Loading ...The challenge of mind duplication/transfer
12 May 2008Others have discussed the concept of duplicating one’s mind or backing it up. Before copying a mind you first need to know
1. How (minor detail!)
- While alive
- After death
2. How for that organism
- Human
- Fish
3. The context of what is being duplicated
- For the same organism
- Another organism of the same species
- A different organism
4. The ability to reinsert that context into
- The same organism
- Another similar organism
- A different organism
5. Doing it while the organism is still alive and doing it without causing any damage.
That being said conceptually we should be able to create a snapshot of a simple mind such as a worm’s, or simple organism post death. More complicated organisms such as humans are going to be an enormous challenge. For starters we’ll likely discover that the human mind while complicated isn’t going to be the most complicated mind to read or copy.
Diseases, physical changes/mutations, and disorders will make interpretation and transferring of this data difficult. Those fearing mind duplication may perhaps even damage themselves using one of these physical changes in a similar manner to how some people damage their fingerprints to prevent fingerprint identification but to prevent mind viewing. To take this one step further analysis of a mind affected by an unknown condition may be partially possible via modules for known conditions (Alzheimer’s, etc).
Even if such a technology were restricted to post death this would be extremely useful to troubleshoot cause of death, family secrets/history, as well as build a private profile on the individual. These mind images could be archived in a ‘mind library’ and could even recreate specific scene’s throughout history by those who witnessed it bringing history to a new level. Who knows maybe we’ll even see something like The Final Cut based on stored memories.
2 Responses to “The challenge of mind duplication/transfer”
May 13th, 2008 at 9:08 am
That is like cloning- sure, you get a copy, but the original is dead. It is rather useless. If you wanted to retrieve information… well, in the future, after death they could probably take apart the area responsible for memory. Unfortunately, human memory is plastic so I’m not sure how useful it would be.
June 13th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
So, re: c. elegans and neuroscience, see:
http://minduploading.org/research.html
But particularly I’m wondering whether or not the ideal of whole mind duplication is going to ever be possible. You have divergence from yourself on a moment-by-moment basis, and we can show this by looking at all of the diffusion rates throughout your entire brain. So really what you want to do is capture some sort of ‘design essence’ of the brain architecture, much like Markram has been doing with his whole brain simulations and minicolumnar research.
http://heybryan.org/intense_world_syndrome.html or something.
- Bryan