From: Jeff Dee (jeff@illusionmachines.com)
Date: Tue Sep 24 1996 - 16:52:45 MDT
>From: Chris Hind
>I was considering this thought. The best way to be uploaded is to
>genetically engineer an organism that would grow into your brain and destroy
>a neuron and map the equivelant connections in a virtual world. This
>organism would serve as an interface between brain and machine. After
>destroying the neuron, the organism would fill the gap with itself and have
>all connections from other neurons be redirected through the interface to
>the virtual brain map inside a virtual world inside a computer. Long term
>memory would be deleted and recreated and redirected to the computer first
>which would make things slightly longer to retrieve while the organism
>slowly grew into and took over your brain.
Why is this a 'genetically engineered organism', and not a swarm of nanobots?
>This would enable you to grow
>into the virtual world to where you could switch between both and then
>eventually disconnect all biological senses entirely and live inside this
>virtual world.
I think I'd like to live in both worlds.
>Is this better than cloning yourself inside a machine and
>destroying the original biological copy and thus kill off 'you' your
>self-aware being for some clone knowing everything you know living inside a
>virtual world?
Call me old-fashioned, but making an immortal copy of me doesn't appear
to *me* as if it helps *me*. I'm not too keen on the idea of killing myself,
even if I know that there's some other me that's ready to take up the
slack. What I like about the idea of progressive replacement of neurons
is that to *me* it would feel as if nothing has changed - but I'd wind up with a
technological brain instead of this crummy old meat contraption. I wouldn't
have to kill myself off to make a digital clone - I'd become digital myself.
-Jeff Dee
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