How to Upload Your Mind to a Computer
I magine that a person'due south brain could be scanned in bully detail and recreated in a computer simulation. The person's mind and memories, emotions and personality would be duplicated. In effect, a new and every bit valid version of that person would now exist, in a potentially immortal, digital form. This futuristic possibility is called listen uploading. The scientific discipline of the brain and of consciousness increasingly suggests that mind uploading is possible – there are no laws of physics to prevent information technology. The technology is likely to be far in our future; it may be centuries before the details are fully worked out – and notwithstanding given how much interest and try is already directed towards that goal, mind uploading seems inevitable. Of class nosotros can't exist certain how it might bear upon our culture just as the applied science of simulation and bogus neural networks shapes upwards, we can guess what that mind uploading hereafter might be like.
Suppose i twenty-four hours you get into an uploading dispensary to have your encephalon scanned. Let's be generous and pretend the engineering science works perfectly. It's been tested and debugged. Information technology captures all your synapses in sufficient detail to recreate your unique mind. Information technology gives that mind a standard-event, virtual torso that'southward reasonably comfortable, with your face and vocalization attached, in a virtual surround like a high-quality video game. Let's pretend all of this has come truthful.
Who is that second you?
The first yous, let'southward phone call it the biological you lot, has paid a fortune for the procedure. And yet you walk out of the dispensary just as mortal as when y'all walked in. Yous're nevertheless a biological being, and eventually yous'll die. Equally you bulldoze home, you retrieve: "Well, that was a waste of money."
At the same time, the simulated you lot wakes up in a virtual flat and feels like the same old you. It has a continuity of experience. It remembers walking into the clinic, swiping a credit carte du jour, signing a waiver, lying on the table. It feels as though it was anaesthetised and and so woke up over again somewhere else. It has your memories, your personality, your thought patterns and emotional quirks. It sits up in a new bed and says: "I can't believe it worked! Definitely worth the cost."
I won't phone call it an "it" any more than, because that mind is a version of you. Nosotros'll telephone call it the simulated you. This "sim" you lot decides to explore. Yous pace out of your apartment into the sunlight of a perfect twenty-four hour period and find a virtual version of New York City. Sounds, smells, sights, people, the feel of the sidewalk underfoot, everything is present – with less garbage though, and the rats are entirely sanitary and put in for local colour. You chat up strangers in a fashion y'all would never do in the real New York, where you'd exist worried that an impatient pedestrian might dial yous in the teeth. Here, y'all tin't be injured because your virtual trunk can't break. You lot stop at a cafe and sip a latte. It doesn't taste right. It doesn't feel like annihilation is going into your stomach. And goose egg is, considering it isn't real food and yous don't accept a tum. It's all a simulation. The visual particular on the table is imperfect. There'due south no grittiness to the rust. Your fingers don't have fingerprints – they're smooth, to save retentivity on fine detail. Animate doesn't experience the same. If you lot hold your breath, you don't get featherbrained, because there is no such affair every bit oxygen in this virtual world. Yous find yourself equipped with a complementary simulated smartphone, and you phone call the number that used to be yours – the telephone you lot had with y'all, just a few hours ago in your experience, when you walked into the dispensary.
Now the biological you answers the telephone.
"Yo," says the sim you lot. "It's me. I mean, it's y'all. What's up?"
"I'g depressed, that'south what. I'm in my apartment eating ice-cream. I can't believe I spent all that coin for goose egg."
"Zilch?! You would not believe what information technology's similar in here! Information technology'southward a fantastic place. Recall Kevin, the guy who died of cancer last week? He's here too! He's fine, and he still has the same task. He Skypes with his old yoga studio iii times a calendar week, to teach his fitness class. But his girlfriend in the real globe has left him for someone who's non dead yet. However, lots of new people to appointment here."
I take to resist getting carried away by the humour of the situation. Underneath the details lies a very existent philosophical puzzler that people will somewhen have to face up. What is the relationship between bio you and sim yous?
I adopt a geometric manner of thinking about the state of affairs. Imagine that your life is similar the rise stalk of the letter Y. Yous're born at the base, and as you grow upwardly, your mind is shaped and changed along a trajectory. And then y'all permit yourself be scanned, and from that moment on, the Y has branched. At that place are at present two trajectories, each one as and legitimately you. Permit's say the left-hand co-operative is the simulated you and the correct-hand branch is the biological you lot. The part of you lot that lives indefinitely is represented past both the stem of the Y and the left-hand co-operative. Simply as your childhood cocky lives on in your adult self, the stem of the Y lives on in the faux self. Once the scan is over, the ii branches of the Y proceed along different life paths, accumulating different experiences. The right-hand co-operative will die. Everything that happens to it afterwards the branching point fails to achieve immortality – unless it chooses to scan itself again, in which case another branch appears, and the geometry becomes even more complicated.
What emerges is non a single you, but a topologically intricate version, a hyper you with two or more branches. One of those branches is e'er going to exist mortal, and the others take an indefinite lifespan depending on how long the estimator platform is maintained.
Y'all might remember that since the bio you lives in the existent globe, and the sim you lot lives in a virtual earth, the two will never come across and therefore should never encounter whatever complications from coexisting. But these days, who needs to come across in person? Nosotros interact mainly through electronic media anyway. The sim you and the bio you represent two fully functional, interactive, capable instances of you, competing within the same larger, interconnected, social and economical universe. You could easily find yourselves meeting over video conference.
At the simplest level, mind uploading would preserve people in an indefinite afterlife. Families could take Christmas dinner with sim Grandma joining in on video conference, the tablet screen propped upwards at the end of the table – presuming she has fourth dimension for her bio family unit any more than, given the rich possibilities in the simulated playground. It'due south this kind of idealised afterlife that people accept in mind, when they think about the benefits of mind uploading. Information technology'south a human-made heaven.
But unlike a traditional heaven, information technology isn't a separate globe. It's seamlessly connected to the real world. Think of how y'all interact with the globe correct at present. If you lot live the typical western lifestyle, and then the smallest role of your life involves interacting with people in the physical space around you. Your connection to the larger world is almost entirely through digital means. The news comes to you on a screen or through earbuds. Distant locations are real to you mainly because you larn about them through electronic media. Politicians, celebrities, even some friends and family may be to you mainly through data. People work in virtual offices where they know their colleagues only through video and text.
Each of us might equally well already be in a virtual world, with a steady menstruation of information passing in and out through CNN, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and text. Nosotros alive in a kind of multiverse, each of united states of america in a dissimilar virtual bubble, the bubbles occasionally merging in real space and then separating, but e'er connected through the global social network. If a virtual afterlife is created, the people in it, with the aforementioned personalities and needs that they had in real life, would have no reason to isolate themselves from the rest of us. Very little needs to change for them. Socially, politically, economically, the virtual and the real worlds would connect into i larger and always expanding civilisation. The virtual world might as well be simply some other city on World, filled with people who have migrated to information technology.
We've always lived in a earth where culture turns over with each generation. But what happens when the older generations never die, but remain just as active in society? In that location's no reason to think that the living volition have any political, economical, or intellectual advantage over the simulated.
Think of the jobs people have in our earth. Many of them require concrete action, and those are the jobs that will probably be replaced by automatons. Taxi driver? Publicly shared, self-driving cars are well-nigh here. Street cleaners? Checkout operators? Construction workers? Pilots? All of these jobs are probably for the chopping block in the medium to long term. Robotics and artificial intelligence will take them over. The rest of our jobs, our contributions to the larger world, are done through the heed, and if the listen tin be uploaded, it tin can continue doing the same job. A politico can work from cyberspace simply as well as from real space. So can a instructor, or a director, or a therapist, or a journalist, or the guy in the complaints department.
The CEO of a company, a Steve Jobs blazon who has shaped up a sweet set of neural connections in his brain that makes him infrequent at his work, tin can manage from a remote, simulated part. If he must shake hands, he tin take temporary possession of a humanoid robot, a kind of shared rent-a-bot, and spend a few hours in the real world, meeting and greeting. Fifty-fifty calling it the "existent" earth sounds prejudicial to me. Both worlds would be as real. Maybe the improve term is the "foundation" world and the "deject" world.
The foundation world would exist full of people who are mere youngsters – mainly under the age of eighty – who are all the same accumulating valuable experience. Their unspoken responsibility would be to gain wisdom and experience earlier joining the ranks of the cloud globe. The residuum of power and culture would shift quickly to the cloud. How could information technology not? That'south where the knowledge, feel and political connections will accumulate. In that scenario, the foundation globe becomes a kind of larval stage for young minds, and the cloud world is where life really begins. Mind uploading could transform our culture and civilization more greatly than anything in our past.
Michael SA Graziano is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/20/mind-uploading-brain-live-for-ever-internet-virtual-reality
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