Immortality - Is it worth it?

[D.Turtle]

What would you do with 1000 years of life even if you could be healthy for all or most of it, i think longevity has to come with a change in our cognitive processes amount other things hence evolution.

Read all of Fanfiction.net. Play all computer games that exist. Walk the entire Earth. Learn a hundred different jobs. Read every book ever written. Make it my goal to meet as many people as possible. Learn a hundred different sports. Teach generations of kids. Mentor hundreds of students. Write a hundred books. Travel the solar system. And so on.

Do you regularly see old people die out of boredom? Or do active old people do just as much as active young people?

There already is enough stuff today to keep anyone as busy as they want to for thousands of years. And the speed of new developments is picking up. Every new development opens up additional stuff that you can do if you have the time to. The idea that immortality would lead to boredom is ridiculous.

[Starglider]

i think longevity has to come with a change in our cognitive processes amount other things hence evolution.

What is this 'has to'? There is no 'has' about it, although yes removing aging makes fixing the numerous fundamental flaws with human cognition a little more urgent and desireable (it was already highly urgent and desirable). Fortunately we're making steady progress on that too.

[Singular Intellect]

The fact is our hypothetical immortal human would quickly end up being surrounded by fellow immortal humans, and then quickly surpassed as they merge with technology, becoming magnitudes more intelligent, expressive and interactive with both the real and simulated worlds.

The magical immortality imparted here could quite easily, depending upon it's mechanism, become a massive hinderance, preventing an interface with technology and change along with everyone else (as a sci fi example, X-Men's Wolverine has the problem whereas he feels pain like everyone else, but his regenerative biology prevents the use of things like pain killers). What at first glance seems like a wonderous gift would rapidly become a horrific setback. On that grounds alone I'd refuse it, unless knowing exactly how it works and knowing it won't hinder the future enhancements I'm talking about.

[Justforfun000]

Starglider Wrote:

This is currently true, but there's no particular reason why it will continue to be true indefinitely.

Well..I know anything could be possible...I have great faith in recent advances in medicine and I do believe that it's not only possible...but likely probable that we will start tackling diseases and age-related barriers to a longer life. But true immortality? I honestly doubt that will be anything more then a dream.

As someone mentioned earlier, even an immortal could be killed in a random act of fate. I TRULY doubt we will ever become invulnerable! The longer the live...the better chance you will encounter a fatal accident..

I'm all for extending what we can though.

[Starglider]

As someone mentioned earlier, even an immortal could be killed in a random act of fate. I TRULY doubt we will ever become invulnerable! The longer the live...the better chance you will encounter a fatal accident..

Most accidents don't destroy the brain, they just render the body incapable of maintaining life support to it. This is fairly pathetic in the sense that if anyone tried to sell a computer that permenantly broke after being unplugged for a couple of minutes, it would be laughed off the market. Re-engineering the brain so that it goes into a hibernation state with lack of blood flow, instead of dying, greatly increases survivability because most fatal accidents don't destroy the brain. Obviously where possible you'd pair that with improved shock tolerance and skull reinforcement. Even where the brain is disrupted, given the ability to directly manipulate cellular structures we could reassemble and repair anything but massive damage (with varying degrees of memory loss).

Surviving incidents that would reduce a human to ashes or chunky salsa will require digital backups and/or transition to a non-human physical form.

What at first glance seems like a wonderous gift would rapidly become a horrific setback. On that grounds alone I'd refuse it, unless knowing exactly how it works and knowing it won't hinder the future enhancements I'm talking about.

Even though you have no guarantee of any of that stuff appearing in your lifetime? I doubt any plausible biological immortality is going to prevent uploading anyway.

[Broomstick]

Surviving incidents that would reduce a human to ashes or chunky salsa will require digital backups and/or transition to a non-human physical form.

In which case the person is dead and a copy of their mind survives. Which may be OK for a lot of people, but let's not kid ourselves about what "uploading" really means in this context.

[Starglider]

In which case the person is dead and a copy of their mind survives.

In the case where there is a restore from historical backup, the person's continuous causal history is interrupted. The copy is still effectively the same person but yes, you can reasonably say that a unique individual was lost. Even here there is a strong argument that this is functionally equivalent to perfect amnesia, so the equation of unique subjective experience to continuous joint causality is suspect (there was a good scene in 'Schild's Ladder' where a posthuman and some sentient AIs have exactly that debate).

In the case where an armoured data storage unit takes a live snapshot of brain state, and is retrieved after the incident (as in the 'stacks' of the Takeshi Kovacs books), or where there is a direct upload of the live snapshot as in the Cylons from nBSG, causal history is not interrupted and no unique individuals are destroyed. Obviously there is the cessation of biological processes but that's true even when you cyro-freeze someone in liquid nitrogen, thaw them out and resucitate them (something lots of cryonics advocates don't consider 'death').

[Broomstick]

In the case where an armoured data storage unit takes a live snapshot of brain state, and is retrieved after the incident (as in the 'stacks' of the Takeshi Kovacs books), or where there is a direct upload of the live snapshot as in the Cylons from nBSG, causal history is not interrupted and no unique individuals are destroyed.

If there's a dead body (or the remains of one) then somebody died. As I said, a copy of them might live on, and short of actual immortality that's good enough for me, but it won't be the actual me that's sitting here typing right now.

Obviously there is the cessation of biological processes but that's true even when you cyro-freeze someone in liquid nitrogen, thaw them out and resucitate them (something lots of cryonics advocates don't consider 'death').

Please don't talk like that process - freeze and rethaw with actual processes resuming - is fact for humans beings right now because it's not. It's hard to take you seriously when you act like fiction is fact. I'd be thrilled if it were fact, but it's not right now.

And no, that wouldn't be death, because the same mind in the same body would resume living. It's not death, it's hibernation or suspended animation but it is not final cessation of life.

As I said, I have no problem with the notion of uploading, making copies of one's mind as a form of "immortality", but the fact is with both of those processes the original person dies (or, in the case of a copy, suddenly acquires a mental twin). The person that continues on afterwards is not, in fact, the same individual although that person may be such a close relative that society deems it fine for the copy to get all the original's stuff, be addressed by the same name, and so forth.

[Singular Intellect]

What at first glance seems like a wonderous gift would rapidly become a horrific setback. On that grounds alone I'd refuse it, unless knowing exactly how it works and knowing it won't hinder the future enhancements I'm talking about.

Even though you have no guarantee of any of that stuff appearing in your lifetime? I doubt any plausible biological immortality is going to prevent uploading anyway.

Hence why I pointed out 'depending on the mechanism' of the OP immortality. Gamble on a potentially limiting form of magical immortality, or wait for the kind that introduces itself into humanity via technology. I'd comfortable betting on the latter, but not the former.

As for technologically imparted immortality and merging with technology, I have every expectation of that occurring within my lifetime, and much sooner than many people would think. People simply don't grasp exponential rates of progress.

As I said, I have no problem with the notion of uploading, making copies of one's mind as a form of "immortality", but the fact is with both of those processes the original person dies (or, in the case of a copy, suddenly acquires a mental twin). The person that continues on afterwards is not, in fact, the same individual although that person may be such a close relative that society deems it fine for the copy to get all the original's stuff, be addressed by the same name, and so forth.

Interesting question: what if your body were injected with hundreds of millions of blood sized computing devices that repaired and maintained your body while keeping you at a biologically young age. Suppose these same devices are networked with systems outside of your body while also interfacing with your brain, expanding your intelligence and memory capabilities. And let's say you take a severe blow to the head sometime after this enhancement, causing memory loss. The nanobots in your body start repairing this damage and rebuilding artificial brain cells based upon records kept outside of your body. Your memories start to return gradually as this process happens until you have all of them again.

What extend of damage is required, in your estimation, before a person 'dies' and it's just a copy being rebuilt?

[Starglider]

As I said, a copy of them might live on, and short of actual immortality that's good enough for me, but it won't be the actual me that's sitting here typing right now.

You can feel like that if you want. There are assorted thought experiments that deconstruct your viewpoint down to its basic flaws, but every time a transhumanist does that it just causes the opposition to repeat 'but... dead... is... dead...' over and over again, so I won't do it again now.

Bear in mind that from the point of view of the people who don't believe in the 'continuity flaw' philosophy, you are the one kidding yourself. I'm pretty confident you're wrong because this fits neatly into a big set of intuitive human beliefs that look really silly once you actually try to replicate the basic mechanisms of intelligence and consciousness. The vast set of utterly wrong human intuitive beliefs about physics, chemistry, biology etc have fallen to empirical enquiry and are now drilled out of children in school. The equally large set of wrong intuitive beliefs about psychology and consciousness has resisted assault until very recently, but we're now finally starting to make some progress on it.

[Broomstick]

We are ALL continually rebuilt - if it's a gradual process of replacement as cells wear out there isn't death. It's change, or metamorphosis, but not death.

When the body containing a conscious entity permanently stops functioning, that's death. That's why, in the hypothetical sudden rendering of a person into "chunky salsa" or "thin paste" or whatever it's a sudden cessation of life. That person dies. A "back up copy" or upload nearly identical to that person may come on line, but it's not the same person even if the two are so close it's easier to treat them the same. A gradual replacement over time, no, that's not death, that's what happens normally in living creatures.

[Broomstick]

As I said, a copy of them might live on, and short of actual immortality that's good enough for me, but it won't be the actual me that's sitting here typing right now.

You can feel like that if you want. From the point of view of the people who don't believe in the 'continuity flaw' philosophy, you are the one kidding yourself. I am reasonably confident that your viewpoint will dwindle into a small minority, once these transhumanist technologies become commonplace.

Reality does not change by majority vote.

Nor should you be so confident that these "transhumanist technologies" will ever exist. Your continual assertion that they will is no more accurate than crystal ball gazing. At this point in time we have nothing even slightly capable of "uploading" a human mind, and a lot of the other transhumanist stuff is either non-existent outside of science fiction or in the most primitive state.

[Simon_Jester]

So where's the line? I mean, "disintegrated, then restored from backup" doesn't preserve the individual because there's a discontinuity. "rebuild their memories after a massive bout of amnesia" preserves the individual because there... isn't a discontinuity? I'd think there is one but you seem to be saying there isn't.

So where's the line? Does destruction of the brain have to be total before an attempt to restore using backup data no longer preserves the individual? What if the damage isn't total, but is extreme? If Singular Intellect's pet nanites had been used in 2004 to patch up Terri Schiavo and rebuild her brain, would it still be Terri Schiavo?

[Starglider]

Reality does not change by majority vote.

I hadn't looked at it like this before, but this right here is the primary symptom that you aren't rationally considering the problem. 'Reality is like this... because it just is' is the most primitive kind of human belief. From that starting point, things we have direct experience of become 'reality is like this... because of my personal rationalisations of my personal collection of annecdotes'. Things we don't have experience of or can't explain become 'reality is like this... because it makes me feel better to believe that', which of course becomes religion. Eventually we invented science, which holds that reliable descriptions of reality have to come from 'formal theory verified by indpendent, reductionist experiment', or in practice 'a consensus of specialists qualified in those particular fields'.

Obviously you aren't treating this as a part of reality to be verified by conventional empiricism; I get the impression you won't admit any sort of experimental evidence, and you are completely certain in your individual ability to proclaim a fundamental fact of reality without any special qualification, something Nobel prize winners would be hesitant to do. It isn't even religion because you aren't relying on a supporting dogma or 'the pope told me so'. That unthinking, easy certainty that 'reality is like this... because' almost always comes from that atavistic hardwired rationalisation, which just formed as the most expident way of layering human consciousness onto animalistic aversion to injury and death.

There isn't anything I can say to snap you out of that. That said it'd be nice if the fact that most people who do study consciousness in depth do start discarding these sort of assumptions gives you a little flicker of doubt.

[Singular Intellect]

Nor should you be so confident that these "transhumanist technologies" will ever exist.

We're already building molecule scale technologies (nanobots), three dimensional computing capabilities, blood sized robotics, etc.

The future is approaching a lot faster than you think it is.

[Simon_Jester]

Obviously you aren't treating this as a part of reality to be verified by conventional empiricism; I get the impression you won't admit any sort of experimental evidence...

Starglider, you're skipping something here.

This is a philosophical question, not a scientific one: is an identical copy the same as the original, for purposes of determining whether the individual has "survived?" That question is as old as Plutarch. While I think Broomstick is over-hasty in deciding what the answer must be, I don't think this is on par with saying "the sun orbits the Earth because... because!" or some such.

[Broomstick]

So where's the line? I mean, "disintegrated, then restored from backup" doesn't preserve the individual because there's a discontinuity. "rebuild their memories after a massive bout of amnesia" preserves the individual because there... isn't a discontinuity? I'd think there is one but you seem to be saying there isn't.

So where's the line? Does destruction of the brain have to be total before an attempt to restore using backup data no longer preserves the individual? What if the damage isn't total, but is extreme? If Singular Intellect's pet nanites had been used in 2004 to patch up Terri Schiavo and rebuild her brain, would it still be Terri Schiavo?

I'll start with the last question and work backward.

In the case of Terri Schiavo, if I correctly understand your meaning, you'd use nano-whatevers to repair the damage to her brain and/or restore lost memories. Now, we don't fully understand how the brain or memory works, and I'm not privy to the details of what precise brain damage she had. Were her memories destroyed or was her means to access them destroyed? If the former, then constructing wound mean... well, she's be a different Terri Schiavo. We all change over time, after all, we don't think as adults the same way we did as children because we change not only in visible ways but in our brain structure and how we think. There would be a discontinuity there. Would it be sufficient to declare a Terry Schiavo 1.2? Honestly I'd have to think about that one, as I haven't considered it before. If it's a matter of reconstructing the mechanisms to access memories that exist but were, due to damage, inaccessible then she'd the same person. Reconstructed memories? There may well be some grey areas here, this question may not have a sharp, binary answer.

Next (moving backward), rebuilding after massive amnesia - well, what do you mean by "amnesia"? Again, are the memories destroyed, or inaccessible?. If you rewrite over the brain, replacing what is left, then yes, you've killed the person and replaced them with a close copy from my viewpoint. Half restore, half original? It's a definite change of some sort. Again, there doesn't have to be a sharp demarcation just because we're more comfortable with the idea, there could well be some ambiguous cases. It's rather like the case of Abby and Brittany Hensel, conjoined twins - are they one person or two? It depends. For some things the answer is "one" and for other circumstances "two". Reality likes to play jokes like that.

For legal and social purposes it may make sense to treat "rebuilds", "restores", and "copies" of these sorts as the same person.... but given human nature it's ludicrous to think there won't be second guessing or changes that wouldn't have occurred otherwise. I have a nephew still recovering from severe brain damage - prior to his accident when he got stubborn or made a poor choice it was because he was inexperience or a young man.... now, when he does that is it because he's a stubborn young man or because he's brain injured? Or consider organ transplants - why, yes, that new heart does become part of the recipient, fully integrated in to the body, but it's not the original heart - there are still detectable differences. Since all these "upload" technologies are, at this point, entirely hypothetical it is ridiculous to second guess them. There may be detectable differences (which may not even be negatives - perhaps "restores" or "uploads" have clearer recollections than those who haven't had the technology used on them, as a possible example). There may not be.

Really, this whole business of "uploads are the same person!" strikes me as similar to discussions of "souls". Substitute "soul" for "mind" or "personality" or "memories" and it sounds like religion and magic, and that's part of my objection. It sounds awful damn mystical for a board of supposed athiests to be talking about taking the mind/soul of one body and putting it into another or some sort of computer or robot body or whatever.

[Broomstick]

Reality does not change by majority vote.

I hadn't looked at it like this before, but this right here is the primary symptom that you aren't rationally considering the problem. 'Reality is like this... because it just is' is the most primitive kind of human belief.

Then why do YOU engage in it? You're insisting that your view of the future is the One True Way. If you have actual technologies that actually work to point to that would be one thing, but right now 90% of what you claim is no more than wishful thinking.

Eventually we invented science, which holds that reliable descriptions of reality have to come from 'formal theory verified by indpendent, reductionist experiment', or in practice 'a consensus of specialists qualified in those particular fields'.

Correct. So... point me to this "upload" technology. Show me someone who actually understands how the human brain functions from micro to macro level. Provide evidence.

I get the impression you won't admit any sort of experimental evidence

Bullshit. I say you have no evidence of these technologies outside of science fiction.

You want to talk about the possibility of, say, a better artificial hearing? Artificial sight for the blind? Sure, let's do it - because there is some sort of actual technology to extrapolate from. We can discuss the current tech and its limitations and possible ways to continue improving on it.

But you're talking about AI, mind uploading and things we do not have at this point in time. At all. The closest thing we have to "mental upload" is writing - which has improved incrementally over the past 6,000 or so years but does NOT bring the dead back to life. You can read a book, you can't have a conversation with it. So.... show me the evidence that this uploading you speak of is even possible. Discuss it, don't just proclaim it as Absolute Truth because it makes you sound like a religious nutjob in the First Church of Transhumanism.

There isn't anything I can say to snap you out of that. That said it'd be nice if the fact that most people who do study consciousness in depth do start discarding these sort of assumptions gives you a little flicker of doubt.

There is, at this point, a mighty gulf between philosophy and transhumanist technology. It's like cryogenics - people freezing heads and bodies thinking that they will be revived one day. You know, I think the whole-body freezers are less nutty than the head freezers - if you just freeze the head you now have the problem of not only thawing out and repairing the freeze damage to living tissues, you also have the problem that a detached head is NOT viable. Wow, you just went from reviving an intact (though frozen) body to now needing ANOTHER technology that doesn't exist yet, that is, keeping a detached head alive and/or providing it a body. Now, maybe, one day there will be a viable cryogenic technology - but that doesn't mean the people dunked in liquid nitrogen will be able to be revived by it. There might need to be some sort of chemical treatment before freezing, the optimal temperatures might be different, there might need to be special techniques to both freeze and revive to prevent cells from bursting - and make no mistake, the current cryopreserved people have massive celluar damage, virtually every cell ruptured from expanding ice crystals. It may be that they are, and will forever be, just dead meat on ice. I'm sorry, but it IS a possibility. If you're talking about extracting DNA from those ruptured cells and cloning a body.... well, they'd be a clone, wouldn't they? Cloned, perhaps in body AND mind, as the mental person would have to be restored as well. Again, a form of immortality a lot of people might well be comfortable with, but you'd still have a pile of dead meat on a slab at some point.

See, even when the science fiction comes true it's not always exactly like we envision it. We can't cheat reality. There is no telepathy, just the telephone. It replicates much of telepathy - we can communicate with people out of sight, out of earshot, on the other side of the world - but it's by a technology obedient to the laws of physics, not a psychic trick.

Your "uploading" of a human mind may or may not be possible. You are twisting my doubt into some sort of refutation, which it is not. See, unlike you, I realize that this thing does NOT exist in our present time. It may not be possible. It may wind up taking a form we don't imagine yet. You, on the other hand, keep protesting "It's True! It's True!" when it doesn't exist. Whether or not we have to append a "yet" to that last sentence only time will tell.

[Lord of the Abyss]

You know, I think the whole-body freezers are less nutty than the head freezers - if you just freeze the head you now have the problem of not only thawing out and repairing the freeze damage to living tissues, you also have the problem that a detached head is NOT viable. Wow, you just went from reviving an intact (though frozen) body to now needing ANOTHER technology that doesn't exist yet, that is, keeping a detached head alive and/or providing it a body.

I believe the usual argument is that it's cheaper, and that the technology to upload the data from a frozen brain is if anything more primitive/plausible than the technology needed to restore a frozen corpse. I don't think it's all that nutty either; it's not like there's some more plausible alternative to cheating death. They're certainly more likely to be restored than someone who is buried or is cremated, and being dead they don't exactly have a lot to lose. They might as well roll the dice.

[Broomstick]

Well, sure, it's their money, their body. I just don't see any basis in fact that extracting a living person from a detached frozen head is any more likely than reviving an entire frozen body.

I do understand the economic incentive, of course.

[K. A. Pital]

Part of the problem with the philosophical argument for identical copies being THE OBJECT is that they are true - only for an instance of copying, however. Only at that very moment the object and the copy are one and the same. However, if you allow the continued existence of both objects, they will become different entities the very next instance of time, as one gets unique Experience A and the other Experience B with no means to share that data after the copying link has been severed.

[Simon_Jester]

Part of the problem with the philosophical argument for identical copies being THE OBJECT is that they are true - only for an instance of copying, however. Only at that very moment the object and the copy are one and the same.

This is an issue when two versions of the same thing exist side by side- but what of cases where there is only one version at a time?

I'll start with the last question and work backward.

In the case of Terri Schiavo, if I correctly understand your meaning, you'd use nano-whatevers to repair the damage to her brain and/or restore lost memories. Now, we don't fully understand how the brain or memory works, and I'm not privy to the details of what precise brain damage she had. Were her memories destroyed or was her means to access them destroyed? If the former, then constructing wound mean... well, she's be a different Terri Schiavo. We all change over time, after all, we don't think as adults the same way we did as children because we change not only in visible ways but in our brain structure and how we think. There would be a discontinuity there. Would it be sufficient to declare a Terry Schiavo 1.2? Honestly I'd have to think about that one, as I haven't considered it before. If it's a matter of reconstructing the mechanisms to access memories that exist but were, due to damage, inaccessible then she'd the same person. Reconstructed memories? There may well be some grey areas here, this question may not have a sharp, binary answer.

Something like half her brain had physically dissolved by the time of her death- no one seriously believed there was any possibility of her ever 'coming back,' and I suspect the answer to your question is "both." If her memories were stored in any given chunk of her brain, odds are good they were destroyed; odds are good that critical chunks of brain tissue used for the thoughts needed to retrieve memories were destroyed too.

If you rebuilt it all in a state identical to what it was before her collapse and persistent vegetative state began, what then?

Let me ask another hypothetical- you're grabbed by Alien Space Bats (or Martians, or a mysterious stranger with a fondness for scarves ) and time-warped twenty years into the future. There is a clear physical discontinuity in your occupation of the world, but no discontinuity in your qualitative experience. Are you still the same person?

If so, that ties back into the Schiavo case: if you rebuilt her brain to 1989 standards (before her accident), there'd be a physical discontinuity in the existence of her brain, but no subjective discontinuity- she'd just have, in effect, gone to sleep for 15 years as far as her own perceptions were concerned.

Next (moving backward), rebuilding after massive amnesia - well, what do you mean by "amnesia"? Again, are the memories destroyed, or inaccessible?. If you rewrite over the brain, replacing what is left, then yes, you've killed the person and replaced them with a close copy from my viewpoint. Half restore, half original? It's a definite change of some sort.

If this is contemplated in cases where no viable mind can exist without the restoration, I'm not sure the overwrite could be said to kill anyone.

Really, this whole business of "uploads are the same person!" strikes me as similar to discussions of "souls". Substitute "soul" for "mind" or "personality" or "memories" and it sounds like religion and magic, and that's part of my objection. It sounds awful damn mystical for a board of supposed athiests to be talking about taking the mind/soul of one body and putting it into another or some sort of computer or robot body or whatever.

I can live with talking about souls, but I'm funny that way. Thing is, what working definition of "I am this person over here," what definition of individuality, can we have in a materialist context?

Throwing all supernatural ideas out the window, you're still left with the question of what it means to say "I am me," and the problem of excluding "not-me" from the list of things that can be considered "still me." Trying to draw the line at some pattern of mental states and memories is about as good a result as you're going to get- and a lot better than trying to come up with some definable physical property which is lost if we rebuild someone's brain from backup.

[K. A. Pital]

This is an issue when two versions of the same thing exist side by side- but what of cases where there is only one version at a time?

That's not possible with instant or near-instant copying. In case of human mind (since we're talking about transhumanism), how would you even do that? Over-time upload, where parts of the original brain will cease functioning as soon as the "information" is "uploaded" - transformed and written on some other carrier (and also functionally accessible for the person in the process of being "copied")? That might be feasible, but partial brain activity cessation usually results in damage to the remaining parts of the brain and thus the entire personality. Sure, in this case you could continously copy the object, but during the process a high risk of personality damage arises.

Not to say it doesn't arise with any other methods of either copying or even prolonging biological life.

[Broomstick]

We do have some precedent in real life for "brain discontinuity" - injuries and stroke, for example. I've had relatives who experienced one or the other, and it can be quite disconcerting. You have someone who appears physically the same, but may have had significant mental changes. The person is different. Legally and socially they're the same person, but a frequent expression (not just in my family, but in other instances of such things) is that they are a different [name].

So, unless the copying process is absolutely perfect (and, especially at first, that may not be the case) there will be a difference, and I have to wonder if it will have some of the same effect in observers - this person is a different [name]. Combine that with a possibility of putting the mind into a radically different form (because the physical does affect the mental) and you have some interesting questions about identity.

Now, in this case, you might get some improvements, unlike stroke or injury where the results are almost always less than before, and if some of those improvements are ordered by the person prior to copying, well, that's arguably self-improvement. It would be different than current circumstances, for sure.

[Modax]

[snip]
Your "uploading" of a human mind may or may not be possible. You are twisting my doubt into some sort of refutation, which it is not. See, unlike you, I realize that this thing does NOT exist in our present time. It may not be possible. It may wind up taking a form we don't imagine yet.

I think 'uploading' must be theoretically possible for philosophical reasons.

What I mean is, should uploading turn out to be actually physically IMPOSSIBLE it follows that there would have to be something essential and magical about human brains which no 'mere machine' can ever have. To think that uploading is impossible is to believe that biological life is MAGIC, and I can't except that.

BUT theoretical possibility does not translate at all in to application. It's quite possible that uploading will not be invented within any of our lifetimes.

There does appear to be some, preliminary, theoretical progress going on, none of which is really at the point where it would count as direct empirical evidence of the plausibility of uploading, but that's beside the point. This article (published a few weeks ago) gives what seems like a good overview:

source

SM Dambrot: What’s your take on the Blue Brain Project? They’ve apparently emulated a cat’s neocortical structure and announced that their goal is to emulate a human neocortex within, at this point, roughly eight years.

Dr. Goertzel: This is a long and complex story regarding a number of fascinating simulations done on IBM supercomputers. If you look at what Henry Markram did in simulating a cortical column, in the Blue Brain project, that was very interesting from a number of standpoints -- yet in some ways it didn’t do everything some people think it did. In simulating that column, Markham had to dig deeply into the equations of the flow of charge along a single neuron – and he actually published some really cool papers in Biological Cybernetics about adjusting those equations based on the measurements he and his team made. On the other hand, when you look at what the actual simulation he ran was, you can see that they did not actually simulate the precise input/output behavior of the cortical column.

What you’d like to see ideally is a simulation where if you feed some input into the column and get some output from the column, you see exact agreement with what you’d get from a real cortical column. They didn’t do that; what they did do was create a simulated column that statistically had the same input/output properties as a real column. That’s worthwhile and interesting, but it’s not uploading a cortical column. Since we don’t know the information coding of the column’s inputs and outputs, we don’t really know if we’ve gotten everything that’s there. Imagine that you simulated the input/output properties of me as a language user in this way: from the statistical standpoint of acoustic analysis it would look like it had the same input/output properties as I do, yet it’s missing the information.

Now, the cat brain that you mention was actually Dharmendra Modha's work. It was a totally different project based on IBM hardware that was the next generation from what Markham used. They simulated a neural network similar in size and connection complexity to a cat’s brain. However, the pattern of connections was random – not derived from study of the cat brain and it didn’t go down to the level of neurotransmitter concentrations either. It was a wonderful hardware demonstration of building a formalized neural network of that huge size, but it didn’t have the same dynamics or structures as a cat brain because we don’t know what those are.

As it happens, Modha’s team at IBM has done some other work aimed at understanding those structures, and published quite an interesting paper on the structure of the monkey brain in which they curated thousands of neuroscience papers and charted which regions of the monkey brain connected to other regions, trying to parse the connection structure just on a region-to-region level. There are hundreds of brain regions and hundreds of thousands of papers on how they’re connected. Also, they were the first to sort through all the different nomenclatures and sub-literatures in the world to create a coherent database of the connections between different parts of the monkey brain.

So that‘s interesting, and eventually if you bring that kind of connectivity diagram together with the kind of simulation that they did, potentially you could get a large-scale simulation with more of the same structures and dynamics as a real animal’s brain – but they haven’t gotten there yet.

Open Connectome is another interesting project, at John Hopkins University, to mention in that regard. It’s a little bit earlier stage that what Modha’s team did with the monkey brain, but it’s all Open Source. Their scientists upload connectivity data from different parts of the brain, and make open source tools where anyone can go online and help map out neurons, synapses and what’s connecting to what in the data – and this could produce a much more fine-grained map of the connectivity structure. If something like that succeeds, then you could really make a large-scale brain simulation that does what the brain does – which is something that neither Markham nor Modha did in their simulations.

SM Dambrot: That kind of open-source project would have a significant benefit to a wide community of neuroscientists.

Dr. Goertzel: Yes – they want to go Web 2.0 with it: They want to not only have scientist upload their data, but also have people from around the world log on and help interpret the data. It’s interesting – there are some image processing tasks that people are good at but computers aren’t that good at. For example, with three-dimensional imaging data – the type of data that the John Hopkins researchers have uploaded – people can look at and see, “yes, there’s a neuron there, and it’s pointing to another neuron over here.” Current image processing tools, however, are quite weak with 3D data.

So right now, there’s a role for people to look at this 3D data and see what’s connected to what. Once AI is a little further advanced at 3D image processing tasks, the role of people will shift to correcting the AI’s mistakes, and then ultimately the AI could obsolete people – in part by leveraging the training data obtained from people’s image classification judgments made by using the Open Connectome web interface.

So at this time we have not been able to truly 'upload' one small part of one region of a cat's brain...but the understanding of the problem is advancing rapidly. Still, this is going to take many decades if not more than a century, even taking into account an accelerating rate of progress.