Feather

Well it appears we're pretty much in agreement, then.

Marduk

"And the scientific problems are vast, as well. The process you're talking about would require not just breakthroughs in technology, but breakthroughs in theoretical understanding, which are much slower and tougher to come by."

I read a book caled "The Physics of Star Trek" by Krauss (I think that was his name) Anyway while he was talking about the "Transporter" I still think it would apply to this transfer of a human mind/brain to an android. The amount of data you would need to store and transfer would take a computer the size of the Galaxy. The location of each atom, the instructions to move and reposition etc.

Corwin

Not really. It would take a fundamentally different KIND of computer... but it doesn't follow that it would have to be any bigger. Quantum computers could manage data operations at that level, (there have been suggestions that the brain itself is a quantum computing system... divided opinions on that score, nobody's really sure which camp is right.)

elwoodblues

This could very well be. In fact, I'd be quite surprised if the brain didn't take some advantage of effects on the quantum level. But the fact that we can't say for sure either way right now (and have very little experience and knowledge about quantum effects in general) says quite a bit about how little we know.

tronvillain

Presumably you mean that the brain may take advantage of quantum effects in a way that something the liver does not, which I have yet to see any evidence for.

marduck:
Ah, but that assumes that transferring a human mind into an android would involve every atom in the brain, when the task could potentially be accomplished at a much higher level.

elwoodblues

Correct, and I haven't seen any evidence either. What I ALSO haven't seen is a compelling argument that the brain cannot employ quantum effects in the same way that a theoretical quantum computer could. The fact that these things are not well understood and very, VERY weird has no bearing on that possibility. The fact that quantum computation has so much potential power says quite a bit to the possibility. If there is a mechanism that can lend that much power with very little resource input, you can almost guarantee that evolution will hit on a way to harness it.

The Lone Ranger

I suspect that it'll be a long time before it will be possible to download a person's consciousness into an android brain, even if such a thing is deemed desirable.

If "immortality" is the goal, a more practical approach, it seems to me, is to work on biological immortality. Consider: an awful lot of the aging process is genetic in nature. Most body cells seem to be "programmed" to reproduce only a certain number of times. Some of the deterioration that comes with age appears to be due to pleiotropy -- many genes have multiple effects; in some cases, it appears that the effects of a particular gene are good for you early in life, but bad for you later in life. (Once you've reached the age where you're unlikely to reproduce anyway, natural selection's ability to weed out deleterious alleles or modify their function is sharply reduced.)

The thing is, not all animals show senescence as they age. Tortoises, for example, appear to live until something kills them. They show no apparent signs of declining health or fertility as they age, they simply grow more slowly.

We know that neural tissue can regenerate and be replaced in adulthood in quite a lot of bird species, so the loss of brain tissue as we age does not seem to be a biological inevitability.

In short, if only we knew enough about human genetics, biochemistry, and physiology, it might well prove possible to genetically engineer humans to be effectively immortal.

In the long run, that might prove more practical a route to immortality than downloading our brains into androids.

***

If such a procedure is perfected in my lifetime (highly unlikely) and I sign up for it, does this mean I have to start wearing a long coat wherever I go and carrying a sword?

Cheers,

Michael

cricket

lol 'start'? Ive always pictured you like this already.

The Lone Ranger

*Chuckle* You have no idea.

(Actually, I do like long, flowing clothes, and I like Winter because it gives me an excuse to dress that way. And I do own a katana, which I keep nice and sharp.)

Cheers,

Michael

David Bowden

Yes, I think this will come to fruition, if we understand "universal fabricators" to mean molecule-scale construction, not sub-atomic construction. I can't imagine how nanobots could manufacture neutrinos.

Yes, but "the level of human beings" is a tough thing to define. I think AI is possible where the AI has the capacity to speak and reason compatibly and with mutual benefit with an intelligent human being. There will probably always be debate as to the extent to which AI and human intellegence are similar "under the hood." But I think it's not only possible, but almost a certainty that machines will emerge with communication and problem-solving abilities that mesh with humans'. I think this will come about as the result of both direct human design and gradual machine self-adaptation, and I can't imagine what "beyond" will actually be like, although I can imagine a lot of different possibilities, some good and some really bad for Homo sapiens.

Yup. I foresee this happening with ever more organs and systems in the near future. Directly replacing the whole brain or large chunks of it with electronics is perhaps too complicated a procedure to undergo without risking severe damage to the mind of the subject, but that doesn't mean another solution isn't possible.

I wonder if we won't soon be "off-loading" a great deal of our important brainwork to machines outside the skull (e.g., super-duper AI palmpilot descendants or a million personal nanobot agents, or both). If so, then eventually enough of the individual's personality would be redundantly functioning outside the "wet" brain for personality to find Homo sapiens embodiment more hassle than anything else, and it would be a trivial matter to shut off the biological "you" and continue on in whatever modular form inherits your personality and legal rights. These post-humans would not necessarily eschew humanlike bodies - but surely the brains of such entities wouldn't be simple replacements of what we now have.

If you mean can a "person" survive a trip that starts on Earth and finishes at a nearby star system... yes, I believe it's possible. But not for a purely organic Homo Sapiens, unless hibernation becomes possible. But that would be a horribly expensive method of shipping intelligent persons from star system to star system.

More likely, IMO, is sending out rapid and tiny probes (or swarms of them) to other star systems, where they would use local resources to reproduce themselves and also to produce a lot of specialized gear capable of producing and sustaining whatever intelligence-bearing organisms it can engineer from instructions contained in memory or sent to it via communication signals from Earth.

Once that groundwork is laid, we can send AIs or the sort of post-human "persons" described in my answer to question 3, over communications networks at the speed of light. Since immortality might be a given, "lifetime" would become a quaint word with little practical significance. This scenario would pretty much require everything in questions 1-3 working out in favor of the survival of humans and/or their heirs.

-David