Shroom Man 777 wrote:I mean, a perfect copy and replacement is possible...theoretically. But in implementation, there are going to be problems
For an engineering challenge as difficult as this, the large problem will tend to be solved by breaking it down into a series of smaller and easier problems, perfecting the solution for each, only then gradually progressing up to working on a hundred-billion neuron human brain.
That may mean first managing gradual replacement of a 300-neuron nematode brain, comprehensively testing and refining until the result approached perfection. Then someday manage such on a brain as complex as a fish. Eventually, later manage such on brains as complex as those of mice, of cats, etc.
That includes reproducing the effect of hormones, everything involved in emotions, etc.
(I'm assuming a perspective like my own of desiring initially no noticeable changes to how one was biologically, then only later trying improvements like the ability to moderate anger or fear with a thought).
Besides, if one is the average person undergoing the procedure in a future scenario where the technology is available, one probably isn't the first person undergoing it or even one of the first million people undergoing it. The procedure may have been tested and refined over countless past human subjects, after the prior implementation on animals.
This is not to say the replacement process would be absolutely perfect, but the brain isn't absolutely perfect to begin with, e.g. a few out of one's 100 billion neurons dying all the time. Given enough technological refinement, it could be good enough that one wouldn't notice the difference.
The brain has some amount of plasticity, adaptability, and ability to remap itself, so to speak, as observed in studies of people recovering from brain injuries. Biological organisms are imperfect from top to bottom but just real good as still functioning despite some imperfections. For example, it's even the case that one of a person's legs can be a little longer than the other, by up to millimeters if I recall correctly.
Of course, self-replicating nanorobots are quite a complex engineering challenge, not something I would anticipate in the near-term future short of Singularity-style general AI development or vast allocation of R&D resources over time, but I'm just observing the preceding is definitely possible within the laws of physics. (Strictly speaking, they don't have to be self-replicating, but having them grow and reproduce like biological cells is the probable route for producing a hundred billion of them to actually be economically affordable, more like growing a hundred billion bacteria than manually assembling robots one by one).
Shroom Man 777 wrote:You are trapped in a body that's no longer your own, as the parts of "you" are being replaced by more cybernetic components while the fleshy bits of your brain are removed.
"Fleshy bits" of brain being removed is poor terminology, sounding almost like a ghoul tearing out chunks. This is just a matter of a small number of the hundred billion microscopic neurons in one's brain being replaced per day, with no pain, no noticeable effect, and no harm observed by the individual.
If viewed in an x-ray, it might look a little like a tumor slowly growing in one's brain over the years, except it wouldn't be harmful.
Even in the adult brain, it is known now that there is a little continuing neurogenesis of thousands of new neurons a day (contrary to some outdated info in decades-old books). Every day some of your 100 billion neurons die and some new ones appear. You remain yourself. Gradual neural replacement would be little different in principle.
That's most obvious in an alternate possible technique of gradual brain replacement through new neurons genetically engineered to be less susceptible to senescence, given sufficiently advanced biotechnology. However, it's also true if they are nanorobotic replacements, which provide the potential for improved capabilities and longevity beyond anything biological. (After everything is replaced, the fun can begin, like "slowing down time" by speeding up one's brain to think many times faster if or when desired, since biological neuron networks operate on timeframes of milliseconds, but artificial ones could be capable of functioning on timeframes such as microseconds).
Shroom Man 777 wrote:And as less and less of you remain, you become less and less of a person while the cybernetic component becomes more you (to the outside world).
In the end, all that's left of "you" inside your mind is a feeble blabbering marginalized thought-process no different from a baby or that of an old person and darkness encroaches you as you finally achieve "immortality" as that last fleshy bit of your brain is replaced
No, your thought-process is based on the new nanotech neurons just like it incorporated the new biological neurons when one grew from being a child to an adult. You'd just need to watch out that you weren't starting to notice anything going wrong like memory loss, e.g. though it still beats dying you don't want to end up with the equivalent of Alzheimer's disease, but good enough technology should be able to avoid that.
Besides, this is a voluntary medical procedure, not a horror movie. If the person experienced anything wrong, if negative side-effects were noticed, he or she could stop the gradual process at any time.
Predating modern plastic surgery,
The Island of Doctor Moreau is typical of the dystopic perspective common in fiction by portraying the ability to surgically modify animals and humans being used for horror and creating monsters. Yet, in the real world, there's a lack of motivation for such, and the actual use of plastic surgery is often to restore victims of serious burns and other injuries to a more normal appearance ... aside from other uses of less practical value or necessity but still not horrible.
Likewise, if the technology for gradual neuron replacement is eventually developed, it will tend not to be used to create horrible experiences but to extend the enjoyment of life, like other medical technologies.
Shroom Man 777 wrote:that's gonna be interesting (story) material
The tendency to look for dystopic perspective for fiction is understandable. After all, a story that is all happiness, peace, and light without conflict would tend to be boring compared to entertaining fiction with suffering, angst, and violence. The mirror universe
Star Trek episodes were among the best.
However, it isn't necessary for technology to be the problem. For example,
Star Trek is sometimes criticized from how often the conflict in the plot comes from events seeming to be the result of engineering incompetence. Technology is the backdrop of a story's setting, but conflict can come from other sources, like war, interpersonal conflict, crime, etc.
To me, it seems that dystopic portrayal of new technologies has become so common as to be like a cliché. For example, it's boringly predictable when genetically-engineering people appear in a TV show to usually have them portrayed as the bad guys and condone racist/speciest discrimination against them.
I'm reminded of how one web page illustrates the common tendency towards looking more for problems than for solutions:
THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA
Suspend your disbelief and imagine the following miracle to have occurred: A young doctor working in a hospital discovers that he has the power to cure anyone under the age of seventy of any sickness or injury simply by touching the patient. Any contact, however brief, between any part of his skin and the skin of the patient will cure the disease.
He has always been devoted to his work, and he wants to use his gift to benefit humanity as much as possible. However, he knows that the gift is absolutely non-transferable, will last for his lifetime only, and will not persist in tissue separated from his body. This was explained by the angel or flying saucerite who gave it to him.
What will happen if he uses his gift?
What should he try to do and how should he go about it?
What is the most favorable result that can be expected?
I consider myself a member of the scientific rather than the literary culture, and my idea of the correct answers to the above questions reflects this. However, in order to mislead the reader, I shall give some pessimistic scenarios and related literary exercises.
LITERARY EXERCISES IN PESSIMISM AND PARANOIA
1. The doctor uses his gift, the other doctors are jealous and disbelieving and drive him from the hospital. He cures patients outside, they get him for quackery and put him in jail where he can't practice. Even in jail, he cures people, and the prison doctor has him put in solitary confinement. Even there he cures a guard of cancer and then the little daughter of the warden of the prison. This arouses the fears of the insecure, narrow minded, brutalized and bureaucratized prison doctors to the extent that they have him sent to a hospital for the criminally insane to be cured of his delusion. There, they lobotomize him. Write scenes in which doctors disbelieve cures taking place before their eyes, self justifying speeches by people who decide to imprison him even though they know better, and the report justifying his commitment to the mental hospital.
2. His gift is judged sacrilegious by the church of your choice. Fanatics are aroused by preachers, and our hero is burned at the stake. Write a speech justifying burning the doctor as a lesser evil compared to letting him go on violating God's law that man must suffer disease and death.
3. His gift is judged holy by a religion that gets control of him, and its use is surrounded by so much ritual that hardly anyone gets cured. Describe the ritual; make it beautiful.
4. People keep coming to him until he is exhausted, but there is always an emergency case more touching than all that have gone before and eventually he dies of exhaustion. Write his speech saying that he realizes he can cure more people if he gets some sleep, but true morality requires him to treat the immediate emergency.
5. He forms an organization for curing people and at first works very hard but gradually gets lazy, is corrupted by desire for money, power, fame and women, requires more and more flattery and obsequiousness, eventually strives single-mindedly for power, develops cruel tastes, comes to dominate the country, and is finally assassinated. Write speeches for him justifying his increased demands at various stages. Write the self-justifying speech of the assassin.
6. He is taken over by the U.S. government which either:
a. keeps him to cure members of the ruling military-industrial complex and to co-opt leaders of the people. Describe the subtle way in which a revolutionary is co-opted in the guise of being given a say in how the gift shall be used. Write the speech of a revolutionary refusing to be cured of his wounds after unsuccessfully trying to blow up the doctor.
b. devises a system of boards to allocate the use of his ability in the fairest possible way, but its operation is frustrated by injunctions and demonstrations by paranoid groups (your choice as to whether the groups are left, right or center) that cannot be convinced that his services are being allocated fairly. Write speeches charging that any of the following groups are not getting their fair share: Blacks, veterans, the poor, Southerners, policemen. Make up lists of demands on behalf of these groups.
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12. In order to destroy his gift the doctor tricks some scientists into skinning him alive. Explain why he does this.
13. He brings about universal health and the population explodes.
14. Universal health is achieved, but when he dies medicine has been neglected, immunities are gone and plague wipes us out.
15. Write a great American novel combining as many of the above catastrophes as possible.
16. Write an impassioned letter to him urging him to keep his gift secret.
I believe that all the above catastrophes would be avoided and the gift made into a great benefit. Those readers who consider themselves as members of C. P. Snow's scientific culture should try to work out the best solution for a day or so before going to the solution page.
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SOLUTION TO THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA
A solution requires morality, common sense, and technology.
You flunk on moral grounds if you propose not to cure anybody.
Any attempt to cure as many people as possible gets a B. To get an A, you must do the arithmetic and see that it is possible to cure almost everybody for a while.
Clearly the gift is finite. The doctor will eventually die, and his patients will face disease again as they will anyway when they reach seventy. This is no reason not to get the maximum benefit.
It turns out that he can cure everyone in the world whose disease or injury can be diagnosed in time to bring him to the doctor. The solution is technological.
Approximately 60,000,000 people under seventy die each year, i.e. two people die each second. We build a machine that can move 12 people per second past him on each of ten moving belts. A mechanism should be provided to stop the motion of the finger of the patient momentarily so that it touches the doctor rather than brushes his skin.
On the basis of the arithmetic the doctor need only spend 1/60 th of his time curing people, i.e. 24 minutes per day.
In order to reduce transportation costs it might be desirable to build a number of machines in different regions of the world and for the doctor to make trips to these machines, say once a month, to get the slow diseases, and to fly the emergency cases to wherever he happens to be.
It would not be very difficult for the doctor to get this solution adopted given a reasonable degree of persuasiveness either on his own part or on the part of some former patients he could recruit to help him. Doctors are often skeptical, but we have postulated a miracle that would convince almost all of them. Politicians are often shortsighted and bureaucrats bumbling, but what would be required in this case is simple enough so that they could do it. It is not possible to predict whether any important opposition to the use of the gift would develop. If so, it might be necessary to protect the doctor from assassination and the equipment from sabotage, and even then, there would be some risk of disaster.
I have not postulated any mental or physical side effects but it would be necessary to watch for them as well as for possible adverse social side effects.
The use of this gift would contribute to the population problem but not so much as one might think. In the U.S. 4,000,000 people are born each year but less than 1,000,000 under 70 die each year and most of these are past the child-bearing age. Elimination of death under 70 would require for stabilising the population that couples limit themselves to an average of say 2.1 children rather than the 2.2 children that might be allowable otherwise.
In countries with larger death rates of young people the population effect would be larger, but ordinary medicine is already having a similar effect.
Some people find the above solution repulsive because it involves a big machine with moving belts which would probably be noisy. Maybe they don't like a technological solution to what has been conceived as a moral problem.
Other people think that a law of nature is surely being violated - namely, a law that says that any apparently worthwhile innovation involving technology surely must have harmful side effects at least equal in magnitude to the apparent benefit.
There remains, however, the literary problem. Namely, imagine that the above analysis is correct and that the problem would be solved. Imagine further that the doctor, while posessing the gift of healing, is not a super-organizer or super-hero of any sort. How could one make literature of such a situation. The pessimistic and paranoid fantasies of the previous section make much better literature at least by present literary standards.
From here.
Though at least it's not Fucking Scary like Shrooms story, if the integration between the new components and the wetwear was that bad I'd become a luddite and go live in a shack far away from the Insane Transhumanists.
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- PeZook
