Would you do this?

Imagine you have been told you have one year left to live,
and someone has just invented a device that allows you to download the contents of your brain, and all your memories, into a storage system,
and they offer you this opportunity...
You could be put to sleep, ie your stored brain turned off, and brought back for 1 day every ten years, and you could look around and see how everything was doing during that one day before being put to sleep for ten more years, would you do it?

When I put this idea to people the usual questions are...
1 - for how long will this go on? (As long as you want. When you get bored, you simply fail to reset the timer. You die. Its in your hands.)
2 - what if something goes wrong? (You were going to die in a year anyhow. Get over it.)
3 - what happens if the Earth is no longer here. (then you probably wouldn't be waking up to see that.)

So, would you do it? Would you want to come back every ten years for 1 day and see how the world is going?

 

If I can have my brain uploaded I want to keep living EVERY day. Why do I only get one every ten years?

I'd love it if we developed the technology like in the Black Mirror episode San Junipero. Yes I'd do it, no question.

 

Downloading the contents of my brain to a computer would permanently crash the computer...

 

that does not sounds appealing at all. and i'm a curious person too. but what a weird and uncomfortable way to go about it.

 

Nah. One day every ten years... So, you get a load of the place ten years from now. Have a lot to think about. Then you're dead. Then you wake up and I suppose you remember what that one day was like ten years ago, and now you're ten more years in the future trying to consume all of that information. It would be a total drag.

 

Considering consciousness remains so fundamentally mysterious to us, with people's ideas about it ranging from consciousness being an illusory phenomenon of the brain, to consciousness being a part of everything in the universe, if I were given that last year to live, I would definitely do this.

 

No because you're basically describing the life of a robot. And ultimately your feelings and such are not real in any way shape or form, you're just an AI imprinted with real life data.

This reminds of The 100 most recent TV series, I wouldn't want to live forever that way at all.

 

How does ones feelings go from authentic in a human body to artificial if they are being directly transferred to the avatar?

 

The robot may understand feelings, but can never ever feel authenticity of real feelings.

By transferring your thoughts/history onto a storage drive then you're just becoming a robot. You were never ever born from the womb of a loving caring family. Even if if you protected by an AI robot technology you'd still be a software program, regardless of if your data was recorded from a living brains history .

 

I don't understand why the media that is used to store your feelings and such matters, so long as it has a high degree of fidelity. The real me, Dice, is currently being stored in an organic framework with lots of electrical and chemical crap going on to keep me going. How would transferring Dice to a silicon framework, with the proper software to simulate the electrical and chemical crap of a human brain, make any difference? I would feel precisely the same (albeit without a body, which frightens me more than anything about this possibility.) A difference which makes no difference is no difference.

Anyway, I'd do it as long as I had the freedom to choose to stop it when I got sick of seeing how fucked up the world becomes.

 

I think it's the safest bet not to assume that a computer can feel emotions like a brain can. They're not made of the same stuff.

 

People can't bear to entertain the idea human bodies aren't magical and special.. I mean, I don't care either way, and maybe computers are fundamentally less than we are, but people seem to have a negative emotional reaction against the idea robots could replicate the human brain.

 

I'm only against the idea because there is clearly a flaw in the reasoning that a computer can be a human brain. They're not made of the same things.

 

In fact, I think the opposite is true. That some people think there is something magical about computers.

 

It makes us analyze personal identity and challenges us when thinking about questions like What does it mean to be human?

It's interesting because I think it only applies to the brain and mind. I bet practically no one would consider someone with artificial limbs less human.

 

Absolutely not! I'd want to live it up that last year. But then, I'm probably older than most of the folks here and I've lived a pretty adventurous life and death, however soon it might be, isn't something I dread. The way I look at it, I wasn't miserable before I was born and won't be miserable when I'm gone. I'll simply be gone. I have it in my will that I want no service, no marker, and no reminders to anyone that I ever lived. The Neptune Society has already been paid to discard me.

 

Indeed. It just doesn't bother me if they can replicate a brain, mind, consciousness, whatever. If they could, it doesn't change what we are. Doesn't make it any less beautiful. I'd say given that we've gone done the route of technology (over, say, magick), it's totally natural we would replicate ourselves with it. I don't think it's impossible but I'm close to agnostic about it. The people saying it's impossible always seem sure, and I don't see how.

 

I think there are some futurists who ascribe to the Transhumanism philosophy and come off a bit overzealous, for instance giving specific predictions about when the Technological Singularity will occur and many of these ideas are quite abstract, so I'm not surprised there is disbelief, perhaps even some skeptics are resistant.


Constructing a sentient robot with a "human brain" seems like it might be closer to being realized than having someone's entire wetware brain mapped and consciousness downloaded into a program/matrix/network. There are some hurdles that I see, after all we're essentially attempting to emulate a complex organ after millions of years of evolution. Fortunately evolution develops slowly and technology develops rapidly.

 

No one is even close to replicating consciousness in an AI or a robot, and the researchers I've found admit that they have no idea how this would even be done. woo seems to think that something magical will just happen and they'll become conscious. Maybe so.

I don't see how anyone can't see the difficulty in creating a machine that has awareness, a sense of identity, and a subjective experience of it all. There's no way to program that. There's nothing you can specifically do to make it so. You could inundate the machine with all kinds of sensory input and hope for the best, I guess, but still there would be no way to tell if it actually was a sentient being or, essentially, a zombie.

You can't program a machine to feel love, hate, anger, etc. It might go through the motions, but the actual sensations are something that is linked to the specific chemicals that exist in our brains.

No, being able to replicate awareness and a sense of identity does not say anything about how consciousness itself interacts with the several dimensions of our universe. But, like I said, no one has any idea how this would be done. We don't know how consciousness works or what it is, so saying you can create it in a robot or AI is pretty far-fetched. For the life of me, I don't understand people who think it's entirely feasible. I can only assume that they assume that human beings are just a kind of computer, and if it can exist in one computer it can exist in any computer. I essentially disagree with the notion that all we are is something that computes and relays information, ignoring the higher subjective self that actually experiences it all.

 

I've said in other threads, I don't think we will create and program it as such
It will "evolve" out of what we've created.

Why does it have to lessen what we are? What if technology manages to access the metaphysical world of souls or however it works, if we are more than just biological computers.