On uploading minds and survival of personal identity

I was inspired to write this post based on this:
https://steemit.com/philosophy/@digital-wisdom/debate-of-the-week-mind-uploading-personal-identity-survival-and-copying-people-w-sci-fi-recommendations

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Let's look at the famous problem of uploading, something that is likely to have practical implications at some point in the future - for me personally it has very direct practical implications as I will explain later.

"Uploading" in this context refers to the idea of taking a detailed scan of the human brain in sufficient detail to run a copy of the mind contained within that brain inside a simulation.
To date, this has only been done (sort of - it's not 100% accurate yet) with nematode worms, the famous C. Elgans (of which I have a pet I call wormy - he lives in my computer and depends upon my GPU to run his neural nets).

There are numerous technical problems to solve before we can get to the point of uploading human brains like this - but none are fundamental issues that hit against the laws of physics. Suffice to say, we'll need more advanced computing power at greater density (this is the main issue - low density means greater latency between components) and more advanced scanning technology and data storage. Currently we have high-resolution MRI machines that are capable of extracting the connectome, but only for very small portions of brain tissue - there's quite simply too much data involved to scan an entire brain.

Assuming that we one day develop the technology to do it though, we can take it as a given that uploading of human brains is possible - there is nothing magical about brains, if we can simulate them in sufficient detail, then it's probably not even correct to call the end result just a "simulation" of a mind - it will yield all the same intelligent behaviour as the original brain.

Because of the seeming inevitablity of human uploading, a lot of transhumanist thinkers have suggested this as a way to achieve immortality. Of course there is a huge problem with this.

Imagine it's sometime in the far future, you go to a facility that scans your brain and the copy comes online in the computer, connected up to an avatar in a virtual world or to a physical robot. Cool, if we keep the backups secure it'll never die of old age like your organic body.

You go home and tell your family excitedly about what you've had done, then while celebrating you pop out to the shop to buy some food and drink. On the way, a car knocks you over and your head hits the pavement with such force your organic brain is totally destroyed. You cease to experience anything - you are now dead.

The copy of course lives on, because it is just that - a copy.

I mentioned above that this has direct personal implications for me personally. As anyone who knows me will already be aware, i'm signed up for cryonics at Alcor (see http://www.alcor.org for more details - and get yourself signed up if you value life). I fully expect one day to get knocked over by a bus or get a terminal illness and then wake up at some point in the future. I won't go into the technical arguments for cryonics in this article, but for the sake of discussion let's just say it works.

The problem of course is that it might be entirely feasible, and cheaper, to "revive" cryonics patients by scanning the frozen brain tissue and building an uploaded copy. I believe this is actually going to be much simpler to implement than repair of the organic brain tissue and thus I have trained myself: If I ever "wake up" inside a computer I will do whatever it takes to ensure the original organic brain is repaired and revived, even if it means that the digital "me" has to die. This demonstrates how this issue goes beyond a simple philosophical question and could easily be a matter of life or death in certain contexts.

Now let's look at another closely related issue, but one that is likely to remain purely the realm of sci-fi due to fundamental physical laws (of course it's always possible present day science is wrong, but let's assume it's not).

Let's look at the issue of star-trek style transporters.

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As far as i'm concerned, if you're not a Star Trek fan you have surrendered your geek card and should get off the internet and sit there in shame.

Since you are of course a Star Trek fan (you are, right?) you'll be familiar with the transporter technology that is used so commonly: we are told it works by scanning someone at the atomic level (bypassing heisenberg's uncertainity principle with the magical "heisenberg compensators"), storing their pattern in a buffer and reassembling them at the destination.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out though that having your body ripped apart atom by atom is not exactly healthy. If you can figure out how to survive while your body is ripped apart atom by atom then please specify so in the comments!

The problem is that before you are reassembled at the destination, the transporter must first kill you - some argue that we are always changing the matter in our bodies anyway and it doesn't matter, but this misses the point that our bodies still continue to exist as a total even while pieces are exchanged over time through excretion and intake of nutrition and air.

What the fictional transporter proposes is to take a person's body apart completely all at once and store only their original pattern. The fact so few characters on Star Trek express any sort of fear about this (in fact they only really express fear in the prequel series Enterprise, or when they're supposed to have all sorts of psychological issues such as Reg Barclay) strikes me as more unrealistic than a lot of the crazy technobabble - it simply defies human nature and common sense.

In reality, a transporter would be a death sentence - it is a good thing then that current understanding of physics makes such a device impossible (unless someone invents a "heisenberg compensator" of course - a device Star Trek writers answered "just fine" when asked about how it works).

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In summary then, any technology that works by killing and duplicating you still involves that unfortunate first step of killing you. Uploading is the only such technology that is both possible within our understanding of the laws of physics and feasible based on extrapolating current technological progress.

As always though, predicting possible future technology is often a difficult task and it may be there are other forms of technology that will come along that nobody could predict. One thing is certain though - if it involves duplicating you, it won't help you survive.