Loading ...What duplicating or backing up your mind really means: Mind snapshots
9 July 2008Shortly after writing the The challenge of mind duplication/transfer post I went seeking others to chat with about this topic. I hoped on irc and had an interesting conversation in a neuroscience channel. It was a great conversation that lead to some very interesting possibilities being discussed.
People typically think that duplicating the mind means that they can live forever or continue their existence indefinitely. The reality is that *if* in the future we can duplicate the mind we’ll be creating snapshots of the mind when the copy was made. We’ll likely not be able to take snapshots from people immediately before they die and instead may have snapshots from various phases in their life. You may decide to ‘backup’ at important moments in your life at various ages.
The use cases are fairly interesting for when you’d use this.
- Reverting to a saved mind snapshot when you’ve experienced a trauma
- Editing a snapshot to remove memories
- Restoration for medical purposes such as:
* Restoring backups to multiple bodies to study environmental effects on mind development
* Restoring backups to multiple bodies to study physical affects on the active state of the mind
- Restoring your pets mind into a cloned copy
- Restoring a human mind to a cloned copy to gain from their perspectives
- Restoring a mind to a cloned copy to utilizing their knowledge and thought patters to solve complex problems
- Restoring an ‘aged mind’ into a younger cloned instance of the body
The possibilities are endless and certainly make for a decent scifi book 
2 Responses to “What duplicating or backing up your mind really means: Mind snapshots”
July 10th, 2008 at 11:52 am
It’s been done. Mindscan by Robert J. Sawyer.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Cool I’ll be sure to check this out.