sakrilege

From a newsstory on the cloned baby...
It is my understanding of the brain that the memories & 'contents' are physically based. Synapses exist based on experience. In order to 'upload' a person's experiences into an 'empty' brain, wouldn't the physical structure of the brain have to be modified?

Godbert

Yes. Not only the identity and number of neuron connections is different but also their strength (number, regulation, sensitivity of synaptic receptors and transmitter releasing systems).
And obviously there is a time factor in the internal wiring process so it cannot be done quickly.
I'd say if you could ever do sth similar, for instance by sort of calculating the nerve input required to wire an empty brain approximately like an existing one it would still take years.
Of course you could not generate an exact copy and I don't know how exact the reproduction has to be to still be functional. My guess is it has to be almost perfect because of the delocalized/crossreferenced nature of memory. So it might just be completely impossible to ever do it.
Also I don't think having a clone is that much of an advantage for such an undertaking.

thebeave

This is completely wacky, especially in a 25 year time frame. People seem to think there is some sort of USB or firewire interface at the back of the neck, and all we have to do is figure out the protocol and then do a data dump. Thanks to millions of years of evolution, the brain is such a monsterous clusterfuck of random data bits and spaghetti style programming, that we are really not even close to the point where we can really understand and map it, much less download it.

happyboy

i wouldn't rule out the possibility that one day it'll happen. i have no doubt whatsoever that one day, in the not-TOO-distant future, things like this will be commonplace.

happyboy

Tom Sawyer

Maybe it wouldn't be so much of an upload as surgically removing the brain from the original body and transplanting it into a new one. That would get around the problem of having to replicate the entire neural structure and all that.

The main area to get around with this method would be the degeneration of the original brain cells, since they would not be replicated in the new clone. There's research going on right now to understand why cells degenerate and die over time, so perhaps there'll be a way to halt this process so the brain cells stay healthy. Of course, if they can do that for brain cells, they'll probably be able to do it for the rest of the body as well and we won't have to worry about using the clones.

To be clear, by "they", I of course mean the Raelians.

Shake

This sounds very Matrix-esque. The idea of 'uploading' memories, thoughts, or even how to do things, is ridiculous. If you could 'learn' things as in The Matrix, what would be the joy of reading a book and forming your own opinions on a subject? And why wouldn't everyone just get some sort of standard courses 'uploaded' and start a job years earlier than we do now? Aside from physical difficulties, what would prevent an 8-year-old with say, accounting knowledged uploaded, from taking a job with an accounting firm?

The other film that pops to mind when talking about 'uploading' memories, etc. is Total Recall. Look at all the problems that caused! (I don't want to diverge into a debate as to whether or not AHnold's character was at the end, experiencing reality or stuck in his mind's uploaded adventure)

Having recently finished Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, I am convinced that the mind is simply too complex for today's technology for us to be able to upload information to it (short of the proven, time-tested method of experience and learning).

los

Total Recall.

Demosthenes

But that misses the point of uploading the human mind. The fundamental purpose of an upload is to provide an insurance against loss and destruction.

If you just transplant a brain to a new body, you're still at a risk from death by saying being hit by a truck or even from a stroke or something. An upload of your mind and having a suitable numbers of backups updated on a regular basis would give you a guarantee against any loss of your personality.

Got killed by a suicide bomber? Then you're resurrected in a new body from your backups. Depending on the last time you updated your backups, you may have memories leading up to the moment the bomb went off or you may be missing a couple hours of memories.

That's just assuming you're keeping to a faithful construction of a human brain carried around in a body. Others would prefer to live within virtual realites only limited by the power of computing and the human imagination. Removed from the limitations of the human flesh, there's nothing stopping people from changing themselves into something different, rather like butterflies from catepillars.

Here's where I start to speculate about the possible practical things we could do with uploading.

With uploading we could do away with brains, no more worrying about the fragile nature of neural tissue, we can have powerful mini computers in our skulls instead. Hell, we could jump off the tallest building and be dashed to pieces but survive anyway.

I'm sure it's making your skin crawl reading about that. I don't expect you go out right now and adopt that stance. Hell, it took me years to fully come to terms with the implications.

Let's say there's an outpost somewhere in the Jupiter system. To reach there, we could go on a barge for a few months while subjecting our bodies to the stress of space travel or we could instead read out our information, transmit it via gamma waves because radio would probably take too long due to the amount of information. The outpost then receives the information comprising our minds in a matter of hours, install our minds in rented bodies and we're up and about in less than a day instead of months or years it would have taken us to get to Jupiter the long route. It's not too difficult to extend that scenario to interstellar distances with probes setting up the necessary equipments in other star systems and transmitting ourselves to those systems.

Very speculative, yes and won't be bound to happen for a long time, but don't be surprised if those possibilities come true some day.

Just to whiz your appetite Closer

Personally, I think such a method of learning via uploading information is rather unlikely, because we have to process the information and allow it to integrate with the rest of our knowledge. It seems that if we were to try to upload information, it won't change anything except place the information directly into our brain. We still have to process and assimilate the information though perhaps vastly at an increased rate instead of if we were to do it the old fashioned way.

Assuming such a method is possible, then there's really nothing to stop an 8 year old child from taking a job at an accounting firm besides possible new child labor laws, job experience, and being able to relate to your co-workers at an age experience level. Maybe it'll become preferrable since you don't have to deal with the difficulties of adults but more easily manipulated children... Rather repungant yes.