Computers are already half of your brain.

They do most of our calculations, they serve as memory for photos, home videos, entertainment.
They alert us to our appointments, our friends activities, our finances and we dump our innermost thoughts on them.

It cannot be long before we are even more interconnected. Via heads-up displays that beam pin-point images into your retina from a non-descript eye-brow piercing, or sun glasses.

Then we will be physically interfacing with our devices. Wi-fi transmitters translate the electro static patterns on our scalps directly to portable mp3 sized super computers which do all the functions that computers serve today plus a thousand we haven't yet imagined.

how long before these things are surgically attached to us? How long before they are grafted into our skulls? How long before they record what we want, and eventually record everything that goes on in our heads? Essentially becoming back up hard drives of our minds?

Who here thinks that in the future when our Albert Einstein's bodies die that our progeny will bury the body, turn around and look at his computer mental back-up and just throw it away? Can you do that? Can you take a copy of Albert Einstein's brain and just throw it in the trash? When it's still viable? When all it needs is a 120v. adapter?

They will be kept as reference databases. Then they will be queried through text dialogs, then they will be left on to help crunch numbers, and before long we will put them in mobile chassis. Next comes autonomy and free range movement.

These are the children of the future.

Humans are fragile and greedy. Our environment has difficulty dealing with our wants and refuse. Our bodies wear down, our pulpy hearts and brains too susceptible to failure. In some distant future when we meet an alien civilization, it will probably be from behind robotic eyes.

Here are my reviews from a few years ago of two of The Matrix movies, offered now as a tribute to Steve Jobs, author of our wired world.

http://rtulip.net/yahoo_site_admin/asse ... 004428.htm

http://rtulip.net/yahoo_site_admin/asse ... 004414.htm

johnson1010 wrote:Computers are already half of your brain.

They do most of our calculations, they serve as memory for photos, home videos, entertainment.
They alert us to our appointments, our friends activities, our finances and we dump our innermost thoughts on them.

It cannot be long before we are even more interconnected. Via heads-up displays that beam pin-point images into your retina from a non-descript eye-brow piercing, or sun glasses.

Then we will be physically interfacing with our devices. Wi-fi transmitters translate the electro static patterns on our scalps directly to portable mp3 sized super computers which do all the functions that computers serve today plus a thousand we haven't yet imagined.

how long before these things are surgically attached to us? How long before they are grafted into our skulls? How long before they record what we want, and eventually record everything that goes on in our heads? Essentially becoming back up hard drives of our minds?

Who here thinks that in the future when our Albert Einstein's bodies die that our progeny will bury the body, turn around and look at his computer mental back-up and just throw it away? Can you do that? Can you take a copy of Albert Einstein's brain and just throw it in the trash? When it's still viable? When all it needs is a 120v. adapter?

They will be kept as reference databases. Then they will be queried through text dialogs, then they will be left on to help crunch numbers, and before long we will put them in mobile chassis. Next comes autonomy and free range movement.

These are the children of the future.

Humans are fragile and greedy. Our environment has difficulty dealing with our wants and refuse. Our bodies wear down, our pulpy hearts and brains too susceptible to failure. In some distant future when we meet an alien civilization, it will probably be from behind robotic eyes.

If you had the option of immorality by uploading your "consciousness" into a computer after your body dies, would you?

Do you think that perhaps alien civilizations that are billions of years more advanced than us have accomplished this? Might the life that we are searching for in the universe be totally binary intelligence? Might the laws of physics be live intelligence?

These are some of the questions that keep me up at night

Ant wrote:If you had the option of immorality by uploading your "consciousness" into a computer after your body dies, would you?

....or even get the point where computers can download a living brain not only to a computer, but say full human clone or something, and then your consciousness is transferred from your brain to the new clone brain and you can carry on as many times as you can manage to transfer consciousness from brain to computer to brain, or brain to brain even.

Why not?

Shit, I'd probably give it go.

It's funny to think about brain uploading. Cloning and teleportation fall into this same category.

In any of these, even if the new "you" is identical in every concievable way, it won't be "you".

If you stand next to your new robot body, perfect clone, or teleportation double, the "you" that has always been piloting your body will still be in your body.

You are looking at an "other" you. This doesn't solve immortality for you. It solves immortality for those who you would leave behind when you die. To them, the continuity would go almost unbroken, but somewhere there is a body lying in the dirt that was you, before this new "other" you took over.

Creepy.

What about a scenario like Terminator 4 where the guy that donated his body to science was dismantled and made into a robot, with the same brain. He remembered his old life in flash backs and such. Now that was presented as if it was the same consciousness that he'd always experienced, even though he was now a robot with a brain and heart.

I guess that's why I was thinking that if you transferred the thoughts and memories from one brain to another then the new brain would be functioning based on your private thoughts and memories - the clone brain or what-have-you. So unless consciousness is not to do with our brains, but rather supernatural souls or something else, I don't see how the old consciousness would be "left behind" so to speak. Need more input...

the only solution to getting the consciousness that is in your body into another is to remove the brain and put it into some other life support system.

My favorite example is teleportation.

In reality it wouldn't work like stepping across huge distances, but rather, disintegrating and storing the data that comprises a person, then re-assembling that person on the other side from material already present. (even if that's just hydrogen, then built into all the necessary elements through fusion).

Now, with that info already recorded, they could print hundreds, millions of copies of you.

In a perfect transaction, each of them would have a continuous memory from entering the teleporter to exiting, all thinking that they are "you". But they are new "other" versions. None of them are the you that entered the machine. That you was destroyed. it's dead. An imposter walks in your place.

To each of these transporter doubles they would earnestly think that they were the original. They would still want that twenty dollars they lent to a friend and everything else. So, to THEM, the continuity is perfect. And since they are being completly rebuilt anyway, there is no reason to include things like congenital heart defects. So, in essence, this new body would be a perfect copy of you and your mind, but with a young body. It could live an aditional hundred years, but the baby stage would look and behave like an adult.

That seems like a recipe for immortality. But the you that entered the machine has to die.

You die. Some "other" takes over and does everything that you planned to do with this new body, perfectly in alignment with what you would have done if it were like stepping across huge distances. for all purposes it is exactly the same, but you are dead.

So that creeps me out.

On getting one continous un-interrupted consciousness into another body, you could move the brain, or perhaps you could integrate electronic storage into the brain to the point that you don't know which one is doing the heavy lifting.

Then, as your brain slowly dies from old age, the computer in your head continues to work exactly as your brain did. Is that the same "you" as before?

Don't know.

That's interesting. So in the case of T4, the guy donates his body to science, then the body is used to harvest the brain and heart for a robot. Because the same brain was tranferred therefore the same consciousness was transferred from the body to the machine. All he knew was that he was sitting in a lethal injection chamber and the next thing he knew he was in the future waking up in the middle of battle scene. Continued consciousness after a period of rest. I guess if the solution to brain aging was applied then the consciousness could go on and on.

Think about this as well.

Every cell, every atom in your body is being recycled.

Some of these atoms are cycled out pretty speedily, actually. I had heard once that phosphorous is being cycled out of your brain about every two weeks.

Your brain is itself constantly being broken down and rebuilt as atoms pass through your system. The atoms that remembered your 11th birthday 6 months ago are now being strained out of drain-water in a sewage plant. The atoms in your brain today which remember your 11th birthday are yesterday's pizza.

How could you maintain a persistant experience of consciousness when transitioning from organic to machine memory? Well, we've been doing it for 4.3 billion years. You consume unconscious particulate they take over the job of old cells, and participate in what makes up your consciousness.

Is it so hard to imagine a slow replacement of your organic brain cells with non-tech analogs? A replacement that happens to gradually that there is no disconnect moment? No death? A for-real extension of the very same consciousness. Not just a copy, but the same pattern slowly being slid off of a meat stencil and onto a silicone one.

Strange thougts.

I expect all the old fogies to speak up and say Nah, people will never stand for this, there'll be a huge backlash against melding humans with computers. And I think there will be, but it will be a backlash of octogenarians. When that generation dies, the newer generations will probably see nothing wrong with doing all this sci-fi stuff with our bodies. I'm glad I'll have the opportunity to opt out of it all.