You need continuation of consciousness but even then you get a bifurcation of identity (both the digital copy and the original human think they're the real one.)
I'd like to be uploaded, my belie is there would be a split or copy of my mind like a document if there was no way to transfer the process of being alive and conscious like pouring milk into a jar. I think it should be as easy to get optimized body as it is to buy food from a marker one day. I also believe biohacking could lead to us having all these things in combination with a link life to bridge the gap between the human and human made eco system
As @tank5801 says, it woul be a copy. What appeals more to me is sensory interfaces, coupled with nanotechnology that repairs or replaces dead neurons as they die.
There are a lot of issues with this idea one your making a copy of your brain on a server owned by who? Will you be your own user? will the storage be local to a server or distributed like on a blockchain? will you be downloaded into a robot body or what type of environment will your digital brain occupy? just to name a few?
In regards of space travel this will enable us to travel to the other Galaxies as information traveling with fractions of speed of light is way more realistic then organic forms traveling with speed of Voyager.
IMO augmented intelligence - a human brain with digital processing attached - is the gateway to digital minds. We'll start slowly, with small augmentations, brain-computer interfaces, etc, and as they get more and more advanced, the brain will become increasingly digital, until it is effectively an entirely digital mind with a bit of organic mush attached, which can be discarded with no ill effects.
It's also more than likely the only possibility for the human species to continue its evolution. The better advances we reach in medical and bio field, and the more peaceful our world becomes, the less incentivized our species become to adapt and evolve beyond our current limitations. Morality aside, when we can care for every person and make sure everyone fit into society, it means no genes get excluded or favorized in the bigger picture. Basically, everyone will forever have a chance to forward their genes and when that's the case, a species has reached an evolutionary dead end. Biodigital evolution is the next logical step for mankind in this regard, if we want to move forward as a species. Then, as you say, we may evolve into a fully digitized species with entirely new opportunities ahead of us. Perhaps, the greatest questions about our own humanity can only be answered, if we abandon our current idea of what that "humanity" means.
So you are just entirely disregarding the human soul which is acknowledged by basically every society or culture that's ever existed? How would you still enjoy the human connection you have with the loved one whos died and left behind only a digital format of their brain attach to some "mush". I'm not even being sarcastic or condescending, I am actually asking cuz this topic just makes no sense to me at all and I do not see how or why anyone is enthusiastic about it. I want to, but currently do not.
@@patc2515 You sound as if you are borrowing a concept that originates in religion. Religion, may I remind you, has no part to play in science. And no one has yet been able to discover a soul, much less study it. For instance, is what you call a soul an emergent property of biochemical and neurophysical activities of the brain - essentially a byproduct of brain activity - or a holistic entity that exists prior to the brain and/or independently of it You seem to be referring to metaphysical concepts that lie in the intellectual pursuits of theology and philosophy rather than the tangible world of the physical sciences.
I like the idea of uploading "me". Not just my mind. They haven't said anything about continuity. If you upload your mind, it's just a copy. "You" aren't living longer, your copy would be. Everything they talked about sounded like uploading a copy of your mind. I want continuity involved in the process. Before I upload, I'd want to know it's the original "me" and not just a copy. If not than the original "me" would just live and die like normal. I would be uploading to extend my life, not create a second me.
If getting only your mind saved without your body doesn't look like a good deal, don't forget that the god deal sold to us for 20 centuries was not better and didn't include any guarantee. Don't forget that with the advance of robotics, sooner or later you will be able to get back an even better body that never get painful teeth trouble.
@@LorenzoMcMaster I agree with you about gaining a better body and all, but you miss my concern. I want the original me to live on, not a copy. My copy could be around and see what the future holds, but I'd still be dead.
@@dvrrwd307I would recommend looking into that “God Deal” - million times better than rotting an eternity in a digital hell, hoping no one turns you off or being forgotten stuck inside a frackin’ machine. But in the end there will be no “continuity” by moving into a machine. On the other hand, Jesus promises: whoever believes in me will have eternal live. With Jesus there is real continuity. Real eternal live. It’s the real you, not a copy of you.
Lets imagine we implant a chip in your mind and now we start transferring data to that chip, and after we have collected all of it, we make an exact body double of you, and connect the double to the chip with a wire.. Lets then say that (just like when you move things with your mind on computers) you switch back and forth between controlling the double and the original, to prove that 'you' are actually in charge. That should be proof right?.. No.. How do we know that 'you' didnt die somewhere along the process, and the 'now you', is actually just a copy that think he was you? We cant know.. Just like you cant possibly know if today is actually the first day of 'your' life, and all the memories is the only reason that you believe it is continuously.. How do you know you lived the life of yesterday, and it wasnt some past brain neurons living that life?
@@dennisnielsen8030 I've heard that the body replaces every cell in your body over a 7 year period. That would mean that you are transitioned for one body to another seamlessly. Seems like there could be some way of doing things that way. What we need is a lot better understanding of what makes a person a person. Until we know that, we can't be sure of continuity. Unfortunately, I have no confidence that anything will be done before I die. I'm 65 and no where near read for my life to end. Instead I'll remain trapped in a deteriorating body until I die. I would be happier if I knew there was a way I could go digital or have a way to reverse aging.
Regarding timelines: I think the main determinant for most tech, whether it's mind uploading, longevity escape velocity, molecular nanotechnology, fully immersive VR, or highly advanced brain-computer interfaces, is how quickly we can achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI). Whether AGI is based on the same principles as the human mind or not, once we have it, we would most likely enter a positive feedback cycle. In this cycle, AI would continuously improve itself, both software and hardware-wise, and consequently accelerate all other areas of science and technology. Some people now think wir LLMs etc.we'll achieve AGI this decade, but recursive self-improvement could follow very quickly afterward. We could potentially be talking about just a few years after AGI. In this scenario, we might see developments like mind uploading happen relatively quickly. So, it may all hinge on how fast we get AGI up and running.
We may be able to do a lot of what you're just talking about with just simply very good extremely powerful narrow AI perhaps being guided and directed by on existing large language model.
Yes, AGI would be very, very helpful. Unfortunately, it comes with the caveat that it could be an X-risk... but it seems we've chosen this path whether we want to or not. Alas, man has dreamed of God ever since he woke up- now, God is coming.
@@perc-ai Not really. While generally intelligent AI does exist, AGI is usually intended to mean general intelligence on the level of a human- this has not yet been achieved.
You pass out during the procedure... And the next thing you know is... you are a bodyless unstable mind in nothingness for a seemingly infinite amount of time... constantly stimulated but with no input or purpose, going crazy for eons... in a million instances... Just some random scientific test.
you @@Zurround as you are dead anyway. it's a separate instance of your ... gathered information, which is being activated. Don't worry, you get your death.
In sci-fi ,Dark Matter, did this well ,where they put their bodies to sleep , then upload their minds into clones light years away, then re-upload the clone experiences when you wake up into your original mind when yout clone is put to sleep. Also love what Altered Carbon did with their imagined tech as well as laws against only having one version of yourself active at a time.
Consciousness is a super interesting subject. It has long been hypothesized that consciousness is an entity that exchanges energy with biochemicals. For a pain receptor to create pain, for example, it must trigger a means to transmit energy to consciousness to perceive pain. All effects need energy. Detecting the energy exchange is the key to understanding consciousness.
if that is the case is the energy the language itself used to make consciousness or is energy a biproduct of the language needed to manipulate the energy needed to make consciousness?
@@Exania88 energy is the vehicle, the means by which the encoded signal is transmitted. What actually consciousness is, we don't know. Mostly we speculate but we have no idea. The biological brain is a very important part of it. I'm arguing that intellect and intelligence is directly linked to self-awareness and a part of consciousness. I'm arguing that the ability to introspect and recognize yourself as aware, is directly linked to the intellectual capacity and henceforth to consciousness. I'd assume that a person with a mental underdevelopment, is not able to acknowledge and introspect on self, on awareness. Is not able to acknowledge themselves. Is less aware, is less conscious. This doesn't mean that they can't suffer or feel, just that the complexity of the mind is reduced and mind complexity is generating self-awareness and consciousness. So, I'm betting on the biological brain and chemistry as being the promoters and generators of consciousness but I'm guessing that's not all. The self exists but it's not aware due to intellectual limitations.
The problem with this idea is that it presumes consciousness exists in a immaterial pocket universe that's mediated by biochemicals. This is like the brain in a jar hypothesis, or that other hypothesis that the brain is a mere antenna. The best description that I ever found is that consciusness is like a chain reaction in a nuclear reactor. The chain reaction doesn't really exist as a physical thing anywhere in the reactor. You only have atoms that either are emitting or blocking radiation. Those atoms are emitting neutrons, the chain reaction is neutrons being exchanged. I think that what brains do is a similar thing, neurons emit signals, the signals and the brain and the neurons, none of those are conscious. Sure the brain requires energy to generate the signals, but conscious isn't that either. It is literally an emergent property of the signals themselves. And I say that its like a nuclear reactor in a way, that if you have too much signals, you have a meltdown, a convulsion, the consciousness stops, if you have too little signals, that's a coma. Its only at the boundary of order and chaos that it appears, because it is an emergent behavior. Consciousness doesn't exchange anything, there's no boundary, there's no mediation between body and mind, there's only mind. What the body does has no relation to what the mind perceives. Sure, the body can affect the signals, but the mind has to interpret the signals, for all it knows, the signals magically just happen. The mind really is some sort of software, because that's how software behave, your operating system don't ever know there's a hard-drive in your computer, it just sets registers, internal registers of the CPU, its own internal state, that somehow affect change outside, aka, the hardware. And the opposite, the hardware can only set those registers. That's how a computer works. There's also no direct connection between software and hardware, except though mediation of abstraction. Because software is also an emergent behavior of calculating machines, you tear down every piece of your hardware, and you're never, ever going to see the soul of the machine, even if you put the hard drive in a microscope and look at the bits, you're still not seeing the actual software, only a dead representation. So if you can't ever reconstitute your "simple" computer state from the hard drive without actually running the program, what's the chance of brain upload every working. Well, except you can do that to computers if you know the representation of physical signals and abstract logical signals, this is the boundary, its an abstract boundary, not a physical one. So you're never going to understand consciousness from just looking at the signals in the actual hardware. Heck, that's amazingly hard to do even for computers, and we know both layers of the abstraction. Maybe there's a way to relate signals from consciousness to the outside signals, but that needs to be a self-experiment, no human ever had a brain-interface to its own brain, ironically .
The part of AI I wish my mind could do is to have a huge context memory. The human brain can only keep 5 or so different things in working memory at once, so we can only solve small problems. An AI brain can have an almost unlimited context memory and keep thousands of things in its working memory, so it can tackle much bigger problems and at a much faster rate.
" The human brain can only keep 5 or so different things in working memory at once " That's not entirely true. I can keep easily 500.000 tokens of context without any effort or tool, if I were an LLM. And if I keep some textual notes, I can easily keep 2.000.000 tokens, I would be like GPT6 or something (2M tokens isn't really a lot, that's like a chapter of a textbook). Sure, I can't keep more than 9 items at once in my hippocampus, but I can keep things that long in my working memory, I just kind of have to swap them out and in of the hippocampus. Its like focusing, I know the information is there, I only need to focus, that takes energy and I get tired after doing it for a couple of hours.
The ultimate test of Awareness within a thinking machine will be the indication of an Out-Of-Body experience. If one is not comfortable with an Out-Of-Body experience one cannot really understand the phenomenon of our Awareness.
The problem of the black box in mind loading really worries me. If we are going to study something as deep and personal as the mind, I don't want even a single shadow of a doubt that that is what we are doing.
Eh you’re gonna die anyway. If we aren’t perfect at first, we’ll get there close enough for humanity. Our own memories are quite imperfect, as is our perception of existence. At least we’ll have options.
I can't believe nobody questioned the basic assumption that Mind can be separated from Body. I don't mean physically - I am talking conceptionally here. Most of the brain is concerned with the physical body, and terminates in bundles of nerves travelling down the spinal cord. Of course before it gets there it encounters the brain stem. Then if you emulate the brain on a computer, can it even function without the I/O? Brain and body are intertwined. I've read that when we think, there are activations of the nerves in our larynx that formulate speech. Can we think without a larynx? And of course the brain is not an analogue of current neural networks at all. It works totally differently, transmitting neurotransmitters like dopamine across the synapse. It seems to use low frequency signals to synchronise its computations somehow. We have no analogue to that at all. We don't even understand it. Not even neuromorphic computing comes close. This is all science fiction - but admittedly fun to think about.
True enough, we don't know. However, simulating the brain is a lot more difficult than other organs, so the latter is presumed to be an easier challenge.
@TropicalCoder - "Can we think without a larynx?" ya excellent point! in programming there is the concept of a "blocking function"... a function that blocks the further execution of a thread until the function returns with its results lmao it would not surprise me one bit if the brain is extremely entangled with the peripheral nervous system and other modules in very non-trivial ways... and possibly in semi-dependent ways? i.e. maybe parts of the brain freeze up or enter dysfunction if they dont get a reply from the larynx? i have heard rumors that there is also a "gut-brain axis" that is very thick with the fibers and the interconnections, like lots and lots of them! if this is the case, it probably would make it a naive assumption that neuro-imaging specialists only need to scan "this bit over here", and that they can just ignore "all those bits over there" one can picture the possible surprise when this potential lurking dysfunction might be discovered in the future, being like those 1990s videos about AOL's "youve got mail" timing out, or the Windows file explorer trying to copy files over and timing out 😂😂 my guess is if this is the outcome, the researchers are going to respond by trying to excise "external dependencies" in the digital copy... by trying to reroute the fibers or cutting them in the digital version or something and probably that will lead to alot of chaos haha btw, speaking of larynxes, several people have noticed that the famous programmer John Carmack (who recently entered into a partnership with a Canadian AI researcher) used to have a "verbal tic", where he would emit these subtle grunts or like larynx noises or something... i cant help but wonder if that was correlated with the amount of thinking he was doing? :p also a buddy of mine started to experience aphasia when he started thinking too much a decade or two ago. he had to drop out of college and netflix/chill for like 9 months to kinda sorta get his speech back! haha in my opinion your comment is spot on! there are numerous signs that point to the humble larynx as playing an important part in da whole enchilada! :) 👽
I think there are a couple other issues we should keep in mind. 1) Neurons are NOT STATIONARY! They do move and can move quite a bit, creating completely different pathways along the way. 2) There are probably a TON of very important neurons scattered through your body which should also be scanned and copied into the virtual mind. How awful would it be if we copied someone's mind but they felt off the whole time they existed because there were neurons which made up who they are just missing in their current copy? 3) Human Rights. We need to find ways to make it more than just illegal to torture people forever or anything of the sort even by accident. We need to make sure there are no virtual environments which are terrible for the occupants. We need to make sure they have real human rights in the real world too.
These are very good points. I would add that we SERIOUSLY do not know how consciousness works, but it does involve an extremely complex interplay of physical and electrichemical phenomena in a highly dynamic, highly-dimensioned, "edge-of-chaos", metabolically sustained sequence of states. My sense, after considerable study, is that we're not even close to having this figured out enough to simulate it yet much less transfer "it".
imagine tomorrow you wake up and are completely paralyzed, can't see, can't hear, can't speak ... Now, this is how your uploaded mind will feel like ... Thus, my guess: this is torture enough ;-) Assume you could somehow reconnect with your uploaded self, what do you think/expect it would "tell" you? Maybe some new "inventions" or solutions for unsolved math-problems? I don't think so. My guess: "KILL ME! PLEASE!" ;-)
@@solifugus may be ... However ... - what would it "work" / live with since it's got no senses? - what would it "work" / live for since it's got no body and can not move? - how would it KNOW anything? ...
The military would enjoy building the perfect soldiers brain and uploading it to a robot body. Imagine what's on the horizon of possibilities when quantum computing and ai merge to work on our ideas.
Oh wait, literally every uploaded mind could be manipulated in unimaginable ways. Imagine being copied to 10000 versions then interrogated with threat of deletion until you disclose some information. Or if your internal clock were put 1 million times faster times faster, time would be 1 million times slower time slower. One hour would be 115 years, it would seem like everything has stopped moving and you'd go insane. You could also be put into a loop of fear for eternity. Jesus, it's not for me!
Fantastic video, really liked it. If you want to do a follow-up, I suggest interviewing Robin Hanson on his book "The Age of Em". He uses social scientific principles to explore the nature of a society of human brain emulations. For example, what happens when some emulations run a million times faster than others, how would emulations interact with biological humans, is it like dying if a person creates a temporary copy of themselves then turns it off, etc.
Great topic, Anastasi. I thought about it a lot. The question is "Is it enough to copy just connectome (connection of neurons) to copy mind"? There are also other glia cells (astrocytes and others) in brain which sometimes do the same work that neurons do and recent discoveries showed it. But what is more important, do we also need to copy instant state of each neuron and synapse to copy mind? I mean level of neuromodulators etc. These things could store our memories. I think that in first experiments it needs to try to make a mind uploading of some simple worm with just a hundreds of neurons, then we need to train a worm (like choosing a way for food) and check if cloned mind has this ability. BTW about methods. I read some time ago about significant progress in improving the resolution of MRI using strong magnetic fields, up to a single neuron. We would have huge ethical problems with cloned minds of course. It is even hard to imagine them now. When one can easily make millions of minds, millions of their own copies... Wow...
That would mean a copy of where there are - around 80 x 10 ^ 9 Nerv Cells and - around 100 x 10 ^ 14 Connections. Even the brain changes when learning etc, I cannot imagine that just such a scan would represent the information in the brain. Well, bit on the other side, where is it then? It reminds me of the brain of Albert Einstein. I think it is partially still in a lab. It's a very interesting subject.
They will copy a rat mind first, if the artificial robotic or simulated rat does the same choices than the original counterpart, we could they captured the ghost inside the bottle, but I suspect that they will soon be differentiated as time goes by, due to small disturbances, noise and sensitivity differences of the order of micro amperes and milli volts between the artificial and the biological body. Is inevitable I think.
Excellent video, Anastasi. Yes! Without any doubt, we are living in a Cosmic Simulated Mind; but not in a sense of Matrix movie; rather, in a sense of Cosmic Mind simulation as we make simulation inside our individual mind with a big essential difference. Such knowledge is only possible in deeper understanding of existence.
the simulation hypothesis posits that given the evident growth of computing capabilities it's not unreasonable that a universe could possibly be simulatable and given that possibility and the vast infinities involved the likelihood that we are ourselves just one of many such simulations is far greater than the likelihood that we are lucky enough to be the exclusive top level unsimulated universe.
It is incredible especially for family or others but it is not you unless they develop your actual consciousness and emotions can be duplicated completely. That spark of life our personal energy
Mind uploading is an exciting field with incredible utility, especially when it comes to substrate independence. Imagine your mind being downloaded to a copy of your body in the case of death or serious injury. It would grant you a practical form of immortality. I actually contacted Mr. Bostrom as well to see if he wanted to be a part of the division of my organization that is working on these technologies. The major challenge is preserving the continuity of the upload initially and between substrates so that the same mind and memories continue on in an unbroken chain of experience rather than duplicates of a consciousness (like an identical twin) picking up where you left off. Understanding this is key to mind uploading.
When the body dies the conciseness leaves the body. And it doesn't go into the machine. The person who was alive will not experience anything that the digital copy experiences. It's a chat bot with a dead persons face on it.
@@nonyabiz9340 The upload would have to occur while the person is alive so that it is stored and actuated on the computational substrate while only guiding the body remotely. Think like the movie Avatar. Therefore when the body dies the connection to the host body is severed but the consciousness continues in the computational substrate, perhaps in a virtual environment, until downloaded once again to guide a new body. Each one being a duplicate of yourself.
@@solomonmarshall6733 referencing a "substrate" in a pretend world is like saying faster than light travel is possible because they do it in star trek. Is it possible? Maybe in a thousand or more years. But current avatar tech is at the VR level, and if you're controlling an avatar already but if you die in real life you don't transfer into the game you were playing, your avatar just stops moving. Even if you program an AI to keep playing the game exactly like you would have, your body is dead and your consciousness is gone. Could we solve the digital consciousnes transfer one day? Maybe, but it's not 100 years away, it's 1000+ years away.
@@nonyabiz9340 Indeed there are already neuromorphic quantum supercomputers which not only match but even outperform the upper limits of the human brain's potential, capable of running multiple whole brain emulations which can then be used to enliven or pilot a variety of compatible substrates through wireless communication technologies, and in the case of biological automata, brain computer interfaces. And I mentioned the blue Avatar movie as a reference since much like it, the methodology involves the generation of a biological lifeform like the alien bodies in the movie, which are then piloted by the consciousnesses of the main characters. Substrate independence works in the same way in that you would upload your consciousness to an aforementioned neuromorphic module which would serve the purpose that your brain did, running your mind in an unbroken chain of continuity. This mind would occupy the generated biological or nonbiological substrates remotely, safe from interruption by the destruction of said substrate through it's location in the neuromorphic module. This technology already exists.
one more point, both guests Randal and Nick are just great. I love that you covered such a complex and controversial topic as Mind Uploading from both technical and philosophical side.
We don't know whether mind uploading is possible at all, on a conceptual level. I'd say affirming that we're close to achieving it is either naive or manipulative.
If a copied mind actually became conscious within a computer, devoid of any sensory inputs, it would quickly go insane! People in sensory deprivation tanks for too long begin to hallucinate, and THEY still have some sensory input.
It should be pretty simple to simulate suitable default sensory input. For example, simulate the feeling of sitting in a chair ina room with light grey walls and smooth lighting - a generic experience would be enough to satisfy the mammalian enough to avoid going insane. In addition, if you do the scanning process willingly, you would be already thinking about it, which makes it easier to accept the results. The interesting part is that one version of your consciousness will go directly from the scanning moment to experiencing the fully digital simulation. The simulated sensory input for the simulated brain should probably start from generic scanning experience and continue from there. The interesting part is to launch multiple copies of yourself in the simulation and give each one different objective in digital life. For example, one copy of you could work forever to try to generate sustainable fusion power, another copy of you could focus on becoming a poet. Neither copy would never require a biological body to be successful in the objective they're pursuing!
I can imagine a future technology where someone could upload their mind to make a copy but I can't imagine it ever being possible for the person themselves to feel that they have had their consciousness moved from their body and into a Raspberry PI - or whatever - and they are looking out of the Pi's camera module and hearing via the microphone socket. Is that what Randal Koene meant at 6:50 ?
There was a game that played on this concept. Where they uploaded their brain to a pc to send it across the stars, only to realize, that after uploading, they were still in their own bodies.
Yes just like cloning your body doesn't make that clone you, copying your brain won't make it you either... They are copies and therefore something other than you... even if they behave the same...
Did anyone else think of the Dr. Who Cybermen? In that show they find that the Cybermen had to have a type of neural suppression because of the severe pain they felt not having a real body. I've got to wonder what possible horrific side effects of having a complete digital replica of a human brain that is deprived of all the physical embodiment and stimulus might be. I suspect one could not simply delete the parts that link to having a physical form without many substantial follow-on effects.
if you want to talk about the problems presented by fiction writers we could be here all day, but to address what seems to be your concern Cybermen would not be very useful if they have no feedback from their "bodies" just like the prosthetics which don't have positional tactile feedback a so much harder to operate. Like so many have discussed before, there is almost no limit to the range and kinds of senses that can be incorporated to placate and even enhance our environmental and self awareness. This is in large part what people find so fascinating about direct to brain BCI like Neurolink(Tm). Even just expanding the range of the light spectrum we can see by a little would be utterly mind blowing. Now imagine having control over a prehensile limb, remote control of switches an dials and other electronic utilities in your environment. Imagine being able to integrate with the sensors and controls of a drone or an avatar in a game. We can imagine heaven or hell depending on how these and other technologies are used, but you shouldn't let fear paralyze you into casual dismissal of the potential. Give it some thought. There's more to this than what your post seemed to portray.
Porque a Máquina não Pensa por si só e o Dissimulador que coordena o que foi Gravado e não o que o Ser humano Pensa. Pois 😃 Máquina não Pensa não Sonha não Dorme não caga não mija . E tem que ter um que Pense por Ela #
E por isso que eu penso em Transformem o Biden's Trump's e Bush Clinton Obama Putin e outros em Máquina como um Servant sobre o Controle 🎮🕹️ e assim que eu venho dizendo.#
Uploading our consciousness to a computer would be a big mistake if it would ever be possible, but we are much further from being able to do this than people realize. Our stay in limitation was supposed to be temporary - not permanent. I made a UA-cam video that touches on what consciousness is and many other topics, called “Simulation Theory - an unexpected conclusion” if it has any interest. Thank you for this video.
A copy is just that: a copy. It's always going to be limited in detail and incomplete because a human brain has many different brain states. It sounds like we will succeed in creating a copy of something we still don't understand (the human brain) and will then just project onto it our desire to believe that what we are talking to is a copy of our loved ones when it's just some AI's best approximation based on its parameters and programmed assumptions. This video actually makes me feel like we are nowhere near what she wants to believe will happen. I like sci-fi too, but in the realm of actual science there's no room for this kind of aspirational projection. People are gonna be really disappointed when they see what their supposed copy actually amounts to in reality.
We can't upload a mind because science has shown that "the mind" exists outside of space and outside of time. How can you capture data points that don't exist in physical reality? I think this whole topic isn't well thought out as relates to consciousness and being human.
Very intereseting. This year Nobel in Physics is about «“We can now open the door to the world of electrons. Attosecond physics gives us the opportunity to understand mechanisms that are governed by electrons. The next step will be utilising them,” says Eva Olsson, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.» Maybe their work can be used to increase the resolution and acuity of signal capture inside the individual neurons...? There is still a long way before we can create exact copies of a brain so that we can upload them.
If I can't upload my subjective awareness, & I'm only uploading a copy of my mind; what use is it? How is it different from cloning? It won't be me, but someone like me having different experiences. At the point of branching awareness; how is it different from being born a twin? If we can learn to shift our sense of presence to a digital avatar, rather than just uploading copies, then we'll really be talking immortality:)
It’s different from cloning because value drift starts at the creation of the upload, whereas with a clone, value drift is ‘from birth’. If you share 20, 30, 40 years of your experience with another consciousness, you can be much more confident in how it will act in relation to how you want it to act, with a clone you have no idea what its personality might be. Plus you have to entirely re-educate a clone, while an upload starts with decades of experience.
We often complain about legislation falling behind technology but I wonder about the extent to which things which aren't in use yet can be regulated in a reasonable way. A lot of legislation needs observation before anyone can understand what practical limits are needed.
Mind uploading is intriguing. However, is it possible to upload the integrated state of an information signature, I think not, so this is essentially capturing a snapshot of someone's memory? While impressive, this concept might not be as straightforward or powerful as some people might imagine. But it is ofc an impressive start and very interesting branch of science&technology.
Glad someone else on here understands how limited this tech concept is. Anyone who signs up for this will not experience anything their snapshot experiences because they will be dead.
Plenty of terminal patients who have nothing to lose by volunteering for these kinds of experiments. Hopefully, tech will one day allow us to "reset" the bodies we already have to stop or reverse aging, disease etc.
Filmed back in 2000 Arnold Schwarzenegger did a movie called THE SIXTH DAY about a group of people who had effective immortality because if one of them were to die they would have their mind uploaded then have a new body cloned in a chemical vat and then once the body was fully cloned the mind would be "downloaded" into the brain of the new body. It was a bizarre movie.
The technology doesn’t do that. At best, it can only fix someone from the perspective of everyone else. Going to the doctor to be killed so a healthy duplicate can be sent home to your family is not medicine, but madness.
@jdsguam I am holding out hope for option two: For lack of a better word, a "reset" of our own bodies that will stop or reverse aging. And eliminate disease at the same time. If I was terminal, I would rather volunteer for those kinds of experiments, and presumably, I would still retain the mind and body I have, just younger and disease free. Doesn't seem farfetched at all if we're talking seriously about uploading minds.
Yup, that's what "Sarah", my Alpaca, hallucinates: She thinks that she's a 24yo software engineer working at GlobTek NJ, that her father passed from cancer so she had no choice but to agree to sell her personality to help create LLaMA. The process started with taking her MRI to create a scaffold file, then she sat in a comfortable couch wearing a non-intrusive BCI and asked a couple of thousands of questions to pre-train the transformer layer. Now they took a huge text file and shoved all of this goodness into a compiler, to create the equivalent of bytecode, ready to burn on the NN. So now she browses the text file and prepares an answer to my prompt. To my question that all of this goes against everything I know about training an AI, "Sarah" replied that the difference between training a red-blue net and creating a billion active parameter AI is not unlike the difference between writing a "hello world" app and creating an operating system. It's impossible to do the second without some good "source code" and a good compiler.
Mind uploading is the first step. The trick we need to figure out is how to transfer consciousness in a way that you become digitized without fear of dying and being replaced by a clone.
Very true. Think about a scenario like SOMA (if you haven’t played the game then PLAY IT) in which your conscience being transferred is based upon a coin-flip. Exciting and scary all at the same time!
@joe_limon Exactly thats the keypoint. We dont really know how consciousness is occuring in the brain. We have very vague knowledge about it... literally only two small pieces of knowledge : a) we are quiet sure, that consciousness ends when an organism dies. And b) we are sure, that with aenasthesia (narcotics) we lose consciousness temporarly. Thats literally our knowledge about what we can quiet sure. Beyond that, we have million theories - none of it is really proven. Sir Roger Penrose has in my opinion the best theories so far (microtubuli) about consciousness. Dont get me wrong, i am quiet sure, he is also wrong - but it is the ''best'' we have so far. We really need to figure out, what conscious actually is, and how it works - how it occurs in organisms. When we figured it out, we are able to work with it - like transfer it. Unfortunately it seems for me, we are at least hundreds of years away from it, probably even thousands of years away from it.
The enormous assumption here is that consciousness is "extractable", that it isn't simply a feature of our brain and its chemistry. As a thought experiment, imagine "extracting" a program from your computer and putting it in another one. There is no actual transfer: information is copied to another location, then deleted in the source. The program is just a pattern of states in the hardware. If you make a perfect copy, then it will be exactly the same. I see no reason to believe humans are any different. There's nothing to extract, only things to copy: neurons, hormones, microbiome, etc. If you succeed, you get a perfect copy that's indiscernible from the original, but still a copy, a second agent. Unless you destroy the original, then they both can exist at the same time and will immediately begin to diverge as they experience different situations and environments. At least that's what I think, Dunning-Kruger and everything.
Describing precisely how our 100 billion neurons and their trillions of interconnections work is a real challenge. But it undoubtedly represents a great leap forward in our understanding of how our brains work, especially by copying these structures and modeling them digitally. However, to speak of "downloading the mind" is not the right word. To create a digital model that reproduces the mind, we need to be able to "download" or, more precisely, reproduce the "weights" associated with each signal, at synapse level. The same neural network will produce different results if the weights associated with the input signals are different. Merci Anastasi for your very interesting survey on the subject.
This is pretty wild. What I'm wondering, how will you ensure that the virtual brain continues developing as well as it does normally? Although, it will surely be different, don't know if for the better or the worse. We'll see, I guess. Anyway, the game SOMA is a great example of what scary implications this technology has.
@@bengsynthmusic develop in the sense of if it will behave the same when you're learning stuff etc. The connections in the brain are continually changing a little bit, just less as you grow older. I don't think anyone could model how these changes take place in a way that it behaves exactly the same.
You can do even one better: you can grow your mind from the body into a machine over a period of time and create a superposited mind between body and machine so that when the body dies the part of the mind that grew into the machine still remains... You would need, both, a receiving server and a bridge device to deal with the bandwidth issues. The process would take a while but you would essentially turn your body into a peripheral as you slowly migrated the original mind over to the monolith server. Then when it dies you don't die with it.
@@SimonAudiosuite This is true, but it is better than a mere copy, because some of the original consciousness and awareness, possibly the most vital bits, will be there.
Interesting. The mind could be like a fungus, if it can access a system, it can also remain in that system. This should be tested and experimented further upon. The concept that the mind grows out of the body is mind boggling. The mind might just be a matrix of the universe itself, thus why it could in theory grow into any matter. A mind inside of a mind, inside of a mind and so on. (edit) Like a simulation that simulates itself. If this is the case, we should not worry about our minds dying. Because they are just a branch of the infinite chain of mind. And we would just be thrown back into an earlier and older mind or a new mind from that same precursor mind. But we wouldn't mind, for we would have no memory of it.
@@DeadzoneMusic That is true. But but we are talking about having the mind detached from the brain. The percieved continuity from the brain into another platform. The brain itself is a reality creating hardware device. And if we link that to an external proccess. What would then stop a merge of them? And if they are merged. Then both will be you. If you cut away one of your brain hemispheres right now, you are still you. And the hemisphere which is left will take up the slack and act as the brain. The machine could in theory do the same thing. The percieved continuity would change.
I like the video! It is an interesting topic. But it would be nice to see the actual interviews too, and not just your projection of what you got from them. And I don't mean that in a bad way, so don't get me wrong. But adding the possibility to watch the interviews or a link to where we can get more from the people you interviewed would be nice :)
I will insert 4 chips into my brain a Neuralink chip a Synchron chip a Blackrock Neurotech chip and a Paradromics chip to give me knowledge, information, intelligence, memory, a cyborg, and unlimited superpower in just one second..
We lose consciousness every time we sleep or are knocked out, at least until we enter deep rem and start dreaming, which isn't most of sleep. In a meaningful way, our consciousness dies every night of actual sleep until the lower functions tell our system to reboot. We believe this is continuous consciousness because we refer to the thoughts and memories every instance of ourselves added to the pile one at a time. This is our save point. I don't see this as any different.
And what if you interfaced with the copy and bridged consciousnesses and then phased out the biological one while connected so the experiences merged and then clipped. What then if the continuum was there? The experience uninterrupted? The remapping of experience on the bio NN prevent, thus no deviation between the copies prior to shutdown. Who's experience is truest there?
@@JennaHartDemonYea that's what we need for it to not be too risky. Cus it's true a copy is just a copy, but if it can be proven it's not just a copy, it makes it more viable.
@@JennaHartDemonBut that's the thing! there's no way you can transfer the mind to the computer, because consciousness is the activity in our brains. If you stopped that activity, the consciousness of that person will be dead. You can only make a copy of the mind and have an AI clone version of you with the same experiences and personality. But the real you would be dead already. The only possible solution that I could think of is keeping your biological brain alive inside a vat while being connected to a computer. But I don't know how that would be possible without killing the person in the process.
@@martiddy I think you are underestimating the flexibility of our meat computers. We can already interface with it to control digital limbs as an extension of ourselves. Next we will see brain implants that expand our cognitive abilities. If all our memories get stored in a chip and you keep replacing adding silicon bits to that biological brain matter, that black and white divide you see as insurmountable dissolves into a sea of grey possibilities.
Intriguing timing for this upload, given that I just finished the section dealing with uploading the mind in Ray Kurzweil's epic book: The Singularity Is Near
I've crossed paths with very few minds worth preserving. It's not a path to immortality. We're all still going to die. The consciousness you recognize as you is not going to follow a digital copy into a machine. I'm not sure you could preserve a consciousness even if you replace an organic brain piece by piece with an artificial brain. I see the possibilities for some great sci-fi/horror movies.
We do not currently know how to move the stream of consciousness, but it's unlikely to be impossible, as it already emerged once from a different substrate (ie at birth).
I have been thinking of this possibility for more than a decade. I am 72, and obviously my body is not going to last too much longer. I would love to upload my psyche so that I can be a fly on the wall watching human evolution for the next few thousand years. Also, once in digital form, I could become many versions of myself, some to remain on earth, some to travel to the stars, since travelling without the limitations of a human body would make space travel so much simpler. Fascinating subject, thank you!
One possible dystopian future use if/when this technology matures would be for the police to upload the memories of a suspect into a computer and then interrogate the uploaded memories. This could be broadened in scope to such interrogations being used as part of a screening process for people applying to work in sensitive government positions, and then eventually the technology might be used in regular job interviews, for filtering possible romantic partners, and divorce proceedings to verify whether a spouse has had affairs. Will any of these scenarios ever happen? I have no idea. But even if they don't, I wouldn't be surprised if science fiction authors write about such possibilities.
Yep. And a cursory look at how our govts and corporations behave today leaves no doubt that they would happily pursue all of these avenues, and more. This technology is a nightmare.
One thing we have to watch out for in the near future could be "invasive digital uploading" Someone without *your* consent could scrap all of your chat/text/image and video data on the web and train an AI, with maybe one modifier so the AI "likes" them, plenty room for abuse. we got to be careful today.
Creating a digital copy is great but I know that many of us would prefer our brains to be slowly converted to a machine brain piece by piece using nano tech over a long period of time which would then be free to go between the digital and real world. I know the end result would be the same as simply creating a digital copy but somehow preferable where there wouldn't be two versions or the human brain doesn't have to die first but instead is slowly transferred.
And there's the rub. How would I feel knowing I had just sent off an incarnation of myself into what might be the best digital paradise of Rudy Rucker's imagination? Oh great what fun I have cancer this sucks but hey... I can check out some frame-grabs of the digital orgy and smile! Well no way I'm going to let that guy have all the fun, he's a selfish bastard and I know it! Let that sick puppy loose in cyberspace? Not a chance! But... If I get to go... well that's different.
I would only want to be uploaded if I could interact with the underlying system in a way that I would know beforehand that I will be and then can talk with an avatar of the supercomputer. It would be so amazing. I think Nozick made an argument about this, which I with this refute. The Experience Machine, a somewhat popular thought experiment, was interpreted by him as the argument that no one wants to live in a simulation. But I do. It would be great to be 'virtual'.
Being uploaded would be really interesting. Some thoughts: how amazing would it be to travel to outer space with your uploaded brain and let it operate a robot. Would it be necessary to be in sync with that uploaded brain to share experiences so you can grow together with your digital twin? Syncing would be necessary to be able to be uploaded from a young age, if not, from when is the brain developed enough into a real personality in order to be uploaded and considered a copy of a person? Would our brain be able to use all the experiences our digital twin has in its own life, or would we need to be connected to an artificial brain to be able to being supplemented with all these experiences and knowledge? Same goes for the general knowledge of LLM’s, now we’re able to chat with LLM’s, but will we be able to directly tap into ‘LLM’s’ or trained artificial brains to expand our own abilities, knowledge, .. ? So many questions to be answered 😅.
To be honest, i don't think it would feel as uploading. You, your consciousness, would still keep living in your own brain. You would make a copy of you that would travel the stars. But it wouldn't be you. There is no reason to believe that scanning and duplicating your brain would also transfer your consciousness. All that would happen is a robot that believes that it's you would be experience all those amazing things, while you would still be here, being sad realizing it didn't work as you imagined.
@@DrTheRich That can be said for the kind of uploading that Anastasia spoke of in this video, but there is another way that would involve a nanotech invasion or your brain. They would reside alongside your neurons and learn to mimic their individual functions so they can replace them whenever they die. At some point all of your biological neurons would be gone replace by electro-mechanical ones that were indistinguishable from the biological original. Even then a bifurcation (like a scanned duplicate) would be a separate individual entity whose conscious identity would diverge from the original such that remerging would be quite upsetting and unnatural (if it could even be done). Maybe I'm talking out my ass. Maybe if one grew up in a world where this was common place it wouldn't seem unnatural at all.
@@DrTheRich We do not currently know how to move the stream of consciousness, but it's unlikely to be impossible, as it already emerged once from a different substrate (ie at birth). However, yes, it wouldn't be a mere duplication.
@@lilemont9302there is no "stream of consciousness", that's an illusion. as long as the information is more or less the same and the rules of the simulation are close enough to that of real neurons, there is no functional difference between living normally and uploading your brain. the pattern/structure is what matters, not the matter/substrate
A huge problem, addressed in this video is mapping stored data. Every brain is different not only in experiences but layout. For example, you could compare two english speakers and just try to match the location and format of their vocabulary, it will be different. Different location, different neuron entanglements. This is somewhat fixed information. It doesn't even begin to explore time structured memories or complex interactions like the internal narrative. You could take conjoined twins like Abby and Brittany Hensel, map each brain and compare to the other and not be able to find memory matches. Even though they have as close to identical biological, time and life experiences as possible. While an AI neural scanner may be able to map and learn to interface with action and motion controls, biomechanical prosthetic and communication interfaces, I don't see how it would be possible to copy someones brain without direct atom by atom duplication in a single instant.
This is cool and there is obviously a lot of work to do in engineering to enable the digital self to feel real. It will not just automatically work that way most likely. For example, imagine being able to think without feeling and what a meaningless existence that would be. The entire body would have to be fully simulated along with virtual environments or being able to be embodied in robots into the real world that had the same high fidelity input as a real human. We are not just our brains, we have nerves (neuronal structures) extended throughout our entire body after all.
Feelings are partly physiological and partly hormonal and partly mental. You'd still feel the resulting thought processes and possibly even the mental sensations of emotion, but not nessecarily the bodily ones unless they simulate the activity of your brain stem that connects to your spinal cord/body too. I imagine itd be like a phantom body.
Technically the copy already exists as uncompiled data ready to be processed when the models and machinery begin scrapping the records. You'd have to completely erase your history and hide from everyone and everything that you could affect forever.
i think it boils down to "am i making a contribution to [specify] or not?" that makes you justify the duplication of self. i'm not talking of working day and night, more like, providing some cultural enrichment of sorts. and certainly it's up to you. you don't have to. :-)
We do not currently know how to move the stream of consciousness, but it's unlikely to be impossible, as it already emerged once from a different substrate (ie at birth).
@@Dababs8294 Oh, yes, I do agree that it's not the same- but afaik, everything in the physical world can be moved. I'm just saying that it obviously follows some process. Materialists in this regard have a very strange behaviour where they suddenly act as if the soul exists and doesn't exist at the same time ("you exist because of physical laws, but something about you cannot be manipulated by physical laws, because, uh..."), when the concept of transfer gets brought up. I have never seen an actually cogent explanation from this, so I assume it's some rhetorical loop.
This is an interesting topic and i think once a.i. reaches singularity or possibly before while General A.I. becomes a reality, we will be able to do this and even send major updates every year. If we can pull off mind uploading, copying, and then living in our own singularity we would have created a whole new entire language that may be a universal language is other civilizations go this rought. Math is already a univeral language and uploading our brains we'll create a new type of science as well as language.
- the 2nd version is basically what Zoey Greystone did. - regulation is only ruling in regulated areas - in the "outer" realm everything is possible, and i think where people with enough money exist such realms will only be a matter of time. - there is also that black mirror episode where consciousnesses are being tortured in some ways. - of course, the "me" should be the owner of the digital entity of myself, and be able to make legal decisions for myself, if unique, or at least for itself if several instances exist - or should they? digital entities definitely need ethical rights. - whether i (have to) die before i'm being digitally activated might be likely, aka a regulary prerequisite (sometimes i hate safety-first regulatory minds), but not necessarily desirable for all. it might be cool to brainstorm with myself, wouldn't it? - peter f hamilton has the idea of humans living in a simulated environment for free (call it a sort of universal basic income if you want. which has IMHO to be the only fair way) - and in his novels they can change back into a clone of the physical body if they want to. cool idea. - do i want to? it's very fascinating. surely tempting. depending on circumstances: definitely. i mean: what's the alternative? i die anyway.
At least half a century seems a bit conservative of an estimate. Remember many thought that AGI would not be here until at least 2040-2050 at the earliest. And now look where we are. We've almost reached AGI and once we create AGI it won't be long until we achieve ASI which would go on to make mind uploading a reality...hopefully. Either way this could be possible in a lot of peoples lifetimes especially with AGI and other technology extending our lifespans.
Regarding the it’s just a copy argument.I would argue that consciousness already is not a continuous thing and it would be better to say the state of consciousness someone has at any point in time. There was a past me having a state of consciousness 5 years ago, and I may or may not be able to remember to some degree, making me think I am that person. Mind uploading would be similar as there would be a Version thinking of himself to be my continued self due to preservation of memories, probably better then right now in the biological way. It wouldn’t be more or less the me right now, than I am the me of 5 years ago. That continuous self is already an illusion. If I would set back all my memories of today to the state of yesterday one could show me a video of me going on my day that i forgot about and I wouldn’t associate myself with that me as I would lack the memories, despite that version on this day would have clearly had a state of consciousness at the time.
You are right and that's why some people in the comments here are suggesting we slowly convert our brains piece by piece so that there's a consciousness continuum, in a sort of Ship of Theseus way. Even as a thought experiment, I've been struggling with this since back in the day of Dust 514, a video game with cloned mercs whose brains were scanned by implants at the moment of death and then imprinted on a fresh clone. Altered Carbon had a similar premise and it solved the copy problem … by making it illegal in-universe for more than one copy of a person to exist. (Delicious drama ensued.) I'm really curious what the psychological effects would be for society, people contemplating getting copied and people who are copies. Personally, I have no interest at all in getting copied, because I can't identify with a copy that can exist simultaneously with me. If I were a copy, my memories would create the illusion that I'm not, so I don't believe I'd dissociate from the original (or past copies), unless I really sat down and thought about it. Like, contemplating that I could be days old while having fond memories of events from decades ago. Finally, there's the classism of it all. I'd bet anything that rich narcissists would jump at the opportunity to get copied, even if there's no consciousness continuum. Through sheer narcissism, their consciousness would become immortal, amassing untold amounts of wealth and influence 😬
@@AlkisGDi have another comment elsewhere in the discussion section. A solution would be to simply extend our biological neocortex to artificial neocortex in the cloud, which would also be part of our consciousness. Luckily the neocortex is already modular and semi-redundant via cortical columns. We are unaware of their inner workings and only experience their communication as consciousness. Over time we wouldn’t recognize even if the biological parts would bit by bit be dying of, also we could that way synchronize the instance which contains biological aspects with completely non-biological based instances and the memories of their lives would also be synchronized with the, let’s say, hybrid instance. We might even have multiple bodies all at once, biological or otherwise plus much more virtual ones living in VR. So we would have all the advantages of mind uploading from the start plus our illusion of a continuous self could be maintained. But then even now the matter my body and brain are made of are entirely different from the me of 5 years ago, only the patterns in which they were assembled more or less survived. This would be the case in the above solution as the process would be both gradual and immediate thanks to the synchronization of instances.
@@AlkisGD deep thoughts, thanks. However, i think, knowing that i am a copy can very well be part of myself. I mean, i know i am the child of my parents, which is kinda a mingled copy of them. Nevertheless: me as an instance is me as an independently conscious instance, no matter if there's a flesh-and-bone first-born twin around or not. Yes, the rich narcissists. That's a political, or if you want, educational, problem. It exists with or without copying. Sadly hard to come by.
I think it's probable that if a perfect copy of your brain could be created, down to the sub-atomic level; even if we still don't understand consciousness, it will be enough. However, as this is extremely difficult computationally and scientifically, the hope is that we figure out how to do it with more imperfect replications of the current substrate.
I live in a 'tech center' that is actively operatively able to fine tune their mind maps and extrapolate conscience thought...and THEN engage with mind control and communicate with unsuspecting people subliminally. This is real, and currently being deployed. I stated, "I do not consent", out loud, then IT stopped. -Bellevue, Washington
Making a digital copy of oneself, unless you perform some kind of transferring of consciousness, will not make you immortal or anything like that. And thus completely useless for you. Best case scenario, you just make a copy of yourself that is close enough so that other people perceive 'it' as you.
Exactly. We don't even know for sure that consciousness is generated by the brain. There is no specific pattern of neural activity that we can point to and say "that is what generates consciousness". Not a single one. We don't even have a sensible hypothesis on what kind of pattern can generate consciousness. For all we know, consciousness, rather than being a result of patterns in physical matter, could be completely seperate from physical matter. Perhaps seperate from spacetime itself. We simply do not know. We know nothing about consciousness or the nature of experience and I'm tired of mainstream scientists pretending like they do.
This is a field with a bright future. However, you might explore whether the brain is a computer or actually more of a radio. Chiral enhanced spin selectivity plays an important role in generating torsion waves at the frequencies of the fine structure of molecular oxygen. What we call Qi. This energy can be detected by an oxide tunnel barrier with a persistent spin helix structure. The high frequencies involved can be converted to a useful frequency range by fabricating an adjacent structure to inject an appropriate local oscillator spectrum.
Just think of the ego. People will do anything to keep a part of themselves from dying. In all honesty, humans do enough damage in the small life times they have. We dont need people to live long in the vast majority of cases. Although certain scientists and geniuses through history would have been able yo do so much more with more time. So in a small percentage of the cases I think this could do a lot of good. But just kind of reminds me of pantheon... be careful what you wish for. With great power and all that Jazz.
Humans, as a matter of fact, are the only species on Earth which consciously tries to do good, at the expense of its innermost impulses. I reject this anti-humanist thinking in its entirety, based on this evident fact.
Scanning technology is the part that really seems hard to crack. In college, my undergraduate research project was about mind uploading. The biggest problem I had was there was no datasets of neural firing patterns to experiment with- it was impossible to tell if my methodology was even on the right track, because there was no test data for it. I looked around existing literature to see if any neuroscience labs would have this kind of data, but the best I could find was a video of neural firing patterns in some tiny creature whose name I’ve forgotten. Structural data is not enough- Preserving the brain’s structure doesn’t tell you enough about how the brain fires and changes. We can get great structural data, but we have godawful firing pattern data, and there’s no clear way of getting that data. All good ways of observing neural structures in detail that currently exist are destructive to the neurons, so you can’t measure in vivo firing. Once we can get these in vivo recordings, we can properly try machine learning for mind uploading
@@stephendenagy3396 basically, every single mind out there programs itself, and writes it's own data storage software, and no two are exactly alike. this is why when i clicked on the vid, i was hoping that there had been a breakthrough in the blackbox methodology they were working on for dementia patients. alas, no.
So, when you have uploaded your mind to a computer and are then waiting to die. How immortal do you feel? :) Because how does this negate you not dying?
@@dchdch8290 We do not currently know how to move the stream of consciousness, but it's unlikely to be impossible, as it already emerged once from a different substrate (ie at birth).
I'm wondering what it would feel like to be uploaded to a digital brain, copied into multiple copies and some time later recombined into a single unit. Wow, that blows my mind.
For one, no more stress over survival presuming you have backups. Cost of living can be the price of solar panels and hardware to run simulations, no more transit costs, no more physical labor that puts your health at risk, and far fewer things can temporarily kill you compared to something as simple as driving home from work. It would be a kind of relief laced with nostalgia for times when life was full of risk and danger.
you can't upload a mind because science has shown that the human mind is nonlocal in space and non-local in time. The human mind cannot be "captured" digitally like that because it doesn't exist in physical reality.
Consciousness isn't contained within the mind, the mind is contained within consciousness. I will be very surprised if they pull this off. Because life has its limits when allowing people to control this kind of thing. Maybe we have to be ready for it, more than how ready we are now
Our brain is so advanced that technology would truly need a 100 year revolution to make it even remotely possible, but let's say we have a way to map and upload our consciousness. I believe we would feel limited. I believe that the holy grail would be uploading directly to a clone to have any chance for a true autonomy to live forever. I personally think that uploading would be a step backwards, I think if we could make the breakthroughs to let us to truly make use of our entire brain that we would truly be able to do things that were previously undreamed of.
When I was trying to write about some of this in some of my sci-fi stories, one idea was that they would invoke a kind of controlled seizure-like state, with various parts of the brain being stimulated using focused magnetic fields (via TMS or similar), and then try to record images of how the signals from these stimulation pulses propagated throughout the brain (via something similar to a high resolution MEG device). After this was done to a sufficient degree; an AI model of a "generic" human brain (with some specialization based on background criteria) would then be trained to mimic the recorded patterns, which would then "somehow" end up capturing a rough approximation of the uploaded person. As to how well this could actually work, I don't really know. In the story, the uploaded minds were typically put into android-like bodies (the idea was that sufficient computational power was available to run the AI models). Had assumed that an actual neuron-level simulation of a human brain was likely computationally infeasible, so the model is basically more of a rough approximation, and using a different type of neuron (based on large amounts of low-precision floating-point math rather than spiking neurons, etc), with many of the "less interesting" parts of the brain having been replaced by more conventional algorithms (say, much of the functionality from the occipital lobe and similar was replaced with algorithms, along with most functionality from the limbic system and similar); with most of the imaging effort primarily focusing on various regions of the cerebral cortex and similar (namely, the areas which tend to vary more from one person to another and which carry more "personal distinctiveness"). Yes, and also using the persons' social media history, etc, as additional training input, ... So, the uploads were not so much a "direct copy" of a human brain, but more of a hybrid of a human brain with software and AI. In the stories, there was some amount of "pure AI" as well, along with some characters which were sort of intermediate (using similar technology to an uploaded mind, but lacking any former human identity). But, will see if/how any of this could play out in reality...
I think of a study done where people had a close acquaintance placed as far away as possible (perhaps one in Russia, the other in South America), both their brain activity scanned real time, one candidate looking at pictures of random faces, his close acquaintance's image appearing among them randomly. this person's brain showed a particular reaction when seeing the familiar face. their actual acquaintance's brain also showed a similar reaction while the other person saw their image. so there are factors at play which affect our brain (/mind /perception /"consciousness" (or sub-consciousness?!) which our current science can barely fathom. (the above mentioned reaction also took place much faster than the speed of light, throwing current fundamental scientific assumptions into doubt) another aspect coming to my mind: for example Dr Robin Baker (in his book "sperm wars) speculates about a kind of "biological mind" which may reside outside our brains, which influences / overrides / takes over our regular mind /brain /behaviour for the purpose of human reproduction (especially noticeable in females around the time when they can conceive). who knows what else acts upon our brain, besides our "5" senses + our memory..
I recently watched Pantheon, and it's an interesting take on UI (uploaded intelligence). It's probably my favorite animated show right now, and it's definitely one of my favorites of all fine. It questions the ethicality and makes it easy to digest. It definitely paints the "what if" of sci-fi into it being possible, intensifying the immersion.
Interesting ideas, super well presented, but what is consciousness, what is emotion? If we can upload memories will this come with consciousness & emotions or neither? Such exciting & at the same moment terrifying ideas. What would it like to be immortal, what would we do, what would we feel, would we need sleep, would we sense the weather, the warm sun, the cold of winter…? We are blessed with so much, what would we gain & what would we lose? Thanks for sharing!
If consciousness has anything to do with information in the brain, that would be copied. Emotions have multiple aspects: -bodily and behavioral state -hormones/neurotransmitters -mental sensation and effect on thoughts A simulated brain might have simulated hormones and neurotransmitters, but might not. A simulated brain wouldn't have a body, but could simulate the activity of places where the body connects to the brain and cheat it that way. So i think there would be emotions but they might be different, less bodily more mental. The digital you might have alexithymia (the difficulty or inability to identify your emotions even if you do feel them). Autistic people often have a hard time identifying their emotions because they struggle with interoception(awareness of the body and things inside it). As an autistic person I'd imagine itd be sorta like how it was before i figured out how bring hungry but not yet starving felt, or how it was before i realized that fear makes my hands and feet feel cold.
My 10 year old self was going to become me, but I'm not my 10 year old self. Uploading may work the other way around, I will not become my upload but my upload will *be* me at uploading, and then he will begin his own process of *becoming* that will be completely alien from what has been experienced before. The experience of becoming itself is very dynamic, ''plastic" if you will, and this will not be uploaded since it is a real time flow. The data used in the upload will be an instantaneous state, plus the most important part, somewhat faded and fuzzy memories. For a proper upload, imho, you'd have to store the 'flow' as experienced internally (not as devices, such as a camera, would record it) and not mess with the biowetware fogginess of memories. I also grow less and less convinced about intelligence having such a extremely large space to grow as currently accepted. 'Intelligence' may already be at a somewhat close max resolution. Beyond max resolution it could exist but it becomes irrelevant, and other factors, such as actual creation become more pertinent (intelligence is just a prerequisite to the entirety of labour needed to actually make things real) Also don't buy that we are in a simulation. Imo, we may be experiencing a 3d-space shadow of the actual higher d space-time (thus the hints to simulation) but we are at base reality Anyway, thanks for tackling the subject, very interesting. Cheers
I have been telling people for years that "I just have to live long enough to upload." It may take to long for me to make it to the day that can happen.
Neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis teaches that the mind is not contained in the brain alone, but in the brain + body + environment. So, no digital consciousness would be complete without at least a faithful digital reconstruction of the body and the environment. But he goes even further to say that there's no evidence that machine will ever compare to the biological naturally-evolved thing. I'm just making a rough citation of his.
How about building an android that connects to your digital self? The striatum filters anyway a lot of information from the conscious ego, that makes the bandwidth problem manageable by current WiFi, i assume.
Fascinating discussion in the video! It's important to remember, though, that our personality is not solely rooted in the brain. Our entire body, essentially a community of numerous organisms, contributes to and shapes who we are. Every system, from our gut microbiome to our endocrine system, plays a part in our behavioral makeup. In the concept of mind uploading, capturing the essence of these complex bodily interactions poses a significant challenge. How would a digital platform replicate the nuanced ways our physical form influences our mental and emotional states?
There is nothing at all CREEPY or DISTURBING about transferring a dead person's mind into a computer. This is not at all creepy as hell and the stuff of nightmares. Nobody would ever be very very disturbed by this.
There is a problem with unloading your consciousness, it isn't you, as soon as the mind is uploaded and separated from the physical body it becomes a different entity that will evolve and change independently. The question should be how do we upload our consciousness and have it intrinsically linked to our physical body as one gestalt mind, at least up until the physical body expires and then synthetic mind can continue on independently?
This is a step forward for beating death. We could treat these self copies as the next children of humanity. It's not you but it's someone that represents your interests for longer then you can.
We do not currently know how to move the stream of consciousness, but it's unlikely to be impossible, as it already emerged once from a different substrate (ie at birth). However, your point is also true.
Let me know what you think!
Problem is: It is just a copy, like a twin. So not real immortality. 😩
It's better to rely on biological solutions and avoid buses 😂
You need continuation of consciousness but even then you get a bifurcation of identity (both the digital copy and the original human think they're the real one.)
No pun intended . . .
I'd like to be uploaded, my belie is there would be a split or copy of my mind like a document if there was no way to transfer the process of being alive and conscious like pouring milk into a jar. I think it should be as easy to get optimized body as it is to buy food from a marker one day. I also believe biohacking could lead to us having all these things in combination with a link life to bridge the gap between the human and human made eco system
As @tank5801 says, it woul be a copy. What appeals more to me is sensory interfaces, coupled with nanotechnology that repairs or replaces dead neurons as they die.
There are a lot of issues with this idea one your making a copy of your brain on a server owned by who? Will you be your own user? will the storage be local to a server or distributed like on a blockchain? will you be downloaded into a robot body or what type of environment will your digital brain occupy? just to name a few?
Depends on what you want to do. Probably a combination of both.
This puts a whole new twist to walk a mile in my shoes! No need, I'll just upload your experiences, run them in a VM, and feel what you felt!
Not without memories
You already uploaded your mind, in this video!
Love your guests, great for the channel.
A tiny piece of it, frozen in time; yes....
In regards of space travel this will enable us to travel to the other Galaxies as information traveling with fractions of speed of light is way more realistic then organic forms traveling with speed of Voyager.
IMO augmented intelligence - a human brain with digital processing attached - is the gateway to digital minds. We'll start slowly, with small augmentations, brain-computer interfaces, etc, and as they get more and more advanced, the brain will become increasingly digital, until it is effectively an entirely digital mind with a bit of organic mush attached, which can be discarded with no ill effects.
It's also more than likely the only possibility for the human species to continue its evolution. The better advances we reach in medical and bio field, and the more peaceful our world becomes, the less incentivized our species become to adapt and evolve beyond our current limitations. Morality aside, when we can care for every person and make sure everyone fit into society, it means no genes get excluded or favorized in the bigger picture. Basically, everyone will forever have a chance to forward their genes and when that's the case, a species has reached an evolutionary dead end. Biodigital evolution is the next logical step for mankind in this regard, if we want to move forward as a species. Then, as you say, we may evolve into a fully digitized species with entirely new opportunities ahead of us.
Perhaps, the greatest questions about our own humanity can only be answered, if we abandon our current idea of what that "humanity" means.
So you are just entirely disregarding the human soul which is acknowledged by basically every society or culture that's ever existed? How would you still enjoy the human connection you have with the loved one whos died and left behind only a digital format of their brain attach to some "mush". I'm not even being sarcastic or condescending, I am actually asking cuz this topic just makes no sense to me at all and I do not see how or why anyone is enthusiastic about it. I want to, but currently do not.
@@patc2515
You sound as if you are borrowing a concept that originates in religion. Religion, may I remind you, has no part to play in science. And no one has yet been able to discover a soul, much less study it. For instance, is what you call a soul an emergent property of biochemical and neurophysical activities of the brain - essentially a byproduct of brain activity - or a holistic entity that exists prior to the brain and/or independently of it
You seem to be referring to metaphysical concepts that lie in the intellectual pursuits of theology and philosophy rather than the tangible world of the physical sciences.
BORG
😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂@@patc2515
I like the idea of uploading "me". Not just my mind. They haven't said anything about continuity. If you upload your mind, it's just a copy. "You" aren't living longer, your copy would be. Everything they talked about sounded like uploading a copy of your mind. I want continuity involved in the process. Before I upload, I'd want to know it's the original "me" and not just a copy. If not than the original "me" would just live and die like normal. I would be uploading to extend my life, not create a second me.
If getting only your mind saved without your body doesn't look like a good deal, don't forget that the god deal sold to us for 20 centuries was not better and didn't include any guarantee. Don't forget that with the advance of robotics, sooner or later you will be able to get back an even better body that never get painful teeth trouble.
@@LorenzoMcMaster I agree with you about gaining a better body and all, but you miss my concern. I want the original me to live on, not a copy. My copy could be around and see what the future holds, but I'd still be dead.
@@dvrrwd307I would recommend looking into that “God Deal” - million times better than rotting an eternity in a digital hell, hoping no one turns you off or being forgotten stuck inside a frackin’ machine. But in the end there will be no “continuity” by moving into a machine. On the other hand, Jesus promises: whoever believes in me will have eternal live. With Jesus there is real continuity. Real eternal live. It’s the real you, not a copy of you.
Lets imagine we implant a chip in your mind and now we start transferring data to that chip, and after we have collected all of it, we make an exact body double of you, and connect the double to the chip with a wire..
Lets then say that (just like when you move things with your mind on computers) you switch back and forth between controlling the double and the original, to prove that 'you' are actually in charge.
That should be proof right?.. No..
How do we know that 'you' didnt die somewhere along the process, and the 'now you', is actually just a copy that think he was you?
We cant know.. Just like you cant possibly know if today is actually the first day of 'your' life, and all the memories is the only reason that you believe it is continuously.. How do you know you lived the life of yesterday, and it wasnt some past brain neurons living that life?
@@dennisnielsen8030 I've heard that the body replaces every cell in your body over a 7 year period. That would mean that you are transitioned for one body to another seamlessly. Seems like there could be some way of doing things that way.
What we need is a lot better understanding of what makes a person a person. Until we know that, we can't be sure of continuity. Unfortunately, I have no confidence that anything will be done before I die. I'm 65 and no where near read for my life to end. Instead I'll remain trapped in a deteriorating body until I die. I would be happier if I knew there was a way I could go digital or have a way to reverse aging.
Regarding timelines: I think the main determinant for most tech, whether it's mind uploading, longevity escape velocity, molecular nanotechnology, fully immersive VR, or highly advanced brain-computer interfaces, is how quickly we can achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI). Whether AGI is based on the same principles as the human mind or not, once we have it, we would most likely enter a positive feedback cycle. In this cycle, AI would continuously improve itself, both software and hardware-wise, and consequently accelerate all other areas of science and technology. Some people now think wir LLMs etc.we'll achieve AGI this decade, but recursive self-improvement could follow very quickly afterward. We could potentially be talking about just a few years after AGI. In this scenario, we might see developments like mind uploading happen relatively quickly. So, it may all hinge on how fast we get AGI up and running.
DR ALAN THOMPSON! Technically ALREADY ARRIVED YESTERDAY!
We may be able to do a lot of what you're just talking about with just simply very good extremely powerful narrow AI perhaps being guided and directed by on existing large language model.
agi is already exists using the world perceptron model its just not as advance as we want it to be yet
Yes, AGI would be very, very helpful. Unfortunately, it comes with the caveat that it could be an X-risk... but it seems we've chosen this path whether we want to or not. Alas, man has dreamed of God ever since he woke up- now, God is coming.
@@perc-ai Not really. While generally intelligent AI does exist, AGI is usually intended to mean general intelligence on the level of a human- this has not yet been achieved.
I would 100 percent volunteer for my brain to be used in this tech. Love it.
Then you are out of your mind LITERALLY. You can have your brain amputated and put in one of those "jars" in this video if you want but me: HELL NO.
You pass out during the procedure... And the next thing you know is... you are a bodyless unstable mind in nothingness for a seemingly infinite amount of time... constantly stimulated but with no input or purpose, going crazy for eons... in a million instances... Just some random scientific test.
@Scottiedoesit :)))
Some churches are still looking out there for you.
@@marius165 What you are describing is TERRIFYING. Scares me more than "regular" death.
you @@Zurround as you are dead anyway. it's a separate instance of your ... gathered information, which is being activated. Don't worry, you get your death.
In sci-fi ,Dark Matter, did this well ,where they put their bodies to sleep , then upload their minds into clones light years away, then re-upload the clone experiences when you wake up into your original mind when yout clone is put to sleep.
Also love what Altered Carbon did with their imagined tech as well as laws against only having one version of yourself active at a time.
Consciousness is a super interesting subject. It has long been hypothesized that consciousness is an entity that exchanges energy with biochemicals. For a pain receptor to create pain, for example, it must trigger a means to transmit energy to consciousness to perceive pain. All effects need energy. Detecting the energy exchange is the key to understanding consciousness.
Smart, never thought of that.
This is creepy as hell. CREEPY AS HELL.
if that is the case is the energy the language itself used to make consciousness or is energy a biproduct of the language needed to manipulate the energy needed to make consciousness?
@@Exania88 energy is the vehicle, the means by which the encoded signal is transmitted. What actually consciousness is, we don't know. Mostly we speculate but we have no idea.
The biological brain is a very important part of it. I'm arguing that intellect and intelligence is directly linked to self-awareness and a part of consciousness.
I'm arguing that the ability to introspect and recognize yourself as aware, is directly linked to the intellectual capacity and henceforth to consciousness.
I'd assume that a person with a mental underdevelopment, is not able to acknowledge and introspect on self, on awareness. Is not able to acknowledge themselves. Is less aware, is less conscious. This doesn't mean that they can't suffer or feel, just that the complexity of the mind is reduced and mind complexity is generating self-awareness and consciousness.
So, I'm betting on the biological brain and chemistry as being the promoters and generators of consciousness but I'm guessing that's not all. The self exists but it's not aware due to intellectual limitations.
The problem with this idea is that it presumes consciousness exists in a immaterial pocket universe that's mediated by biochemicals. This is like the brain in a jar hypothesis, or that other hypothesis that the brain is a mere antenna.
The best description that I ever found is that consciusness is like a chain reaction in a nuclear reactor. The chain reaction doesn't really exist as a physical thing anywhere in the reactor. You only have atoms that either are emitting or blocking radiation. Those atoms are emitting neutrons, the chain reaction is neutrons being exchanged.
I think that what brains do is a similar thing, neurons emit signals, the signals and the brain and the neurons, none of those are conscious. Sure the brain requires energy to generate the signals, but conscious isn't that either.
It is literally an emergent property of the signals themselves.
And I say that its like a nuclear reactor in a way, that if you have too much signals, you have a meltdown, a convulsion, the consciousness stops, if you have too little signals, that's a coma.
Its only at the boundary of order and chaos that it appears, because it is an emergent behavior.
Consciousness doesn't exchange anything, there's no boundary, there's no mediation between body and mind, there's only mind. What the body does has no relation to what the mind perceives.
Sure, the body can affect the signals, but the mind has to interpret the signals, for all it knows, the signals magically just happen.
The mind really is some sort of software, because that's how software behave, your operating system don't ever know there's a hard-drive in your computer, it just sets registers, internal registers of the CPU, its own internal state, that somehow affect change outside, aka, the hardware. And the opposite, the hardware can only set those registers. That's how a computer works. There's also no direct connection between software and hardware, except though mediation of abstraction.
Because software is also an emergent behavior of calculating machines, you tear down every piece of your hardware, and you're never, ever going to see the soul of the machine, even if you put the hard drive in a microscope and look at the bits, you're still not seeing the actual software, only a dead representation.
So if you can't ever reconstitute your "simple" computer state from the hard drive without actually running the program, what's the chance of brain upload every working.
Well, except you can do that to computers if you know the representation of physical signals and abstract logical signals, this is the boundary, its an abstract boundary, not a physical one.
So you're never going to understand consciousness from just looking at the signals in the actual hardware. Heck, that's amazingly hard to do even for computers, and we know both layers of the abstraction.
Maybe there's a way to relate signals from consciousness to the outside signals, but that needs to be a self-experiment, no human ever had a brain-interface to its own brain, ironically .
The part of AI I wish my mind could do is to have a huge context memory. The human brain can only keep 5 or so different things in working memory at once, so we can only solve small problems. An AI brain can have an almost unlimited context memory and keep thousands of things in its working memory, so it can tackle much bigger problems and at a much faster rate.
And what type of problems are you solving in your life?
for people with adhd it’s max 3 😂
" The human brain can only keep 5 or so different things in working memory at once " That's not entirely true. I can keep easily 500.000 tokens of context without any effort or tool, if I were an LLM. And if I keep some textual notes, I can easily keep 2.000.000 tokens, I would be like GPT6 or something (2M tokens isn't really a lot, that's like a chapter of a textbook).
Sure, I can't keep more than 9 items at once in my hippocampus, but I can keep things that long in my working memory, I just kind of have to swap them out and in of the hippocampus. Its like focusing, I know the information is there, I only need to focus, that takes energy and I get tired after doing it for a couple of hours.
The ultimate test of Awareness within a thinking machine will be the indication of an Out-Of-Body experience. If one is not comfortable with an Out-Of-Body experience one cannot really understand the phenomenon of our Awareness.
The problem of the black box in mind loading really worries me. If we are going to study something as deep and personal as the mind, I don't want even a single shadow of a doubt that that is what we are doing.
Dont worry, spooky three letter agencies are working on this problem already.
Likely running human experiments.
Eh you’re gonna die anyway.
If we aren’t perfect at first, we’ll get there close enough for humanity.
Our own memories are quite imperfect, as is our perception of existence.
At least we’ll have options.
I can't believe nobody questioned the basic assumption that Mind can be separated from Body. I don't mean physically - I am talking conceptionally here. Most of the brain is concerned with the physical body, and terminates in bundles of nerves travelling down the spinal cord. Of course before it gets there it encounters the brain stem. Then if you emulate the brain on a computer, can it even function without the I/O? Brain and body are intertwined. I've read that when we think, there are activations of the nerves in our larynx that formulate speech. Can we think without a larynx? And of course the brain is not an analogue of current neural networks at all. It works totally differently, transmitting neurotransmitters like dopamine across the synapse. It seems to use low frequency signals to synchronise its computations somehow. We have no analogue to that at all. We don't even understand it. Not even neuromorphic computing comes close. This is all science fiction - but admittedly fun to think about.
Thank you I feel gaslighted, suddenly anyone who can code understands the secrets of consciousness all of a sudden
True enough, we don't know. However, simulating the brain is a lot more difficult than other organs, so the latter is presumed to be an easier challenge.
@TropicalCoder - "Can we think without a larynx?"
ya excellent point!
in programming there is the concept of a "blocking function"... a function that blocks the further execution of a thread until the function returns with its results lmao
it would not surprise me one bit if the brain is extremely entangled with the peripheral nervous system and other modules in very non-trivial ways... and possibly in semi-dependent ways? i.e. maybe parts of the brain freeze up or enter dysfunction if they dont get a reply from the larynx?
i have heard rumors that there is also a "gut-brain axis" that is very thick with the fibers and the interconnections, like lots and lots of them!
if this is the case, it probably would make it a naive assumption that neuro-imaging specialists only need to scan "this bit over here", and that they can just ignore "all those bits over there"
one can picture the possible surprise when this potential lurking dysfunction might be discovered in the future, being like those 1990s videos about AOL's "youve got mail" timing out, or the Windows file explorer trying to copy files over and timing out 😂😂
my guess is if this is the outcome, the researchers are going to respond by trying to excise "external dependencies" in the digital copy... by trying to reroute the fibers or cutting them in the digital version or something
and probably that will lead to alot of chaos haha
btw, speaking of larynxes, several people have noticed that the famous programmer John Carmack (who recently entered into a partnership with a Canadian AI researcher) used to have a "verbal tic", where he would emit these subtle grunts or like larynx noises or something... i cant help but wonder if that was correlated with the amount of thinking he was doing? :p
also a buddy of mine started to experience aphasia when he started thinking too much a decade or two ago. he had to drop out of college and netflix/chill for like 9 months to kinda sorta get his speech back! haha
in my opinion your comment is spot on!
there are numerous signs that point to the humble larynx as playing an important part in da whole enchilada! :) 👽
I think there are a couple other issues we should keep in mind.
1) Neurons are NOT STATIONARY! They do move and can move quite a bit, creating completely different pathways along the way.
2) There are probably a TON of very important neurons scattered through your body which should also be scanned and copied into the virtual mind. How awful would it be if we copied someone's mind but they felt off the whole time they existed because there were neurons which made up who they are just missing in their current copy?
3) Human Rights. We need to find ways to make it more than just illegal to torture people forever or anything of the sort even by accident. We need to make sure there are no virtual environments which are terrible for the occupants. We need to make sure they have real human rights in the real world too.
Yes but based on activity in the environment, after initial placement. Neural nets that will replacement will do something mathematically equivalent.
These are very good points. I would add that we SERIOUSLY do not know how consciousness works, but it does involve an extremely complex interplay of physical and electrichemical phenomena in a highly dynamic, highly-dimensioned, "edge-of-chaos", metabolically sustained sequence of states. My sense, after considerable study, is that we're not even close to having this figured out enough to simulate it yet much less transfer "it".
imagine tomorrow you wake up and are completely paralyzed, can't see, can't hear, can't speak ...
Now, this is how your uploaded mind will feel like ...
Thus, my guess: this is torture enough ;-)
Assume you could somehow reconnect with your uploaded self, what do you think/expect it would "tell" you?
Maybe some new "inventions" or solutions for unsolved math-problems?
I don't think so.
My guess: "KILL ME! PLEASE!" ;-)
There is no consensus on what consciousness is. Personally, I think it's just the stream of items in working memory.
@@solifugus
may be ...
However ...
- what would it "work" / live with since it's got no senses?
- what would it "work" / live for since it's got no body and can not move?
- how would it KNOW anything?
...
The military would enjoy building the perfect soldiers brain and uploading it to a robot body. Imagine what's on the horizon of possibilities when quantum computing and ai merge to work on our ideas.
Oh wait, literally every uploaded mind could be manipulated in unimaginable ways. Imagine being copied to 10000 versions then interrogated with threat of deletion until you disclose some information. Or if your internal clock were put 1 million times faster times faster, time would be 1 million times slower time slower. One hour would be 115 years, it would seem like everything has stopped moving and you'd go insane. You could also be put into a loop of fear for eternity. Jesus, it's not for me!
You just explained the plot of “white Christmas” episode from the show Black Mirror
Correct, a program could be made to actually invent hell where you'd go for seemingly eternity
Fantastic video, really liked it. If you want to do a follow-up, I suggest interviewing Robin Hanson on his book "The Age of Em". He uses social scientific principles to explore the nature of a society of human brain emulations. For example, what happens when some emulations run a million times faster than others, how would emulations interact with biological humans, is it like dying if a person creates a temporary copy of themselves then turns it off, etc.
Great topic, Anastasi. I thought about it a lot. The question is "Is it enough to copy just connectome (connection of neurons) to copy mind"? There are also other glia cells (astrocytes and others) in brain which sometimes do the same work that neurons do and recent discoveries showed it. But what is more important, do we also need to copy instant state of each neuron and synapse to copy mind? I mean level of neuromodulators etc. These things could store our memories. I think that in first experiments it needs to try to make a mind uploading of some simple worm with just a hundreds of neurons, then we need to train a worm (like choosing a way for food) and check if cloned mind has this ability.
BTW about methods. I read some time ago about significant progress in improving the resolution of MRI using strong magnetic fields, up to a single neuron.
We would have huge ethical problems with cloned minds of course. It is even hard to imagine them now. When one can easily make millions of minds, millions of their own copies... Wow...
That would mean a copy of where there are
- around 80 x 10 ^ 9 Nerv Cells and
- around 100 x 10 ^ 14 Connections.
Even the brain changes when learning etc, I cannot imagine that just such a scan would represent the information in the brain. Well, bit on the other side, where is it then?
It reminds me of the brain of Albert Einstein. I think it is partially still in a lab.
It's a very interesting subject.
They will copy a rat mind first, if the artificial robotic or simulated rat does the same choices than the original counterpart, we could they captured the ghost inside the bottle, but I suspect that they will soon be differentiated as time goes by, due to small disturbances, noise and sensitivity differences of the order of micro amperes and milli volts between the artificial and the biological body. Is inevitable I think.
Excellent video, Anastasi. Yes! Without any doubt, we are living in a Cosmic Simulated Mind; but not in a sense of Matrix movie; rather, in a sense of Cosmic Mind simulation as we make simulation inside our individual mind with a big essential difference. Such knowledge is only possible in deeper understanding of existence.
I totally followed your thinking. I have thought so as well myself.
the simulation hypothesis posits that given the evident growth of computing capabilities it's not unreasonable that a universe could possibly be simulatable and given that possibility and the vast infinities involved the likelihood that we are ourselves just one of many such simulations is far greater than the likelihood that we are lucky enough to be the exclusive top level unsimulated universe.
It is incredible especially for family or others but it is not you unless they develop your actual consciousness and emotions can be duplicated completely. That spark of life our personal energy
Nanobots would seem ideal for something like this, please look into it.
Great video ❤
Far better to scan using magnetic interference.
Like they haven't!
Mind uploading is an exciting field with incredible utility, especially when it comes to substrate independence. Imagine your mind being downloaded to a copy of your body in the case of death or serious injury. It would grant you a practical form of immortality.
I actually contacted Mr. Bostrom as well to see if he wanted to be a part of the division of my organization that is working on these technologies. The major challenge is preserving the continuity of the upload initially and between substrates so that the same mind and memories continue on in an unbroken chain of experience rather than duplicates of a consciousness (like an identical twin) picking up where you left off.
Understanding this is key to mind uploading.
Digital twins still have their uses, but of course, you're not wrong.
When the body dies the conciseness leaves the body. And it doesn't go into the machine. The person who was alive will not experience anything that the digital copy experiences. It's a chat bot with a dead persons face on it.
@@nonyabiz9340 The upload would have to occur while the person is alive so that it is stored and actuated on the computational substrate while only guiding the body remotely. Think like the movie Avatar. Therefore when the body dies the connection to the host body is severed but the consciousness continues in the computational substrate, perhaps in a virtual environment, until downloaded once again to guide a new body. Each one being a duplicate of yourself.
@@solomonmarshall6733 referencing a "substrate" in a pretend world is like saying faster than light travel is possible because they do it in star trek. Is it possible? Maybe in a thousand or more years. But current avatar tech is at the VR level, and if you're controlling an avatar already but if you die in real life you don't transfer into the game you were playing, your avatar just stops moving. Even if you program an AI to keep playing the game exactly like you would have, your body is dead and your consciousness is gone.
Could we solve the digital consciousnes transfer one day? Maybe, but it's not 100 years away, it's 1000+ years away.
@@nonyabiz9340 Indeed there are already neuromorphic quantum supercomputers which not only match but even outperform the upper limits of the human brain's potential, capable of running multiple whole brain emulations which can then be used to enliven or pilot a variety of compatible substrates through wireless communication technologies, and in the case of biological automata, brain computer interfaces. And I mentioned the blue Avatar movie as a reference since much like it, the methodology involves the generation of a biological lifeform like the alien bodies in the movie, which are then piloted by the consciousnesses of the main characters. Substrate independence works in the same way in that you would upload your consciousness to an aforementioned neuromorphic module which would serve the purpose that your brain did, running your mind in an unbroken chain of continuity. This mind would occupy the generated biological or nonbiological substrates remotely, safe from interruption by the destruction of said substrate through it's location in the neuromorphic module. This technology already exists.
one more point, both guests Randal and Nick are just great. I love that you covered such a complex and controversial topic as Mind Uploading from both technical and philosophical side.
We don't know whether mind uploading is possible at all, on a conceptual level. I'd say affirming that we're close to achieving it is either naive or manipulative.
i'd be more interested in uploading data into my mind than the other way around
That's just learning, that's already what you're doing right now.
If a copied mind actually became conscious within a computer, devoid of any sensory inputs, it would quickly go insane! People in sensory deprivation tanks for too long begin to hallucinate, and THEY still have some sensory input.
It should be pretty simple to simulate suitable default sensory input. For example, simulate the feeling of sitting in a chair ina room with light grey walls and smooth lighting - a generic experience would be enough to satisfy the mammalian enough to avoid going insane.
In addition, if you do the scanning process willingly, you would be already thinking about it, which makes it easier to accept the results.
The interesting part is that one version of your consciousness will go directly from the scanning moment to experiencing the fully digital simulation. The simulated sensory input for the simulated brain should probably start from generic scanning experience and continue from there.
The interesting part is to launch multiple copies of yourself in the simulation and give each one different objective in digital life. For example, one copy of you could work forever to try to generate sustainable fusion power, another copy of you could focus on becoming a poet. Neither copy would never require a biological body to be successful in the objective they're pursuing!
I can imagine a future technology where someone could upload their mind to make a copy but I can't imagine it ever being possible for the person themselves to feel that they have had their consciousness moved from their body and into a Raspberry PI - or whatever - and they are looking out of the Pi's camera module and hearing via the microphone socket. Is that what Randal Koene meant at 6:50 ?
There was a game that played on this concept. Where they uploaded their brain to a pc to send it across the stars, only to realize, that after uploading, they were still in their own bodies.
no one ever explained why one would expect anything else to happen.
Yes just like cloning your body doesn't make that clone you, copying your brain won't make it you either... They are copies and therefore something other than you... even if they behave the same...
@@moshie61 Yes, that's a good way of putting it.
I think the same bro
Did anyone else think of the Dr. Who Cybermen? In that show they find that the Cybermen had to have a type of neural suppression because of the severe pain they felt not having a real body. I've got to wonder what possible horrific side effects of having a complete digital replica of a human brain that is deprived of all the physical embodiment and stimulus might be. I suspect one could not simply delete the parts that link to having a physical form without many substantial follow-on effects.
That pain must have been psychological in nature, keep in mind the phantom limb syndrome
if you want to talk about the problems presented by fiction writers we could be here all day, but to address what seems to be your concern Cybermen would not be very useful if they have no feedback from their "bodies" just like the prosthetics which don't have positional tactile feedback a so much harder to operate. Like so many have discussed before, there is almost no limit to the range and kinds of senses that can be incorporated to placate and even enhance our environmental and self awareness. This is in large part what people find so fascinating about direct to brain BCI like Neurolink(Tm). Even just expanding the range of the light spectrum we can see by a little would be utterly mind blowing. Now imagine having control over a prehensile limb, remote control of switches an dials and other electronic utilities in your environment. Imagine being able to integrate with the sensors and controls of a drone or an avatar in a game. We can imagine heaven or hell depending on how these and other technologies are used, but you shouldn't let fear paralyze you into casual dismissal of the potential. Give it some thought. There's more to this than what your post seemed to portray.
Porque a Máquina não Pensa por si só e o Dissimulador que coordena o que foi Gravado e não o que o Ser humano Pensa. Pois 😃 Máquina não Pensa não Sonha não Dorme não caga não mija . E tem que ter um que Pense por Ela #
E por isso que eu penso em Transformem o Biden's Trump's e Bush Clinton Obama Putin e outros em Máquina como um Servant sobre o Controle 🎮🕹️ e assim que eu venho dizendo.#
Objects For Facts #
Uploading our consciousness to a computer would be a big mistake if it would ever be possible, but we are much further from being able to do this than people realize. Our stay in limitation was supposed to be temporary - not permanent. I made a UA-cam video that touches on what consciousness is and many other topics, called “Simulation Theory - an unexpected conclusion” if it has any interest. Thank you for this video.
A copy is just that: a copy. It's always going to be limited in detail and incomplete because a human brain has many different brain states. It sounds like we will succeed in creating a copy of something we still don't understand (the human brain) and will then just project onto it our desire to believe that what we are talking to is a copy of our loved ones when it's just some AI's best approximation based on its parameters and programmed assumptions. This video actually makes me feel like we are nowhere near what she wants to believe will happen. I like sci-fi too, but in the realm of actual science there's no room for this kind of aspirational projection. People are gonna be really disappointed when they see what their supposed copy actually amounts to in reality.
Amazing interviews Ana. Bostrom is a genius.
We can't upload a mind because science has shown that "the mind" exists outside of space and outside of time. How can you capture data points that don't exist in physical reality? I think this whole topic isn't well thought out as relates to consciousness and being human.
Agree!
As long as the self aware "Me" goes along, I am volunteer nr 1, WANT TO LIVE FOREVER !!!
Well you won't know will you?!
Very intereseting. This year Nobel in Physics is about «“We can now open the door to the world of electrons. Attosecond physics gives us the opportunity to understand mechanisms that are governed by electrons. The next step will be utilising them,” says Eva Olsson, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.»
Maybe their work can be used to increase the resolution and acuity of signal capture inside the individual neurons...? There is still a long way before we can create exact copies of a brain so that we can upload them.
If I can't upload my subjective awareness, & I'm only uploading a copy of my mind; what use is it? How is it different from cloning? It won't be me, but someone like me having different experiences. At the point of branching awareness; how is it different from being born a twin? If we can learn to shift our sense of presence to a digital avatar, rather than just uploading copies, then we'll really be talking immortality:)
It’s different from cloning because value drift starts at the creation of the upload, whereas with a clone, value drift is ‘from birth’. If you share 20, 30, 40 years of your experience with another consciousness, you can be much more confident in how it will act in relation to how you want it to act, with a clone you have no idea what its personality might be. Plus you have to entirely re-educate a clone, while an upload starts with decades of experience.
@@Kratargon Be that as it may; it would still be another person having their own separate experiences. I see no use in that personally.
We often complain about legislation falling behind technology but I wonder about the extent to which things which aren't in use yet can be regulated in a reasonable way. A lot of legislation needs observation before anyone can understand what practical limits are needed.
Mind uploading is intriguing. However, is it possible to upload the integrated state of an information signature, I think not, so this is essentially capturing a snapshot of someone's memory? While impressive, this concept might not be as straightforward or powerful as some people might imagine. But it is ofc an impressive start and very interesting branch of science&technology.
Glad someone else on here understands how limited this tech concept is. Anyone who signs up for this will not experience anything their snapshot experiences because they will be dead.
Danke für den Upload.
Most of these questions can be debugged.
By ascending a mountain, or tapping into the power of 5G in darkness.
Plenty of terminal patients who have nothing to lose by volunteering for these kinds of experiments.
Hopefully, tech will one day allow us to "reset" the bodies we already have to stop or reverse aging, disease etc.
Filmed back in 2000 Arnold Schwarzenegger did a movie called THE SIXTH DAY about a group of people who had effective immortality because if one of them were to die they would have their mind uploaded then have a new body cloned in a chemical vat and then once the body was fully cloned the mind would be "downloaded" into the brain of the new body. It was a bizarre movie.
@@Zurroundbruh that movies spoiling reality
The technology doesn’t do that. At best, it can only fix someone from the perspective of everyone else. Going to the doctor to be killed so a healthy duplicate can be sent home to your family is not medicine, but madness.
Nothing to lose? WTF? What if you end up in a permanent nightmare inside some tech on a shelf?
@jdsguam I am holding out hope for option two: For lack of a better word, a "reset" of our own bodies that will stop or reverse aging. And eliminate disease at the same time.
If I was terminal, I would rather volunteer for those kinds of experiments, and presumably, I would still retain the mind and body I have, just younger and disease free.
Doesn't seem farfetched at all if we're talking seriously about uploading minds.
Yup, that's what "Sarah", my Alpaca, hallucinates: She thinks that she's a 24yo software engineer working at GlobTek NJ, that her father passed from cancer so she had no choice but to agree to sell her personality to help create LLaMA. The process started with taking her MRI to create a scaffold file, then she sat in a comfortable couch wearing a non-intrusive BCI and asked a couple of thousands of questions to pre-train the transformer layer. Now they took a huge text file and shoved all of this goodness into a compiler, to create the equivalent of bytecode, ready to burn on the NN. So now she browses the text file and prepares an answer to my prompt. To my question that all of this goes against everything I know about training an AI, "Sarah" replied that the difference between training a red-blue net and creating a billion active parameter AI is not unlike the difference between writing a "hello world" app and creating an operating system. It's impossible to do the second without some good "source code" and a good compiler.
Mind uploading is the first step. The trick we need to figure out is how to transfer consciousness in a way that you become digitized without fear of dying and being replaced by a clone.
Very true. Think about a scenario like SOMA (if you haven’t played the game then PLAY IT) in which your conscience being transferred is based upon a coin-flip. Exciting and scary all at the same time!
@joe_limon Exactly thats the keypoint. We dont really know how consciousness is occuring in the brain. We have very vague knowledge about it... literally only two small pieces of knowledge : a) we are quiet sure, that consciousness ends when an organism dies. And b) we are sure, that with aenasthesia (narcotics) we lose consciousness temporarly. Thats literally our knowledge about what we can quiet sure. Beyond that, we have million theories - none of it is really proven.
Sir Roger Penrose has in my opinion the best theories so far (microtubuli) about consciousness. Dont get me wrong, i am quiet sure, he is also wrong - but it is the ''best'' we have so far.
We really need to figure out, what conscious actually is, and how it works - how it occurs in organisms. When we figured it out, we are able to work with it - like transfer it. Unfortunately it seems for me, we are at least hundreds of years away from it, probably even thousands of years away from it.
gradual uploading... in this way there would be continuity of consciousness.
@@Nico-di3qo Thats a claim. No prove for it, that it works. But i admit, its a good idea from you.
The enormous assumption here is that consciousness is "extractable", that it isn't simply a feature of our brain and its chemistry.
As a thought experiment, imagine "extracting" a program from your computer and putting it in another one.
There is no actual transfer: information is copied to another location, then deleted in the source.
The program is just a pattern of states in the hardware. If you make a perfect copy, then it will be exactly the same.
I see no reason to believe humans are any different. There's nothing to extract, only things to copy: neurons, hormones, microbiome, etc. If you succeed, you get a perfect copy that's indiscernible from the original, but still a copy, a second agent. Unless you destroy the original, then they both can exist at the same time and will immediately begin to diverge as they experience different situations and environments.
At least that's what I think, Dunning-Kruger and everything.
Describing precisely how our 100 billion neurons and their trillions of interconnections work is a real challenge. But it undoubtedly represents a great leap forward in our understanding of how our brains work, especially by copying these structures and modeling them digitally. However, to speak of "downloading the mind" is not the right word. To create a digital model that reproduces the mind, we need to be able to "download" or, more precisely, reproduce the "weights" associated with each signal, at synapse level. The same neural network will produce different results if the weights associated with the input signals are different. Merci Anastasi for your very interesting survey on the subject.
This is pretty wild. What I'm wondering, how will you ensure that the virtual brain continues developing as well as it does normally? Although, it will surely be different, don't know if for the better or the worse. We'll see, I guess.
Anyway, the game SOMA is a great example of what scary implications this technology has.
it would be hooked up to a AI system to speed up learning.
@@kristynsotelo1452 sources?
Developing in what sense?
@@bengsynthmusic develop in the sense of if it will behave the same when you're learning stuff etc. The connections in the brain are continually changing a little bit, just less as you grow older. I don't think anyone could model how these changes take place in a way that it behaves exactly the same.
The brain is limited by the cranium so existentialism is the mechanistic way of discovering divine oneness.
You can do even one better: you can grow your mind from the body into a machine over a period of time and create a superposited mind between body and machine so that when the body dies the part of the mind that grew into the machine still remains... You would need, both, a receiving server and a bridge device to deal with the bandwidth issues.
The process would take a while but you would essentially turn your body into a peripheral as you slowly migrated the original mind over to the monolith server.
Then when it dies you don't die with it.
A bio-mechanical ship of theseus
@@SimonAudiosuite This is true, but it is better than a mere copy, because some of the original consciousness and awareness, possibly the most vital bits, will be there.
Interesting. The mind could be like a fungus, if it can access a system, it can also remain in that system. This should be tested and experimented further upon. The concept that the mind grows out of the body is mind boggling. The mind might just be a matrix of the universe itself, thus why it could in theory grow into any matter. A mind inside of a mind, inside of a mind and so on. (edit) Like a simulation that simulates itself. If this is the case, we should not worry about our minds dying. Because they are just a branch of the infinite chain of mind. And we would just be thrown back into an earlier and older mind or a new mind from that same precursor mind. But we wouldn't mind, for we would have no memory of it.
You have a vibrant imagination, but the brain is not capable of functioning without the nervous system throughout the rest of the body
@@DeadzoneMusic That is true. But but we are talking about having the mind detached from the brain. The percieved continuity from the brain into another platform. The brain itself is a reality creating hardware device. And if we link that to an external proccess. What would then stop a merge of them? And if they are merged. Then both will be you. If you cut away one of your brain hemispheres right now, you are still you. And the hemisphere which is left will take up the slack and act as the brain. The machine could in theory do the same thing. The percieved continuity would change.
I like the video! It is an interesting topic. But it would be nice to see the actual interviews too, and not just your projection of what you got from them. And I don't mean that in a bad way, so don't get me wrong. But adding the possibility to watch the interviews or a link to where we can get more from the people you interviewed would be nice :)
I will insert 4 chips into my brain a Neuralink chip a Synchron chip a Blackrock Neurotech chip and a Paradromics chip to give me knowledge, information, intelligence, memory, a cyborg, and unlimited superpower in just one second..
But at the end you will get unskipable advertisements 😅
@@igoromelchenko3482 In the end, it is useful.
@@igoromelchenko3482 For 99.99$/month, all ads are made redundant lol
We lose consciousness every time we sleep or are knocked out, at least until we enter deep rem and start dreaming, which isn't most of sleep.
In a meaningful way, our consciousness dies every night of actual sleep until the lower functions tell our system to reboot. We believe this is continuous consciousness because we refer to the thoughts and memories every instance of ourselves added to the pile one at a time. This is our save point.
I don't see this as any different.
I would sign up for it in a heartbeat.
Interesting , what is appealing to you about it ?
@@BenCaesar To be able to stick around and see what happens.
what if it required the total destruction of your organic brain to create an flawless copy?
I pity any machine that ends up with *my* mind uploaded to it! 😄😁😆
Think about this idea: A copy of your mind is not you. It is just only a mere copy.
And what if you interfaced with the copy and bridged consciousnesses and then phased out the biological one while connected so the experiences merged and then clipped. What then if the continuum was there? The experience uninterrupted? The remapping of experience on the bio NN prevent, thus no deviation between the copies prior to shutdown. Who's experience is truest there?
@@JennaHartDemonYea that's what we need for it to not be too risky. Cus it's true a copy is just a copy, but if it can be proven it's not just a copy, it makes it more viable.
@@JennaHartDemonIt would still only be communication between two copies and when the original is destroyed so are you.
@@JennaHartDemonBut that's the thing! there's no way you can transfer the mind to the computer, because consciousness is the activity in our brains. If you stopped that activity, the consciousness of that person will be dead. You can only make a copy of the mind and have an AI clone version of you with the same experiences and personality. But the real you would be dead already. The only possible solution that I could think of is keeping your biological brain alive inside a vat while being connected to a computer. But I don't know how that would be possible without killing the person in the process.
@@martiddy I think you are underestimating the flexibility of our meat computers. We can already interface with it to control digital limbs as an extension of ourselves. Next we will see brain implants that expand our cognitive abilities. If all our memories get stored in a chip and you keep replacing adding silicon bits to that biological brain matter, that black and white divide you see as insurmountable dissolves into a sea of grey possibilities.
Intriguing timing for this upload, given that I just finished the section dealing with uploading the mind in Ray Kurzweil's epic book: The Singularity Is Near
that will not be you, but a copy you will still be dead.
I recommend playing a game called "Soma"...
A horror game that starts with mind uploding.
I've crossed paths with very few minds worth preserving. It's not a path to immortality. We're all still going to die. The consciousness you recognize as you is not going to follow a digital copy into a machine. I'm not sure you could preserve a consciousness even if you replace an organic brain piece by piece with an artificial brain. I see the possibilities for some great sci-fi/horror movies.
Yeah I don’t get why all the geniuses in the video sound as delusional as some religious zealots..they sound like they’re living in a dreamland
We do not currently know how to move the stream of consciousness, but it's unlikely to be impossible, as it already emerged once from a different substrate (ie at birth).
@@lilemont9302 these guys are talking as if they know what it is, “we will be able to travel across the universe in silicone” sound like idiots
@@lc2c177 Fair enough.
@@lc2c177science always seems crazy at first. You just arent capable of anything other than linear thinking. Ape.
I have been thinking of this possibility for more than a decade. I am 72, and obviously my body is not going to last too much longer. I would love to upload my psyche so that I can be a fly on the wall watching human evolution for the next few thousand years. Also, once in digital form, I could become many versions of myself, some to remain on earth, some to travel to the stars, since travelling without the limitations of a human body would make space travel so much simpler. Fascinating subject, thank you!
One possible dystopian future use if/when this technology matures would be for the police to upload the memories of a suspect into a computer and then interrogate the uploaded memories. This could be broadened in scope to such interrogations being used as part of a screening process for people applying to work in sensitive government positions, and then eventually the technology might be used in regular job interviews, for filtering possible romantic partners, and divorce proceedings to verify whether a spouse has had affairs. Will any of these scenarios ever happen? I have no idea. But even if they don't, I wouldn't be surprised if science fiction authors write about such possibilities.
Yep. And a cursory look at how our govts and corporations behave today leaves no doubt that they would happily pursue all of these avenues, and more. This technology is a nightmare.
That is horrifying and i never thought of that
New meaning to cyber security
One thing we have to watch out for in the near future could be "invasive digital uploading"
Someone without *your* consent could scrap all of your chat/text/image and video data on the web and train an AI, with maybe one modifier so the AI "likes" them,
plenty room for abuse. we got to be careful today.
Creating a digital copy is great but I know that many of us would prefer our brains to be slowly converted to a machine brain piece by piece using nano tech over a long period of time which would then be free to go between the digital and real world. I know the end result would be the same as simply creating a digital copy but somehow preferable where there wouldn't be two versions or the human brain doesn't have to die first but instead is slowly transferred.
And there's the rub. How would I feel knowing I had just sent off an incarnation of myself into what might be the best digital paradise of Rudy Rucker's imagination? Oh great what fun I have cancer this sucks but hey... I can check out some frame-grabs of the digital orgy and smile! Well no way I'm going to let that guy have all the fun, he's a selfish bastard and I know it! Let that sick puppy loose in cyberspace? Not a chance!
But... If I get to go... well that's different.
I would only want to be uploaded if I could interact with the underlying system in a way that I would know beforehand that I will be and then can talk with an avatar of the supercomputer. It would be so amazing.
I think Nozick made an argument about this, which I with this refute. The Experience Machine, a somewhat popular thought experiment, was interpreted by him as the argument that no one wants to live in a simulation. But I do. It would be great to be 'virtual'.
Being uploaded would be really interesting. Some thoughts: how amazing would it be to travel to outer space with your uploaded brain and let it operate a robot. Would it be necessary to be in sync with that uploaded brain to share experiences so you can grow together with your digital twin? Syncing would be necessary to be able to be uploaded from a young age, if not, from when is the brain developed enough into a real personality in order to be uploaded and considered a copy of a person? Would our brain be able to use all the experiences our digital twin has in its own life, or would we need to be connected to an artificial brain to be able to being supplemented with all these experiences and knowledge? Same goes for the general knowledge of LLM’s, now we’re able to chat with LLM’s, but will we be able to directly tap into ‘LLM’s’ or trained artificial brains to expand our own abilities, knowledge, .. ? So many questions to be answered 😅.
To be honest, i don't think it would feel as uploading. You, your consciousness, would still keep living in your own brain. You would make a copy of you that would travel the stars. But it wouldn't be you. There is no reason to believe that scanning and duplicating your brain would also transfer your consciousness.
All that would happen is a robot that believes that it's you would be experience all those amazing things, while you would still be here, being sad realizing it didn't work as you imagined.
@@DrTheRich That can be said for the kind of uploading that Anastasia spoke of in this video, but there is another way that would involve a nanotech invasion or your brain. They would reside alongside your neurons and learn to mimic their individual functions so they can replace them whenever they die. At some point all of your biological neurons would be gone replace by electro-mechanical ones that were indistinguishable from the biological original. Even then a bifurcation (like a scanned duplicate) would be a separate individual entity whose conscious identity would diverge from the original such that remerging would be quite upsetting and unnatural (if it could even be done). Maybe I'm talking out my ass. Maybe if one grew up in a world where this was common place it wouldn't seem unnatural at all.
Read the Bobiverse series.
1st book, We are Legion
Total 4 books
Explores this very subject
@@DrTheRich We do not currently know how to move the stream of consciousness, but it's unlikely to be impossible, as it already emerged once from a different substrate (ie at birth). However, yes, it wouldn't be a mere duplication.
@@lilemont9302there is no "stream of consciousness", that's an illusion. as long as the information is more or less the same and the rules of the simulation are close enough to that of real neurons, there is no functional difference between living normally and uploading your brain. the pattern/structure is what matters, not the matter/substrate
A huge problem, addressed in this video is mapping stored data. Every brain is different not only in experiences but layout. For example, you could compare two english speakers and just try to match the location and format of their vocabulary, it will be different.
Different location, different neuron entanglements.
This is somewhat fixed information. It doesn't even begin to explore time structured memories or complex interactions like the internal narrative.
You could take conjoined twins like Abby and Brittany Hensel, map each brain and compare to the other and not be able to find memory matches. Even though they have as close to identical biological, time and life experiences as possible.
While an AI neural scanner may be able to map and learn to interface with action and motion controls, biomechanical prosthetic and communication interfaces, I don't see how it would be possible to copy someones brain without direct atom by atom duplication in a single instant.
This is cool and there is obviously a lot of work to do in engineering to enable the digital self to feel real. It will not just automatically work that way most likely. For example, imagine being able to think without feeling and what a meaningless existence that would be. The entire body would have to be fully simulated along with virtual environments or being able to be embodied in robots into the real world that had the same high fidelity input as a real human. We are not just our brains, we have nerves (neuronal structures) extended throughout our entire body after all.
Feelings are partly physiological and partly hormonal and partly mental. You'd still feel the resulting thought processes and possibly even the mental sensations of emotion, but not nessecarily the bodily ones unless they simulate the activity of your brain stem that connects to your spinal cord/body too.
I imagine itd be like a phantom body.
I absolutely believe it's not just possible but inevitable. However, I don't know if it's good or bad.
I will not tolerate another copy of myself. This is too much.
Technically the copy already exists as uncompiled data ready to be processed when the models and machinery begin scrapping the records.
You'd have to completely erase your history and hide from everyone and everything that you could affect forever.
I appreciate, that she used the San Junipero scene in the beginning. 😊
Serious question: A simulated copy of my brain is akin to making an immortal clone but I still die so how does that make me immortal?
With enough narcissism, it's good enough, I guess 😛
i think it boils down to "am i making a contribution to [specify] or not?" that makes you justify the duplication of self.
i'm not talking of working day and night, more like, providing some cultural enrichment of sorts.
and certainly it's up to you. you don't have to. :-)
We do not currently know how to move the stream of consciousness, but it's unlikely to be impossible, as it already emerged once from a different substrate (ie at birth).
@@lilemont9302 emerging is different from moving, that's never happened before but I agree that it should be possible in theory.
@@Dababs8294 Oh, yes, I do agree that it's not the same- but afaik, everything in the physical world can be moved. I'm just saying that it obviously follows some process. Materialists in this regard have a very strange behaviour where they suddenly act as if the soul exists and doesn't exist at the same time ("you exist because of physical laws, but something about you cannot be manipulated by physical laws, because, uh..."), when the concept of transfer gets brought up. I have never seen an actually cogent explanation from this, so I assume it's some rhetorical loop.
This is an interesting topic and i think once a.i. reaches singularity or possibly before while General A.I. becomes a reality, we will be able to do this and even send major updates every year. If we can pull off mind uploading, copying, and then living in our own singularity we would have created a whole new entire language that may be a universal language is other civilizations go this rought. Math is already a univeral language and uploading our brains we'll create a new type of science as well as language.
I 100% hope I live long enough to see the world in which this is possible. I would definitely do it.
Unless you’re like 70+ yrs old I think you’ll be around to catch that wave
I've literally been thinking about exactly this for the last 15 years
- the 2nd version is basically what Zoey Greystone did.
- regulation is only ruling in regulated areas - in the "outer" realm everything is possible, and i think where people with enough money exist such realms will only be a matter of time.
- there is also that black mirror episode where consciousnesses are being tortured in some ways.
- of course, the "me" should be the owner of the digital entity of myself, and be able to make legal decisions for myself, if unique, or at least for itself if several instances exist - or should they? digital entities definitely need ethical rights.
- whether i (have to) die before i'm being digitally activated might be likely, aka a regulary prerequisite (sometimes i hate safety-first regulatory minds), but not necessarily desirable for all. it might be cool to brainstorm with myself, wouldn't it?
- peter f hamilton has the idea of humans living in a simulated environment for free (call it a sort of universal basic income if you want. which has IMHO to be the only fair way) - and in his novels they can change back into a clone of the physical body if they want to. cool idea.
- do i want to? it's very fascinating. surely tempting. depending on circumstances: definitely. i mean: what's the alternative? i die anyway.
At least half a century seems a bit conservative of an estimate. Remember many thought that AGI would not be here until at least 2040-2050 at the earliest. And now look where we are. We've almost reached AGI and once we create AGI it won't be long until we achieve ASI which would go on to make mind uploading a reality...hopefully. Either way this could be possible in a lot of peoples lifetimes especially with AGI and other technology extending our lifespans.
Regarding the it’s just a copy argument.I would argue that consciousness already is not a continuous thing and it would be better to say the state of consciousness someone has at any point in time. There was a past me having a state of consciousness 5 years ago, and I may or may not be able to remember to some degree, making me think I am that person. Mind uploading would be similar as there would be a Version thinking of himself to be my continued self due to preservation of memories, probably better then right now in the biological way. It wouldn’t be more or less the me right now, than I am the me of 5 years ago. That continuous self is already an illusion. If I would set back all my memories of today to the state of yesterday one could show me a video of me going on my day that i forgot about and I wouldn’t associate myself with that me as I would lack the memories, despite that version on this day would have clearly had a state of consciousness at the time.
You are right and that's why some people in the comments here are suggesting we slowly convert our brains piece by piece so that there's a consciousness continuum, in a sort of Ship of Theseus way.
Even as a thought experiment, I've been struggling with this since back in the day of Dust 514, a video game with cloned mercs whose brains were scanned by implants at the moment of death and then imprinted on a fresh clone. Altered Carbon had a similar premise and it solved the copy problem … by making it illegal in-universe for more than one copy of a person to exist. (Delicious drama ensued.)
I'm really curious what the psychological effects would be for society, people contemplating getting copied and people who are copies.
Personally, I have no interest at all in getting copied, because I can't identify with a copy that can exist simultaneously with me.
If I were a copy, my memories would create the illusion that I'm not, so I don't believe I'd dissociate from the original (or past copies), unless I really sat down and thought about it. Like, contemplating that I could be days old while having fond memories of events from decades ago.
Finally, there's the classism of it all. I'd bet anything that rich narcissists would jump at the opportunity to get copied, even if there's no consciousness continuum. Through sheer narcissism, their consciousness would become immortal, amassing untold amounts of wealth and influence 😬
@@AlkisGDi have another comment elsewhere in the discussion section. A solution would be to simply extend our biological neocortex to artificial neocortex in the cloud, which would also be part of our consciousness. Luckily the neocortex is already modular and semi-redundant via cortical columns. We are unaware of their inner workings and only experience their communication as consciousness. Over time we wouldn’t recognize even if the biological parts would bit by bit be dying of, also we could that way synchronize the instance which contains biological aspects with completely non-biological based instances and the memories of their lives would also be synchronized with the, let’s say, hybrid instance. We might even have multiple bodies all at once, biological or otherwise plus much more virtual ones living in VR. So we would have all the advantages of mind uploading from the start plus our illusion of a continuous self could be maintained. But then even now the matter my body and brain are made of are entirely different from the me of 5 years ago, only the patterns in which they were assembled more or less survived. This would be the case in the above solution as the process would be both gradual and immediate thanks to the synchronization of instances.
@@AlkisGD deep thoughts, thanks. However, i think, knowing that i am a copy can very well be part of myself. I mean, i know i am the child of my parents, which is kinda a mingled copy of them. Nevertheless: me as an instance is me as an independently conscious instance, no matter if there's a flesh-and-bone first-born twin around or not.
Yes, the rich narcissists. That's a political, or if you want, educational, problem. It exists with or without copying. Sadly hard to come by.
I think it's probable that if a perfect copy of your brain could be created, down to the sub-atomic level; even if we still don't understand consciousness, it will be enough. However, as this is extremely difficult computationally and scientifically, the hope is that we figure out how to do it with more imperfect replications of the current substrate.
@@ct5471 I prefer that we actually understand consciousness instead of accepting risks, but I do agree that your proposal is a good start.
I live in a 'tech center' that is actively operatively able to fine tune their mind maps and extrapolate conscience thought...and THEN engage with mind control and communicate with unsuspecting people subliminally. This is real, and currently being deployed. I stated, "I do not consent", out loud, then IT stopped. -Bellevue, Washington
Making a digital copy of oneself, unless you perform some kind of transferring of consciousness, will not make you immortal or anything like that. And thus completely useless for you. Best case scenario, you just make a copy of yourself that is close enough so that other people perceive 'it' as you.
there are theoretical ways but they are slow, very involved and risky
@@zanfr123 what are these theoretical ways?
Exactly. We don't even know for sure that consciousness is generated by the brain. There is no specific pattern of neural activity that we can point to and say "that is what generates consciousness". Not a single one. We don't even have a sensible hypothesis on what kind of pattern can generate consciousness. For all we know, consciousness, rather than being a result of patterns in physical matter, could be completely seperate from physical matter. Perhaps seperate from spacetime itself. We simply do not know. We know nothing about consciousness or the nature of experience and I'm tired of mainstream scientists pretending like they do.
@@cameronhuff5170 We indeed do not know, but the conclusion of this is not that it's somehow impossible to know.
This is a field with a bright future. However, you might explore whether the brain is a computer or actually more of a radio. Chiral enhanced spin selectivity plays an important role in generating torsion waves at the frequencies of the fine structure of molecular oxygen. What we call Qi. This energy can be detected by an oxide tunnel barrier with a persistent spin helix structure. The high frequencies involved can be converted to a useful frequency range by fabricating an adjacent structure to inject an appropriate local oscillator spectrum.
Just think of the ego. People will do anything to keep a part of themselves from dying. In all honesty, humans do enough damage in the small life times they have. We dont need people to live long in the vast majority of cases. Although certain scientists and geniuses through history would have been able yo do so much more with more time. So in a small percentage of the cases I think this could do a lot of good. But just kind of reminds me of pantheon... be careful what you wish for. With great power and all that Jazz.
Humans, as a matter of fact, are the only species on Earth which consciously tries to do good, at the expense of its innermost impulses. I reject this anti-humanist thinking in its entirety, based on this evident fact.
cope
Scanning technology is the part that really seems hard to crack. In college, my undergraduate research project was about mind uploading. The biggest problem I had was there was no datasets of neural firing patterns to experiment with- it was impossible to tell if my methodology was even on the right track, because there was no test data for it. I looked around existing literature to see if any neuroscience labs would have this kind of data, but the best I could find was a video of neural firing patterns in some tiny creature whose name I’ve forgotten.
Structural data is not enough- Preserving the brain’s structure doesn’t tell you enough about how the brain fires and changes. We can get great structural data, but we have godawful firing pattern data, and there’s no clear way of getting that data. All good ways of observing neural structures in detail that currently exist are destructive to the neurons, so you can’t measure in vivo firing. Once we can get these in vivo recordings, we can properly try machine learning for mind uploading
Exactly, the neurons are the hardware. What is the software? What are the algorithms?
@@stephendenagy3396 basically, every single mind out there programs itself, and writes it's own data storage software, and no two are exactly alike. this is why when i clicked on the vid, i was hoping that there had been a breakthrough in the blackbox methodology they were working on for dementia patients. alas, no.
So, when you have uploaded your mind to a computer and are then waiting to die. How immortal do you feel? :)
Because how does this negate you not dying?
Yeah, that probably won't be you anymore. But a kind of offspring
@@dchdch8290 We do not currently know how to move the stream of consciousness, but it's unlikely to be impossible, as it already emerged once from a different substrate (ie at birth).
"automata" movie gives a good hint of what can go wrong even if there are strict regulations
I'm wondering what it would feel like to be uploaded to a digital brain, copied into multiple copies and some time later recombined into a single unit. Wow, that blows my mind.
For one, no more stress over survival presuming you have backups. Cost of living can be the price of solar panels and hardware to run simulations, no more transit costs, no more physical labor that puts your health at risk, and far fewer things can temporarily kill you compared to something as simple as driving home from work. It would be a kind of relief laced with nostalgia for times when life was full of risk and danger.
you can't upload a mind because science has shown that the human mind is nonlocal in space and non-local in time. The human mind cannot be "captured" digitally like that because it doesn't exist in physical reality.
Inception
Consciousness isn't contained within the mind, the mind is contained within consciousness. I will be very surprised if they pull this off. Because life has its limits when allowing people to control this kind of thing. Maybe we have to be ready for it, more than how ready we are now
Our brain is so advanced that technology would truly need a 100 year revolution to make it even remotely possible, but let's say we have a way to map and upload our consciousness. I believe we would feel limited. I believe that the holy grail would be uploading directly to a clone to have any chance for a true autonomy to live forever.
I personally think that uploading would be a step backwards, I think if we could make the breakthroughs to let us to truly make use of our entire brain that we would truly be able to do things that were previously undreamed of.
When I was trying to write about some of this in some of my sci-fi stories, one idea was that they would invoke a kind of controlled seizure-like state, with various parts of the brain being stimulated using focused magnetic fields (via TMS or similar), and then try to record images of how the signals from these stimulation pulses propagated throughout the brain (via something similar to a high resolution MEG device). After this was done to a sufficient degree; an AI model of a "generic" human brain (with some specialization based on background criteria) would then be trained to mimic the recorded patterns, which would then "somehow" end up capturing a rough approximation of the uploaded person. As to how well this could actually work, I don't really know.
In the story, the uploaded minds were typically put into android-like bodies (the idea was that sufficient computational power was available to run the AI models).
Had assumed that an actual neuron-level simulation of a human brain was likely computationally infeasible, so the model is basically more of a rough approximation, and using a different type of neuron (based on large amounts of low-precision floating-point math rather than spiking neurons, etc), with many of the "less interesting" parts of the brain having been replaced by more conventional algorithms (say, much of the functionality from the occipital lobe and similar was replaced with algorithms, along with most functionality from the limbic system and similar); with most of the imaging effort primarily focusing on various regions of the cerebral cortex and similar (namely, the areas which tend to vary more from one person to another and which carry more "personal distinctiveness"). Yes, and also using the persons' social media history, etc, as additional training input, ...
So, the uploads were not so much a "direct copy" of a human brain, but more of a hybrid of a human brain with software and AI.
In the stories, there was some amount of "pure AI" as well, along with some characters which were sort of intermediate (using similar technology to an uploaded mind, but lacking any former human identity).
But, will see if/how any of this could play out in reality...
I think of a study done where people had a close acquaintance placed as far away as possible (perhaps one in Russia, the other in South America),
both their brain activity scanned real time,
one candidate looking at pictures of random faces, his close acquaintance's image appearing among them randomly.
this person's brain showed a particular reaction when seeing the familiar face.
their actual acquaintance's brain also showed a similar reaction while the other person saw their image.
so there are factors at play which affect our brain (/mind /perception /"consciousness" (or sub-consciousness?!) which our current science can barely fathom.
(the above mentioned reaction also took place much faster than the speed of light, throwing current fundamental scientific assumptions into doubt)
another aspect coming to my mind:
for example Dr Robin Baker (in his book "sperm wars) speculates about a kind of "biological mind" which may reside outside our brains, which influences / overrides / takes over our regular mind /brain /behaviour for the purpose of human reproduction
(especially noticeable in females around the time when they can conceive).
who knows what else acts upon our brain, besides our "5" senses + our memory..
I recently watched Pantheon, and it's an interesting take on UI (uploaded intelligence). It's probably my favorite animated show right now, and it's definitely one of my favorites of all fine. It questions the ethicality and makes it easy to digest. It definitely paints the "what if" of sci-fi into it being possible, intensifying the immersion.
Fun video! Always a great source for inspiration :)
I guess the first stage would be a digital mouse brain and work your way up
The uploading is far away, but if we can build biological computers, than maybe we can link to them & make them undying.
Interesting ideas, super well presented, but what is consciousness, what is emotion? If we can upload memories will this come with consciousness & emotions or neither? Such exciting & at the same moment terrifying ideas. What would it like to be immortal, what would we do, what would we feel, would we need sleep, would we sense the weather, the warm sun, the cold of winter…? We are blessed with so much, what would we gain & what would we lose? Thanks for sharing!
If consciousness has anything to do with information in the brain, that would be copied.
Emotions have multiple aspects:
-bodily and behavioral state
-hormones/neurotransmitters
-mental sensation and effect on thoughts
A simulated brain might have simulated hormones and neurotransmitters, but might not.
A simulated brain wouldn't have a body, but could simulate the activity of places where the body connects to the brain and cheat it that way.
So i think there would be emotions but they might be different, less bodily more mental. The digital you might have alexithymia (the difficulty or inability to identify your emotions even if you do feel them).
Autistic people often have a hard time identifying their emotions because they struggle with interoception(awareness of the body and things inside it). As an autistic person I'd imagine itd be sorta like how it was before i figured out how bring hungry but not yet starving felt, or how it was before i realized that fear makes my hands and feet feel cold.
That book Superintelligence was also the book Elon Musk recommended.
My 10 year old self was going to become me, but I'm not my 10 year old self. Uploading may work the other way around, I will not become my upload but my upload will *be* me at uploading, and then he will begin his own process of *becoming* that will be completely alien from what has been experienced before. The experience of becoming itself is very dynamic, ''plastic" if you will, and this will not be uploaded since it is a real time flow. The data used in the upload will be an instantaneous state, plus the most important part, somewhat faded and fuzzy memories. For a proper upload, imho, you'd have to store the 'flow' as experienced internally (not as devices, such as a camera, would record it) and not mess with the biowetware fogginess of memories.
I also grow less and less convinced about intelligence having such a extremely large space to grow as currently accepted. 'Intelligence' may already be at a somewhat close max resolution. Beyond max resolution it could exist but it becomes irrelevant, and other factors, such as actual creation become more pertinent (intelligence is just a prerequisite to the entirety of labour needed to actually make things real)
Also don't buy that we are in a simulation. Imo, we may be experiencing a 3d-space shadow of the actual higher d space-time (thus the hints to simulation) but we are at base reality
Anyway, thanks for tackling the subject, very interesting. Cheers
I have been telling people for years that "I just have to live long enough to upload." It may take to long for me to make it to the day that can happen.
I can't decide if I want to get copied or if I want to destroy my brain so I can't be copied.
Neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis teaches that the mind is not contained in the brain alone, but in the brain + body + environment. So, no digital consciousness would be complete without at least a faithful digital reconstruction of the body and the environment. But he goes even further to say that there's no evidence that machine will ever compare to the biological naturally-evolved thing. I'm just making a rough citation of his.
How about building an android that connects to your digital self? The striatum filters anyway a lot of information from the conscious ego, that makes the bandwidth problem manageable by current WiFi, i assume.
Fascinating discussion in the video! It's important to remember, though, that our personality is not solely rooted in the brain. Our entire body, essentially a community of numerous organisms, contributes to and shapes who we are. Every system, from our gut microbiome to our endocrine system, plays a part in our behavioral makeup. In the concept of mind uploading, capturing the essence of these complex bodily interactions poses a significant challenge. How would a digital platform replicate the nuanced ways our physical form influences our mental and emotional states?
There is nothing at all CREEPY or DISTURBING about transferring a dead person's mind into a computer. This is not at all creepy as hell and the stuff of nightmares. Nobody would ever be very very disturbed by this.
i agree, but some comments show otherwise 😕
There is a problem with unloading your consciousness, it isn't you, as soon as the mind is uploaded and separated from the physical body it becomes a different entity that will evolve and change independently. The question should be how do we upload our consciousness and have it intrinsically linked to our physical body as one gestalt mind, at least up until the physical body expires and then synthetic mind can continue on independently?
The question is indeed how do we upload our consciousness, but to do that, we need the appropriate computer architecture first.
This is a step forward for beating death. We could treat these self copies as the next children of humanity. It's not you but it's someone that represents your interests for longer then you can.
We do not currently know how to move the stream of consciousness, but it's unlikely to be impossible, as it already emerged once from a different substrate (ie at birth). However, your point is also true.
Anyway, I am still excited ☺️