Consider the origin of life and its likely initiator, the theoretical process of abiogenesis. Without going into too much detail, it constructs a pretty decent platform by which the organic matter by which life is built (amino acids and long chain proteins, nucleotides and polynucleotides, lipids, etc) readily form on their own from raw materials by merely simulating Earth’s early atmosphere in a lab (and then goes on to postulate how over the course of a billion years or so these parts could self-appropriate into the first primitive cells to be subjected to the process of the evolution of life). So far, the study of evolutionary biology, genetics, the triangulation of genes, abiogenesis, etc. seem to indicate the same thing: that life is a series of simulacra that originated at a point. Heck, we can even see our relation to bacteria with which we share paragraphs of identical genetic information. My point is that we are this evolved machine that has a set of finite parameters which are to be decoded, even if we don’t agree on a timeline. If we are to speak of the philosophical concept of whether a copy of someone is actually that person, then I find it more useful to observe a gradual process of transition. If one were to transition slowly, part-by-part from a biological to a digital substrate, keeping intact the action potentials of neurons and the connections of the neural network as well as all other relevant details, then you would have a system that indeed would be able to be defined as a bunch of zeros and ones. The consciousness of that person wouldn’t have been disrupted, and he or she would be convinced of their identity. Now, you could make the case that the parts replaced would have a small margin of error in rendering the person, which I believe is true. However, you could make the case that you aren’t exactly you after any relevant experience you have where your neural network changes, cells are replaced, you have a heart transplant, go through puberty, or even when you wake up from sleeping and forget where you are, etc. There are constantly disruptions and changes to our consciousness yet we still claim our identities. I won’t go into quantum differences and it’s potential role in consciousness because my rant has already gone on long enough. I’m not trying to tell you that you’re wrong but rather share my views that are alternative to yours. Neither of us will ever be able to do justice to the whole of our belief on this matter via a box of text.

I wish some of you people could hear yourselves.

It’s becoming extremely clear to me that the first thing we’re going to need after the singularity is a strong and immediate repeat of the Enlightenment. The clerics of the new world are already lining up, mythologies in hand, to take advantage of it.

You’re not putting people into the machine, you are exposing them to it.

Whatever else happens, these people from Google and Facebook and their successor organizations will definitely accomplish that, have no illusions.
They will capture every last speck of data about all of our lives, store it, tag it, process it, make it available for review and reconstruction (think of how useful that will be, for them!, how much easier it will be to manipulate, indoctrinate and control people [I’m sorry, I meant manage their “compliance,” err, market to them, “educate” them, attune their behavior with the standards of the governing “community”]. (Oh, and participation will be nominally voluntary but mandatory in practice, as it will be all but impossible to live in the world normally without transmitting, however unwittingly, enough data about yourself to flesh out your profile well enough for purposes of the system. That will not be an accident either).
Even in this article, the idea of “uploading” the “minds” of everybody on Earth is presented as a Marketing concept, which is to say, a technique of compliance management, a way to get everybody to buy into the program being sold by creating the illusion that they “own” it or are “participating.”

http://www.kurzweilai.net/solve-for-x-celebrating-moonshot-thinking

This is off the top of my head: I was thinking that instead of just Google funding this, why not take a lesson from another high-minded project which was also just this past Saturday the subject of an interview on KPFK’s Digital Village:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/we-are-the-world-inviting-everyone-onboard-the-100yss-is-practical-and-will-help-to-ensure-its-success

So, why not a planetary fund for “Solve For X” projects. I would call it the X-Fund, except that the name is taken… along with a host of others. Maybe, tentatively, Be-Fund – altho there is a fund in India for low-income youth startups… darn… Slightly different spelling, though, and “befund” has the great advantage of meaning “the findings or results” in German, which is PERFECT! So, a nod to the Indian project – maybe a cooperative deal or an agreement to help publicize them?

So, regardless, here’s how it works: Everyone contributes one dollar or simply signs up, and major contributors make up the balance for those who can’t afford even $1, and then there is $7Billion available to actually investigate and pursue projects that should be done. Planetary warming, universal justice, etc.

Or, like, figuring out a really equitable way to distribute the planetary production that respects everyone’s human rights and and at the same time doesn’t discourage people from being really productive. (My project, BTW, based currently on a Common Law perspective.) Like the current Challenge contests, in which people are asked for solutions to real problems, rewards could be financed via the planetary Be-Fund, with the winner(s) sharing a percentage of the value added if they choose to make in a proprietary venture.

So, you come up with a solution to some pressing social problem, collect a reward for your efforts, and then, you’re allowed by contract to collect royalties of up to perhaps 1~10% of the value that your idea added to the user’s lives, on the basis of some patent that you filed and got. (Actually, part of the $1 sign-up contract for Be-Fund would be that you agreed to adhere to the principle of paying that limited royalty on Be-Fund results. That proprietary interest is not just about making someone filthy rich, however, because the more people benefit from the idea, the more the originator(s) receive back in royalties. So, you have a major vested interest in maintaining and enhancing that value.)

And, you’re required up front to agree to license the use to anyone who pays royalties, as well, so that if someone comes up with a better or more efficient way to do it, you don’t lose out for being first. You still collect royalties from them and perhaps many others, but they also reap the benefits from their contribution. Win-Win-Win, because the Be-Fund also gets a cut, which goes into funding more innovation, as well as reimbursing the original $1 investors, or even paying them dividends as more and more solutions generate more and more wealth. That’s dividends going to effectively the entire planetary population. Nice, huh?

Compare this to our current system of intellectual property: winner takes all and then either is sued out of business by a major player to get the property or uses the patent to block competitors from using the idea. Lose-Lose.

The BeFund solution avoids any such pitfalls by the mechanism of tying everyone’s benefit to everyone else’s, thus also achieving many lofty moral ideals.

Of course our ability to scan the brain will improve, and perhaps there will be dramatic improvements, but I guess the mindfile approach will remain a useful complement to connectome mapping.

The Andreadis article is ideologically-motivated and assumes the conclusions that the author wants to reach, without offering relevant scientific arguments in support. Assuming a conclusion like “[Uploading] is intrinsically impossible” is not science, but wishful luddite mysticism. In science, we let theoretical models and experimental evidence decide.

I consider the feasibility in-principle of mind uploading as (almost trivially) self-evident, but I totally agree with your call for more experimental evidence, and therefore I think mind uploading research, including the Bainbridge-Rothblatt mindfile approach, must be vigorously pursued, and the recently approved Human Brain Project is a good step in the right direction.

Firstly, Dr.Rothblatt (whom by the way, I don’t remember ever seeing an article from her on this website; I did very enjoy her and her optimism in her interview with Kurzweil in the Singularity is Near movie) says that It takes less then 1TB to basically capture someone’s mindfile….but, if I remember correctly, according to Kurzweil, it takes 10TB, which we apparently cost 1000 dollars in 2018, is what constitutes a human being’s memory….not their “essence” (memory, personality etc)…which implies that a person’s mindfile will be much bigger and take much longer to cheapen….10TB is also apparently 10^13…whereas he gauges human intelligence to be 10^16-10^19….with all human intelligence today being 10^26, which is bigger then the 10^22 figure…

I’m probably mixing apples with oranges, much less getting the numbers straight, but I felt strangely confused reading; another weird feeling I got was basically what Gordon said…if we uploaded ourselves, we wouldn’t have to leave Earth…or leave “anywhere”, wouldn’t we? We’d be able to stay on Earth (actually, we’d technically probably be spending much of our time in VR) and be connected and part of this starship as well, as computronium is seeded and spread across the cosmos, expanding our presence and intelligence that much further….the whole idea of a giant starship, if I have the right image in mind, seems strange at any case…wouldn’t swarms of molecule-sized ‘starships’ spread across the cosmos be a more accurate vision of the future? Barring the mind-uploading, this one giant starship going to find new life is basically the conventional mentality that people have with the future….which is quite deviant and limited to what our capabilities in the future will bring us.

Apologizes if I’m not reading this article at all…I am always happy to read more on the ‘logical endpoint’ known as mind-uploading.

I’d much prefer pouring money into the NASA effort to build a warp drive. Instead of a big data view of this souvenir-view of starships, let’s build the real thing and make it available to everyone. I think we need to do this sooner than later and we need to stop with the “oh, it’s too difficult” nonsense. We need a Manhattan project.

The essential nature of our species is the basis: It is our conversation, dissention, changes of minds, new and divergent ideas that let us all contribute to this thing. No one cares about a Kodak-moment. I think you open this project up and you’ll have more ideas than you can deal with which, by the way, is the kind of problem you want when there’s an incoming asteroid or red dwarf star.

Build the drive. The rest will take care of itself.

Stephen, Oxford, UK

In mind uploading, we read information from the brain, and we must try to read enough information. In mindfiles, it is the brain that chooses which information to write out, and again, the problem is to capture enough information. I think both techniques will be used in parallel, for example using brain scans to capture low level information and mindfiles to capture high level cognitive information.

The problem of mindfile technology is that with current technical means (writing blogs, posting videos, answering questionnaires) it would take too long to build a mindfile rich enough for uploading, but I think this may change dramatically once high speed brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are available.

Also, a lot of information does not need to be acquired from the brain because it is available in the cloud. For example, Google Street View converts a text string (say, your address) to a full visual map of your more familiar sights, that can be added to your mindfile.

Just lifelogs alone, IMHO, is obviously not enough. Full brain scanning is the safest, most guaranteeing way for personality uploading.

Once you have the article, read down to this paragraph: ” The basic idea of uploading is to ‘take a particular brain [of an astronaut, in this case], scan its structure in detail, and construct a software model of it that is so faithful to the original that, when run on appropriate hardware, it will behave in essentially the same way as the original brain,’ as Oxford University’s Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap explains.”

This seems to be a much better way to go, than the “mindfile” described by Dr. Martine Rothblatt.

Just check out the Charles Stross book, Accelerando, as Giulio describes in his article. It’s a good read and available in libraries and used book stores.

Also, Dr. Rothblatt talks about doing all this in 30 or 45 years. Ray Kurzweil charts the Singularity as arriving in 32 years or so. We will have the connectome by then for sure, and we be able to load up all we are into the starship without ever leaving home.

We are certainly going to have self-reproducing robots up on the moon and out among the asteroids long before the year 2045. They’ll be multiplying like rabbits out there in the Solar System and building more space stations and space ships than you can keep track of without a computer in your head. But in ten years or more we just might have those robots and those computer implants.

A few years after that, and there will be robots out amongst the asteroids

In less than 40 years there will be enough robots out there to start building a starship with a charged particle accelerator as a drive that will thrust the ship at one gravity. In a little more than a year of thrusting at one gravity, the ship will be very close to the speed of light.

This can happen and will happen just as long as the people of the world will it.

It can all start with a single self-replicating robot and a proper toolkit. (That includes a solar array to power everything and a 3-D printer.)

http://www.bonusprizes.net/index.php?source=trafficvance&keyword=Kurzweilai.net

Don’t anybody here answer their phoney survey and don’t be fooled by their lying promise that you have won a prize. Certainly, never give them your contact data. They will bill false goods and services onto your phone bill.