no idea even how far away we are from this “reverse engineering” of the human conscienceness. So yeah, sure, right around the corner…

mikey

 
 

A copy of your pattern is still you even if it runs on a different machine. Otherwise, how could the people on Star Trek beam everywhere?

 
 

Brain duplications and brain transplants of one sort or another are some of the more common hypotheticals in the Philosophy of Personal Identity, which has been hotly debated for the last few thousand years. While discussing these in detail often has the unfortunate side effect of making one’s own brain explode, you do get to freely reference any number of Star Trek episodes with transporter malfunctions (and now The Prestige.) It’s not as if we have a definitive scientific answer to the question of persistence of consciousness.

Say you and your friend are about to have an operation. A doctor will remove your brain and replace it with your friend’s. Your friend will get yours in return. Right before you are sedated, you are put in the red operating room, and your friend in the green operating room. Your bodies will not be moved during surgery. What room do you wake up in after the surgery is completed? Does you answer change if your brains are not removed, but rather the information inside is “downloaded” into a computer and then uploaded into each other’s meatware? What if your mind is uploaded into both bodies?

Most people instinctively believe that their consciousness/identity will follow their brain, though it’s essentially a skeptical hypothesis, like brain-in-a-jar solipsism or Last Thursdayism.

Also, John Locke is a major figure in this branch of philosophy, and while he’s grouped with other political philosophers on Lost, it’s probably his work on personal identity (specifically, chains of being) that is most thematically relevant to the show.

 
 

hasenkatz is referring to one of the more prominent transhumanist fantasies, where you can replace neurons, one by one, with robo-neurons that mimic their fleshy counterparts’ functions exactly, only they’re indestructible. Sort of like replacing a ginormous Lego sculpture, brick by brick, with titanium Legos.

Of course, the “tiny software chips” that he imagines don’t exist, and no one has even the remotest idea about how to “add them to your brain over time”, but nanotechnology–which fills about the same function in the transhumanist imagination that atomic energy did for futurists mid-twentieth-century–will surely fill in the breach. After all, they laughed at the idea of practical personal jet packs and robot butlers, and… oh, wait.

 
 

mikey, I don’t buy it.

Since a part of that array of stuff you described is the pattern and activity of neurons firing and brain activity at a quantum level, there is, perforce, a level of uncertainty that cannot be controlled. therefore even an exact duplicate would not be the same… and would continue to diverge, ever increasingly, as the process of experience continues to diverge from the original’s.

 
 

Descarteswas in a pub enjoying a pint. Renee’s glass was empty, so the barman asked, “Would you like another?”

Descartes said, “I think not.”

And disappeared.

 
 

Vache beat me to the Star Trek reference, so to keep my nerd cred, I present the two TNG episodes that best exemplify this philosophical problem: “Realm of Fear” and “Second Chances.”

In the former, Reginald “Howlin’ Mad” Barclay demonstrates that even in the 24th century, some people are not convinced that transporters actually work as Vache describes. What to say that your identity and consciousness are not obliterated every time you transport, and a new, duplicate you is created at your destination. That person has all of your memories and physical attributes and a seemingly continuous consciousness…how could you prove it isn’t the same one? For that matter, how can you prove that you have the same consciousness that you did five minutes ago?

The latter is the episode where Riker finds out that a transporter malfunction left a copy of himself marooned on a planet for 13 years. Neither copy has any idea this happened, the first thinks the transport was a success, the second thinks it simply failed, leaving him stranded. The stranded one even gets to bone Troi after he’s rescued, since he is essentially the Riker she knew before their relationship went south. (I don’t recall if he laughs at the other Riker. I would, though.)

 
 

Descartes was in a pub enjoying a pint. Renee’s glass was empty, so the barman asked, “Would you like another?”

Descartes said, “I think not.”

And disappeared.

 
 

Sorry, that must have been my existential copy of myself that posted there.

 
a different brad
 

Y’know, that always bugged me about Star Trek. How would anyone know if transporting just plain killed you and then created an identical xerox in the planet below?

As for all this talk of consciousness, we’re kinda missing one important thing. Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg of our mental processes, and not really as important as we like to make it. I don’t mean to get Freudian, since I think his psychological metaphysics are bunk, but it’s like mountains. They exist because of the movements of tectonic plates, movements which are generated by all sorts of shit going on at even deeper levels.
My point is, we don’t know what the hell we are, still, so how are we going to duplicate ourselves at all?
And hasenkatz, if you start referencing cog sci, you lose. Cog sci is up there with phrenology, at least in the here and and now.

Nevermind the whole replacing your organic self idea displays an inherent hatred of being human so intense even a misanthrope like me can’t understand it.

 
 

You need to go back and examine that one, Billy. There is no requirment, indeed no real possibility that Quantum mechanics (subatomic) are in play in brain fuction at all. The brain functions electromagnetically and chemically. Electromagnetics are quite well understood, and chemical reactions are at the atomic or molecular scale, and therefore Quantum Mechanical effects cannot apply.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty needs particles in motion in order to be called into play. It merely states that you can know a particle’s location, or it’s velocity, but you cannot know both, and the more precision with which you know one, the resulting less precision can you estimate the other.

Not bad for an old uneducated hoodlum, eh?

mikey

 
 

When we were drunk or stoned in college we would seriously consider the question of when the aliens came and wanted you to go with them – but you had to decide right away and you couldn’t tell any of your friends or family where you were going, you just had to either climb aboard the alien spacecraft and go or stay behind on Earth – would you go?

Generally the answer was “yes”.

 
 

The copy laughs at you as your organs fail, then goes off and makes love to your spouse: this is progress?

The heck with that. The thought of some copy boning my old lady (probably watching me die with his hand on her tit), drinking my booze, driving my car really pisses me off.

 
 

The mind is what the brain does.

That’s as heavy as it gets with me.

 
Galactic Dustbin
 

Is it an exact copy of me- or is it a young healthy version of me I’m downloading into? OR did I go for the full head of hair, abs, buns of steel upgrade?

Ethier way I could do MUCH better then my old spouse…

 
 

Seriously, it’s like motherfuckers aren’t even reading Frederick Pohl anymore. Kids today, with their dreams of downloaded brains…

 
 

>After all, they laughed at the idea of practical personal jet packs and robot >butlers, and… oh, wait.

Oh yea, and instead of these childish fantasies we actually got whole factories run to 95% by roboters and computers, producing goods so precisely and rapidly, it could not have been imagined mid-century. Or the internet. Or a guy controlling a computer with his mind.

Of course there is much speculation. But there is a lot of reason for hope.

 
 

> Nevermind the whole replacing your organic self idea displays an inherent
> hatred of being human so intense even a misanthrope like me can’t
> understand it.

Nonsense. If you break your leg, you use technology to fix it as well as possible. If you get cancer, you use radiation and advanced chemicals to treat it. Enhancing your body and prolonging life with the help of technology is no different. Ultimately, it’s driven by a love for life. And yes, perhaps this love of life is greater than loyalty to a traditional definition of “human”. But I fail to see where the hatred comes in.

 
 

we actually got whole factories run to 95% by roboters and computers…

95%? You sure about that? ‘Cause you’re gonna have to provide some, you know, facts or something to convince me that there are factories where more than about 20% of the assembly line tasks, not the factory wide operations, mind you, are done by robot…

mikey

 
 

Imagine tiny software chips being added to your brain over time, taking up some of your old and new memory as time pases. Over the years, you might achieve a gradual shift of your memory (and consciousness) from biological to purely technological devices.

Would I still be able to get high after these chips have taken over my brain? Would we able to modify these chips so that I could still get high but wouldn’t be tempted to head down to the supermarket for Phish Food? Would there be a Greasemonkey option that would kick in when I’m channel surfing and if I see William Kristol on TV he’ll just be talking about pie?

 
 

Vache Folle said,

May 31, 2007 at 22:53

“A copy of your pattern is still you even if it runs on a different machine. Otherwise, how could the people on Star Trek beam everywhere?”

Many were sceptical (or is that are to be sceptical?) Among them was/will be the original Dr. “Bones” McCoy. Nevertheless, he would occassionly albeit always reluctently consent to being transported. Who is the Real McCoy I ask you?

 
a different brad
 

Using technology to heal, or to overcome or compensate for the effects of aging, is one thing, hasenkatz. I’m not a luddite, and medical advances or bionics aren’t what worries me.
You’re talking about rewiring the brain. You’re talking about creating minds that can be remote controlled (yesyes mr tinfoil hat, i see you, now shut up), that can be reprogrammed with a switch. You’re talking about never being able to trust sensory data again. You’re talking about memory that can be accessed, deleted, or altered. You’re talking about an utter destruction of privacy, even beyond where we’ve gone today.
You’re basically willing to risk utter destruction of the human self for capacities that in all likelihood wouldn’t be better than our own for several technological generations, if ever. Your idealism reminds me of neo-cons talking about Iraq, frankly. Reality is not idealistic.

 
Qetesh the Abyssinian
 

Duros62, I salute you. It’s a good thing my keyboard has a protective covering that magically repels fur and nasal-delivery-beverages, otherwise I’d be coughing up a furball for another laptop right about now.

Viz the topic at hand: Professor Booty, I’ve not read that particular Fred Pohl story, but I do have a more than nodding aquaintance with the works of John Varley, and in particular his story called The Phantom of Kansas. That one posits memory recording technology which allows you to record your ‘self’ up to the current time.

And of course the issue with that is that as the heroine gets killed each time, each incarnation really truly dies, in the sense that (a) that body dies, and (b) the memories between the last recording and the death aren’t recorded. It’s a fascinating story, for a bunch of reasons, as are several of his other short stories.

His bestest everest short story, Air Raid, was sharp like a razor blade, the sort of story that haunts your thoughts for months afterwards. Years, indeed. Alas, the story was extended into a novel, Millenium, which was merely good, and subseqently made as a movie, which was appalling in almost every way.

I’m excited, however, to have just discovered that someone made a movie of one of his lighter stories, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, starring the inestimable Raul Julia. Now I’m going to have to spend lots of time trying to track that down, drat drat drat…

 
 

mikey,

Not bad, but wrong. The famous mathematician Roger Penrose has even postulated that quantum mechanical effects in the brain are the “Ghost in the Machine”, i.e. that these effects are the reason that artificial intelligence will never be achieved. But neurons firing involve the movements of atoms from one place to another, and therefore, quantum mechanical effects can be significant.

The only way transhumanism will allow immortality is by gradual replacement of human parts with artificial ones, and we’re a reallllly long way from that. Copies are just copies, not continuations of your consciousness.

 
 

Vonnegut wrote a short story that discussed replacement of bodily functions, to the extent of the old MST3K classic “jan in the Pan” where a woman’s head is attached to several rooms full of machines doing the work of the rest of her body.

Thge engineers in charge controlled the woman’s sleeping, waking, and moods by altering the levels of chemicals in the system. She even had arms, but the arms could not be positioned to commit suicide.

Which was all the woman wanted.

So is it still the same woman? She no longer has free will, if she ever did.

(pass that doobie over here. whose dorm room is this?)

Ya caught me mikey. Quantum uncertainty occurs at the sub-atomic level, not the molecular. Although no one round here thinks you’re a hoodlum.

But wouldn’t the electronic transfer involved in neuron activity also be at the sub-atomic level, since we’re talking about transfer of electrons? Electrons are where the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes in.

 
 

Regarding the death aspect…yeah of course you’d die. But if, say, I get cancer as family history dictates I should and there was some way to make a new me that thinks it’s me…well that me would be mighty happy, while the suffering me is probably also pretty happy to take a morphine shot.

All that said, I think life extension and cures for cancer are going to be way closer than a back-up firewire drive for all my stupid ideas.

Incidentally, this is a great little film about duplication…sadly I think there’s only a short clip of it available (I don’t do that Real shit).

 
 

Qetesh,

Yeah, and Cory Doctorow stole that idea for his awful novel “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom”. That book made me so mad I wanted to hunt him down and demand those 2 hours of my life back.

Algis Budrys had the inverse idea in his book “Rogue Moon”. There copies could be made, but the new copy was, of course, a different person as soon as the two copies started having different experiences.

 
 

I haven’t read the particular Pohl that Booty mentions, but some of the other stuff involves just what’s going on in that short film: transporters are xeroxes, not transporters, and the copy that appears on the other end is a disposable version of you. You walk out on your end, somebody gives you a cheque for donating a version of you, and your copy goes to work in the salt mines.

 
 

Brain download is actually the sub-text of “Altered Carbon” by Richard K Morgan. In it, you can have your brain downloaded into a databank for storage (or prison terms) and then later uploaded into a new body (real or synthetic). The whole concept is kind of weird, but hey, who am I to criticize fiction authors? 😉

 
Qetesh the Abyssinian
 

One other thing about all this whizz-bang tech stuff: I’m a complete geek (and yes, socially retarded, as is compulsory for geeks), and I love the speculative nature of some scifi, both in terms of tech and sociopolitical structures.

But probably the main thing that’s kept us from having all this marvellous doodaddery already is the fact that stupendous sums of money are wasted on things designed to kill people. Really, vast amounts are squandered on military hardware, research into better ways to make human protoplasm suffer and die, and training young people to become sociopathic enough to try to kill each other.

If things were otherwise, we’d probably already have those jetpacks and solar power, we’d have eliminated world hunger and created anti-gravity, and done all sorts of other groovy things. Except that the money (and hence research etc) has been squandered on death.

While I remember, I mentioned Overdrawn at the Memory Bank in my previous comment: that story does great work in investigating the intersection between hard storage (memory), running instructions (programming/consciousness), and locus of control (programmer/human consciousness). Gives rise to all sorts of questions and heavy thinking time, which is my idea of a great story.

Another thing I’ve noticed about science/speculative fiction is that the adventure stories and the harder tech stories are usually written by men, while the sociopolitical structure explorations are usually written by women. Has anyone else noticed this? I mean, C. J. Cherryh’s done some marvellous series about different sociopolitical structures, headlined by the magnificent Downbelow Station;Sherry S. Tepper’s got those highly emotive social crisis books; Ursula Le Guin did some marvellous classics such as The Dispossessed, and so on. I can’t, off the top of my head, think of a male author who’s done the same thing.

Oh, except that one whose name I can never remember, who wrote a book that I just loved to death, and now bloody well can’t find, thanks for reminding me. Drat yet again.

Hurrah, my friend Instant Preview saved me from the dreaded Unclosed Italics Tag embarrassment! Twice!

 
 

I think it’s worth mentioning that Stanislaw Lem is a far smarter author, if cornier, than almost anybody mentioned so far. The Cyberiad and The Star Diaries completely destroyed my interest in science fiction because everybody else looked like a shallow idiot next to him, even when he was cribbing from Borges.

Lem has quite a bit to say about every ethical problem of note that science fiction can think of.

 
Herr Doktor Bimler
 

Ya caught me mikey. Quantum uncertainty occurs at the sub-atomic level, not the molecular. Although no one round here thinks you’re a hoodlum.
Penrose’s idea (well, not his idea, but one he likes enough to promote it) is that the interior of the microtubules that make up a neuron’s cellular skeleton might become quantum-coherent, despite being well above the usual coherence temperatures. This is a bit of a hack to allow quantum indeterminacy at cellular scale.
The argument strikes me as wildly implausible, but not batshit-crazy.

 
 

But wouldn’t the electronic transfer involved in neuron activity also be at the sub-atomic level, since we’re talking about transfer of electrons? Electrons are where the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes in.

This is a good, and interesting question. Here in ‘Silicon’ Valley, it’s been a critically important question for at least fifteen years. There were concerns that an effect called “quantum tunneling” would undermine processor accuracy at the 100Nm feature size. And many very strange, highly advanced workarounds were proposed. We are now going into production with dies at 45Nm. Still not a real problem. All we’re doing here, making processors at Intel and AMD, is manipulating electrons. Remember, electrons are the lowest mass particles that can occur and be manipulated in the world we live in, and the only Leptons we regularly manage.

So it turns out that up to some as yet unspecified level, quantum effects can be kept at bay. Science doesn’t sit back and be a victim of physics, it USES physics to manage materials and effects. That’s a good thing….

mikey

 
Herr Doktor Bimler
 

Also, ‘Echo round his Bones’, by Thomas Disch.

 
 

Wildly implausible is a very good description. Your description of his theory is a lot more specific than the one he sets out in “The Emperor’s New Mind”. It is therefore even less plausible.

It has been shown that quantum tunneling is significant in the movements of particles as massive as protons, even at room temperature, and it has been hypothesized that certain enzymes that involve proton transfers have specifically evolved to take advantage of these effects. Judith Klinman at Berkeley has been studying this.

 
 

Indeed. But quantum mechanical predictions can be described as a number of solutions, ranked based upon statistical probability. You’re measuring likelihoods, not actualities. And therein, the larger scale observable is the determining measurement….

mikey

 
 

Qetesh, I was going to mention Lem, but RBubba beat me to it. Also Henry Kuttner, although some might protest that C.L. Moore may have been responsible for “his” best stuff. And of course Terry Pratchett. There are plenty of men who do interesting wetware stuff, if only my aging mind had not shed so many memory neurons, but I’d be the first to agree that women have a sizable numeric advantage when it comes to the stuff with actual characters instead of just Tom Swift. And some of the best men-who-write-about-people are non-white or gay or otherwise Outside the Privileged Circle (oh, yes, Chip Delany).

Would there be a Greasemonkey option that would kick in when I’m channel surfing and if I see William Kristol on TV he’ll just be talking about pie?

When they market *that* option, I’ll seriously consider downloading my brain. Seriously, though, I”m so shallow and self-centric that my problem with the whole NanoHumanity field is the same as my problem with Libertarianism: Theoretically it might sound like an excellent idea, but the individuals I’ve actually met who are most committed are such dreary, obnoxious, undersocialized bores that I don’t want to spend a long wet afternoon in their company, much less the rest of virtual eternity. Given the choice of Glenn Reynolds forever and immanent death, I’d choose the carbon monoxide with a quickness.

 
 

One more book rec on the topic: John C. Wright’s trilogy, The Golden Age, The Phoenix Exultant and The Golden Transcendence. Set in the far, far far future, and loaded with ideas about these very issues — in fact, a significant portion of the story involves the question of whether a person whose primary body died and who was reloaded from a backup copy, missing an hour of time, is in fact the same person (and thus heir to the original’s wealth). There’s a lot more to it than that, including a wide variety of different mental forms humans might choose to take in the distant future. Not perfect books, but pretty good.

 
 

Duros62, I salute you. It’s a good thing my keyboard has a protective covering that magically repels fur and nasal-delivery-beverages, otherwise I’d be coughing up a furball for another laptop right about now.

Welp. my work here is done. =)

Bubba, thank you thank you thank you for finding that John Weldon film. I have been looking for that for years now. Saw it once and can’t keep it outta my head.

 
 

Seriously, it’s like motherfuckers aren’t even reading Frederick Pohl anymore.

Or James Patrick Kelly. Think like a dinosaur!

 
 

Personally, I think that a robot butler, or a personal jet pack would have been way cooler than a robot-controlled factory. But that’s just me.

 
 

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