From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Dec 02 1999 - 18:52:27 MST
On Thu, 2 Dec 1999, Technotranscendence wrote:
> On Thursday, December 02, 1999 10:39 AM Robert J. Bradbury
> bradbury@www.aeiveos.com wrote:
> I commented on the process of making uplifts immortal.
>
> Whoa! Uplift and upload are not interchangeable. To uplift is to take a
> nonsentient lifeform and make it sentient. To upload is to transfer a
> biobrain to nonbiological substrate. Someone already defined this
> elsewhere, but I think it needs pointing out since the terms are almost
> spelled the same.
>
The light bulb went on after I read a few more posts, esp. Greg's.
I would however argue that "uplifting" without "uploading" is
probably going to be fairly difficult. You are going to have
a very difficult time discovering when you have actually achieved
"sentience" without have a *lot* of diagnostics in the system.
I don't think you can do it (with any certainty) with a pure
biotech mediated approach. It might be possible with a combination
of biotech generic-neuro-organs *and* nanobot mediated single-neuron
monitoring and strength tuning. But grafting neuro-organs onto
existing (and potentially widely different) neuroarchitectures is
going to be a very *iffy* proposition. "Uplifting" primates - ok,
dogs, pigs & cats - perhaps, dolphins & whales - fine. Octopodes -
hmmmmm... Flies and Ants... doubtful. Yeast, you've got to be kidding.
If you upload before uplifting the whole thing gets much easier.
Robert
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