Upload Yourself Fool!
There is a lot of talk, these days, about people
attempting to achieve immortality by uploading their brain.
One of the first instances of consciousness upload in sci-fi I encountered was
in William Gibson's, 1984 novel "Neuromancer" it was
Sense/Net's recording of McCoy Pauley, the Dixie Flatline.
There were others, such as Cobb Anderson in Rudy Rucker's 1982 novel "Software"
but the Flatline was the first to make a real impression.
This was the first one to really make me think about what it would be like.
We never got to meet the Flatline as a human, I guess is one critical piece.
We got the chance to know Cobb Anderson
before he got himself killed and coded up into a bot.
The Flatline was an aware and thinking being,
a little irked that he couldn't feel.
He came online with the desire to be erased, and yet,
seemed to maintain his sense of humor.
If we could upload our consciousness into a computer,
it is likely a method can be come up with,
that can be accomplished without killing the original.
If you had a functioning method,
why would you wait until near your death?
Why not make a weekly backup? Daily? Live stream?
I want a functioning copy of myself right now.
I think me and I would be fast friends.
It would be interesting to witness our divergence.
Would I resent me for having a body while I didn't?
Pronoun troubles.
Would a copy be married? Be a parent?
Would a copy be able to own property?
What about ownership of the hardware the copy inhabits?
Could it own the product of it's labor or intellectual property at least?
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Immortality: When We Digitally Copy Our Minds, What Happens to Humanity?
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image: assets.mubi.com/images/film/482/image-w1280.jpg?1445946470
video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hc-95YzN_4g
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The show WestWorld has me thinking about things of this nature a great deal right now. Would an AI with consciousness be a true living being? If it's just a computer than it is finite, so it would not leave this temporal plane I assume. I tend to lean on the side that mind is part of the physical experience and spirit is something separate and infinite. I would have a hard time with conscious AI simply because I tend to love rather easily and would find it tragic to love something that would end with such finality. Then again...nope, need to back away a little, this is where the 50 amp fuse in my brain threatens to trip haha!
i saw many different scifi themes in Westworld. From Blade runner to Neuromancer, and many things between.
i guess there is a need to define critically what we mean when we say "true living being". the keys of a piano are finite, but the music that can be played on those keys is not. can this be said of what we already call "true living beings"? what part does consciousness play? i have known people who probably wouldn't have passed a Turing test. at what point does AI artificial intelligence, become AC artificial consciousness? is it a progression? is consciousness possible without intelligence?
brain, intelligence, mind, consciousness, spirit, soul, being, not necessarily in that order. did i miss anything?
In Tolkien's books humans had the "gift" of mortality. Perhaps it would be great to be able to live 200 years, but immortality...at a certain moment this must become a Hellish punishment. Can the uploaded mind be erased upon request?
there seems to be much made of the idea that extreme longevity is somehow indistinguishable from actual eternal life. i don't think there is anything in the universe that has or can last that long. there is always the EMP, or at the very least a person could have their hardware turned into a plasma. no molecular organization can survive something like that. i've long noticed the idea in fiction, that long life is supposed to be unpleasant. i think i'll try it first, before i take the death option, it's a rather permanent choice with death.
These are fascinating musings...
Have you read Frederik Pohl's Heechee series? He envisioned stored inteligences with somewhat limited function. Another of my favorite Sci-Fi authors, Jack McDevitt, has AI's in his books that are (presumably) non-sentient clones of individuals that can be brought up as holograms and conversed with after a person's death...
Like Woody Allen, however, I prefer to achieve immortality by not dying. ;) I think I've already shared with you that I fully expect to do so, courtesy of my God Jesus Christ. I find the thought of figuring out how to do so on my own quite beyond me...
Continuity of consciousness, what constitutes a unique individual, especially with respect to morality and responsibility, and related questions are endlessly fascinating to me; I've written some about these matters, and have a long list of latent articles yet to be written... Thanks for keeping me thinking! 😄😇😄
thanks for the comment and the interest.
these subjects and more, are what keeps me reading about AI, simulation, and others.
i do intend to remain biologically alive, but i think i would get along swimmingly with a back up.
curing death doesn't seem an insurmountable obstacle.
How about this one?
Upload your brain, then strip out anything that doesn't drive your superego, program that onto a interactive chip, then insert THAT back into your noggin.
Think of all the fun arguments you could have with yourself...or at least that part of you that is hyper-moralizing and always looking at the end result.
You I want a piece of cake
Super Ego You We will get fat and unable to complete our goal for today, taking over the world
You But cake tastes GOOD
Super Ego You The taste of the cake is irrelevant. Prepare to initiate Stage One
You NARF!
sounds like current normal. it's like having pinky and the brain living in there. every part wants a mute button once in a while. i'd want a hub, so i could plug in as many as i currently have a need for. if were able to isolate other parts as well, i could make the brain/mind modular and have different configurations depending on the activity.
taking it seriously, there are so many applications that could be done with that technology.
Of course, there are some frightening possibilities as well, but I focus on the upside potential.
Glad you got the Pinky and the Brain reference...I had forgot about that show
this is not specifically about Pinky and the Brain, but there is a book with two characters who are nicknamed Pinky, and also The Brain. anyone who enjoys the cartoon, may enjoy this book,
The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross. this, and subsequent books in this series, read like Lovecraftian horror, James Bond, and Brazil, all mixed together in nearly equal proportion. Stross is an amazing scifi writer. The Atrocity Archives is not scifi.
Happy New year. cheers.
I'll look that up
HAPPY NEW YEAR
brain, from the beginning i noticed that he has the voice of Orson Welles, and it occurred to me at some point, that Orson Welles played the famous Charles Foster Kane, in Citizen Kane, and that Kane was also a megalomaniac. this led me to the seemingly inevitable conclusion that brain was actually CITIZEN Brain, aspiring conqueror of the world.
good timing! I was just reading this on the Pinky and the Brain wiki page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinky_and_the_Brain
i thought i'd seen every episode. that's funny.
Hahahahha
thank you. i'll be here all week.
Follow me ya 😁
leave your neural nets and follow me.
Iam have follow You 😀