[ExI] Concerning mind uploading

[Ben Zaiboc]

Hi, J?r?me.

I've heard quite a few people express the same doubts about uploading.  I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding about what life as an upload would presumably be like.  Nobody is proposing that an upload would be a 'disembodied mind', with no inputs or outputs, a purely mental existence. 

I think of it this way:  Currently, humans have a brain that is linked to a body that exists in an environment.  These links are all via neurons, transmitting signals to and from the body's sense organs, muscles and endocrine glands.  This means that absolutely every sensation we ever have comes into the brain as neural signals, and absolutely every action we ever make starts out as signals from the brain.  We are a brain-in-a-box now. We always have been.

So, the experience of being and acting in any environment, 'real' or 'simulated', is completely dependent on the signals coming in to and going out from the brain.  This makes no difference to whether the brain is biological or electronic (or anything else), and it makes no difference whether the body and environment are 'real' or 'simulated'.  

An upload's mind will run on some kind of computer, and will have inputs and outputs just like a biological brain.  The great thing is that those inputs and outputs could be linked to the 'real world', or to a 'simulation' (I'm putting these terms in quotes because I think that we'll find the distinction becomes increasingly blurred), and the fidelity will be something that we can constantly improve, up to and beyond what we currently experience.  If you wanted, your simulated body could be an exact copy of your original biological one, and you could live in a simulated world indistinguishable from this current one.  Or you could inhabit a robotic body in the 'real world'. Or any combination.

There's no theoretical reason why an upload couldn't inhabit a biological body (although I see little point in this), in which case you probably wouldn't even notice the difference.  Only an x-ray scan would reveal that there was a computer in your head (or somewhere) instead of a couple of pounds of cholesterol-rich jelly.

I fully expect that life as an upload will be much, *much* more rich, intense and satisfying than life as a biological human.  And that's apart from the other advantages, such as taking backups, not dying from stupid things like heart attacks, being able to access and alter your own thought processes directly, etc.

Ben Zaiboc