Ponderings of science, philosophy, history, society, and many other topics
This video does a pretty good job at outlining the idea and stark challenges with mind uploading. (Watching it isn't necessary to understand this post, unless you're completely unfamiliar with the idea. It's 14 minutes long, although the last few minutes are an advertisement.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b33NTAuF5E Kurzgesagt: Can You Upload Your Mind & Live Forever I'm … Continue reading Mind uploading and the philosophy of self
Netflix dropped the second season of Altered Carbon on Thursday, so naturally I had to binge through it. This show is based on the novels by Richard K. Morgan. While the first season (which I reviewed) broadly followed the plot of the first book, albeit with a lot of additions and enhancements to the storyline, … Continue reading Altered Carbon, season two
Michael Graziano has an article at The Guardian, which feels like an excerpt from his new book, exploring what might happen if we can upload minds: Imagine that a person’s brain could be scanned in great detail and recreated in a computer simulation. The person’s mind and memories, emotions and personality would be duplicated. In … Continue reading Michael Graziano on mind uploading
Sean Carroll on his podcast interviewed Lisa Aziz-Zadeh on embodied cognition: Brains are important things; they’re where thinking happens. Or are they? The theory of “embodied cognition” posits that it’s better to think of thinking as something that takes place in the body as a whole, not just in the cells of the brain. In … Continue reading The implications of embodied cognition
Several years ago, I read Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs novels about a future where people's minds are recorded in a device (called a "stack") implanted just below the brain stem, essentially providing a form of mind uploading, and allowing people to survive the death of their body. Kovacs, the protagonist of the series, is an … Continue reading Altered Carbon
A while back, I highlighted a TEDX talk by Anil Seth where he discussed that cognition is largely a prediction machine. Apparently Seth more recently gave another talk at the full TED conference, which is receiving rave reviews. Unfortunately, that talk doesn't appear to be online yet. But one article reviewing the talk focuses on something … Continue reading Why embodiment does not make mind copying impossible
Michael Graziano has an article at the Atlantic looking at the plausibility of mind copying. He doesn't beat around the bush, going all in with the title: Why You Should Believe in the Digital Afterlife, although the actual text of the article is more nuanced, and echoes what I hear from most neuroscientists. As a neuroscientist, … Continue reading The challenges of copying a mind
Click through for full sized version and red button caption. Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Of course, the upshot is that if you view humans as organic machines, it opens the door to something like robot heaven eventually working for us. We might someday build heaven. Indeed, if it should turn out that there is a heaven … Continue reading SMBC: Robot heaven
I've written numerous times here that I tend to think that AGI (artificial general intelligence) and mind uploading are both ultimately possible. (Possibly centuries in the future, but possible.) I've also noted that we'll have to have a working understanding of the mind, how it works, how it is structured, before we can do either, … Continue reading Discovering the architecture of the mind
The other day, I highlighted the article by neuroscientist Kenneth Miller on the possibility of mind uploading. Miller saw it as possible, but thought it might be thousands or maybe even millions of years before we could do it. Here's a take by another neuroscientist, David Eagleman, being a bit more optimistic, and discussing the … Continue reading David Eagleman: Can a computer simulate a brain?
