This is a WTAhall Post from Hubert, And I thought it worthy of a post for general observation and discussion....
Ever since the emergence of biological entities on this planet there have been major and minor revolutions. One of the most amazing processes has undoubtedly been the cortex development of humanoid apes, that resulted in such unforeseeable and wonderful creations as vanilla ice cream, french fries, Saturn-V-rockets and Jerry Seinfeld. But the apparently most stunning and shocking revolution is beginning to loom ever larger on the horizon: the victory of man over death. Natural selection's blind phase of experimenting with carbon compounds as the exclusive carrier substance tends to come to an end.
A future project called posthumanism transcends Homo sapiens and tackles the liberation of life from an inevitably self-destroying carrier or catalysator. All life-performing processes of the body-mind-continuum will be transferred from unreliable carbon to a more steady carrier, that seems to promise potential or relative immortality. This hypothetical consciousness transfer is called "uploading".
For more than a decade uploading was a term rather provoking misunderstandings - "What.those freaks want to migrate on a hard disk?" - than contributing to clarification. When Hans Moravec described his vision of the destructive consciousness transfer for the first time in his 1988 book "Mind Children", he called the brain scan, where the read out wet jelly was thrown on the compost in favor of an artificial neuron system, "downloading", which turned out to be a clumsy careless comment. The early transhumanists who, at that time were already executing their down- and uploads with incredibly daring 2.400 bps, were of course not amused, because this term suggested the descent down to humble spheres. And hardly any transhumanist could identify with a process the name of which had the prefix "down" as an element. So Moravec's suggestion of transferring human consciousness from the doomed carbon unit of the human body to a more steady, faster and immortality promising medium was renamed without further ado into its opposite: uploading.
But now, I think, time has come to introduce more precise terms. To my ears uploading sounds much too trivial, popular and widespread to appropriately represent the most stunning revolution of all times since the emergence of the first single-celled organism. I can upload a foto of my Norwegian wood book shelf, that I want to sell, from my hard disk to the far more powerful server of ebay.com or sink a text of mine from the limited RAM of my computer into the Mariana depths of the international computer network and call this event uploading. But this term does not fulfill the requirements, the transfer of life processes from the human body to another substrate is demanding.
So that's why I offer you some alternatives that paraphrase processes that have to do with - pardon my English - "uploading"
consciousness transfer
consciousness continuity/continuum body-mind-continuity/continuum life transfer identity transfer self-transfer streaming consciousness / con-streamer
I understand streaming consciousness (sc) as communicating perception data and experience values as digitally encoded information that flows on a permanently leased line from the original human to her or his backup copy. Besides "sc" might paraphrase the permitted swinging in and out of the consciousness of other posthumans, who are already in charge of an electronically enhanced platform, where they can make available some selected tributaries of their stream of consciousness or even their entire life processes for other posthumans to sniff at. And a con-streamer might be a future device to execute "sc" on.
I understand that the replacements of terms only takes place in vivid communication with other humans. No single person can determine or coin terms, others do not agree on. So, please do not regard my suggestions as a gloomy declaration of a linguistic fight. I only wanted to make some suggestions to talk with a little bit more appreciation about the revolution of the consciousness transfer.
Cheers,
Hubert
BJK: So, should an informed transhumanist use the term "Consciousness Transfer" rather than "Uploading"?