Dobromir Rahnev: Is it possible to upload the awareness of your mind to a computer? The concept, cool but perhaps a bit scary, is known as uploading spirit. Think of it as a way to make a copy of your brain, a transfer of your mind and consciousness to a computer.
You would live there digital, perhaps forever. You would be aware of yourself, you would keep your memories and still feel like you. But you wouldn’t have a body.
Within that simulated environment you could do everything you do in real life – eating, car driving, sports. You could also do things that are impossible in the real world, such as walking through walls, fly like a bird or travel to other planets. The only limit is what science can realistically simulate.
Executable? Theoretically, uploading in mind should be possible. Yet you may wonder how it can happen. After all, researchers hardly started understanding the brain.
Nevertheless, science has a track record to convert theoretical possibilities into reality. The fact that a concept seems terrible, unimaginably difficult does not mean that it is impossible. Consider that science brought humanity to the moon, the human genome has sesequenced and eradicated smallpox. Those things too were once considered unlikely.
If a brain scientist studies perception, I fully expect that one day I will upload a reality. But from today we are nowhere close.
Living in a laptop
The brain is often considered the most complex object in the well -known universe. Replication of all that complexity will be extremely difficult.
One requirement: the uploaded brain need the same inputs that it always had. In other words, the external world must be available.
Even dressed in a computer, you would still need a simulation of your senses, a reproduction of the ability to see, hear, smell, touch, feel – and move, blink, detect your heartbeat, set your circadian rhythm and do thousands of other things.
But why is that? Could you not just exist in a pure mental bubble, in the computer without sensory input?
Removing people from their senses, as they place in total darkness, or in a room without sound, is known as sensory deprivation, and it is considered a form of torture. People who have difficulty feeling their physical signals – thirsty, hunger, pain, an itching – often have challenges in the field of mental health.
That is why the simulation of your senses and the digital environment in which you are located must be exceptionally accurate. Even small disturbances can have serious mental consequences.
Billions of Pinheads scanning
The first task for a successful mind -upload: scanning and then maping the full 3D structure of the human brain. This requires the equivalent of an extremely advanced MRI machine that can describe the brain in an advanced way.
At the moment, scientists are only in the very early stages of brain mapping – including the entire brain of a fly and small parts of a mouse brain.
A complete map of the human brain can be possible in a few decades. But even the capture of the identities of all 86 billion neurons, all smaller than a pinhead, plus their trillion connections, is still not enough.
Uploading this information to a computer will not achieve much. That is because every neuron constantly adjusts its functioning, and that must also be modeled.
It is difficult to know how many levels of researchers should go to make the simulated brain work. Is it enough to stop at a molecular level? Nobody knows at the moment.
2045? 2145? Or later?
Knowing how the brains calculate things can offer a shortcut. Researchers could only simulate the essential parts of the brain, and not all biological peculiarities. It is easier to produce a new car, knowing how a car works, compared to trying to scan and replicate an existing car without any knowledge of its inner operation.
However, this approach requires that scientists find out how the brain creates thoughts – how collections come from thousands to millions of neurons to perform the calculations that bring the human mind to life. It is difficult to express how far we are.
Here is another way: replace the 86 billion real neurons with artificial, one by one. That approach would make uploading much easier. At the moment, however, scientists cannot even replace any real neuron with an artificial one.
But keep in mind that the pace of technology speeds up exponentially. It is reasonable to expect spectacular improvements in computing power and artificial intelligence in the coming decades.
Another thing is certain: uploading spirit will certainly not have a problem to find financing. Many billionaires seem happy to separate with a lot of their money for an opportunity to live forever.
Although the challenges are huge and the path forward is uncertain, I believe that one day it will be an upload of mind a reality. The most optimistic predictions determine the year 2045, only 20 years from now on. Others say the end of this century.
But in my opinion both predictions are probably too optimistic. I would be shocked if the uploading of Geest will work for the next 100 years. But it can happen in 200 – which means that the first person who lives can be born in your life forever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DWNVX1NYUA
Dobromir Rahnev, Assistantial teacher Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology
This article has been re -published from The conversation Under a Creative Commons license. Read the Original article.
