62 replies to this topic

[manowater989]

Yeah I will. Did you see this other post: http://www.imminst.o...1&t=3764&hl=&s= ? And this one, the last post made by the Amordaad guy, http://www.imminst.o...&f=47&t=5498&s= If real, assembler-class nanotech will be here "certainly" by 2020, as this person claims, then how in any possibility will complete brain-computer interface take **80** years longer, or more? I think you are probably just more pessimistic than some people. When I said that about the internet, I said "computer scientists",or theorists, which are exactly who wrote those books. The point is, MOST people couldn't have imagined it. Similarly, this has already been conceived of. In any case, I already know what I think. I plan to work on these problems personally, I guess, as many on here do, but so that even if it would have taken that long, I myself will make sure that it happens a lot faster. I would like to see, if anyone knows where such information may be present, something of an even more scientific nature than that article http://edition.cnn.c...brain.download/ with information about the projected amount of time it will take, similar to de Grey's precise forecasts on the timeline for each step of his SENS approach to physical immortality.

Edited by manowater989, 24 June 2005 - 04:40 PM.

[quadclops]

just relying your entire existence on the action of one heart that could stop functioning properly at any moment for any reason or virtually none at all. These things worry me every second I am alive

As I age that worries me too. For a little something hopeful on that subject, read this.

[manowater989]

Well, that is hopeful, but like all nanotech it is pushed further down the line by the difficult-to-surmount trouble we have with making any kind of mechanical, moving, working parts on that scale, our tools are just too crude still at this point, unless that's changed recently. But no-one did answer my question about predictions for the projected timeframe for the emergence of the kind of processing and, more importantly, electrode-implantation and precise linking necessary to implement my idea of "spreading" or networking consciousness out from a base biological brain into the development of redundant nonbiological extensions, which over time could supplement, equal, and even eventually make irrelevant the state (or survival) of the original biological base to the "person's" continued existence (kind of like becoming a superbrain, to the point where your ENTIRE original brain is like only one cell in your new, network-brain, and in the course of a normal, biological brain many cells die every day without seriously jeopardizing the person's existence). I actually found something on my own with timeframes that were even more optimistic than I was hoping for, http://www.kurzweilai.net/ take a look. I can't imagine you guys could have not seen this site or it's rosy predictions before, do you just think they're too unrealistic?

[John Schloendorn]

no-one did answer my question about predictions for the projected timeframe for the emergence of the kind of processing

We've had a quality discussion related to these questions here.

Generally, if a word begins with "kurz" and ends with "weil", I certainly don't buy anything that's near it [sfty]. But don't get me wrong, despite making certain religion-like predictions of doubtful value, Ray is doing a lot to promote longevity and for that reason I'm a big fan of his.

I hate this pessimism [...] Millions die every year.

Optimism will not save them. Work will. Pessimism or optimism are just moods. As long as they don't interfere with your work to make this happen I don't care which mood you choose to be in...

[DJS]

Oh come on John, you're raining on his parade. [tung] It's like telling Tommy that there's no Santa Claus...

I think that most of us came to Immortalism under the spell of "the vision", but as rationalists most of us eventually realize the futility of prognostication and instead set out to make our desires a reality. The immensity of the problem can not be over stated.

Manowater, Kurzweil is inspiring fiction with particular emphasis on memetics that are attractive to our cognitive framework. Do I think I'll be seeing spiritual machines in 2030? Not likely. You see, I embrace Transhuman philosophy and agree with it in principle. What I disagree with is the time frames being put forward by many Transhumanists. In this regard I guess you could consider me somewhat conservative in relation to the movment as a whole.

[DJS]

As far as the gradual replacement scenario goes..

I think that connecting today's rather crude neural interfaces which rely on the brains plasticity, with the hypothesis that we will be able to transfer over all of the essential components of consciousness via BCI, is unrealistic in the short term.

But I'd like to throw all of my objections aside and ponder instead an individual living in 2030 (a 2030 in which SENS has not been developed, and senescence is still a fact of life) who has managed to "upload" or transfer his consciousness over to an artificial substrate.

I ask you, what happens when his body dies? So what that his conscious still exists on an artificial substrate. He no longer has eyes, ears, taste, touch. He is absolutely isolated from the outside world. He has become a disconnected "brain (or silicon chip) in a vat"...the ultimate hell IMO.

No, this won't do. If the gradual replacement scenario is to work you would also need a variety of synthetic pieces of hardware to connect you with the outside world.
----------------------------------------
Its funny though because we actually had a pretty good discussion with Ocsrazor about this very issue not too long ago. BCI vs traditional biotech -- in the end its anyone's guess.

[manowater989]

Well, I assume that the technologies for interfacing with both virtual and actual worlds would be developed alongside the technology for what I describe, but even if by some bizarre turn of events they weren't, I would still rather be a "brain in a jar", or even a "mind in a chip" than not be anything at all- to me, that's worse than anything, WORSE than "the ultimate hell". Maybe I'm just a bit of an extremist, but that's how I feel. The truth is, I'm sure that once these types of technologies become available, everyone will be doing different things. It's clear that there's no one type of uploading, interfacing, or anything, for that matter, that everyone can or should agree on, I'm just saying that I know how I'll be doing it if I get the opportunity. I had a feeling that you guys might not take that kurzweil guy too seriously, that's why I asked. Still, I don't believe that what he is saying is mere fiction: it might be somewhat overestimated, by I think this crowd is too far on the opposite end of the spectrum: SO cynical and conservative as to make inaccurately long predictions. The truth, as is often the case, is likely somewhere in-between. The reason I'm so keen to try and discern exactly where that lies is, as many others have mentioned, the massive loss of life for each year gained or lost, not of the least concern to me of which is my own. In the end, though, Don is right about most of the things he says; "most of us came to Immortalism under the spell of "the vision", but as rationalists most of us eventually realize the futility of prognostication and instead set out to make our desires a reality" and "BCI vs traditional biotech -- in the end its anyone's guess." That's true, we will have to just wait and ultimately see what happens, and I do realize to some extent the futility of just predicting this and plan to get into trying to accomplish this in the fall. In the meantime, I'm just trying to get the best feel I can for the most reliable projections of when this will probably be possible.

[DJS]

I'm not sure if anyone posted this link yet, but it directly addresses the issues you raise manowater. [thumb]

www.imminst.org

[Matt]

It would be great to see some paragraphs every once in a while manowater..


If its not too much trouble, of course.

[Matt]

Nueral Engineering at the university of S.California are creating a silicon chip implant that mimics the hippocampus area of the brain known for creating memories.

This chip functions with 95% accuracy.

The team next plans to work with live rats that are moving around and learning, and will study monkeys later. The researchers will investigate drugs or other means that could temporarily deactivate the biological hippocampus, and implant the microchip on the animal's head, with electrodes into its brain.


Now that development is well uinderway to mimic different areas of the brain. What if eventually we can replace nearly all or ALL parts of the brain.

Although we may be far from such scenarios described in this thread. We are definitly on our way.

[DJS]

I should also state manowater that I am by no means an expert in neuroscience, but what bother me is when the complexity of the problem is glossed over. Last night I was stuck waiting for my girl at the NY port authority bus terminal for three hours so my mind started to drift towards issue of consciousness and memetics.

I'll start off with memetics and why I think this makes the scenario you are putting forward more difficult to achieve than meets the eye. Okay, we've all heard of the story where the monkey can control a mechanical arm via a neural implant -- and this is very impressive. It show the extreme plasticity (and adaptability) of biological brains. However what I believe separates humans from other biological life forms is our use of the memetic paradigm to model superior internal worlds. Dennett goes into this idea at length and calls this highest level of intentional development Gregorian Creatures (see also Kinds of Minds, Dennett 1996). I believe that the essential components that give us our unique human identities are probably memetic in nature and are subtly integrated into our sensory representations of the external world -- not to mention their role in our self systems which produces our representations of our "selfs". Yet, I do not believe that we truly even understand how a meme, or mental concept is coded for at this time. Is it located in a specific location or is it distributed across a larger region of the brain? Second, how would one transfer vital information from their biological to synthetic substrate? It is currently not within my powers (conscious will) to change -- or even know -- the physical location of memories/ concepts in my brain...or is this transfer suppose to happen spontaneously? If so, how can I be sure that all that is essential to bringing about my "MEness" has been successfully transferred?

I have also found myself somewhat up in the air as of late on the issue of consciousness. For a long time I considered myself to agree with Dennett in principle, taking a hard line materialist position. But then I started to realize that I do not believe consciousness IS physical. What I believe is that consciousness is created by physial processes, but is itself something quite different (epiphenomenalism). This however is getting into dangerous territory and I believe I can see clearly now why Dennett will not concede this seemingly obvious point.

As it is, the hard core materialist position is trying to seal all the doors, but once you admit to conscious experience, you are admitting a level of ignorance to the fundamental underlying process. Now you can claim that there is a 1:1 correlation -- and you would be logically justified because of Occam's razor (hence my position of epiphenomenalism) -- but you could no longer claim any of the certainty that came with the simplicity of materialism. There is always the chance that some essential form of interaction is happening at a level above the purely physical. I should stress that this is not my position, but this recent philosophical uncertainty as to the difficulty of the problem has pushed me even more solidly into the "traditional" SENS oriented camp.

[DJS]

Matt

Nueral Engineering at the university of S.California are creating a silicon chip implant that mimics the hippocampus area of the brain known for creating memories.

This chip functions with 95% accuracy.

The team next plans to work with live rats that are moving around and learning, and will study monkeys later. The researchers will investigate drugs or other means that could temporarily deactivate the biological hippocampus, and implant the microchip on the animal's head, with electrodes into its brain.


Now that development is well uinderway to mimic different areas of the brain. What if eventually we can replace nearly all or ALL parts of the brain. 

Although we may be far from such scenarios described in this thread. We are definitly on our way.

I understand that the seemlesss integration of synthetics into the brain will be (is already) possible, but part of my contention is that integration does not equal a transfer. I have yet to hear a proposal on how such a bio/synthetic hybrid could be partitioned (upon the biological death of the organism) and still maintain the core identity residing within it.

What you are basically saying (without offering any evidence) is that all that is essential will be transferred over as a matter of course.

[manowater989]

Although no-one seems to like my opinions, which was why, after those last few discouraging remarks, I wasn't going to bother anymore and just keep my apparently unpopular beliefs to myself, I believe that integration would equal a transfer, perhaps not immediately but over time, the person would think with both/all their "brains", eventually, I theorize, equivalents of the same types of connections that form between neurons in a developing organic brain would form between the organic and inorganic: when it comes to brains, what gets used grows stronger. Perhaps not every memory or thought the person ever had would make the transition (although I believe they potentially could), but after awhile, I'd guess about 5-10 years, most of the person's self would be spread beyond just the biological substrate. You could be even more sure of this if you made certain each portion of the biological brain was connected to each portion of every digital one, and that every thought was duplicated across the whole system.

[Matt]

Well its not actually about transfering memories or 'you'. It's about creating ones identity in a non biological part of the brain. Chips that mimic each part of the brain could take over the task that the biological part did. As time goes on your build a 'profile'. You are not the same person now as when you were a child. You have grown and things have changed. You continually build an identity, you are never the same person forever.

This transition has nothing to do with scanning the brain, its about slowly replacing the biological brain over time. Your new experiences, your new memories, the memories that you remember all get built into or wired into this new section of the brain. All the visual, auditory and whatever other experience is being processed by the artificial extension of the mind and stored.

Memories will die, If they are not important but you will always remain you at the end of it. The scanning method proposed where we scan at very high resolutions never take into account or have an answer for the question. How do ' I ' get to the other side. Will my conscious self make the transition - It would just be a Copy of me.

I think the transition must be slow in order to achieve the goal. Over time the accumilation of experiences, visual and auditory input will be slowly put onto the non biological section of the brain which enables a seemless transition of yourself from biological to non biological.

[DJS]

manowater

Although no-one seems to like my opinions, which was why, after those last few discouraging remarks, I wasn't going to bother anymore and just keep my apparently unpopular beliefs to myself, I believe that integration would equal a transfer, perhaps not immediately but over time, the person would think with both/all their "brains", eventually, I theorize, equivalents of the same types of connections that form between neurons in a developing organic brain would form between the organic and inorganic: when it comes to brains, what gets used grows stronger. Perhaps not every memory or thought the person ever had would make the transition (although I believe they potentially could), but after awhile, I'd guess about 5-10 years, most of the person's self would be spread beyond just the biological substrate. You could be even more sure of this if you made certain each portion of the biological brain was connected to each portion of every digital one, and that every thought was duplicated across the whole system.

Hey bud, please don't keep quiet, I like your ideas, and always welcome divergent opinions. Second, your goal shouldn't be to convince others but to convince yourself. ) Who cares what others think.

I wish that Peter were here right now, because he is a very strong mind who would take your side and prevent you from feeling "ganged up on".

[manowater989]

Well, I appreciate your kind words. In some ways, it doesn't matter what others think as long as I am able to accomplish what I want for myself, and you are able to accomplish what you want for yourself, etc. To each his own, as the saying goes. But in another way, it very much matters what others think.

As some previous posters have pointed out, what gets worked on or funds devoted to it is what more people consider important: public opinion matters when it comes to these issues, even within the small scale of a small community like this. When you consider that many members are either going into or are already in the related fields, this is even more true: Some of who I'm addressing are those who may be able to help make my ideas reality if they like them, or not if they don't. And I don't even start undergraduate for another 2 months or so, therefore, there's nothing I can do about it on my own for the time being, except try to learn all I can and debate and consider, I suppose.

I have also, in the past, had several bad experiences with groups that were even well beyond the limits of what society normally considers, kind of like this one, turn on me for being too extreme even for their tastes, so I've become weary of even the seeming free-thinkers, sometimes I guess I'm a little beyond even what they're prepared to deal with. In any case, I just don't want to die. That's why everyone's here, I suppose, (except for those with merely intellectual curiosity) but some people seem more content to take a wait-and-see attitude, while someone more like me frantically scrambles to try and "get it done", worrying that each day that goes by is one less day I have.

That's why even SENS isn't good enough for me, even if it does work, de Grey even admits that it would only let someone live up to 5000 years on average, and a single biological body could be destroyed at any time. But as a network, one could hope to survive accidents, planetary disasters, wars, virtually anything that probability can throw at a complex system on the scale of billions of years, long enough to even hope to develop the technology to escape this universe's collapse, or, if heat-death is the correct scenario, potentially become a being of pure space-time to avoid being rendered inert by that fate, and potentially become truly eternal, which is my ultimate goal (one of them, anyway.)

[DJS]

So you're only 18? Man, you've got your act together. At 18 I was...well, I won't tell you what I was doing at 18 [wis]

Say, did you check out the thread I provided earlier started by Ocsrazor? It pertains directly to this conversation.

As you acknowledge in your last post, there is more to attaining our goals than just doing the science. There is also getting the funding -- and trust me -- the general public is, for a number of reasons, extremely skeptical (or even against) our objectives.

Without public support/funding our only alternative is to create our own funding, and this is another one of the major reasons why I remain on the "bio side" of things. IMO there are aspects of our biology which are readily correctable in the short term such as extracellular protein crosslinks and lysosomal aggregates. I believe that ALT 711 is just the tip of the iceberg, with many more AGE breakers just around the corner.

The company, group, person or movement that develops these therapies will have created ample wealth to fund whatever projects they deem worthy. Can you see the same near term prospects for BCI?

Edited by DonSpanton, 26 June 2005 - 03:49 AM.

[DJS]

SENS isn't good enough

I agree. In the long run a synthetic substrate will be necessary. I'm just trying to figure out the best way of getting there.

[Infernity]

Matt,

First, you are never the same person, every moment in your life you are a having new memories and actions in you.

Hence and Second, if the transition must be slow in order to achieve the goal, it should be in some kind of trance, more than in a deep sleep, because of that.

It will make lots of problems uploading or copying if you are changing every moment.

Yours truthfully
~Infernity

[johnuk]

[Before I start, I have found it is useful to always reset the mood for such discussions. I am only replying to suggest ideas rather than undeniably state fact or truth. Please consider what you find useful and stay open minded to that which remains. We have little time for urging with such a time sensitive and complex subject.]

This is something I recently began investing serious amounts of thought into - interfacing and transferring organic neural systems to solid state, or synthetic, technology.

My dad, as well as the remainder of my close relatives, died when I was nine or ten. Being young, I didn't feel as sad as I might have otherwise. One thing the experience did do was make it very obvious to me that someday that would be me and, being an atheist, I have very little consolidation when it comes to death. By the time I was 12 or 13 I was already, literally, loosing nights of sleep over the idea of my own death. I'm now 21.

My interest began to subside as I ran through the possibilities for avoiding my own death, each time ending with a negative answer. I dismissed ideas like cryogenics within days of starting to think about them, as they are long term storage methods, not preservation of a conscious experience.

This continued during my time at school until I had almost fully repressed the urgency with depression and lots of other problems that I'm still putting up with.

During school time, I spent my spare time reading about DIY lasers, semiconductors and subatomic / quantum physics (Farnsworth fusors etc). Things we didn't even begin to talk about until A-level, if at all. I started hanging around on DIY laser and quantum physics forums when I was 11 or so. But not being able to think of anything useful to do with myself, as all the scientific courses I was considering ended with me working in a lab on things that didn't particularly cure my urge for avoiding death, I went from getting straight A's and being the only one answering in most lessons to 'failing' my A-Levels and not going to university. Despite, it seems, my friends expecting me to be the one they would be following to university; they've since expressed this to me when we meet up, expecting me to be doing something incredible.

In my spare time I set about writing patents and trying to find something good I could file to make some money. I'd done manual labour in my summer holidays and for work experience during school time. I learnt from these that there was no way I was ever going back to working for someone else. One guy I worked for was loosing vast quantities of money and time for the sake of writing down who his customers were; he didn't even carry a disposable pen with him. If I couldn't get an interesting acedemic job, I would start my own business instead. I've been pursuing this course since.

But a few months ago I was having some conversions with my brothers (we talk about philosophy / sociology quite often) and doing some work with electronics that began to promote some very interesting lines of thought and investigation.

I was familiar with TENS units from in my teens and used to play around making my arms and hands move with one we owned. Which seems to be about the extent of modern neuroprosthetics; about a hundred separate electrodes. My new goal was to investigate the possibility of interfacing with the entirity of the human nervous system at what I've decided to call it's 'ultimately high resolution', meaning neuron by neuron; the resolution the system's logic emerges from. I also wanted this interface to be addressable (mapped), meaning that individual neurons could be tagged and tracked, such that data received was from a known origin (Say, X/Y on the skin's surface) and data sent would arrive at a known origin (X/Y on the retina). And lastly, as suggested by the previous request, that the interface would be bidirectional, data in and data out.

I should state here that, as you might expect, I believe my own consciousness to be an entirely emergent property of my neural tissue, as I expect many of the members here do as well. Accepting this, I also accept that if I can interface with that tissue at the same ultimately high resolution as the logic that creates my experience of consciousness, I can control my own conscious form. I am also not content with the idea of extending consciousness by years, but would rather look at indefinite periods of time - as I have identified time as being the most fundamental limitation of humanity.

So my design goal is an ultimately high resolution, addressable, bidirectional interface with the human brain. I decided to start by looking at easier tasks that would also have fun results, the optic nerves or spinal cord. The obvious, and in my opinion massively over simplistic, use for this would be in spinal cord repairs or restoring sight. The more inventive ideas would be neural control or experience by proxy through another individual. Or recording, manipulation and reliving of neural events; redisplaying an imagine on one's optic nerve for instance.

I identified a number of possible interfacing methods. The first divide comes with contact or none contact. The latter contains Magnetoencepholography and EEG, and the first, implantable electrodes. Magnetoencepholography interested me as magnetics has a device know as the 'SQUID', or superconducting quantum interference detector / device, at it's disposal. This device has blistering magnetic field sensitivity and can easily detect disturbances in the Earth's own magnetic field, or fields generated from you twitching. Even still, the sensitivity just isn't good enough for individual neuron scanning and the scanners are huge. EEG lacks a SQUID counterpart and so can't keep up. The electronic signal level created outside the skull by neural activity is so low it's in the same domain as the input noise for most electronics. Whilst both technologies can read from a source at present, neither send back to it. Focusing of such fields to neuron by neuron resolutions, and at these distances, is, at present, a virtual impossibility. And then you have the problem of targeting that focus, using X/Y/Z gamma knife type arrangements, without stimulation of the surrounding neual tissue. Add to that the problem of tagging and tracking individual neurons. You move you head, your brain moves, the interface looses it's address mapping.

My only solution to these problems was a direct, contact based interface. Traditionally, at present, these either traumatically puncture the tissue or are just placed against it. I started looking at all the possible ways I could implement my requests of this interface and increase the resolution from bulk tissue stimulation, stimulating maybe a square inch of neural tissue with a hundred separate addressable electrodes using present day technology, to stimulating every neuron in that tissue with the same number of addressable electrodes as there are neurons present, or better yet, a greater number of electrodes.

For my investigation into this I used an estimate of a few million neurons in the ascending and descending pathways of the spinal cord; please note, ascending and descending, not including the PNS, as the PNS has a logic gain of 1 (reflex)! If the technology could support millions of neurons, scaling it up to full brain size would be a matter of money and space.

I asked if there was any hope of present day, or soon to arrive, methods and technology ever handling such a massive number of individual data streams. My conclusion? Unquestionably, yes.

There are numerous technologies scheduled to arrive over the next decade that would make the transmission, storage and handling of such data quantities and rates easily within the bounds of reality.

I then went on to conclude that not only would this possibility soon be available, but that it would rapidly surpass our own organic capacity given it's current growth pattern. The synthetic side of my interface assured to some degree, my only substantial remaining problem relates to bridging the materialistic, physical, organic / synthetic divide. However, I have a reasonable idea of how I would approach this.

The ideas behind this interface seemed so promising to me that I began writing a paper and so far have 30,000 words plus related to my thoughts. I realised that if I wanted to follow this line I would need access to money, equipment and actual human nervous system's to take apart myself, as the precise data I require is missing from current publishing. I had noted that universities, such as Cambridge, are willing to bend their entrance requirements dependant on certain circumstances. I had hoped that by submitting this paper I might be able to get an honourary place on a neuroscience course, as somewhere like Cambridge would offer by far the most support for such experimental ideas.

After spending thousands of hours so far reading into and typing this paper I firmly believe that the technology either is available or is near. And that it's not being put to use properly due to a near unaminous acceptance that death is inevitable. As well as a lack of imagination and a healthy degree of ignorance towards an electronic model of the human nervous system.

I sometimes mention to people that I view death as something we will be cured of in the future. Something we will look back at like we do now towards the common cold or eyesight. I make attempts to demonstrate my point with examples like heart failure, a person ceases to exist for the sake of a mechanical pump (300,000 per year in the US). Or lung failure, death for the sake of a gas permeable membrane. Mechanical failures of a mechanical system that we should be able to fix. Yet such a majority see them as undeniable and unavoidable, and people tend to see my opinion as overly optimistic or funny, preferring easier to understand religious stories instead; or for the scientist, to simply accept death.

Along with my interface thoughts, I've also had two other thoughts that are, in contrast, negative in nature. I had previoulsy had an intense distaste for religion and the religious. My development of these two additional thoughts into their present form occured whilst watching Johnathan Miller's 'Disbelief' on BBC one or two a few weeks ago.
http://www.bbc.co.uk...s/atheism.shtml

Being a fellow atheist, I loved the program, but it was his final comments about his impending death, and that death is waiting for all of us, that really got to me and finalised my two greater concerns.

1.) Scientists who refuse strong AI and the idea of consciousness being an emergent property of brain tissue. In essence, scientists who believe in soul. In my present view, such scientists are religious but don't go to the extent of joining an organised religion due to their social conditioning. These are the same people who would have accepted Darwin as a scientist but refused his theories due to their lack of coherency with the Bible. They'll probably also be biased towards phrases such as "A human has to program a computer". But you don't program human children, they're just born knowing what they do when they're adults.

2.) Far worse, and something that spans both science and religion, with the only difference being in how the two decide to think about it what happens after, the acceptance that life must include death. This is one of the main drives for the creation of religion, expressed by the immortality every religion assures it's believers in some form or another. For scientists it means they don't have to worry so much about finding answers, because death is guaranteed.

Alongside my interfacing work I have also been considering a more detailed electronic model of the human brain as well as the manner in which it compresses the incoming data streams to form a conscious experience. This has been of particular interest to me as it brings the possibility of such a neural interface into a closer proximity; the human mind consciously experiences very little of the data available to it, it compresses the streams, apparently by multiplexing, such that only the abnormal, important or urgent is experienced without conscious thought.

Ever since the human mind went under clinical dissection, there has been talk about the amazing complexity and the phenomenal powers of the human nervous system. I believe this was something of a celebration rather than reality, and that it is now time to start getting down to true realisation, that the human mind is not the unfathomable object it has been made out to be in the past. And that, in fact, a lot of what it does is replicable, just like the beating of heart. Over the last five years in particular I have experimented a lot with my own nervous sytem. One area of interest is with lucid dreaming, noting distortion in these experiences that leaves them far short of phenomenal. During lucid dreams I have been able to 'see' this distortion and having a background in electronics and software compression, I can direct correlations between what my mind is doing and what software does to data deemed suprious. I 'saw' this distortion in my lucid dreams as something that I might not notice a normal dream, artifact in the background of the dream that appear visibly distorted. For example, individuals in my dreams with flickering, warper, fuzzy or missing limbs. I also noted in these lucid dreams that elements I had not experienced in person lacked the detail of those that I had. If I hadn't actually touched something, the sensation of touching it in my dream wasn't vivid. Again, taking, perhaps not much, but still, something away from the presently phenomenal regard of the human mind.

I decide to push this effect either further into my conscious domain so that I could really begin looking at what my mind was capable of generating on it's own, so I tried psychoactives, such as Psilocybe truffles (magic mushrooms) and Salvia Divinorum (a type of Sage / Mint and the most potent naturally occuring psychoactive), expecting to see things chasing me around as I'd been told I would. I was impressed at how easily my mind could be fooled. But I wasn't impressed by the amount of information it could generate on it's own, with the hallucinations, even at high doses, being limited in depth to simple shape, colours and other effects on perception, like visual jittering; no complex moving 'beings' or solid tangible experiences objects. Although this is somewhat unfair to my mind as such chemicals do not enhance or promote the generation of such experiences, they merely distort normal neural activity at the synapses.

To conclude my observations, I believe that within the next decade or two the synthetic side of an interface will have the support it requires to operate at the same data rates and storage quantities required to interface with a human nervous system. The time span could be a lot less if the interest was redirected towards it. The required technology is only developing at this rate due to it's main aim being standard consumer electronics, not experimental neural interfacing.

The biggest challenge will be in bridging the synthetic technology onto the oragnic tissue, but, as I've said, I already have ideas of how this may be approached. Like the synthetic side of the interface, this too could be brought into reality much more rapidly if the require technology was redirected to include a neural interfacing option. But at present, it isn't.

Further thought will also need to be given to the delivery methods of this interface as well as it's interaction with the body's fluidic internal conditions (ionically reactive and flowing) and the scanning and positioning techniques used to address each individual data stream within the bundle.

I may have sounded a little loose on details, such as how this bridging may occur or what this synthetic support technology may be, but with my recent work with patents, and my brother being a patent lawyer, I have an almost unshakable mantra of not publishing my ideas directly into a public domain anymore due to the subsequent ripping off and loss of rights that occurs immediately after doing so.

My paper is in a bit of a mess at the moment, lots of loose ends and bits that need editing, and I'm having a break from it for a while I think - just don't feel in the mood at the moment. I may be interested in publishing it's contents within a small group for review, but at the moment I'm still trying to get the energy together to keep working at such an emmense topic. I also have an annoying habbit, that I'm trying to break, of restarting things as I improve on them, catching myself in a perpetual loop.

I will end on a thought I've had recently regarding neural interfacing and 'downloading' a human mind. My brothers and I were discussing quantum entanglement and the possibility of teleportation of properties between two points. The idea of the object not truly being moved, only it's attributes replicated, arose. The next obvious thought is, if you were to teleport a human doing this, you would end up with a perfect clone of the original (To the atomic level and potentially deeper). To avoid 'telecloning' yourself to a different destination, you'd have to anhilate the original and the attributes were replicated at the distination. The questions is then asked, would I think I was that clone. Surely not right? You'd be the original and dead.

The thoughts resurfaced when I was considering the possibility of downloading a human mind. If I was to simply download the exact logic occuring within a mind into another form, would that other form believe, would I be that other form? Or would it just be a form with my attributes.

This prooved difficult to answer it relies on you knowing what 'me' is, and memories alone do not appear to qualify as the entirity. However, I found a degree of reassurance examining my dreams again. Each night, I, and whoever if reading this, lies down and goes to sleep. While we're asleep, we loose our consciouss experience of reality. When we wake up in the morning we remember some of the dreams and remember what's happened in our past. Since we've also seen other people asleep, we know we almost certainly stay in the same physical location and body.

But during that period, the your effectively 'turned off' to reality. Unless you wake up during the night, or something disturbs you, you'll remember nothing, or very little, of the physical world arround you. When you woke up this morning, how could you be sure you were the same person that went to sleep the night before? How do you know the memories you have now and the dreams you experienced were your's? Because you're in the same physical body? What if we die each night and the person you wake up as only believes themselves to be the former due to the memories they retain in their physical tissue topology? Perhaps sleep is infact the death of an individual conscience experience?

Something to consider before writing off technology and understanding the mind.

Think about it tonight.

When you go to sleep, how can you be sure it'll be you waking up the next morning and not someone thinking they're you?

It's difficult to answer, as with the teleportation example, because it requires a definition of 'me'. But serious consideration of the idea really does make you wonder about precisely what should be considered important during a 'download'.

Sorry for any grammar / spelling mistakes, I haven't had a chance to check through this yet and I usually need five or ten edits before I get everything!

Thanks for your time, which is understandly more important to you than many others,
John

Edited by johnuk, 27 November 2005 - 02:15 AM.

[spiritus]

Am I getting any of this wrong? Am I being too optimistic? Is there something I'm missing? That leads me to other questions about the safety of digital existence. Even Yahoo servers sometimes go down, but when a server going down could mean mass-genocide, they better have better defenses. Are there yet such things as computers with enough back-up power supplies that they could never go down, or crash? I read an article about unbreakable quantum encryption to prevent hacking, does anyone know how far along that is, whether there is any kind of suitable defense against computer virus epidemics that could decimate whole populations of digital people?

To awnser this question I will say that if human error is completely eliminated from servers, then you will be %100 safe.

As of yet, there exists not 1 computer that has the ability to 'not crash or be crashed'.

However, on this very day there exists computers that could be run 100+ years without being reset or turned off.

So if you were to say use a powerful superserver stored in some 'nano-titanium' structure with the new unbreakable quantum encryption* there would be little to no chance of a crash.

*The new unbreakable quantum encrypt. is a very simple way to ultimately secure a connection over long distances. As my understanding of it is, it uses single forms of information, perhaps single bits (not exactly sure) in an extreamly fast transaction. How's this work? Not exactly sure but it's basically a single piece of information flying down the line of a fiber optic cable in superfast fashion. Now the way this works is that if one single piece of information is lost due to interception, it can be detected on the other side almost instantly. Say you are to grab a slice of info, then it arrives incomplete. The info is travelling so fast that it would be technically impossible to grab and replace that single piece of information and replace it without someone knowing and finding out.

The quantum mechanist who was interviewed on the radio said that it would not be possible to develop a device fast enough to grab and replace the info after copying it. "But who knows what will happen in the next 100 years" he said.

[spiritus]

^ that being said, there is always more evil then good in this world and robbing a bank is easier then filling a bank. More dedication would be driven towards developing a device to decrypt quantum code rather then secure it, the test of time will really determine what happens.

P.S. stay good people no matter what your beliefs. Evil may be easier and more profiable but your reputation is priceless and unrepairable

[johnuk]

^ that being said, there is always more evil then good in this world and robbing a bank is easier then filling a bank.

But people only rob a bank because it's worth their while doing so. Initially, at least, they would have little to gain by robbing a hive like mind; other than perhaps intellectual property, and most of these guys will want tangible objects obtained with tangible force (a gun), which takes very little prior thought to accomplish.

There's no way I'd connect such a system to the internet or allow the general public to have access to it. I'd also expect that those individuals being admitted to it would be of the mindset that would not wish to shut themselves down or further persue thoughts that would lead to that result (war / violence / complete dominance).

Like you can now with net servers, I'd physically locate the system somewhere safe, like a bunker, and then not go out of my way to say where I'd put it.

I don't think it would be going to far to fit this system with it's own, small scale, nuclear power plant either. This is how most of today's millitary boats and subs are powered; the reactors can be small enough to be room sized. Then I'd fit that out with some battery / capacitive backup and then double or triple it all to ride through failures.

Organic consciousness emerges from organic tissue that begins to loose it's logic state at room temperature after four minutes of oxygen deprivation. Semiconductors have two options, one that looses it's logic immediately upon power failure (volatile) or another that can hold that data for years, decades or centuries (none volatile). It's difficult to say at this point, but it may be feasible to actually switch off human consciousness stored in a none volatile form and then switch it back on with the consciousness not experiencing the delay (Think about people being knocked unconscious or comatose in accidents, or even going to sleep, and then revived later, all involving a loss of their conscious experience). This would be by far the safest method of holding the conscious logic. The massively reliable power supply would also help. The memory could even be holographic in form rather than using standard memory sticks. All memory could be doubled or tripled up for both physical and logical reliability.

The human body doesn't go to these extents, I know for sure that I don't have two or three hearts, lungs and digestive tracks in case of failure. I would also doubt how much my brain tissue backs it's self up; humans purposefully avoid getting head injuries, so there's been little evolutional drive to force the brain into making back ups to prevent physical damage causing failure.

Neither do Yahoo bother going to these extents because it's cheaper for them to just let the server go down for while rather than upgrade all their equipment to such a level.

Transferring to a solid state form of existence is, in my opinion, unarguably the greatest thing humanity it's self will do. First of all, there'd be no more need to worry about running out of time, so you can start removing time from considerations. Nore is there anymore need to own property or land to fight over, or to do all the things we do now to get a better chance at sexually reproducing (Think about how much of life today is driven purely with this as it's goal. Faster car = better chance, better job = better chance, better education = better chance). So I would hope that those going into it would be good willed enough not to damage it.

Consider how hackers and cryptologists work now. They don't try to break the 128 bit encryption on someone's Paypal account. They wouldn't even bother trying to break it to get into Barclays, or some other huge bank, because it's too much relative effort. They look for easier options, like fishing for people's details with emails. Unless you have something seriously worth taking, or zero protection, they'll just move onto the next person.

Edited by johnuk, 28 November 2005 - 10:13 AM.

[armrha]

That's one interesting part of minds on synthetic substrates. With freedom to tinker with your brain however you want, people will do things to themselves, change themselves in ways that we wouldn't just be shocked by, but ways we'd be literally horrified by. That is the nature of freedom, I suppose... I wouldn't want to restrict them...

[spiritus]

With freedom to tinker with your brain however you want]horrified[/i] by. That is the nature of freedom, I suppose... I wouldn't want to restrict them...

What if that freedom was shocking trials on other humans or concious animals? I suppose "Harm none, do as thou will" comes into play?

[Santos]

...I think, and wait, that we be able to scan a mind, not the brain, just mind wich is really our identity, in at least 30 years. It is not neccesary to contact each neuron, really I think there is not necesary directly contact with the brain wich systems like magnetoencephalografy. Basically, the point is to copy a mind and save it in a digital system in order to preserve it, so there is not necesary to preserve all the body because bodies will always impair again and our genuine identity is our mind. At the end, bodies are for lodge and maintain the brain and brains are just to generated the mind. Independent of the way we follow to inmortality, the goal is to rescue our minds, which is just what we are!

[johnuk]

I think, and wait, that we be able to scan a mind, not the brain, just mind wich is really our identity, in at least 30 years. It is not neccesary to contact each neuron, really I think there is not necesary directly contact with the brain wich systems like magnetoencephalografy. Basically, the point is to copy a mind and save it in a digital system in order to preserve it, so there is not necesary to preserve all the body because bodies will always impair again and our genuine identity is our mind. At the end, bodies are for lodge and maintain the brain and brains are just to generated the mind. Independent of the way we follow to inmortality, the goal is to rescue our minds, which is just what we are!

I agree. However, I assume you are also willing to accept that our consciousness is an emergent property of that tissue, as you stated you believe our brain only to be a carrier for our minds.

By this logic, if you wish to scan the mind out of a volume of brain tissue, you first need to be able to access the brain, neuron by neuron.

I've been doing a lot of research into this area and am running into a few problems with MEG.

A typical MEG scanner needs around ten to a hundred thousands neuron depolarisations before the level of magnetic activity is high enough to be seen on the detectors.

Worryingly, some of the information I've read with regards to the sensitivity of SQUIDs suggest they have a threshold of sensitivity roughly one order of magnitude better than that required for their present day use in the scanning of macro, bulk 'brain actvitity'. As we require neuron by neuron resolution, and typical 'brain activity' can mean tens or hundreds of thousands of neurons at the maximum resolution of today's MEG scanners, we are questionably close to exceeding the threshold sensitivity for SQUIDs long before we ever get close to being able to scan at single neuron resolutions.

I am in the process of trying to assess whether or not the threshold value I've seen quoted equates to the fundamental, absolute for SQUID technology or if it's merely a factor relating to present day SQUID form factor design; reduced performance based on economics.

If it's the first, SQUID based MEG scanning is already out of the running for downloading a mind.

It's also important to remember that MEG offer's no fixed tracking of each neuron; move your head and you blur the scan. Indeed, your own heartbeat might be enough to blur the scan beyond use for neural downloading when you consider that we would be attempting to scan to micron levels of accuracy from a comparably long distance away.

[bgwowk]

The only way a brain could ever be "downloaded" is by in-situ molecular-level analysis using advanced nanotech devices. Destructive analysis (serial sectioning and staining) might permit a lower technology to be used to readout limited aspects of brain information. External scanning is and always has been completely off the table.

---BrianW

[Santos]

...something more; look at this article (if someone had not saw it): Goodbye to human identity:
http://mondediplo.com/2001/08/15neuro

[Santos]

...ok John, however it must be view how a temporal technical limitation. I think, and wait, that in few years we can scan brains with new developed technology. Many important and surprise advances in science become when technology discover the way to reach them, so that's the principal actual threat: to find the tecnical way to scan brains withow touch it.