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Uploading 101
(Monday April 09 2007)
 | Looking more than a single step ahead at the IEET, a gentle introduction to attaining extreme longevity through copying ("uploading") the mind into the computer hardware of tomorrow. "We are going to want to store our brain in a permanent medium. That is where this whole idea of mind uploading comes from. Back up our consciousness and run it on another medium where we don't have 30 million neurons dying every year. ... There are maybe ten to twenty different commonly discussed possible ways to do this. ... The second way is neuron simulation of some sort. You have to somehow get inside the brain, probably destructively, and look at every single neuron and see how is it connected to all the other neurons around it, how are the synapses weighted, how are the synapses connected, and somehow tease that out of the structure. ... The thing that is so interesting is that all of these things are probably possible, perhaps within 40 years." The points made on the speed of progress and our unwillingness to recognize this speed are good. It may turn out to be more efficient in the end to radically change our bodies and minds than to keep repairing what we have. But uploading as commonly presented strikes me as an expensive form of procreation - your copy will live a long, long time, but you'll be stuck exactly where you are. Or destroyed in the copying process, under some schemes. |
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