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Substrate-independent minds

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Imagine a future in which your mind never dies. When your body begins to fail, a machine scans your brain in enough detail to capture its unique wiring. A computer system uses that data to simulate your brain. It won’t need to replicate every last detail. Like the phonograph, it will strip away the irrelevant physical structures, leaving only the essence of the patterns. And then there is a second you, with your memories, your emotions, your way of thinking and making decisions, translated onto computer hardware as easily as we copy a text file these days.
That second version of you could live in a simulated world and hardly know the difference. You could walk around a simulated city street, feel a cool breeze, eat at a café, talk to other simulated people, play games, watch movies, enjoy yourself. Pain and disease would be programmed out of existence. If you’re still interested in the world outside your simulated playground, you could Skype yourself into board meetings or family Christmas dinners.
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Virtual afterlives will transform humanity – Michael Graziano – Aeon


It is tempting to ignore these ideas as just another science-fiction trope, a nerd fantasy. But something about it won’t leave me alone. I am a neuroscientist. I study the brain. For nearly 30 years, I’ve studied how sensory information gets taken in and processed, how movements are controlled and, lately, how networks of neurons might compute the spooky property of awareness. I find myself asking, given what we know about the brain, whether we really could upload someone’s mind to a computer. And my best guess is: yes, almost certainly. That raises a host of further questions, not least: what will this technology do to us psychologically and culturally?
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It will utterly transform humanity, probably in ways that are more disturbing than helpful. It will change us far more than the internet did, though perhaps in a similar direction. Even if the chances of all this coming to pass were slim, the implications are so dramatic that it would be wise to think them through seriously. But I’m not sure the chances are slim. In fact, the more I think about this possible future, the more it seems inevitable.
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"I think it very likely – in fact inevitable – that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of the universe"

Paul Davies, British-born theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist and Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and Co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative at Arizona State University,
 
Constance said:
What is it about the brain that it continues to function even when most of it is missing? It does happen.
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You Would need to cite the specific examples as there may be more than one reason, but in the exposés I've seen, it's the brain's ability to adapt that explains it's continued functioning. The examples I've seen on TV also indicate that the person is not able to function without any signs of abnormality.
 
I recall a conversation with my wife some years ago when our kids were born, telling her that one day in the near future, our kids will be able to access and watch on a screen, all their childhood memories.
 
Those of us who are non-believing heathens might prefer porting our minds to robot bodies before the natural expiration date on our organic selves. It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that a digital representation of your mind, no matter how accurate, is still “you” in some sense. But I think that fear will go away as soon as we see the first robot that thinks and acts exactly like Uncle Bob did before he made the jump. If Uncle Bob the robot acts human enough, we’ll come to see him as the same entity that once inhabited an organic shell. When technology is sufficiently advanced, we’ll get past the magical thinking about spirits and souls and the specialness of having organic parts.

To me, the most interesting possibility for the future involves porting human minds to software that includes entirely simulated realities. Such a program – a digital mind if you will – could live in an entirely artificial reality and experience what seems to be a genuine human life for the rest of eternity, or at least as long as the software keeps running. The freaky part is that if such a thing will someday be possible – and I think it will – then it follows that the time after it happens will be infinitely long whereas the history of time before it happens is finite. So it follows that there is an infinitely greater chance you are already the simulation and not a human who is reading this paragraph and contemplating it. Weird.
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Dilbert’s Scott Adams: Choose Your Immortality | TIME.com
 
The mind-uploading solution
The very high cost of a crewed space mission comes from the need to ensure the survival and safety of the humans on-board and the need to travel at extremely high speeds to ensure it’s done within a human lifetime.
One way to overcome that is to do without the wetware bodies of the crew, and send only their minds to the stars — their “software” — uploaded to advanced circuitry, augmented by AI subsystems in the starship’s processing system.
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It’s also known as “whole brain emulation” and “substrate-independent minds” — the astronaut’s memories, thoughts, feelings, personality, and “self” would be copied to an alternative processing substrate — such as a digital, analog, or quantum computer.
An e-crew — a crew of human uploads implemented in solid-state electronic circuitry — will not require air, water, food, medical care, or radiation shielding, and may be able to withstand extreme acceleration. So the size and weight of the starship will be dramatically reduced.
Combined advances in neuroscience and computer science suggest that mind uploading technology could be developed in this century, as noted in a recent Special Issue on Mind Uploading of the International Journal of Machine Consciousness).
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Canned “E” Primates for Interstellar Travel and a Possible Destination for Them | Dad2059's Webzine of Science Fiction, Science Fact and Esoterica
 
And now? Now, he works at Google. Ray Kurzweil who believes that we can live for ever and that computers will gain what looks like a lot like consciousness in a little over a decade is now Google's director of engineering. The announcement of this, last year, was extraordinary enough. To people who work with tech or who are interested in tech and who are familiar with the idea that Kurzweil has popularised of "the singularity" – the moment in the future when men and machines will supposedly converge – and know him as either a brilliant maverick and visionary futurist, or a narcissistic crackpot obsessed with longevity, this was headline news in itself.
But it's what came next that puts this into context. It's since been revealed that Google has gone on an unprecedented shopping spree and is in the throes of assembling what looks like the greatest artificial intelligence laboratory on Earth; a laboratory designed to feast upon a resource of a kind that the world has never seen before: truly massive data. Our data. From the minutiae of our lives.
Google has bought almost every machine-learning and robotics company it can find, or at least, rates. It made headlines two months ago, when it bought Boston Dynamics, the firm that produces spectacular, terrifyingly life-like military robots, for an "undisclosed" but undoubtedly massive sum. It spent $3.2bn (£1.9bn) on smart thermostat maker Nest Labs. And this month, it bought the secretive and cutting-edge British artificial intelligence startup DeepMind for £242m.
And those are just the big deals. It also bought Bot & Dolly, Meka Robotics, Holomni, Redwood Robotics and Schaft, and another AI startup, DNNresearch. It hired Geoff Hinton, a British computer scientist who's probably the world's leading expert on neural networks. And it has embarked upon what one DeepMind investor told the technology publication Re/code two weeks ago was "a Manhattan project of AI". If artificial intelligence was really possible, and if anybody could do it, he said, "this will be the team". The future, in ways we can't even begin to imagine, will be Google's.
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Are the robots about to rise? Google's new director of engineering thinks so… | Technology | The Observer
 
What would you give for a retinal chip that let you see in the dark or for a next-generation cochlear implant that let you hear any conversation in a noisy restaurant, no matter how loud? Or for a memory chip, wired directly into your brain's hippocampus, that gave you perfect recall of everything you read? Or for an implanted interface with the Internet that automatically translated a clearly articulated silent thought ("the French sun king") into an online search that digested the relevant Wikipedia page and projected a summary directly into your brain?
Science fiction? Perhaps not for very much longer. Brain implants today are where laser eye surgery was several decades ago. They are not risk-free and make sense only for a narrowly defined set of patients—but they are a sign of things to come.
Unlike pacemakers, dental crowns or implantable insulin pumps, neuroprosthetics—devices that restore or supplement the mind's capacities with electronics inserted directly into the nervous system—change how we perceive the world and move through it. For better or worse, these devices become part of who we are
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The Future of Brain Implants - WSJ.com
 
Uploading Memories and Other Mysteries of the Future – New Day - CNN.com Blogs

Futurist and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explores the seemingly endless possibilities of manufacturing memories, the potential for discoveries in brain mapping and a future where we can see each other's dreams in his new book "The Future of the Mind."
"Just last year, for first time in history, we uploaded a memory into a mouse," he said on "New Day" Friday. "Next we’ll upload into primates, for example, chimpanzees. And then we want to create a brain pacemaker for people with Alzheimer's disease so they can upload memory of who they are, who their children are, where they live. And then after that, who knows? "
SEE FULL INTERVIEW ABOVE
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Excellent QandA session in the video
 
Pilots use their MINDS to fly a plane | Mail Online

And while i know Corso is suspect to many in this genre, he mentions a similar technology in his book

There was also a type of headband which, when worn by researchers, made some dizzy, some sick, and others saw lights and their vision was affected. The research scientists later determined that these headbands acted as an interface between thoughts and the vehicle's guidance system, an idea which has only recently begun to be used in aircraft using stealth technology.


VUFORS - Book Review - "The Day After Roswell"
 
Bioengineers Make Functional 3D Brain-Like Tissue Model

Rather than reconstructing a whole-brain network, the Tufts team created a modular design that replicated fundamental features most relevant to the brain's tissue-level physiological functions.
Each module combined two materials with different properties: a stiffer porous scaffold made of cast silk protein on which the cortical neurons, derived from rats, could anchor and a softer collagen gel matrix that allowed axons to penetrate and connect three dimensionally. Circular modules of cast silk were punched into doughnuts, then assembled into concentric rings to simulate the laminal layers of the neocortex. Each layer was seeded with neurons independently before assembly, without the need for adhesive or glue. The doughnuts were then immersed in the collagen gel matrix.
The silk-collagen gel combination provided an optimum microenvironment for neural network formation and function. "The stiffness of the silk biomaterial could be tuned to accommodate the cortical neurons and the different types of gels, maintaining both stability in culture and brain-like tissue elasticity," said the paper's first author, Min D. Tang-Schomer, Ph.D., post-doctoral scholar in biomedical engineering at Tufts.

Bioengineers Make Functional 3D Brain-Like Tissue Model
 
Scientists Discover How To Manipulate Memories and Erase Fear
Thursday, August 28, 2014

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have made an astonishing breakthrough: they believe that they now have the ability to erase feelings of fear or anxiety.The researchers discovered which brain circuits attach emotions to memories but, more importantly, they worked out how to reverse this link.

The brain cells are triggered by a technique called optogentics which uses pulses of blue light to trigger the neurons into firing.





Scientists find secret of reversing bad memories - Telegraph
 
mike said:
Scientists Discover How To Manipulate Memories and Erase Fear
Thursday, August 28, 2014

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have made an astonishing breakthrough: they believe that they now have the ability to erase feelings of fear or anxiety.The researchers discovered which brain circuits attach emotions to memories but, more importantly, they worked out how to reverse this link.

The brain cells are triggered by a technique called optogentics which uses pulses of blue light to trigger the neurons into firing.





Scientists find secret of reversing bad memories - Telegraph
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And watch how fast this is used by the Military ..
 
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