Out of Pod Experience

Nobody thought to mention EVE in this article. One major problem: Science isn't even close to figuring out how neurons firing in waves result in "mind." It sounds like uploading a mind to a computer could be possible around, say... YC 118.

These guys are nuts. The brain is not a computer. Doesn't works like a computer. So whatever understanding we achieve of how the mind works, we still would need to translate that into computers and their on/off states. Think of translating Shakespeare so a crow could understand it and that challenge would be just one thousandth of the one behind translating a brain into computer on/off states.

These kind of initiatives may come up with a imitation of a mind, maybe even one that doesn't looks like Artificial Idiocy anytime in the next century, but even that is unlikely. What are they trying to achieve? What is inteligence? What is a mind? Man is no closer to reach that understanding than a lyrebird is close to build any of the man-made devices whose sounds imitates with perfect skill.

A dog can't understand a dog brain. Human brain can't understand the human brain. But human certainly can delude themselves and turn the most primal fear of man into the biggest scam/delusion in history.

We will die. Get over it, dammit.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Computers, shall I repeat, work with on/off states. Our brain doesn't. As far as we know, a single brain cell could have as much as 10 million excitation states, each one as different from the others as "on" is different from "off" for a switch in our computers. Computers were born to make calculations, not think. And they still are glorified calculation machines. Thanks to algorythms, they can imitate "thinking" with massive calculation processes in a binary form. But they don't do what our brains do.

I repeat: Computers don't think. They don't even work as the only thing we know that thinks (each now and then), aka our brain. And we don't have any clue on how does our brain think; we can't even decide what constitutes "to think".

As for death being a change... Hey: Death is the road to awe.

(Now seriously, one of the things that keeps me going is my faith in that our conscience ends with death. No soul. No afterlife. Only non-existence. Life is nice enough if you only endure it for a while, short or long, but not forever...)

Stop talking about computers. Its not about them, its about brain prosthetic.

I dont think you can take ordinary human and give him eternal life and think he will be thankfull. You need someone capable. Someone who have purpose to live. Who acts like he cares. You will call him eternal, you mortal.

Immortality is to be achieved, not granted.

A dog can also manipulate another dog's brain. That doesn't means that it understands the brain. We have lots of practical knowledge about the brain, but we are not anywhere near a point where it can be replicated, because we don't even know what to replicate or how should be replicated.

FAI, we can theoritize and say that religion and science are byproducts of foraging habits, but we really don't know how does that happen. Thus we can't change the human habit of thinking about the divine (to prove it or disprove it) but nonetheless the idea of divinity is in our brains because our animal ancestors learned that causes and outcomes were associated. Can we get rid of that? No. We don't even know how it's done or where. Maybe is a structural property of the kind of mind we have (so different, say, from a social insect's).

We can't understand our brain to the point of replicating it. That doesn't means that the road to knowledge is worthless; just that there is a limit to what we can know. It doesn't helps that answers trigger questions.

The whole idea of replicating a human mind stems from the faith that whatever we can hack together before reaching a limit will be enough to be sold as inmortality... but it won't be. Artificial Idiocy and the endless difficulties to translate languages should be a warning sign.

"LOL" You are.
As much as we would like to think that we are special little creations, we are just vessels for our genes. Our consciousness is an added complexity that has evolved and proven beneficial to the species. We are not even conscious all the time that we are awake.

By our genes we have predispositions, aptitudes that we may or may not realise.
Language is a great example, we are coded into speaking at least one, twins often make one up between them and some cases of deaf couples, where as one such case involved living on a farm and their child had made up its own language to fill that need.
The nurture aspect is what language we learn.
Humans generally run through a life pattern.
Typical males, go through their puberty, have insecurity about their sexuality, try to prove themselves to their peers and elders, get a car, house and such, attract a mate, provide for them, go through a mid life crisis and die.
On a shorter time scale, many adults get up, go to work, eat the same meals, go home, watch the same sort of TV shows, go out to the same sort of places with their friends on the weekend, maybe watch the same soccer team win or lose, perhaps go to church and repeat that week after week for years.

Sounds a hell of a lot like machines to me.

If you dont know what to do with eternal life, you just dont need it.

some of you are clueless about how we're going to achieve immortality through cybernetics.

the easiest layment term anyone can some up with is to simply create "nanobots" smaller than blood cells which could replicate themselves using the atoms/matter in our body. Why would we do this? because the nanobots would then enter our brain and replace each cell (most people think the brain is just cells so I'm going to stick with cells) one at a time with a artificial cell. now think for a second, why does time matter? why change one at a time... why not change a lot at a time? that is what uploading is. it isn't uploading our memory to a computer... that computer would be a separate entity and we would still exist in our primitive form... we need to merge, convert, evolve into ... not clone.

now that is a primitive way of achieving immortality, the other suggestion would be to reverse engineer our biology so that we do not age, by either replacing our organs through surgery, or to simply let science figure out a way to replenish our bodies with pills or new types of food to swallow which could repair our organs.

therefore, if one is anti technology, in the future the human could choose whether to remain a human... and die of old age, or whether the human wants to live as an immortal in a biological body or become an artificial organism such as a cyborg or android or simply a box inside a huge data center roaming the universe.

when you ask a futurist or a transhuman (person who wants to become a cyborg or something greater) the question "what would you do with all your free time" is a question no creature today can answer that originates from this planet. the reason is simply because of this...

cats do not think about putting soup in a microwave, cats do not think of calculus and algebra... cats obviously do not know nor think about what it would be like to explore the universe utilizing a spaceship... they are primitive creatures that are mostly bored their entire life times wondering where to their next meal will be.

humans are creatures which can only speak, think and elaborate on things they have discovered, they do not have the ability to think of something original, without roots coming from somewhere. humans basically are only capable of understanding patterns and being able to manipulate them into newer mutations, hence evolution.

this means that no human today knows what it would be like to be a creature with a trillion fold intelligence, no human knows what there is to do once you have conquered the entire universe... aka space exploration... because space exploration is our current limit of how we understand things, we have absolutely no clue what we would do aside from war/conquest while doing space exploration... we would expand, while we are traveling we would live in virtual reality living/playing in virtual worlds like eve online, we would watch movies, play sports etc... no human knows what a cyborg would do with its time, it is impossible to think outside of what we currently know. we can not somehow come up with an idea out of nothingness... we need roots, we need background, we need some form of influence.

how will we figure out a way to upload ourselves? by mapping the entire brain with technology, and then reverse engineering it one baby step at a time... we'll start with implants that give us brain interfaces through our eyes, then we'll come up with ways to expand our memory and so on so forth. the first augmented humans will be 1% artificial and 99% biological... with time this will change to 99% artificial and 1% biological and eventually become pure 100% artificial.

it's pretty simple, if you want a more advanced lesson on how we are going to go through this evolution... type in google "transhuman books" or "books on cybernetics/bionics" or something of that sort.

PS. as for those who are paranoid about computer viruses, biological creatures are prone to receive viruses as well... ebola, zika, aids... cancer... at least with technology/software it keeps upgrading... biological creatures are limited to a naturalistic evolution which takes millions of years... just think of what a computer can do in 100 years? and do you think these computer organisms will be computers after a thousand or million years? they will have evolved into something even greater...

Good post, and praise Bob, EVE forums ate by previous TL:DR post. Everyone has been spared. To make it quick this time-- human species is too dumb and mostly arsehat to even avoid the Tragedy of the Commons problem. How are they going to handle being transhumans? They don't even know how to live in a life like the sphinx's riddle: 'What moves on 4 points, then 2 points, then 3 points?' I wouldn't want to live among any perpetual life transhumans unless they'd done their homework in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, or maybe spent a life picking strawberries somewhere.

The first condition to be a decent inmortal, is to not wish being inmortal. The desire of inmortality disqualifies people for being inmortal. Would you trust eternal life on someone who can't get over being mortal? And if he accepts that he is mortal, as sane human beings do, then why does he need being inmortal?

The wish for inmortality, as unlimited greed, is a pathological state of the mind. Something went wrong in the process of stop behaving like a frightened monkey with a brain too large and become human.