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Tag Archives: Mind uploading
The implications of embodied cognition
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Zeitgeist
Tagged Brain, Consciousness, embodied cognition, Mind, Mind uploading, Philosophy of Mind
36 Comments
Altered Carbon
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Science Fiction
Tagged Altered Carbon, Mind uploading, Richard K Morgan, Science fiction
43 Comments
Why embodiment does not make mind copying impossible
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Mind and AI
Tagged Brain, Computational theory of mind, computationalism, Consciousness, Mind, Mind uploading, Philosophy of Mind
30 Comments
The challenges of copying a mind
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Mind and AI
Tagged Brain, Consciousness, Mind, Mind uploading, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
26 Comments
SMBC: Robot heaven
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. … Continue reading
Discovering the architecture of the mind
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Mind and AI
Tagged AI, Artificial general intelligence, Artificial intelligence, Brain, Cognition, Mind, Mind uploading, Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind
30 Comments
David Eagleman: Can a computer simulate a brain?
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 … Continue reading
Posted in Zeitgeist
Tagged Big Think, Brain, David Eagleman, Mind, Mind uploading, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, space exploration
38 Comments
Why alien life will probably be engineered life
Martin Rees has an interesting article at Nautilus: When We Find Aliens, We Might Find Something Like the Borg This September, a team of astronomers noticed that the light from a distant star is flickering in a highly irregular pattern.1 They considered … Continue reading
A darker vision of the post-singularity: The Quantum Thief trilogy
I just finished reading Hannu Rajaniemi’s Quantum Thief trilogy: ‘The Quantum Thief‘, ‘The Fractal Prince‘, and ‘The Causal Angel‘. (The official name of the trilogy is the Jean le Flambeur series, named after one of the chief protagonists, but everyone seems … Continue reading
Greg Egan’s Amalgam is close to the most likely interstellar civilization
The other day, I did a post engaging in speculation on, assuming we don’t discover a completely new physics, what I thought an interstellar civilization might look like. In summary: Given special relativity, travel faster than the speed of light is … Continue reading
