[ExI] Bodies

jameschoate at austin.rr.com jameschoate at austin.rr.com
Wed Mar 10 14:45:13 UTC 2010


Your argument isn't very cutting edge either, further when one actually looks at the concept of 'personality transfer' it isn't as clear cut as you'd make it.

Consider that the first examples likely to see light will be destructive. It will require the stabilizing of the brain will require a fixing process like freezing or some sort of transfusion of a chemical through the structure. This requires two points to be recognized: it will require the destruction of the original and at best it would be suicide and in most cases would be considered a form of murder. There is little chance this will be popular. There are some other aspects that will not be copied using this technology as it does not capture the dynamics of the brain. So the copy will be 'fuzzy' at best and very generic most likely. It's applicability will be in understanding the basic structure of human physical architecture and a high level look at the architecture.

The next stage is to capture not only the dynamic pattern of activity at some point in time, followed by the destruction of the physical brain to determine structural dependencies (each brain is morphologically unique). That pattern of activity can be copied and used either directly in some emulated virtual brain machine or embedded in a more mobile device.

The problem with both of these is the destruction of the original.  That makes this approach, while necessary for follow on approaches to be developed, of little practical applicability. I'll call this generic approach 'Destructive Copying'. The fundamental problem is that what survives is a (questionable) copy of the original. That is not long term survival by anybodies definition. The claim the copy is the same as the original is just wrong.

What does that leave us with? A little introspection makes it clear that what we want is some form of 'Mental Migration' where we can move the mental process, both dynamic and morphological into another framework (and it can be real or virtual). The first is to copy that to a cache and it becomes available to use in multiple locations. However the original is still open to termination, so we're back to the question of is the copy the same as the original and the answer is again clearly no.  The alternate is a  'Direct Migration' where the dynamic and morphological of the original is transfered in real time to another location while at the same removing it from the original body. This again is at best suicide of the original body and many might consider it murder. While this at first blush appears to meet the 'don't destroy the original' upon reflection we see it is a near miss.

What are we missing? Re-integration.

We take the Mental Migration approach and add a single additional concept, re-integration of the mental models from different instances. When this technology will take off is when I can take a snapshot of my mind and copy it into other instances. Then at a latter time re-integrate the experiences and thoughts of those instances in any combination of original and copy that I choose. This puts us almost at the point of using brain transfer for life extension rather than 'Copy Persistence', which are not the same thing at all.

What might that missing element be? Real-time interaction.

When besides making those copies we can re-integrate them in real time such that the original mind becomes a component of a hive of minds that are acting in concert at the same time all the time. This also opens up the potential to re-integrate groups of individuals (ala Borg) into a single hive mind.

---- Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote: 
> The recent discussion doesn't seem cutting edge.
> 
> I suspect that virtually all humans will abandon physical reality entirely.
> 
> You can see this starting with Second Life and WoW.

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