Time Line

Uploading Links

Uploading

Mind Uploading

The Consequences Of
Uploading The
Human Brain

Virtual Brains

In the minds of science fiction writers and transhumanists there is concept called uploading. Uploading refers to copying the contents of a human brain to a computer or cloned body thus creating a kind of serial immortality. As ethics are to morality, uploading would become the secular form of afterlife. Man creates his own heaven. I have always questioned religion, and now I find troubling problems with this humanistic form a life ever lasting.

Powerful imaginations have speculated on endless possibilites that uploading could provide mankind, and for the most part they are appealing futures. Science fiction writers have run wild with this concept leading to a lot of good stories, and down to earth science have made uploading a new quest in scientific research. The concept varies. Roughly there are two types of uploads: safe scans and destructive copies.

Scans are like backups. Imagine being scanned in 2024. You die in 2026. A clone of your body is grown and they upload your 2024 scan into the clone in 2027. That body will wake up feeling like you from 2024. The destructive copy involves taking your brain and running it through some kind of cellular deconstruction analyzer. This is done just after you die, or when you are ready to go over to a new body. Your personality would be transferred to a clone or computer.

A great variation on this idea is the short story, "Think Like a Dinosaur." Interstellar travelers are deconstructed and reconstructed with the rule that no person can exist in two locations at once. This story illustrates perfectly the overlooked fact of most uploading proposals: the old body still has to die, and dying is no fun.

I find the idea of uploading to be a fascinating concept. Not because I think it will ever happen, but because people really do want to make a copy of themselves. Me, I'd prefer the old fashion form of immortality where I just live forever, because no matter how the copy is made, I'm going to die. I find the subject interesting because the topic leads to philosophical self-examination.

The real issue here is defining what a person is and what is personality. I have to ask: is there anything about personality worth copying? What are the uploading people trying to save? If I look at myself I wonder what components make up me? I like to read science fiction. Is building a clone or a computer replacement worth transferring a fondness for futuristic ideas? I prefer brunettes to blondes? Gattaca is one of my favorite movies. I have a lot of memories of people that are dead or will be dead. I have lots of opinions. What's going to be saved? Is uploading just preserving opinions?

The more I think about this concept, the more philosophical ideas it brings up. Obviously, the Me of things is a mechanism that looks and perceives the world. We are all video cameras with attitudes. Each of us could film the same event, but we each have a different emotional reaction to what's being filmed. Another way to look at it is the world has 6 billion cameras filming it from a richly diverse group of angles. Our personalities are the opinions we've made about the shots we've taken.

Up till now, all the cameras are disposable. What the uploaders want is a way to save the film, and keep adding to that stock of footage. I don't know if this has any value, but it's an interesting concept to think about. Currently people are like single processor computers; everyone does their own thing. But what if we could develop a program like the SETI@Home program that coordinates the work of millions of computers? What could we do with that information? It might just produce a poll of opinions, or it might produce new information.

I've started an experiment. I'm using my website as a poor man's uploading system. I'm going to upload as much information about me as I can find. I'm not doing this for egotistical reasosn, or at least I hope not, but because I think it's a neat experiment and I'm just using myself because I'm the easiest person I know to research.

This experiment will teach me at least two things. First, I will learn what details make up my life. Second, I hope to encounter other people playing this game and see what they have learned. I can remember very little about my sixth grade class at Homestead Air Force Base Elementary School. Maybe this site will attract someone else who remembers a little bit more? Say there were twenty-five kids in my classroom with the teacher Mrs. Loretta Saunders. What if those twenty-five people pooled all their knowledge? Could we create something useful with that knowledge?

I've only just started work on this site and I'm already learning a lot. I've got fifty years of past, but very few concrete details to examine other than my memories. When I was in my early twenties, around 1974, I went through a Buddhist phase and I threw away all my personal possessions that I felt I would be attached to in the future. I had a suitcase of photos, slides, 8mm films, letters and other momentos. Now that I'm working on this project I wished I had just stored the suitcase with my Mom. Luckily, for my birthday in 1984 my Mom gave me a scrapbook of photos, so I have some pictures of me when I was young, some report cards, and some photos of my parents to work with. After I got married in 1978, my wife took photos, and I still have some letters and stuff written during that period and later. However, this leaves my most formative period of the sixties and early seventies undocumented.

Like Rachael in Bladerunner I have to base my identity on photographs. I have no real proof of my past, but I believe it to be real. Rachael and the other replicants, we are told, had false memories implanted into them so they would believe they were human. Studying the past like this shows that memories are tricky and not to be trusted.

To complicate things, my past is rather jumbled because my father was in the Air Force and we moved around a lot. I think we moved even more than usual, because we never stayed anywhere for much more than a year or two. He must have put in for transfers. To make matters worse, whenever we moved to a new city, we'd rent a house for awhile and then buy one. Many times this meant changing schools again. While my Dad was stationed in New Jersey we lived in four locations, and I think we stayed there less than two years.

Now all of this will be of little interest to most people. To expand its general appeal requires me to explain the lessons I learned from working on this web page. The best way to do this is to give you, the reader an assignment. Open up a word processing document and start writing down years. For each line, put down one fact, like this:

• 1957 - 1st grade, Flagami, Miami, Florida
• 1958 - 2nd grade, Lake Forest Elementary, Hollywood, Florida
• 1958 - moved to Philadelphia, PA
• 1959 - 3rd grade, New Egypt, New Jersey
• 1959 - moved to Marks, Mississippi
• 1959 - 3rd grade, Marks
• 1959 - got in first fight, I was for Kennedy, other kid for Nixon

This is a hard task. You will discover that memories are hard to pin down. You end up looking for external clues, talking to people, reading old letters, and so on. Then when you start talking with people you discover clashes of memories. Memories aren't that reliable. Which makes me wonder about the validity of uploading. What weird is finding an external source of data that proves a memory is wrong. Once you start doing this kind of work you begin to wonder who you really are.