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News & ArtsThursday, July 29, 2010
Science Science Cannot Save Your Brain
Posted by Paul Constant on Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 4:05 PM
As a response to the popular idea of the Singularity—the nerd-Rapture-like idea that at some point in the future, science will be able to upload our consciousness to computers—Dvice has composed a list explaining why that will never happen:
This may seem like a cheap shot, but "uptime" is something our most advanced computer scientists still struggle with. Hell, our super-sophisticated algorithms can't even keep a text-based microblogging service from crashing during the World Cup — what happens when there's a Fail Whale for your mind? Will it be like getting a hangover, having a stroke, or dying? You'd have to assume we'll all be "backed up," but that raises troubling questions too: when the server running You goes kaplooie, is your "backup" really you, or just a clone of you that takes your place now that the "real" you is lost? The Singularitarians don't have reassuring answers, and I don't want to find out the hard way.
(Also, if a Swedish kid torrents your brain, will that copy of you talk like a pirate?) In any case, I love that we are at the point where someone feels the need to pooh-pooh the idea that we'll all be digitally immortal someday soon.
1
That is not what the Singularity is. The Singularity is when computers get smart enough to design computers that are smarter than they are, independently of humans.
3
Most of those seem like reasons why we shouldn't do it, not why we couldn't do it.
I think its much much more likely we will just figure out how to keep our bodies going longer and longer.
I think its much much more likely we will just figure out how to keep our bodies going longer and longer.
4
Umm...this will absolutely happen Paul. None of those reasons can't/won't be solved or circumvented. Our lifetimes? No, but I'll bet you a pastrami on rye* that we'll be able to do it with a mouse within 50 years. Something along the lines of training one to do a simple task and then 'flash' that knowledge to the brain of its naive murine friends.
*And a pickle on the side
*And a pickle on the side
5
We freeze brains all the time.
Problem is, until we harvest the bodies of the young adult Talibangelists that you're DNA-compatible with, you got nowhere to put it, and the unfreezing process doesn't work well.
But .. we do have brains from a long time ago on ice ...
Problem is, until we harvest the bodies of the young adult Talibangelists that you're DNA-compatible with, you got nowhere to put it, and the unfreezing process doesn't work well.
But .. we do have brains from a long time ago on ice ...
7
Re: "If a Swedish kid torrents your brain, will that copy of you talk like a pirate?"
1. Paul, you just made my day. That's the best pun I've seen in ages.
2. I was in Europe recently, and a friend I was with would strike up random conversations (in French, German, etc.) with the locals, and ask them what "talking in pirate" sounded like. Inevitably, he would follow with a hilarious/dorky example of "arrrgggh, matey!", which would only leave his new acquaintance even more flummoxed. The concept of pirates - with peg legs, eye patches, parrots, and tri-corner hats - is completely foreign to them. How sad.
1. Paul, you just made my day. That's the best pun I've seen in ages.
2. I was in Europe recently, and a friend I was with would strike up random conversations (in French, German, etc.) with the locals, and ask them what "talking in pirate" sounded like. Inevitably, he would follow with a hilarious/dorky example of "arrrgggh, matey!", which would only leave his new acquaintance even more flummoxed. The concept of pirates - with peg legs, eye patches, parrots, and tri-corner hats - is completely foreign to them. How sad.
8
What this really does is make us face the very real possibility that our consciousness and sense of self is just an illusion. We may not like the idea that we could be copied, but that does not make it any less plausible.
9
I'm just waiting for the day when I can upload kung-fu into my brain without having to spend all those years learning it.
11
I've got my brain backup stored in a vault deep below Seattle.
It will only cost $4 to $8 billion to dig it up with a really fancy deep bore tunnel.
It will only cost $4 to $8 billion to dig it up with a really fancy deep bore tunnel.
12
if you mean your brain is a 100000 year old pile of mastadon shit, then I concur with you, "Will the mongoloid."
13
@1 and @2 - er, no. That's not what the singularity is either. The singularity is the point in technological advancement at which innovations will have advanced at such a rapid speed that the current generation's technology will be completely incomprehensible to the generation before. Not just that they won't get it, like some 80 year olds feel about the internet. It's more extreme than that - at the point of the singularity, you would not even be capable of describing technology to the generation before; they just wouldn't have the capacity to understand it. It would be like trying to explain a computer or the internet or a satellite to someone from the time of Jesus. So, uploading our brains to computers or computers being able to design even better computers - neither of these could be the singularity. Why? Because I have the capability to understand that, and put it into words. Whatever the singularity, it's something not currently represented in science fiction, because we currently wouldn't be able to conceive of it. Computers designing better computers will probably be the beginning of the singularity, because that means technology will no longer be bound by human intelligence. But it would only be the cause of the singularity, not the singularity itself.
14
@13 You nailed the definition of it but the premise of the worries in the article is wrong also.
How do you know that every time you wake up you are the same person? How do you know that every time your body completely turns over its atoms for new ones (ever few years for your entire life) you are the "same person?" How do you know if when you take any mind altering chemical you are the "same person" afterwards?
The answer is that you don't. Thinking you are the same person is a feeling, not a fact. It can be reproduced in the computer brain the same as any other.
How do you know that every time you wake up you are the same person? How do you know that every time your body completely turns over its atoms for new ones (ever few years for your entire life) you are the "same person?" How do you know if when you take any mind altering chemical you are the "same person" afterwards?
The answer is that you don't. Thinking you are the same person is a feeling, not a fact. It can be reproduced in the computer brain the same as any other.
16
I thought the singularity was the moment of the big bang. Within a decade we should have computers that are the equal of the human brain. They may even be self aware. In that case, your computer would know you so well, it could probably read your mind. Sort of like being married for fifty years.
17
Well if it helps; by the time the singularity happens robots will have established their own planet. Humans and robots segregate 200 years before the singularity and don't establish trade for like, 900 years.
It should have happened earlier but there was all that crap with the air that screwed everyone for a while. About 300 years from now people can upload consciousness but it is considered passe.
It should have happened earlier but there was all that crap with the air that screwed everyone for a while. About 300 years from now people can upload consciousness but it is considered passe.
18
@15, see Charles Stross' 2005 novel "Accelerando" - it's more or less exactly the scenario posed by Jesi @ 13, and the entire novel is online to read free:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-sta…
Stross' novel takes you through the mind-melting acceleration of global technology over three generations of a family, toward a singularity and beyond.
Even though Stross plays fast and loose with science fictional concepts like wormholes and nanotechnology that can tear apart rocky worlds and remake them into solid, orbiting chunks of mainframe material he dubs computronium, I'm still confident that he thought of most of the "problems" this Dvice article brings up and found ways around them.
I'm not saying I think that a Singularity will happen in our extremely near future, but after reading Stross' novel I'd be lying if I said I didn't sort of wish that it could...
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-sta…
Stross' novel takes you through the mind-melting acceleration of global technology over three generations of a family, toward a singularity and beyond.
Even though Stross plays fast and loose with science fictional concepts like wormholes and nanotechnology that can tear apart rocky worlds and remake them into solid, orbiting chunks of mainframe material he dubs computronium, I'm still confident that he thought of most of the "problems" this Dvice article brings up and found ways around them.
I'm not saying I think that a Singularity will happen in our extremely near future, but after reading Stross' novel I'd be lying if I said I didn't sort of wish that it could...
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