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Uploading Won’t Help You
If there is a Holy Grail in the technological search for longevity and immortality it is uploading. Unfortunately, while uploading will work (in a way), it won’t work for you.
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Posted by DutchCon on 08/14 at 05:30 AM
So just replace the matter in your brain piece by piece with something more sturdy and compatible with external systems.
You don’t upload into a new system and leave the old ‘self’ behind, you just rebuilt your brain while continuing to live. There is no death of the old self and no awakening of a copy.
Metaphysical problem solved, now someone develop me the technology. 
Posted by Bill Nemo on 08/14 at 08:03 AM
Consider the following link and what it implies. Continuity of consciousness - and migrating into an electronic brain - may not be so far fetched if done transitionally. Not exactly uploading, I know, but it could achieve the same goal.
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/thinking-tech/scientists-successfully-create-artificial-brain-region/8706
Posted by Noetic Jun on 08/14 at 08:46 AM
Mind is not a moveable immaterial substance. Mind is data. And, for all even remotely relevant purposes, moving data from source to target is actually *moving* the data, regardless of the fact that technically it consists of deleting and replicating the bit-string in question.
There is no magical identity-ball hidden in data. If a chunk of ones and zeros gets deleted in source and recreated in target, it is fully identical to whatever we might call “actually” moving it.
Posted by melis256 on 08/14 at 09:16 AM
Easy solution.. make the original brain central to begin with then continue to upgrade and interconnect it with external processing units. More and more activity will inherit these externals.
In the end the original brain will be nothing more than an interface for remote controlling the human biological bipedal vehicle. Time to replace it 
Posted by b. on 08/14 at 01:34 PM
Thanks for this.
While I don’t believe that mind is information (that can be copied), I am open to the idea of a bio-engineered “brain” that is both computational and living at the same time. It would be interesting to constrain the growth of such a brain to match a template (your or my brain), and even integrate that brain in a non-living technological body.
Even in this case, the same problem persists. The constrained cultured brain would be influenced by your template, or even start off being a lot like you, but not only would it not be you (it would have a consciousness separate from yours), it would increasingly diverge from you as it lives on, becoming someone else.
Actually, this constrained growth of a living thing already exists, its reproducing and rearing children! Even if you clone yourself and copy your whole childhood (as if that would be possible) you would never confuse yourself with your clone.
Maybe all this emphasis on brains and consciousness has missed an important concept: Self.
Posted by Noetic Jun on 08/14 at 01:50 PM
The “self” is almost assuredly something that is perceived quite differently from what is actually there. There is a phenomenal self-model which the brain constructs from the available data about the body and its disposition within its environment but there is no self-thing that could “get lost” in the uploading process.
Also, at least I am perfectly content, both on personal and on philosophical level, with a bit of death before the uploading process is complete. Clinical or even biological death is probably not so big an actual deal as long as the stage of information-theoretic death is not reached and my mind can be reliably reconstructed on another substrate.
Posted by taiphoon1983 on 08/14 at 02:04 PM
Great article! You make an excellent point and I like the way you think. Here are my thoughts.
If we were going to upload our minds, I believe we will already have the computers that will house our minds already in our heads swimming around. Nanobots if you will. Ray Kurzweil says we have people in the world today that already have microscopic computers in their brains for Parkinson disease. So, in my opinion, slowly we will replace more and more of our brains, (in the lab first and then for health reasons and later for entertainment) until we get to a “tipping point.” For example, maybe we can replace 40% of the brain before it ceases to be the original mind.
With a little help from exponential growth and big data, what if we stop right before the tipping point? We’d have a lot of time to study and fix whatever problems there are for mind transfer with whatever new information we find by then. Of course, there might need to be some breakthroughs, but that’s what we humans are good at.
Posted by haig on 08/14 at 06:13 PM
Please, not this tired old argument again!
Look, your self/mind/identity/soul, whatever you want to call it, is a pattern of patterns all the way down. In actuality, you are being uploaded/downloaded/copied, whatever you want to call it, continuously, every moment of your existence, even right at this moment. Are you really you from 5 seconds ago, 5 days ago, 5 years ago? This question is meaningless, there is no fixed ‘you’, you are a fluid process, and you can never step into that same river twice, as the sages say. Is someone with a cochlear implant not themselves anymore? How about someone with a deep-brain stimulator for depression? This is such antiquated nonsense that it really gets me mad to see it in a transhumanist forum.
How uploading happens, what substrates are necessary, and what techniques will be used to accomplish it, are all technical questions we can only speculate upon right now, but the argument that you won’t be ‘you’ and therefore uploading is impossible really needs to be put to rest once and for all!
Posted by Chrontius on 08/14 at 06:45 PM
DutchCon’s method is probably sound.
Melis256’s method requires relatively massive brain upgrades to work, and if you’re worried about making yourself more durable quickly, you’ll need to rush things in a probably unpleasant way.
b.‘s method is missing something interesting, but possibly non-obvious - the long-term use of data links between multiple humanoid brains to synchronize their memories, experience, &c. I’d be happy to go about my day in two or three places at once, coping with lousy cellular data-links during the day and only making a full sync while all of me are sleeping. (Or suck it up and eat the overage bill if one of me is hit by a bus, and needs to dump a day’s experience wirelessly)
Posted by Lgbtsacc on 08/14 at 09:37 PM
Asking “Who and what am I?” is interesting- ask yourself “Am I that?” about any aspect of “Yourself”, you will find no center that can be positively identified.
In Greg Bears 1986 novel “Eon” people had a small, extremely durable, removable implants that stored the mind in the event of death to be placed in a created body, they also had linked or autonomous virtual selves that could incarnate in various ways.
Transfer is important and good as copying allows the saving of experience but unfortunately not the individual (except as experienced by the current self and others) as illustrated in my example below-
The difference between transfer and copy is destruction of the original.
Imagine you copied yourself into the same room, but alas you hate yourself and a battle to the death ensues; If the copy wins, transfer complete.
Ever see “The Prestige” (2006)?
Posted by Amy Fox on 08/15 at 03:19 AM
This is an interesting topic and a well-written article. I disagree on two points
While I’m inclined to agree with the authour that the “old-fashioned spiritual notion of minds is haunting the idea of uploading” I think it may also be haunting the idea of original versus copy, upon which this article’s thesis depends (and “continuity of consciousness” upon which several comments hinge).
1. To use the software example - when you copy a song to a new computer, we ask ‘is it the same song?’ But what if we don’t copy it - is it still the same song when we play it, restart our computer, and play it again? Is that recreation, interpreted from a disc, the ‘same song’ as the original in some way that copying it over is not? True, the data has not moved from disc to disc (nor has it been been copied, cut etc… - unless the disk has been defragmented, in which case it has moved internally, yet is still considered to have not moved) but why does that matter? Why would it make two local-machine plays of a song into “the genuine article” and the non-local ones others ‘mere copies?’
2. This article claims that “Your goal in going through the uploading process wasn’t to make a copy of you that could go on with its own life—it was to save yourself.”
I disagree. I would upload so that my friends can avoid grief, so that my contributions to society can continue without interruption, so that we don’t spend another thirty years training someone up to my levels of skill, and so that *someone* can have first-hand enjoyment of the life that I have built.
Will it save my self? That presumes that I have a ‘self’ to save. Will she/I have continuity of consciousness? No. But seeing as I probably don’y have it in the first place, this should be no loss.
As we change our mental focus, go to sleep, fall unconscious, meditate and so on, is our consciousness actually continuous? Are our selves continuous? If a human being is thoughts and feelings layered on emotion, is zer continuity just a polite fiction? If so, while there is only an illusionary continuation of self through uploading, it’s not a problem - because *all* continuation of self is a polite fiction.
Why does it matter what brain (or brain emulator) produces a set of reactions and experiences so long as they are congruent? Imagine if, post-upload, your copy turns to you and claims to be you? You respond saying, “but I have the original brain” to which your upload replies with “Yeah, what’s your point?”
So why do we call ourselves the same person day to day? I’d say because it cuts down on cognitive load when it comes to predicting future behaviour and experiences. It’s convenient. But arbitrary. And if our upload-copies match that convenient predictability - if they behave enough like us - then let us make peace with them and call them our selves.
Posted by melis256 on 08/15 at 07:14 AM
Chrontius
I must point out that DutchCon’s and my solution is extremely similar if not the same.
I just explained that while upgrading the brain in the way Dutch proposed, through networking technology there could be done Much more outside the cranium. In fact so much that gradually the majority of “you” would process in these externals.
Posted by Giulio Prisco on 08/15 at 09:31 AM
What Noetic Jun said.
Consciousness and self are properties of thoughts and memories, not of the hardware substrate. Copy thoughts and memories to another substrate, and you have copied consciousness and self.
Posted by SHaGGGz on 08/15 at 10:06 AM
What Amy Fox just said.
The self is just a moment-to-moment construction arising from the materials that just happen to be on hand at that time. Any persistence is illusory. Therefore, it is no less true to say that a “copy” of you wakes up and that the “real” you dies every time you go to sleep, than saying that the uploaded “copy” of you wakes up (provided the uploading process results in a sufficiently accurate representation of your neural pattern) is “you” in the same way.
Posted by pdhopkins on 08/15 at 11:17 AM
haig writes:
[Please, not this tired old argument again!
Look, your self/mind/identity/soul, whatever you want to call it, is a pattern of patterns all the way down. In actuality, you are being uploaded/downloaded/copied, whatever you want to call it, continuously, every moment of your existence, even right at this moment. Are you really you from 5 seconds ago, 5 days ago, 5 years ago? This question is meaningless, there is no fixed ‘you’, you are a fluid process, and you can never step into that same river twice, as the sages say. Is someone with a cochlear implant not themselves anymore? How about someone with a deep-brain stimulator for depression? This is such antiquated nonsense that it really gets me mad to see it in a transhumanist forum]
You are trying to have it both ways here. You say there is no fixed ‘you’ and then you claim that the self survives changes like cochlear implants. Which is it? If there is no fixed ‘you’, that’s fine. That just means that ordinary life changes don’t preserve a permanent unitary self——plenty of people from the Buddha to Hume have argued that. But that only means uploading is as hopeless as regular life in preserving the self.
As for patterns, that doesn’t help either. A pattern is the way something is organized. It is not a thing-in-itself that is lifted from one place and deposited somewhere else. Uploading fans often treat “patterns” the same way they treat “data” and “minds”——as objects that move around like souls. To say a new brain has the “same” pattern as the old brain just means the connections are organized in the same way. Copying the pattern of the old brain “into” a new brain doesn’t make the new mind the same thing as the old mind anymore than rearranging the furniture in my living room the way someone else does would make their living room now exist in my house.
Posted by pdhopkins on 08/15 at 11:26 AM
Amy Fox writes:
1. To use the software example - when you copy a song to a new computer, we ask ‘is it the same song?’ But what if we don’t copy it - is it still the same song when we play it, restart our computer, and play it again? Is that recreation, interpreted from a disc, the ‘same song’ as the original in some way that copying it over is not…
>>>>You are exactly right. But I didn’t claim in the piece that somehow ordinary life does preserve a unitary self. There may not be such a perfectly continuing thing. I just argued that uploading would not preserve the self.
2. This article claims that “Your goal in going through the uploading process wasn’t to make a copy of you that could go on with its own life—it was to save yourself.”
I disagree. I would upload so that my friends can avoid grief, so that my contributions to society can continue without interruption, so that we don’t spend another thirty years training someone up to my levels of skill, and so that *someone* can have first-hand enjoyment of the life that I have built.
>>>>I completely understand that that might be a person’s motivations. That’s fine. But when most people write about uploading they write about it somehow saving themselves, not about making other useful people who have their skill sets.
Why does it matter what brain (or brain emulator) produces a set of reactions and experiences so long as they are congruent? Imagine if, post-upload, your copy turns to you and claims to be you? You respond saying, “but I have the original brain” to which your upload replies with “Yeah, what’s your point?”
>>>>Great scenario. So, I would point out the inconsistency in his remark and ask him why he first said he was me, but now refers to me in the second person.
Posted by b. on 08/15 at 12:28 PM
The mind as pattern of information is a theory, not a fact.
Posted by Giulio Prisco on 08/15 at 12:34 PM
@b. re “The mind as pattern of information is a theory, not a fact.”
It is certainly a theory, in the same sense that Einstein’s relativity is a theory. But it seems to me that it is the only theory compatible with the scientific worldview. Other theories resort to unscientific ideas such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism
Posted by b. on 08/15 at 01:24 PM
@Giulio Prisco, fair enough. As far as I understand, it has been shown that the closer to the speed of light an object travels the slower time unfolds, proving a relation between time and space? If there is such evidence when it comes to the theory that minds as information, I am not aware of it.
Posted by Giulio Prisco on 08/15 at 02:36 PM
@b. Relativity explains experimental evidence better than pre-Einstein physics, which postulated a mysterious and non-observable “aether” whose non necessity was proven by Einstein, It seems to me that vitalist objections to mind-as-information are the “aether” of modern neuroscience.
Posted by CygnusX1 on 08/15 at 04:59 PM
*Smiles* Some great comments here, very enjoyable reading.
As everyone appears to be contemplating with the similar notions that mind is “encapsulated” and integral/reliant upon the biological brain and processes, reductionism is acceptible and possible? Thus the funda-mental question of “what am I?” is surpassed with “who am I?”
Concerning Self and identity, this article regarding future understanding of “Erosion of identity” is worth a visit..
ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/hughes20111119
Concerning this speciality and celebrity status of phenomenological consciousness..
Please contemplate replacing the term consciousness with “awareness”, thus Self-reflexivity is no more than “awareness of Awareness”, and the realisation that the mind, (processes), are what gives this celebrity status?
It is not the eye that sees, it is “seeing” (Hindu Upanishads)
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