What if you were to replace your body cell by cell with special comuterized cells that were programmed to do special things like cover your body with armor as tough as steel and it was as easy as moving your fingers. Imagine the possibilities.
Yes, to a degree that is what I (and many of us here) think of. However, as much as we'd all like to have psuedo-magical powers there are limits to what can be done. Settling for no longer being vulnerable to the ravages of our own biology would be enough for most. The solution, however, might to some be considered questionable or downright unfathomable: I'm speaking of course of 'uploading.' It's not a concept unique to transhumanism by any means: a human mind in a machine is a plot device in many, many scifi shows (an episode of Stargate SG-1, Ghost in the Shell, and an episode of Batman Beyond, to name a few in recent memory), but I'm convinced that slow replacement is the only way it is actually possible. The kind of change in substrait is so dramatic that there is no way to 'copy' a mind onto a machine.
Wetware (the brain) is a tightly bound combination of the influences of software and hardware, to change that configuration to something completely software-based is a major step. There are many methods to describe how this might work, but only something that moved so slowly as to change only a tiny portion or a single cell of the brain at a time would be sufficient to allow adaption without killing the person. To do it in one huge step you will have essentially killed the person and replaced them with copy, because it doesn't fulfill the requirement of continuity. Even if the copy is perfect in pattern, there exists no soul in a body to transfer instantly from one form to another across the separating space.
My favored idea of how to do this (because I thought of it first and then later found it had already been discussed on the net, drat [tung]) would be to fill the brain with nanomachines with the mission of observing neurons. Once a nanomachine had completely and assuridly determined it could mimic all the functions of the single neuron it kills it and takes its place. Meanwhile, via radio it is sending up all the signals that it is recieving and outputing and slowly the replaced neurons form a communication with an outside machine. The transition is that eventually the person's conciousness is expanded to include both their replaced brain and the machine, their mind existing in both stratum at once. The line continues to blur until finally a point is reached at which the initial components of the mind are now secondary to the function of the concious mind, and the original body is no longer necessary for a person to think. It's sort of like first turning your mind into a 'hard drive', networking it with another 'hard drive' and then running your 'program' simultaniously on both of them while you're coping it over.
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Advocacy & Research for Unlimited Lifespans
