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lets start with what exactly you define as mind
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I’ll follow the lead of Moravec and Pearson here, and give the lazy, near-tautological definition “the mind is the effect produced by a functioning brain”. The problem of “hosting a mind,” then becomes that of “emulating a brain”.
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you need an interface to the mind
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Here, I think, you’ve found the meat of the problem. Moravec doesn’t touch this, because he never claims that actual human minds will be uploaded into computers, just that programs will be written to run on sufficiently powerful hardware that are roughly equivalent in intellectual ability to a human being. Pearson, being a “high level” sort of futurist, doesn’t sweat the details, just assumes that some technique will emerge in the next 40 years that will allow a mind to be read into a computer.
This is where I suspect he’s over-optimistic. None of the current brain imaging schemes - the
Wikipedia article “Brain imaging” is a good summary of them – are within a power of ten of the necessary resolution to “read” data from the brain.
In
Rudy Rucker’s novel
, brain uploading is done destructively by robots that carefully cut up as analyze the living brain (disguised as a religious cult that murders people by eating their brains – this is, after all, a cyberpunk novel!). This isn’t far from how fine resolution brain analysis is done now, and might be an accurate prediction how a mind-uploader might someday actually work.
Personally, my greatest hope for a brain imaging with the necessary resolution is with a scheme I first encountered in the (regrettably) late
Robert Forward’s non-fiction
. This scheme involves forming an image of the brain’s structure with atom-level resolution by measuring the annihilation by-products resulting from a minute stream of massive antiparticles (antiprotons, antineutrons, or protronium). Although you wouldn’t expect that beams of antimatter could be used for non-destructive tissue imaging, if you calculate the energies involved, you’ll realize this scheme is actually practical. What’s best, massive antiparticle annihilations produce very rich multi-particle annihilation events, which would allow individual atoms to be pinpointed in 3-d space.
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your brain stores information in neural impulses
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Your brain certainly processes information using neural impulses, but unlike dynamic RAM, this information doesn’t depend on a constant series of neural impulses to persist. Current theory holds that information is actually store in the brain via a complicated and far-from-understood combination of changes in the receptive and emitive potentials of the synapses at the end of neurons, and by the constant rearrangement of the physical connections of these neurons.
Though this distinction doesn’t make the problem of mind-uploading obviously easier or more difficult, it does imply that a scheme that images neural impulses (depolarization event) alone, such as
MEG, won’t work.
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how will it be possible to store those, what kind of a filesystem, format?
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Compared to the “mind reading” problem, I think the “mind hosting” problem will be much easier. Folk have been experimenting with computer simulated neurons for some time. In everyone I know, interest peaked in the late 1980s – a websearch of the once-popular term for an idealized, simulated neuron, “neurode”, now yields several thousand hits of the term used in brand names, and only a hundred of so old ones like
this referring to the once hot subject of “synthetic psychology”. Given the amount of processor and storage likely to be available in the near future, I don’t believe coding a “brain emulator” will be an insurmountable challenge.
