I was thinking about something this evening, 1 minute ago. I was thinking that in the future we might prefer upload our brain and create a perfect reproduction of our brain with all the knowledge already there. We might prefer doing that than doing a child, because doing a child would require teaching what`s life and start from zero/scratch.
I thought about this idea as well, if we find a way to exist in digital forms that would rule normal biological reproduction.
It didn't take me long to also consider the possibility of digital 'sexual' reproduction, that new consciousnesses could be created within a digital system. It depends a lot on how you want to consider the digital system. Initially, I'm sure any digital beings will probably want to be uploaded into their own separate space, such that they can continue interacting with each other as individuals. Over time, as these individuals begin sharing memories with each other directly, the boarders of who is who will start to blur and the individual will no longer be directly linked to any certain set of memories; each individual will begin experiencing the others' memories as if they lived them as well. Perhaps it might evolve to the Star Trek Borg stage, but I have a problem with the Borg idea that says a single consciousness is better than one. We learn by experiencing our environment and our environment has a tendancy to be moderately to highly chaotic, randomised. There's something to be said for being in the right place at the right time to experience something. If we existed only as once consciousness I think it would risk detracting from the diversity of our experiences, that we'd risk just being in the same place as each other all the time, both mentally and physically. Better would be to keep the individuals and just allow them to share the things they experience with each other. Then you start down pathways like, do we actually have absolute free will (I don't think we do personally) or is it mainly determined by what we've experienced to date and the nature of our environment. If you null what we've experienced to date by sharing it out between everyone, so everyone has the same memories, I think you stand a very good chance of producing a Borg like hive, where everyone just thinks the same things as each other, especially if they all happen to be in roughly the same place, and so, receiving roughly the same environment stimuli as each other. Perhaps it would be best to only share some memories and to keep some for ourselves, at first anyway.
The urge to sexually reproduce is part of your genetic memory. By that I mean that your brain tissue has evolved to experience anything that gets you closer to sex as positive, a reinforcing stimuli. This simple memory, that sex = good, is then used as a reference for your empirical memory, that doing x and x in the environment you've experienced gets you closer to sex. That genetic memory is only there because those who didn't possess it fall out of the gene pool. It's the simplest form of evolution, if you don't possess the genetic memory that sex = good, short of being raped, you won't be in the gene pool next time round; your natural death creates the threat needed for population filtering, you don't need any kind of random disaster or mutated virus.
The urge exists to extend your genetic lifespan. Like the religious find it so hard to contemplate an existence without an afterlife, even more people find it hard to contemplate an existence without sex. Contraception means people don't always have children, but they'll be having sex or masturbating on a regular basis to keep this genetic memory satisfied. What you need to realise is that sex and lifespan extension serve to produce the same effect, extending life. Evolution is just a side effect of how it usually happens for humans at the moment, a numbers game that allows natural life extension by sex in a chaotic, randomised environment to be more successful; the more variations you put into a chaotic, randomised system the better the chance of obtaining a positive result. There is naturally occurring life on Earth that reproduces it's self by cloning.
That's one thing that always reminds me of people's stupidity when I hear them talking about experimental drug research 'killing' people, people who would have died anyway had they not taken the drug. Evolution has been killing billions of people, and similar amounts of all other life on Earth, for eons. If a drugs company kills a few tens of people during the development of a drug that will benefit countless numbers more I'd say their doing a much better job than evolution, who relies on the complete extinction of those taking the experimental drug for success. These people are expecting the drugs companies to produce something perfect the first time round, just like gods can. And when they do, it's just science.
"Fist in the air, in the land of hypocrisy"
Then I said no we can`t do that (uploading a brain) because it would make natural selection and evolution obsolet. Making babies from scratch is good for evolution because the child must fight for his/her life, must learn and then must pass the filter and then make natural selection a reality.
The only thing that would cease to evolve would be your body, your logic would continue to evolve for as long as it was experiencing something.
Someone made a similar point to Aubrey De Grey, that we need children to keep society diverse. As he pointed out, people would become more diverse if they lived longer. They'd get bored with old games and invent new things to keep themselves interested, whereas children are more likely to just repeat what their parents thought was fun, perhaps with a few modifications, because they don't have enough spare time to experience and then reinvent as much with a limited lifespan.
Government will never make uploading a reality.
If tomorrow I invented some kind of brain to digital logic system that worked, there's absolutely no way I would care what the government thought about it. If they were bothered by it, I'd just leave and go somewhere else.
The government is just notes on paper designed to keep things running kind of smoothly, usually distorted to some extent because it's run by humans and a good percentage of those humans don't really care about the people they're commanding around, only that they're doing the commanding.
A brain to digital logic system represents something revolutionary for humanity, it wouldn't be the step by step evolution we've experienced due to genetic mutation over the eons so far. Overnight we would achieve something that no other living object on Earth has ever done; disconnected ourselves from a physical form. That calls for a serious rethink of how we treat each other, unless you want to risk this new digital domain becoming a replica, or worse, of Earth today. The Nazis attempted to create a super race by just wiping out everyone but themselves. I would like to create a super race as well, but I would ask those coming into my digital domain to have only one key characteristic, empathy. To care. Provided the individual has this characteristic, it doesn't matter what they are to start with, they can become something else and soak up the potential for a more enjoyable life. If they are apathetic and close minded, they'll only serve to carry over the hate and nastyness people treat each other with today. Of coarse, if they happen to be a scientific genius all the better, but empathy is the only thing I would want to see from people.
As those signing up for cryogenics don't want to wake up frail, I don't want to waste my life trying to create a new digital world for myself and others to enjoy only to have it filled with people trying to make life harder for the rest of us for no reason other than their own enjoyment; people who find joy in another's suffering, and the majority of Earth's population belongs in this group to some extent or another. If that means denying these individuals the freedom to enter, so be it. Because, before anyone asks, I expect I do know better than them, yes. Maybe not for everything, but for a lot of it. [thumb]
Best wishes,
John
Edited by johnuk, 18 December 2005 - 12:14 PM.
