6 replies to this topic

[Bruce Klein]

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"?

[caliban]

BJK: So, should an informed transhumanist use the term "Consciousness Transfer" rather than "Uploading"?

Leaving aside the oxymoron ) , there has always been a tendency to play with words and ideas for mindplays sake. This seems to me such an example.

"Uploading" to me is neither an inadequate nor -as Mr. Hubert seems to suggest- derogatory description of the process in question. Moreover it is easily accessible to people new to the topic and still carries a wide enough remit for the -compulsory- internal divisions to argue about all merry night.

The suggested alternatives strikes me as some sort of quasi-spiritual spillage, usually requiring the word "uploading" anyway when trying to describe what they mean.
For strategic reasons, the word "transfer" might also not be the best to reassure people.

But hey- if we can invent some neat sounding gobbeldiguh, why not do it? We could even raise some money via royalties from StarTrek script writers.
[alien]

[Thomas]

caliban is smaller than Hubert. :D

[Omnido]

Uploading...that word smells of copyright infringement... [g:)]

Even though caliban states that "Transfer" might not fit the bill, perhaps "Transitory Correspondence" might be a better term.
As one of its definitions states:
A function such that for every element of one set there is a unique element of another set.

Im not one to advocate the "Uploading" process, for as many scientific techno-babblists have conjured, it smells too strongly of "Pre-Duplication with Post-Elimination."

This is horrifying to anyone who suscribes to the theory of Dynamic consciousness as being a temporal constant, for if ones mind is somehow "scanned" and then the resulting information merely duplicated within another construct, the "original" of sorts will still remain bound within his/her biological shell, while the "Duplicate" runs amuck inside some brilliantly constructed artificial existence, none the wiser of its "lack of true transitory origin."

Perhaps I too, am beginning to sound like a "Techno-babblist." Heh.
But the idea of having my mind duplicated and then being "discarded" (one would assume logically that this would imply biological termination) leaves me more in horror and rage, than a happy camper who expects to "wake up" inside a dreamy synthetic world.

Lets face it, we are dynamic creatures, and the only "shut downs" of our active "Selves" if you were, are during sleep. However, even I can profess to claim partial awareness of my surroundings even whilst I sleep. I know that I toss and turn, and I know that when a limb feels numb I have cut off circulation to it. Only an effective state of Coma, or an extreme degree of seratonin depletion could put me so far into dreamland that no awareness of reality would be attainable. Such is the case when patients are put under anesthesia. As I have experienced this myself, it is quite a disorentating event. One effectively "Blinks" time itself, having memories of one moment, and then opening ones eyes the next to a completely different moment. Indeed, it is frightening.
Now can I claim that the person who woke up was truly myself? No I cannot. But if I were to discover that such was not the case, I would be furious to discern my "duplication". I would then empathize with my now deceased former self, as I would know that it wasnt truly him who woke up, it was I, a duplicate.

I guess this argumentative tends more along the lines of some sort of Ego-driven self preservation. Aside from nostalgic and aesthetic reasons, many humans might not even care. I know that I would though, and I would probably refuse to live with the guilt and realization of knowing that I was "just a copy of the original".

Edited by Omnido, 04 July 2004 - 10:50 PM.

[MichaelAnissimov]

Doesn't the term "mind uploading" remove the more banal connotations of the word "uploading", anyway?

The *more* banal connotations, yes, but there will always obviously be a whole bunch of banal connotations that aren't removed. Great post, OmniDo; I sometimes justify uploading by the fact that we could easily be inside a giant computer right now, or a network of computers, or any Turing machine you can imagine (a massive mechanism of strings, pulleys, and punchcards, for example), and as long as the condition of functional equivalence is satisfied, then it may result in counterintuitive results, but it's still a solid transfer, as continuitous as when you wake up in the morning, or even moreso. Uploading would be most convenient for interstellar space exploration, cutting the necessary cargo weight by many orders of magnitude. (A city of 10,000 humans could be instantiated on a vessel the size of a grain of sand powered by tons of antimatter.)