From: jamesr@best.com
Date: Mon Nov 04 1996 - 09:53:23 MST
> >
> > >There can be many instances of a single brain, each with its
> > >own consciousness.
>
> I beleive that there is a significant difference between copying a
> conciousness, which operates independently of a root conciousness, and a
> gradual process of gradually copying one's various files one at a time,
> verifying operability, and then transfering processing tothe new file
> from the old, and deleting the old. This would maintain the individual
> stream of conciousness, while the first, in the instance of destructive
> copying, would not, relative to the original wetware. When we talk about
> stream of conciousness, we need to maintain that this is relative to the
> original copy. It does not matter if the original copy shuts down for
> defragging once a day, it is still itself because it only copied and
> erased minute fractions of its conciousness at any one time, and we know
> that a human can operate with a significant loss of brain capacity, just
> not with a total loss, although facetiously, I can think of some
> congressmen who seem to be doing just fine.
I believe incremental replacement of individual brain components is
completely feasible. After all, the brain is a fault-tolerant, error
correcting design. This would be the easy part though. Extending an
architecture never designed to be extended would be a much more
difficult pursuit. Beyond simple component for component
replacement, high level architectural augmentation should be extremely
difficult.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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