Mind uploading

In transhumanism and science fiction, mind transfer (also referred to as mind uploading or mind downloading, depending on one's point of reference), whole body emulation, or electronic transcendence refers to the hypothetical transfer of a human mind to an artificial substrate.

Thinkers with a strongly mechanistic view of human intelligence (such as Marvin Minsky) or a strongly positive view of robot-human social integration (such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil) have openly speculated about the possibility and desirability of this.

In the case where the mind transferred into a computer, the situation would become a form of artificial intelligence, sometimes called an infomorph. In the case where it is transferred into an artificial body, to which its consciousness is confined, it would become a robot, albeit one that might claim ordinary human rights, certainly if the consciousness within were feeling (or were doing a good job of simulating) as if it were the donor.

Uploading consciousness into bodies created by robotic means is a goal of some in the artificial intelligence community. In the uploading scenario, the physical human brain does not move from its original body into a new robotic shell; rather, the consciousness is assumed to be recorded and/or transferred to a new robotic brain, which generates responses indistinguishable from the original organic brain.

The idea of uploading human consciousness in this manner raises many philosophical questions which people may find interesting and disturbing, such as matters of individuality and the soul. Vitalists would say that uploading was a priori impossible.

Even if uploading is theoretically possible, there is currently no technology capable of recording or describing mind states in the way imagined, and no one knows how much computational power or storage would be needed to simulate the activity of the mind inside a computer.

How might mind transfer be performed?

Prospects

True mind uploading remains speculation: the technology to perform such a feat is not currently available, nor is it expected to be for several decades at least. A number of methods have however, been suggested to carry out mind transfers in the future.

Blue Brain Project

On June 6, 2005 IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne announced the launch of a project to build a complete simulation of the human brain, entitled the "Blue Brain Project". The project will use a supercomputer based on IBM's Blue Gene design to map the entire electrical circuitry of the brain. The project seeks to research aspects of human cognition, and various psychiatric disorders caused by malfunctioning neurons, such as autism.

Transplants

An extremely crude means of moving (if not exactly "uploading") consciousness using current technology is the head transplant which has been done on primates somewhat successfully . Another such crude means which some researchers think is feasible in the near term is the whole-body transplant which moves only the brain. Since it is not easy to tell whether a body contains its original brain, nor necessarily easy to tell whether a body has the head it was born with, some of the identity questions are identical for these methods and those based on robotics. However, these methods do not involve copying the mind nor moving it into a non-organic medium, such as an electronic computer. Accordingly, they are technically quite different, and subject to normal limits of organic bodies and brains.

Serial sectioning

A likely method for mind transfer is serial sectioning, in which the brain tissue and perhaps other parts of the nervous system are frozen, sliced apart or ablated layer by layer, and scanned at high resolution, perhaps with a transmission electron microscope. The scans would then be recombined and uploaded to appropriate emulation hardware (i.e., an artificial brain). This would require microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) but would not seem to require molecular nanotechnology. Simply reproducing the structures visible by electron microscopy, however, would not allow replication of the function of a brain, since the function of brain tissue is determined by molecular events, particularly at synapses, that cannot be revealed by electron microscopy.

Nanotechnology

A more advanced hypothetical technique that would require nanotechnology might involve infiltrating the intact brain with a network of cell-sized machines to "read" the structure and activity of the brain in situ, much like current-day electrode meshes but on a much finer and more sophisticated scale. This might even allow for the replacement of living neurons with artificial neurons one by one while the subject is still conscious, providing a smooth transition from an organic to synthetic brain - potentially significant for those who worry about the loss of personal continuity that other uploading processes may entail.

"Cyborging"

Another theoretically possible method of mind transfer from organic to inorganic medium, related to the idea described above of replacing neurons one at a time while consciousness remained intact, would be a much less precise but much more feasible (in terms of technology currently known to be physically possible) process of "cyborgisation". Once a given person's brain is mapped, it is replaced piece-by-piece with computer devices which perform the exact same function as the regions preceding them, after which the patient is allowed to regain consciousness and validate that "nothing has changed" in terms of his own subjective experience of his existence. At this point, the patient's brain is immediately "re-mapped" and another piece is replaced, and so on in this fashion until, the patient exists on a purely hardware medium and can be safely extricated from the remaining organic body.

Brain imaging

It may also be possible to use advanced neuroimaging technology to build a detailed three-dimensional model of the brain using non-invasive methods. This possibility, however, could run into physical limitations concerning the resolution that can be achieved. Very high-resolution brain imaging (down to the nanometer) is currently available, but it would require destroying the brain by means of a serial sectioning scan as described above.

Recreating

It has also been suggested (for example, in Greg Egan's "jewelhead" stories) that a detailed examination of the brain itself may not be required, that the brain could be treated as a black box instead and effectively duplicated "for all practical purposes" by merely duplicating how it responds to specific external stimuli. This leads into even deeper philosophical questions of what the "self" is.

One problem with the mind transfer theory is that it might need a near to infinite amount of specific external stimuli since we humans probably have a very wide amount of different responses.

Copying vs. moving

By some definitions, the copied consciousness would "be the same person" as the donor of the consciousness. In that case, this new being -- the same person as the original -- could have all the rights of the consciousness donor, including the disposal of the old body. By other definitions, the two copies would immediately be considered different people and the issue of which copy "inherits" what can be much more complicated. This problem is similar to that found when considering the possibility of teleportation, where in some proposed methods it is possible to copy (rather than only move) a mind. This is the classic philosophical issue of personal identity.

Philosopher John Locke published "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" in 1689, in which he proposed the following criterion for personal identity: if you remember thinking something in the past, then you are the same person as he or she who did the thinking. Later philosophers raised various logical snarls, most of them caused by applying Boolean logic, which was the only logic available at the time. It has been proposed that modern fuzzy logic can solve those problems, showing that Locke's basic idea is sound if one treats personal identity as a continuous rather than discrete value.

In that case, when a mind is copied -- whether during mind uploading, or afterwards, or by some other means -- the two copies are initially two instances of the very same person, but over time, they will gradually become different people to an increasing degree.

Ethical issues of mind uploading

There are many ethical issues concerning mind transfer. Viable mind transfer technology would challenge the ideas of human immortality, property rights, capitalism, human intelligence, an afterlife, and the abrahamic view of man as created in God's image. These challenges often cannot be distinguished from those raised by all technologies that extend human technological control over human bodies, e.g. organ transplant. Perhaps the best way to explore such issues is to discover principles applicable to current bioethics problems, and question what would be permissible if they were applied consistently to a future technology. This points back to the role of science fiction in exploring such problems, as powerfully demonstrated in the 20th century by such works as Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dune and Star Trek, each of which frame current ethical problems in a future environment where those have come to dominate the society.

Mind transfer in science fiction

Main article: mind transfer in fiction

Uploading is a common theme in science fiction. One of the earlier instances of this theme was in the Roger Zelazny 1968 novel Lord of Light.

Another of the "firsts" is the novel Detta är verkligheten (This is reality), 1968, by the renowned philosopher and logician Bertil Mårtensson. A novel in which he describes people living in an uploaded state as a means to control overpopulation. The uploaded people believe that they are "alive", but in reality they are playing elaborate and advanced fantasy games. In a twist at the end, the author changes everything into one of the best "multiverse" ideas of science fiction. Together with the 1969 book Ubik by Philip K. Dick it takes the subject to its furthest point of all the early novels in the field.

Frederik Pohl's Gateway series (also known as the Heechee Saga) deals with a human being, Robinette Broadhead, who "dies" and, due to the efforts of his wife, a computer scientist (and also quite fetching), as well as the computer program Sigfrid von Shrink, is uploaded into the "64 Gigabit space" (now archaic, but Fred Pohl wrote Gateway in 1976). The Heechee Saga deals with the physical, social, sexual, recreational, and scientific nature of cyberspace before William Gibson's award-winning Neuromancer, and the interactions between cyberspace and "meatspace" commonly depicted in cyberpunk fiction. In Neuromancer, a hacking tool used by the main character is an artificial infomorph of a notorious cyber-criminal, Dixie Flatline. The infomorph only assists in exchange for the promise that he be deleted after the mission is complete.

In the 1982 novel Software, part of the Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker, one of the main characters, Cobb Anderson, has his mind downloaded and his body replaced with an extremely human-like android body. The robots who persuade Anderson into doing this sell the process to him as a way to become immortal.

The fiction of Greg Egan has explored many of the philosophical, ethical, legal, and identity aspects of mind transfer, as well as the financial and computing aspects (i.e. hardware, software, processing power) of maintaining "copies." In Egan's Permutation City and Diaspora, "Copies" are made by computer simulation of scanned brain physiology. See also Egan's "jewelhead" stories, where the mind is transferred from the organic brain to a small, immortal backup computer at the base of the skull, the organic brain then being surgically removed.

In the video game Total Annihilation the 4000 year war which eventually ended with the destruction of the entire galaxy was started over the issue of mind transfer.

In the popular science fiction show Stargate SG-1 the alien race who call themself the Asgard rely solely on cloning and mind transfering to continue their existence. This was not a choice they made, but a result of the decay of the Asgard genome due to excessive cloning, which also caused the Asgard to lose their ability to reproduce.

Mind transfer advocates

The Raëlian religion believes that mind uploading is practiced by extra-terrestrial beings who will teach these skills to mankind.

However, mind uploading is also advocated by a number of secular researchers in neuroscience and artificial intelligence, such as Marvin Minsky. In 1993, Joe Strout created a small web site called the Mind Uploading Home Page, and began advocating the idea in Cryonics circles and elsewhere on the net. That site has not been actively updated in recent years, but it has spawned other sites including MindUploading.org, run by Randal A. Koene, Ph.D., who also moderates a mailing list on the topic. These advocates see mind uploading as a medical procedure which could eventually save countless lives.

Many Transhumanists look forward to the development and deployment of mind uploading technology before the end of the 21st century.

The book "Beyond Humanity: CyberEvolution and Future Minds" by Gregory S. Paul & Earl D. Cox, is about the eventual (and, to the authors, almost inevitable) evolution of computers into sentient beings, but also deals with human mind transfer.

See also

• soul
• Turing test
• teleportation
• virtual reality
• artificial intelligence
• brain-computer interface

External links

• The Duplicates Paradox by Ben Best; theories about the problem of personal continuity
• Joe Strout's Mind Uploading Home Page
• MindUploading.org
• "Treat Yourself to a New Body" BrainTrans, Inc. Company Website - hoax / humor -link dead: 7-23-06
• "The Day You Discard Your Body" by Marshall Brain
• "The history, theory, and present status of brain transplantation." - Medical paper