I don't want to achieve immortality through a reasonably good
imitation; I want to achieve it through not dying.
jm
On 15 Apr 2001, at 20:21, Jim Fehlinger wrote:
>
> Spike Jones wrote:
>
> > Adrian Tymes wrote:
>
> > > Anava000@aol.com wrote:
>
> > > > By the way... if an actual bio-engineered body were to become
> > > > available, how would you transfer your consciousness over?
>
> > > ...send a flood of nanites into your head to nondestructively record
> > > the connections and relative positions of all neurons in your head,
> > > then use the same or different nanites to model the upgraded body's
> > > brain the same way, and see if that person can pull off a reasonably
> > > good imitation of yourself. (Of course, that then leaves the question
> > > of what to do with the new body if it fails, or with the old body if
> > > it suceeds and you'd prefer that there be only one you at a time).
>
> This is almost, but not quite, Eliezer Yudkowsky's modified
> version of the "Moravec Transfer" (first described in Hans Moravec's
> 1988 _Mind Children_): see http://sysopmind.com/singularity.html .
>
> However, the Moravec Transfer, and Yudkowsky's variant, both
> accomplish the transfer without creating a duplicate. There
> is a single consciousness (the most vivid form of this Gedanken
> experiment is performed while the subject is awake) whose
> physical substrate is gradually replaced while the subject is
> reading _Cosmopolitan_, or watching daytime TV ;-> .
>
> The "reasonably good imitation" part happens neuron by neuron;
> after this is achieved, the biological neuron is cut out of the
> network and the simulated neuron patched in, without the
> conscious awareness missing a line of dialog of _General Hospital_.
>
> > We had the notion that if an appropriate neural net computer
> > could be carried around with one, then the computer would
> > observe all conditions and how the person reacted under
> > those conditions. This observation/learning phase would go
> > on for many years, creating a giant state-machine-like
> > table, that would tell the computer how the person would
> > react in any given sitch. Then when the human perished, the
> > software would imitate the human...
>
> This has been done by Greg Egan in the 1990 story "Learning To Be Me",
> published in the 1995 collection _Axiomatic_. In this story,
> every human receives a "jewel" (colloquial for Ndoli Dual),
> a neurocomputer which learns to be that person as the person
> grows up. The creepy part of the story is that replacement
> of the biological brain by the jewel doesn't wait for the
> human to perish; it's done in early maturity (early 30's).
>
> "I was six years old when my parents told me that there was
> a small, dark jewel inside my head, learning to be me."
>
> This story reminds me very much of the old (1964) _Twilight
> Zone_ episode "Number 12 Looks Just Like You"
> http://members.nbci.com/serling/seas5b.html
>
> Jim F.
>
John Marlow
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