Would you upload your brain to The Cloud?
- Thread starter Phyrebrat
- Start date
Sorry, can't access - it's forcing a login to read.
Vladd67
Stake Holder
- Joined
- Jun 10, 2007
- Messages
- 4,089
The Crawling Chaos
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- May 26, 2014
- Messages
- 433
While it is a very interesting topic for SF aficionados, I think ultimately this conundrum only exists because our vision of identity is still deeply rooted in age-old socio-religious traditions that maintain that we are inhabited by a soul (The 'real' me) and it is something distinct from our body (the vessel I inhabit). To me this concept is the new, slightly more scientific, expression of the desire of people tainted by centuries of religious teachings to try to access Heaven after death.
I am of the view that we are our bodies and nothing more. If you were to find a way to upload your consciousness (But what is that? Your memories? Your brain's computing power? What?) to the Cloud, that's all you would do: upload data. Others might be able to access it, but it wouldn't be alive, it wouldn't be conscious, it wouldn't exist. And it certainly wouldn't be you, as the article states.
We have to outgrow this simplistic view of what being alive means. We are not ghosts piloting a machine: We are the machine, and the machine creates and upholds the system that we perceive as our identity. Without the machine to sustain their existence, consciousness and identity cannot survive.
So, yeah. Take care of your body. It doesn't belong to you, it is you.
I am of the view that we are our bodies and nothing more. If you were to find a way to upload your consciousness (But what is that? Your memories? Your brain's computing power? What?) to the Cloud, that's all you would do: upload data. Others might be able to access it, but it wouldn't be alive, it wouldn't be conscious, it wouldn't exist. And it certainly wouldn't be you, as the article states.
We have to outgrow this simplistic view of what being alive means. We are not ghosts piloting a machine: We are the machine, and the machine creates and upholds the system that we perceive as our identity. Without the machine to sustain their existence, consciousness and identity cannot survive.
So, yeah. Take care of your body. It doesn't belong to you, it is you.
Last edited:
night_wrtr
Non-human Protagonist
You summarized my thoughts exactly, so I won't repeat. Its a hard no from me, unless we are talking some kind of Avatar upload, but that is the point I think. It takes everything, not a mere copy.
I'll say that this reminds me of another article (From the clever Wait But Why)with a similar aspect. Teleportation.
The whole article is about "What Makes You You?" and is here:
What Makes You You? - Wait But Why
The teleportation example that I find very interesting is quoted below:
The Teletransporter Thought Experiment
It’s the year 2700. The human race has invented all kinds of technology unimaginable in today’s world. One of these technologies is teleportation—the ability to transport yourself to distant places at the speed of light. Here’s how it works—
You go into a Departure Chamber—a little room the size of a small cubicle.
You set your location—let’s say you’re in Boston and your destination is London—and when you’re ready to go, you press the button on the wall. The chamber walls then scan your entire body, uploading the exact molecular makeup of your body—every atom that makes up every part of you and its precise location—and as it scans, it destroys, so every cell in your body is destroyed by the scanner as it goes.
When it’s finished (the Departure Chamber is now empty after destroying all of your cells), it beams your body’s information to an Arrival Chamber in London, which has all the necessary atoms waiting there ready to go. The Arrival Chamber uses the data to re-form your entire body with its storage of atoms, and when it’s finished you walk out of the chamber in London looking and feeling exactly how you did back in Boston—you’re in the same mood, you’re hungry just like you were before, you even have the same paper cut on your thumb you got that morning.
The whole process, from the time you hit the button in the Departure Chamber to when you walk out of the Arrival Chamber in London, takes five minutes—but to you it feels instantaneous. You hit the button, things go black for a blink, and now you’re standing in London. Cool, right?
In 2700, this is common technology. Everyone you know travels by teleportation. In addition to the convenience of speed, it’s incredibly safe—no one has ever gotten hurt doing it.
But then one day, you head into the Departure Chamber in Boston for your normal morning commute to your job in London, you press the big button on the wall, and you hear the scanner turn on, but it doesn’t work.
The normal split-second blackout never happens, and when you walk out of the chamber, sure enough, you’re still in Boston. You head to the check-in counter and tell the woman working there that the Departure Chamber is broken, and you ask her if there’s another one you can use, since you have an early meeting and don’t want to be late.
She looks down at her records and says, “Hm—it looks like the scanner worked and collected its data just fine, but the cell destroyer that usually works in conjunction with the scanner has malfunctioned.”
“No,” you explain, “it couldn’t have worked, because I’m still here. And I’m late for this meeting—can you please set me up with a new Departure Chamber?”
She pulls up a video screen and says, “No, it did work—see? There you are in London—it looks like you’re gonna be right on time for your meeting.” She shows you the screen, and you see yourself walking on the street in London.
“But that can’t be me,” you say, “because I’m still here.”
At that point, her supervisor comes into the room and explains that she’s correct—the scanner worked as normal and you’re in London as planned. The only thing that didn’t work was the cell destroyer in the Departure Chamber here in Boston. “It’s not a problem, though,” he tells you, “we can just set you up in another chamber and activate its cell destroyer and finish the job.”
And even though this isn’t anything that wasn’t going to happen before—in fact, you have your cells destroyed twice every day—suddenly, you’re horrified at the prospect.
“Wait—no—I don’t want to do that—I’ll die.”
The supervisor explains, “You won’t die sir. You just saw yourself in London—you’re alive and well.”
“But that’s not me. That’s a replica of me—an imposter. I’m the real me—you can’t destroy my cells!”
The supervisor and the woman glance awkwardly at each other. “I’m really sorry sir—but we’re obligated by law to destroy your cells. We’re not allowed to form the body of a person in an Arrival Chamber without destroying the body’s cells in a Departure Chamber.”
You stare at them in disbelief and then run for the door. Two security guards come out and grab you. They drag you toward a chamber that will destroy your cells, as you kick and scream…
I can't even boot up my local offline brain.
Why not? It would only be a copy of my mind which would survive the death of my body.
Assuming my cloud mind could remain sane without physical sensory input, the technology might be developed to download copies back into other bodies -- say newborn clones with minimal memories of their own or twenty-somethings who had been kept in stasis before the download.
If these procedures would become reality, I would anticipate only the very rich could afford them. I would hope exceptions could be made to preserve extraordinary minds, such as that of Stephen Hawking, for the future benefit of humanity.
Assuming my cloud mind could remain sane without physical sensory input, the technology might be developed to download copies back into other bodies -- say newborn clones with minimal memories of their own or twenty-somethings who had been kept in stasis before the download.
If these procedures would become reality, I would anticipate only the very rich could afford them. I would hope exceptions could be made to preserve extraordinary minds, such as that of Stephen Hawking, for the future benefit of humanity.
The Crawling Chaos
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- May 26, 2014
- Messages
- 433
The issue though is that nothing points to disembodied life being even remotely possible and I would even go as far as saying it is impossible (not because we haven't yet figured out how to do it, but because it is physically impossible).
There is nothing of you that can be retained after your body is gone. Nothing you would identify as "you" anyway. Your identity, your consciousness, are not separate entities that live a happy eternal life on the spiritual plane, they are by-products of your organic life as a human body. You cannot live outside of your body, you do not live a separate, parallel existence to that of your body, you are your body.
So whatever data would be stored there on the Cloud, it certainly wouldn't be you and could never be re-uploaded as you into anything. It would just be a lifeless stream of 1s and 0s destined to remain forever trapped in digital form.
night_wrtr said:
Yes, that reminds me of the movie The Prestige, in which...
a magician looking for the ultimate teleportation trick gets Nikola Tesla to build him a machine that creates an identical copy of him a few feet away from the original. The magician becomes extremely famous by performing that trick in which he enters a cabinet to instantly reappear somewhere else in the room, but at the end of the film we find out that every night he has been drowning himself for the copy to live on as the only version of the magician until the following night, etc. His backstage area is filled with water containers inside which float the corpses of his previous selves. Spooky.
I'm not so sure about that. I'll let you know after my first download.
Edward M. Grant
Well-Known Member
I don't think uploading is going to happen in the traditional SF sense. I think we're just going to add so much electronic wizardry to our brains that eventually the organic brain becomes redundant.
Anthoney
Bearded Member
I don't even trust the cloud with my photos.
One argument against the point of this is, if you can upload your "mind" after death from a digital record of it, you could also upload a digital record of it into another body while you were still alive.
And if you do that, where does your awareness reside? Are you going to be aware of being in two places at once? I suggest not. What I think is the case is that the new upload would believe itself to be a continuation of you, but your existing self would perceive no change.
Which means that if you relied on doing this after your death, the new upload would, again, perceive itself as being a continuation of you, but your old awareness would still be extinguished. This is not a route to immortality, any more than creating a clone with your memories would be.
And if you do that, where does your awareness reside? Are you going to be aware of being in two places at once? I suggest not. What I think is the case is that the new upload would believe itself to be a continuation of you, but your existing self would perceive no change.
Which means that if you relied on doing this after your death, the new upload would, again, perceive itself as being a continuation of you, but your old awareness would still be extinguished. This is not a route to immortality, any more than creating a clone with your memories would be.
And we're firmly in the territory of Otherland and Altered Carbon.
Or Caprica then Battlestar Galactica...
As I said...
pH
As I said...
pH
Actually, if the universe is truly infinite in some manner (i.e. there are infinite numbers of other 'universes' out there, just so mind-boggling far away, we will never ever see any interaction with them - so some sort of inflationary 'multiverse' for example) then there are infinite identical minds/bodies that are 'you' anyway. Right now.
Do you feel that your awareness resides across the multi-verse?
Pretty sure they’d reject it as basically incompatible. With anything.
Plus Westworld, Battlestar Galactica and probably a few hundred other sci-fi works.And we're firmly in the territory of Otherland and Altered Carbon.
I answered "yes" to the question posed because uploading my mind to the cloud seems like a shot at some sort of immortality. I can understand how others would answer "no" because they might not like their new or continued existences -- or the use to which the cloud management might put their mind copies.
Digital slavery could become an issue.
Similar threads
-
-
-
A book, around 2010, about uploading a mind into a computer?
- Started by miner_tom
- Replies: 6
-
cryogenics, corpsicles and mind uploads: a discussion "reincarnation" in Science Fiction- Started by JaimeRetief
- Replies: 106