For many transhumanists, expanding our capacities begins with the organ that most sets humans apart from other animals: the brain. Right now, cognitive enhancement largely involves drugs that were developed and are prescribed to treat certain brain-related conditions, such as Ritalin for attention deficit disorder or modafinil for narcolepsy. These and other medications have been shown in lab tests to help sharpen focus and improve memory.
Advances in computing and nanotechnology have already resulted in the creation of tiny computers that can interface with our brains. This development is not as far-fetched as it may sound, since both the brain and computers use electricity to operate and communicate. These early and primitive brain-machine interfaces have been used for therapeutic purposes, to help restore some mobility to those with paralysis (as in the example involving the quadriplegic man) and to give partial sight to people with certain kinds of blindness. In the future, scientists say, brain-machine interfaces will do everything from helping stroke victims regain speech and mobility to successfully bringing people out of deep comas.
Scientists Have Developed a Method to ‘Upload Knowledge To Your Brain’
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Mind uploading may potentially be accomplished by either of two methods: copy-and-upload or copy-and-delete by gradual replacement of neurons (which can be considered as a gradual destructive uploading), until the original organic brain no longer exists and a computer program emulating the brain takes control over the body. In the case of the former method, mind uploading would be achieved by scanning and mapping the salient features of a biological brain, and then by storing and copying, that information state into a computer system or another computational device. The biological brain may not survive the copying process or may be deliberately destroyed during it in some variants of uploading. The simulated mind could be within a virtual reality or simulated world, supported by an anatomic 3D body simulation model. Alternatively, the simulated mind could reside in a computer inside (or either connected to or remotely controlled) a (not necessarily humanoid) robot or a biological or cybernetic body.[5]
Neuroscientists have stated that important functions performed by the mind, such as learning, memory, and consciousness, are due to purely physical and electrochemical processes in the brain and are governed by applicable laws. For example, Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi wrote in IEEE Spectrum:
Many theorists have presented models of the brain and have established a range of estimates of the amount of computing power needed for partial and complete simulations.[5][citation needed] Using these models, some have estimated that uploading may become possible within decades if trends such as Moore's law continue.[12]As of December 2022, this kind of technology is almost entirely theoretical. Scientists are yet to discover a way for computers to feel human emotions, and many assert that uploading consciousness is not possible.[13]
A possible method for mind uploading is serial sectioning, in which the brain tissue and perhaps other parts of the nervous system are frozen and then scanned and analyzed layer by layer, which for frozen samples at nano-scale requires a cryo-ultramicrotome, thus capturing the structure of the neurons and their interconnections.[24] The exposed surface of frozen nerve tissue would be scanned and recorded, and then the surface layer of tissue removed. While this would be a very slow and labor-intensive process, research is currently underway to automate the collection and microscopy of serial sections.[25] The scans would then be analyzed, and a model of the neural net recreated in the system that the mind was being uploaded into.
Underlying the concept of "mind uploading" (more accurately "mind transferring") is the broad philosophy that consciousness lies within the brain's information processing and is in essence an emergent feature that arises from large neural network high-level patterns of organization, and that the same patterns of organization can be realized in other processing devices. Mind uploading also relies on the idea that the human mind (the "self" and the long-term memory), just like non-human minds, is represented by the current neural network paths and the weights of the brain synapses rather than by a dualistic and mystic soul and spirit. The mind or "soul" can be defined as the information state of the brain, and is immaterial only in the same sense as the information content of a data file or the state of a computer software currently residing in the work-space memory of the computer. Data specifying the information state of the neural network can be captured and copied as a "computer file" from the brain and re-implemented into a different physical form.[28] This is not to deny that minds are richly adapted to their substrates.[29] An analogy to the idea of mind uploading is to copy the temporary information state (the variable values) of a computer program from the computer memory to another computer and continue its execution. The other computer may perhaps have different hardware architecture but emulates the hardware of the first computer.
A considerable portion of transhumanists and singularitarians place great hope into the belief that they may become immortal, by creating one or many non-biological functional copies of their brains, thereby leaving their "biological shell". However, the philosopher and transhumanist Susan Schneider claims that at best, uploading would create a copy of the original person's mind.[31] Schneider agrees that consciousness has a computational basis, but this does not mean we can upload and survive. According to her views, "uploading" would probably result in the death of the original person's brain, while only outside observers can maintain the illusion of the original person still being alive. For it is implausible to think that one's consciousness would leave one's brain and travel to a remote location; ordinary physical objects do not behave this way. Ordinary objects (rocks, tables, etc.) are not simultaneously here, and elsewhere. At best, a copy of the original mind is created.[31] Neural correlates of consciousness, a sub-branch of neuroscience, states that consciousness may be thought of as a state-dependent property of some undefined complex, adaptive, and highly interconnected biological system.[32]
Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer.
So yeah. Nectome is a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company. Its chemical solution can keep a body intact for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, as a statue of frozen glass. The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere.
We therefore decided to investigate the connections between these dualistic intuitions, disgust sensitivity and moral sanctioning of soul transfers within the post-modern cultural context. More specifically, we evaluated how a wide array of individual difference measures and situational factors influence moral condemnation in scenarios where a scientist uploads his mind (consciousness) onto a computer (or other medium). We did not have any specific hypotheses in the beginning; these studies were purely exploratory. In this case, forming hypotheses based on pre-existing theory should come after the phenomenon itself has been investigated more carefully. However, gaining new knowledge in our intuitions about mind upload deepens our understanding of several different fields of inquiry. We will return to these issues in the General Discussion section.
Finally, in our studies we focused on one specific mind upload technology, wherein the brain is destroyed as a consequence (a 'Moravec transfer'; Moravec, 1988). This was a conscious methodological decision to avoid issues related to multiple possible simultaneous identities (Chalmers, 2010). There have been suggestions in transhumanist literature that copying the brain without destroying it might be possible. However, several authors argue that any kind of physical body is only a temporary solution and offers more limited opportunities for improvement and adaptation than a 'substrate-independent mind', and thus a destructive upload is preferable (for an overview of the theme see International Journal of Machine Consciousness, Volume: 4, Number: 1 [June 2012], Special Issue on Mind Uploading; and for more specific argumentation, see Koene, 2012)
Scientists at HRL Laboratories demonstrated that they can successfully alter brain activity to improve learning, effectively "uploading" knowledge to the brain. The experiment showed improvement in both motor and cognitive skills.
For as much as would-be academics like to tout their "love of learning," the actual act of learning a new skill kind of sucks. The journey has its moments, obviously, but it's no fun watching someone shred a guitar while you're still only good for a few chords after a month of practice. But according to scientists at HRL Laboratories, there may be a "hack," of sorts: Using low-current electrical brain stimulation, they're able to hasten and improve the learning process. It is, to date, the closest anyone's come to recreating the "knowledge uploads" depicted in The Matrix.
Obviously, that's not the same as plugging a cord into your head and having a full working knowledge of kung fu a few minutes later -- if that's possible at all, it's still many years out on the horizon. But the researchers still believe that what they've developed has current, real-world applicability. 2ff7e9595c
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