This Man Is Not a Cyborg. Yet.

[cronus]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/busin ... ZbzVFC5mYQ

This Man Is Not a Cyborg. Yet.

GET right up close to Dmitry Itskov and sniff all you like — you will not pick up even the faintest hint of crazy. He is soft-spoken and a bit shy, but expansive once he gets talking, and endearingly mild-mannered. He never seems ruffled, no matter what question you ask. Even if you ask the obvious one, which he has encountered more than a few times since 2011, when he started “this project,” as he sometimes calls it.
Namely: Are you insane?

“I hear that often,” he said with a smile, over lunch one recent afternoon in Manhattan. “There are quotes from people like Arthur C. Clarke and Gandhi saying that when people come up with new ideas they’re called ‘nuts.’ Then everybody starts believing in the idea and nobody can remember a time when it seemed strange.”

It is hard to imagine a day when the ideas championed by Mr. Itskov, 32, a Russian multimillionaire and former online media magnate, will not seem strange, or at least far-fetched and unfeasible. His project, called the 2045 Initiative, for the year he hopes it is completed, envisions the mass production of lifelike, low-cost avatars that can be uploaded with the contents of a human brain, complete with all the particulars of consciousness and personality.

What Mr. Itskov is striving for makes wearable computers, like Google Glass, seem as about as futuristic as Lincoln Logs. This would be a digital copy of your mind in a nonbiological carrier, a version of a fully sentient person that could live for hundreds or thousands of years. Or longer. Mr. Itskov unabashedly drops the word “immortality” into conversation.

(continued)

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Artificial hips were just the slippery slope.

[NineBerry]

You can't smell crazy but you can see crazy when you read it.

[cronus]

Once your brain is uploaded to a chip you can safely dispose of your biological frame in the incinerator they have on premises, or if you are into renewables in a deep way the biscuit factory....making those green biscuits.

[Trinity]

But will the uploaded brain with all aspects of a person's complex character be able to evolve and develop as our brains' plasticity allows? If not, then is it safe to say that we could no longer learn from our mistakes and be stuck in a cycle of well, stuckiness?!

[cronus]

But will the uploaded brain with all aspects of a person's complex character be able to evolve and develop as our brains' plasticity allows? If not, then is it safe to say that we could no longer learn from our mistakes and be stuck in a cycle of well, stuckiness?!

Using tomorrows nano-scale technologies then it is possible they'll fine grain the artificial brain so that it more than a match for everything the normal human brain can do?

[NineBerry]

It's not enough to simulate the brain, you need to simulate all glands in the body and more. Also, a problem seems to be trying to simulate consciousness when most of stuff happening in a human being is subconsciousness

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Even if you simulate all the functions of the body you don't have the original in all that hardware, you have a copy. Take a photograph of a tree, then destroy the photograph. The tree remains.

[NineBerry]

Not if you hack down the tree, turn it into paper and print the photograph on that paper a million times.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Not if you hack down the tree, turn it into paper and print the photograph on that paper a million times.

But that's not the same thing as claiming the copy is the original, now is it?

[NineBerry]

There is no original. And there is no spoon.

To be serious. I question all this talk about persons. We are an illusion.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

There is no original. And there is no spoon.

To be serious. I question all this talk about persons. We are an illusion.

Well, you are. I'm the one and only.

[Blind groper]

Yeah.

The flaw in all these discussions is the idea that the copy is the original. If you copy your memory and consciousness onto a computer, and then die, you are dead. Short and simple. The copy is not you.

[Jason]

A stream of consciousness true believer! I thought they were extinct.

[pErvinalia]

There is no original. And there is no spoon.

To be serious. I question all this talk about persons. We are an illusion.

Yep. Uploading your brain into a computer and then dying in your sleep... you aren't going to wake up the next morning in virtual reality. You will still be dead. There will be a computer/robot getting around that thinks it's you, and for all intents and purposes is you. But the you who died in your sleep won't know shit about that.