In Wired this morning, I read the piece "Immortality Through Google" which is a little less far-out than it sounds. The article is mainly about artists designing their own burial urns and a kind of "artistic" website called "The Ego Machine."
But the title stimulated the memory of an afternoon fifteen years ago. Timothy Leary called me from Los Angeles (I lived in Santa Cruz, California at the time). He had just read a piece in the New Yorker about about a scientist named Hans Morovac. "No Loyalty to DNA" by Brad Letha's. Mora vac was publicizing his new (at that time) book Mind Children. Timothy was excited about the piece because Morovac, an MIT scientist introduced a new concept which came to be called "mind uploading." Here is an excerpt from the New Yorker article:
Isn't it only a matter of time, Moravec asks, before we can transfer, or "download," our minds into computers? Copies could then be made of copies and stored in separate, secure places, not all of them on the earth -- a procedure that would virtually insure our immortality. He foresees a number of ways in which downloading might take place. A person could wear each day a miniaturized observational device, whose data, compiled over years and years, would serve as the memory bank of a new intellect. Or you might enter the hospital for brain surgery to be performed by a robot whose hands are microscopically precise and whose command of speech allows the two of you to proceed collaboratively. Since the brain registers no pain when it is subjected to incision, you could be fully conscious during the entire operation. Equipped with an encyclopedic understanding of human neural architecture, and proceeding millimeter by millimeter, the robot surgeon would develop a program that would model the behavior of a discrete layer of brain tissue. This program would produce signals equivalent to those flashing among the neurons in the area under scrutiny, and a series of cables would allow the robot to create "simulations," in which the program is substituted for the layer of brain tissue. The simulation process would be analogous to what's now available in sophisticated audio shops, where a customer can test and compare components at the push of a button and without breaking the flow of the music.
In the book, Morovac explains that the best kind of robot to do this kind of brain-picking would be one with thousands of arms, each one perhaps plucking the information in a single neuron.
The idea of "spidering" the brain has at least a semantic resemblance to the Google "spidering" the web.
From the early days of the web, there has been a page a Mind Uploading Page Since that time, others have picked up on the theme with one of the best on Foresight Institute site, "Mind Uploading
compiled by Robert A. Freitas Jr."
The idea of achieving some kind of immortality beyond this body sounds like a good idea but having my brain plucked apart by a robot spider has always left me somewhat ambivalent. My feelings about these prospects could be summed up by a well-known remark made by comic Woody Allen.
Allen reflecing on one of his two favorite topics said: "I am not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens."
Recent Comments