[ExI] The Parallel Man

[Ben Zaiboc]

Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 6:20 AM, Ben Zaiboc <bbenzai at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > This is my preferred uploading scenario, if it can be
> made a reality, and I think it would appeal to a wider set
> of people than the upload scenarios that put the willies up
> the crypto-dualists, like destructive scanning.
> 
> Not to mention, it has a bit more historical
> precedent.  Replacing
> one's brain bit
> by bit is a famous philosophical scenario posed quite some
> time ago.  
> 
> > Crucially, it's an experiment that a sceptic could
> perform, with confidence that they could just disconnect and
> continue as normal, at any time. ?They could find out 'what
> it's like to be an upload', in a completely reversible way.
> 
> Not sure it's reversible.  Once a biological neuron is
> disconnected,
> what happens to it?


This proposal isn't the same as Moravec's replacement scenario, and there is no disconnection of neurons.

The idea is to create a simultaneous and parallel information-processing system that 'shadows' what the bio brain is doing, adjusting itself and learning until it can do this shadowing perfectly.  The reversability of the process lies in the fact that there is no hardware in the brain itself at all (beyond the ion channels or whatever), and no damage is done to the neurons, no disconnection, no removal, nothing like that.  

The 'shutting off' of parts of the bio brain would be via local anaesthesia, transcranial magnetic or electrical stimulation (or should that be depression?), or something similar.  Something that soon wears off, leaving the bit of brain none the worse.  And it would only be used to test if the subjective experience of running in bio or in silico was indistinguishable, and if not, to investigate why not.  Who knows, it might even demonstrate that uploading is actually not possible!  Not that I'd put money on that, of course.

Even after the subject was happy that the process was complete, there would be no need to do anything to the bio brain (unless you wanted to), and you could happily go for decades with a 'twin-brain', the bio and synthetic parts in perfect harmony.  I'd expect that anyone with this would want to go further, though, and start extending the synthetic part way beyond what a purely bio brain could be capable of, and eventually the whole system would be so much bigger than just the bio component that it would be desirable to ditch it, and go fully synthetic (body as well as brain).  That's when you can start cooking with gas!  Crank the clock speed up, or whatever the equivalent would be, for a start.

I liked the idea of using 3 separate chemical gradients for obtaining a neuron GUID, that's a good one.  I'm also thinking along the lines of the way NMR works, for outputting neuron activity.  Something that can be detected by an external scanning mechanism, rotating through all the ID channels, that is activated only when the neuron fires.

Crikey, it would have to be fast! 300 billion neurons, isn't it? spike time of a couple of milliseconds?  So.. teraherz region.  Okaaaay, maybe another idea...

Ben Zaiboc