Research That Could Lead to Uploading Brain to Computer
Physicist Richard Jones explains transferring one's mind to a computer could be possible in a few decades, but that doesn't mean we should. Is this something that'south best imagined in scientific discipline fiction?
People have always dreamed about going beyond the limitations of their bodies: the pain, illness and, above all, death. Now a new movement is dressing up this aboriginal bulldoze in new technological dress. Referred to equally transhumanism, it is the belief that science will provide a futuristic way for humans to evolve beyond their current physical forms and realize these dreams of transcendence.
Perhaps the most dramatic way transhumanists believe that technology will transform the human status is the thought that someone'southward mind could exist converted into digital data and "uploaded" into an immensely powerful computer. This would permit y'all to live in a world of unbounded virtual experiences and effectively achieve immortality (equally long every bit someone remembers to do the backups and doesn't switch you off).
Yet transhumanists seem to ignore the fact that this kind of mind-uploading has some insurmountable obstacles. The practical difficulties mean it couldn't happen in the foreseeable future, just there are also some more fundamental problems with the whole concept.
The idea of encephalon uploading is a staple of science fiction. The author and director of engineering at Google, Ray Kurzweil, has perchance done the well-nigh to popularize the idea that it might become reality – perhaps every bit soon as 2045. Recently, the economist Robin Hanson has explored in detail the consequences of such a scenario for order and the economy. He imagines a world in which all piece of work is carried out by disembodied emulations of human minds, running in simulations of virtual reality using urban center-size deject computing facilities.
Information technology's a curt step from the thought that our minds could be uploaded, to the notion that they already take been, and that nosotros are already living in a Matrix-mode calculator simulation. Applied science entrepreneur Elon Musk recently revived this word by arguing the chance that we are not living in a computer simulation was only "i in billions." Of class, this is merely a technological revival of the idea that reality is an illusion, which has been discussed by philosophers and mystics for hundreds of years.
Just there are some serious issues with the idea that we could upload our minds to a computer. To showtime with, the practical issue: our brains each have trillions of connections betwixt 86 billion or so neurons. To replicate the mind digitally nosotros would have to map each of these connections, something that is far across our current capabilities. With the electric current speed of evolution of computers and imaging technologies, nosotros might be able to do this in a few decades but only for a dead and sectioned brain.
More Than Molecules
Withal even if we could create such a "wiring diagram" for a living brain, that wouldn't be plenty to empathize how it operates. For that we'd need to quantify exactly how the neurons interact at each of the junctions, and that'due south a matter of molecular-level detail. We don't fifty-fifty know how many molecules are in the brain, let lone how many are vital for its functions, but whatever the reply information technology'south likewise many to replicate with a figurer.
This points united states towards a deeper conceptual difficulty. Just considering nosotros can simulate some aspects of the way the encephalon works, that doesn't necessarily mean we are completely emulating a real brain, or indeed a mind. No believable increase in computer power volition permit us to simulate the brain at the level of private molecules. Then brain emulation would only be possible if we could abstract its digital, logical operations from the messy molecular level detail.
To sympathise the operations of a man-made calculator, we don't need to keep track of the currents and voltages in every component, much less empathise what every electron is doing. We've designed the switching operations of the transistors so at that place's an unambiguous mapping from the state of the circuits to the simple digital logic of ones and zeros. But no-i designed a brain – it evolved – so there is no reason to expect whatever unproblematic mapping of its operations to digital logic.
Unsafe Thought
Even if mind uploading is an impossible dream, some might contend that information technology does no harm to imagine such possibilities. Everyone at some indicate must fright their own bloodshed, and who am I to argue with the many different means people have of dealing with those fears?
But transhumanism's mixing of essentially religious ideas with scientific linguistic communication matters because it distorts the way we remember about technology. Transhumanism tends to run across applied science as a fashion to grant all our wishes. And this is often justified by the statement that technology will inevitably drive man development in a positive direction.
Nevertheless this distorts our scientific priorities and gets in the fashion of us making sensible choices nearly developing the technologies we need to solve our very real current problems. Brain uploading is a slap-up premise for speculative fiction, but it's not a good basis for talking about the future.
This piece originally appeared in The Conversation.
(Height epitome: Courtesy Getty Images.)
Richard Jones is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation and Professor of Physics at the University of Sheffield.
All views expressed are those of the author.
Source: https://www.ge.com/news/reports/could-we-upload-a-brain-to-a-computer-and-should-we-even-try
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