No, really, from Georgia Rose at Vice:
Humans, if you hadn’t already noticed, have stopped evolving. As David Attenborough recently reminded us, our species is the first-by our free will-to remove itself from the process of natural selection, therefore stunting evolution. That, accompanied by Steven Hawking and Elon Musk’s theories that robots will supersede human intelligence and become our biggest existential threat, paints a pretty bleak vision of the future.
Neuroscientist Randal Koene has the answer. Instead of allowing robots to become our cold, lifeless overlords, why don’t we just become partially robotic ourselves? Koene is currently working on whole brain emulation, the process of being able to upload our minds to a computer. By mapping the brain, figuring out its mechanisms and replicating this activity in code, humans could-theoretically-live on indefinitely.
I recently gave Randal a call to try and get my head around his ideas. More.
Is it true that we are expected to believe that humans have stopped evolving? Then what about Nick Wade and the Troublesome Inheritance?
Anyway, a friend reminds us that that was the theme of the movie Transcendence.
But, what happens if the support staff make a mistake and scramble a geek’s brain files with the files of the Relationships TV airhead? That’s the frite part, the one we never wanna see. 😉
Follow UD News at Twitter!
Good luck to Randal Koene! That is if he can come anywhere close to doing it before he dies of depressive discouragement.
This has been the Atheistic version of hope for everlasting life for years, to have one’s brain uploaded into a Super-Computer
Dr. Egnor has been doing a series on the erroneous belief that computers are capable of consciousness at ENV. Here’s his latest:
Here are the previous articles by Dr. Egnor on the subject:
Software engineer Erik Larson also did a series at ENV on the erroneous belief that computers are capable of consciousness. Here is one of his articles:
This errouneous belief that computers are capable of consciousness goes back to at least Alan Turing. Alan Turing, who invented computers, infamously thought that his brain was merely a ‘Turing Machine’. This following poem teases the ‘merely a machine’ notion of Turing
Yet Turing, although I don’t think he ever actually admitted it, actually ended up proving that Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem was valid for computers, and thus the notion that computers are capable of consciousness has been invalidated since at least that time:
Kurt Godel stated the implications for the incompleteness theorem, as it related to computers and consciousness, as such:
Moreover, it is found to be a physical requirement that memories/information be stored ‘non-physically’, on a ‘spiritual’ basis, rather than a physical basis because of the following,,,
First, it is important to note that a human brain has, (conservatively), more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth.
Second, it is important to note that computers with very many switches have a huge problem with heat,,,
Yet the brain, though having as many switches as all the computers, routers, and internet connections on earth, in a very confined space no less, does not have such a problem with heat,,,
Moreover, a certain percentage of the heat generated by computers is because of something known as Landauer’s principle.
Moreover, Landauer’s principle implies that when a certain number of arithmetical operations per second have been exceeded, the computer will produce so much heat that the heat is impossible to dissipate.
Thus, the brain is either operating on reversible computation principles that no computer (or computer engineer) can come close to emulating (Charles Bennett; IBM), or, as is much more likely, the brain is not erasing information from its memory, as the material computer is required to do during arithmetical operations, because our memories are stored on the ‘spiritual’ level rather than on a material level. This argument has been developed more formally here:
To support this view that ‘memory/information’ is not being stored in the brain, one of the most common features of extremely deep near death experiences is the ‘life review’ where every minute detail of a person’s life, every word, every deed, is reviewed in the presence of God.
At the 17:45 minute mark of the following Near Death Experience documentary, the Life Review portion of the Near Death Experience is highlighted, with several testimonies relating how every word, deed, and action, of a person’s life (all the ‘information’ of a person’s life) is gone over in the presence of God:
What brain?
🙂