Comments on: Mind uploading won’t lead to immortality

By: Robert Newport

Robert Newport — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 22:10:21 +0000

First, I totally agree with the author that the word and concept of immortality is ineptly applied to our quest for achieving greatly extended lifespans and I have on numerous occasions petitioned the cryonics community of which I am a member to drop the term altogether. Secondly, I wish I did know from where and how, consciousness arose. I do not and I am not convinced that anyone else does either. While it is true that with disturbed brain function consciousness can be disturbed, it is not always true, and we have many anecdotal reports of patients conscious of various elements of their surroundings while in coma and even while brain ‘dead’. As for identical twins, clearly the author has not thought this out, nor researched it fully, as their are many studies that indicate that twins pairs do share consciousness, at least at times of crises.
I am afraid that we simply do not know enough about the very nature of consciousness to conclude that an exact copy of a human brain would or would not confer consciousness on the resulting being. I, for one, would not refuse an upload, if it became possible. I am not however ready to give up my cryonics arrangements on the hope that the upload would work, nor would I volunteer to allow my brain to be destroyed if that is what it took to upload it.
Thank you for this interesting discussion. Robert R Newport M.D.

By: Carson

Carson — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 21:03:02 +0000

I could not have said it better. This is the most accurate description of consciousness pertaining to uploading I have seen. It's not movable or transferable. We are tied to our organic brain. Would be interesting to know if the self is tied at atomic level, quantum, or higher level like neuronal connections and what not. I'm thinking consciousness is just created from several organic interactions going on in our brain. All the small parts working together creates this self. Strange that so many in the transhumanist community think consciousness is just data or a pattern. We are our brain. I wish it was not true. Another interesting thing to think about and where research should be happening is animal consciousness/self. Starting with mice to higher levels social animals like dogs. Their memories defy logic at times. Whatever consciousness is it's fundamentally the same in all species. It's just an arrangement of matter in a certain way.

By: Maciamo Hay

Maciamo Hay — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 18:49:58 +0000

Edwin, neurons do not regenerate themselves like other body cells. We have the same neurons as when we were born, except that their number declines over time. A very small number of neurons has been known to be regenerated in some brain regions (e.g. cerebellum), especially after a trauma, but that would have little incidence on our consciousness.

By: Edwin

Edwin — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 10:42:39 +0000

Our brain is already entirely different from the one we had when we were children.

All the neurons and chemicals have already been replaced by our growth and aging.

Yet we retain our old sense of self. We still believe we are the same being as we were when we were children.

Add to that the idea that our mind exists directly independent of our body is directly contradicted by everyday observations. Like the fact that alcohol and other physical substances can change our conscious states and that degenerative brain diseases Alzheimer’s and brain damages can seriously impair or even destroy conscious states and the fact we don’t expect young children to be capable of advanced forms of abstract thinking, they require more fully developed brains. Certain controlled substances can also generate out of the body experiences, similar to the ones experienced during near death experiences.

So the only option left is that we can retain our sense of self, even if every neuron replaced by a similar neuron with the same function.

What then is to stop us from replacing every neuron with a synthetic/software neuron which can do the same things?

That is why I am sure we can download ourselves into a machine. It would feel like sleeping and awakening. In fact people who die and come back alive say that dying feels like sleeping, which supports the above facts.

By: William Bliss

William Bliss — Thu, 19 Jun 2014 14:45:43 +0000

No one is suggesting the original person will survive serial sectioning.
The relative immortality belongs to the new copy.

The author overlooked a very, very distant option.
If nanobots could surround each neuron, study their exact function, and continuously upload this data, then when each neuron dies the local nanobots could take over the physical functioning of that dead neuron. The simulation of the original neuron’s synaptic “decisions” would be performed in the “mainframe”. In this fashion, every day more and more of the person’s consciousness would be moved into the “mainframe”, and the body would become a telepresence device.

The person would not be able to determine how much of her brain function was local or in the mainframe, unless the mainframe was queried.

Today’s research in insect simulation is important because such whole body simulation gives us a laboratory for testing neural models, with feedback coming from watching how the insect behaves.

By: Ellis Reppo

Ellis Reppo — Thu, 19 Jun 2014 08:23:54 +0000

No. A copy is as good as the original. Read Kurzweils essays in his first three books. They can also be found on his website. "The feeling of self" is a collection of processes. "I" am a collection of processes. "You" are too. If these processes can be transferred into another substrate then I will survive. Assuming you understand this to be truth, so will "you" if you choose to do this when the time comes.