Hello from Virginia!

[ragarth]

Hello! I'm an atheist in roanoke, virginia. I recently read an article comparing secular nations to religious nations that made the premise that the reason american atheists are unhappier than their brethren in more secular nations is due to a lack of community and social involvement given the USA being a rather religious nation and all, so I decided to hunt down atheist communities online to see if it has a positive effect upon myself.

I'm an atheist who has lived in a couple places across the country. I grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, went to a technical college and got a degree with computers. I then moved to Dallas, Texas and lived there for several years. After my grandmother died I moved back to comfort my family, and in time moved up to Columbus, Ohio. I ran into some problems, lost my job, and ended up moving back to my hometown. The economy isn't looking too hot, so I decided now was a good time to get more education and advance my career, so I'm now back in college with the objective of getting a PhD in computer science and doing research.

My reason for choosing CompSci goes hand in hand with my philosophy. My family was rather religious and so I grew up like the vast majority of most americans. I rapidly grew unhappy with Christianity and persued alternate religions. In time I came to realize my major reason for wanting a religion to believe in was due to a fear of death, I was perpetually restless with my beliefs because I couldn't rationalize them, but I couldn't leave them behind because I am afraid of the end of me. I still hold this fear, but I now focus that energy into attempting to find a solution to it. I've decided that death, dying, old age are not inherent parts of the human condition, and that it is inevitable that humanity will eventually achieve a solution to these problems. My objective is to find that solution soon enough that it can be applied to us, and admittedly in a state of greed, to myself. Computer Science plays into this because I feel artificial intelligence research will play a key role in the development of a post-human society, and will spell the beginning of a merger between man and machine. AI research will assist us by leading towards better cybernetic interfaces, greater understanding of cognitive diseases, and superior analytic systems for research and technology across the board- specifically neuroscience. From this, I have a belief that humanity will achieve what popculture has termed uploading, where a person either copies or transfers themselves into a computer designed for this purpose. I have an idea on the process by which this can be done, but this is my objective and I hope to see it come to fruition.

As you can guess, I'm a bit kooky.  

[McQ]

Welcome to the forum. Thanks for the intro. So you are a person on the way to helping us all become transhumans? Excellent!  

[Whitney]

Hi..welcome to the forum.

Question...if you are successful in creating a way for me to upload my brain to a computer and I upload my brain yet also keep myself as I am now.  Does that mean that there are two of me?  Would my new computer self care if my body self died?

[ragarth]

Hello to McQ!

Hi..welcome to the forum.

Question...if you are successful in creating a way for me to upload my brain to a computer and I upload my brain yet also keep myself as I am now.  Does that mean that there are two of me?  Would my new computer self care if my body self died?

And hiya laetusatheos!

As for your question, I need to warn you, I'm a long winded individual.
Now, there are two methods one could 'upload' one is to copy, and the other is to transfer. Copying is simple and what you describe here. You basically in some way replicate the 'self' of a person into the new meida, in this case, a computer. From that moment your experiences will be different from those of the computer and so you two will be two different people. Further, there's no way to know right now if a digital existence would alter your virtual duplicate's behaviors due to differences between the virtual environment and your body like the presence or absence of hormones and hormone producing body parts, so you may very well see instant differences in emotional and logical reactions between you and your counterpart. There will also be inherent errors in the duplication process, my current theory on this is to place sensors (possibly made of buckyballs since they have the property of entering the cell walls and staying there without entering the cellular plasma, and since the ion channels of the neurons is in the cell walls, this is a great place to pick up the electrical stimulation of a firing neuron.) within the brain that will attach to neurons and emit signals when activated. These signals would then be read, and so a map of synaptic connections can be produced mathematically without destroying the connections. It'd be impossible to know if you completely tagged all the neurons, and to know if you got the math perfectly right on reverse engineering the synapses, but you're relying on the ability of neuralnets to be self healing and capable of surviving varying amounts of damage to fill in the gaps. All this means there's a good chance that your virtual counterpart will not be you, there's just too many places things could change, and then after a while of you two experiencing things differently, you will both become truly different people.

As per whether your self will care about your body, well, that depends on your virtual self's personality. If someone cloned you right now, would you care if your clone got squished by an anvil?

[Tom62]

Welcome to the forum. The idea of transhumanism interests me as well, since I'm an avid SciFi reader. I do however think that it will take many more years to develop such a technology.  The antipathy against such a technology is however enormous, especially from an ethical, moralistic and theological point of view. The fear for creating a kind of superhuman or playing God is very great. The idea that humans continue to live on inside a computer, android or clone also give many people the creeps. Human society may not be ready for such a technology and perhaps never will.

Man Machine, pseudo human being
Man Machine, super human being

[Repeat:]
The man machine, machine....

-- Kraftwerk (1978)

[ragarth]

Welcome to the forum. The idea of transhumanism interests me as well, since I'm an avid SciFi reader. I do however think that it will take many more years to develop such a technology.  The antipathy against such a technology is however enormous, especially from an ethical, moralistic and theological point of view. The fear for creating a kind of superhuman or playing God is very great. The idea that humans continue to live on inside a computer, android or clone also give many people the creeps. Human society may not be ready for such a technology and perhaps never will.

These are valid concerns, but wouldn't you say that death itself is possibly the greatest human tragedy of all? Even if groups bent on enforcing their will upon others disagree with me, I feel it's my responsibility to attempt to alleviate this horrible coincidence of being alive, regardless of the political and psychological pressure that groups may put me under. It's important to remember that while the loud masses may cry out, the majority of religious folk are decent rational people, short of another george bush putting stringent limits on the technology, some rich individual/s would find value in this kind of research if only for it's application in understanding and curing diseases like Alzheimer's , parkinsons, or any other debilitating neurological disease. Even if it proves fruitless and impossible it will add to life extension through the curing of diseases, and then I'll just have to rely on biological extensions to push the lifespan further. If the US becomes acid for research like this, then I'll take my research over seas where people are less anti-intellectual and frothing at the mouth to produce a religious monoculture.

Regardless, I can't back down from a dream based on fear, if fear were something that could stop me, I would never have left religion.

[Tom62]

I agree with you Ragarth. But there are indeed great challenges waiting ahead just to overcome the concerns and fears of the people. But I think that the research alone would bring mankind enormous benefits. Here I'm thinking f.e about patients with Alzheimer disease, who can than retrieve their lost memories instantly from a small computer embedded in their brains; sight enhancements for those who are visually impaired, etc. etc.

[ragarth]

Tom62,

That it certainly will. Research like serves to advance just about every sector of human knowledge, capability, and well being regardless of whether it's successful or not.

[Whitney]

I remember when I was in elementary or middles school I read an article that in the next 10 years there would be a computer chip we could plant in our brains and just download all the knowledge we need.  Although I know we are making great advances in understanding the mind it seems like we have a lot more than a life time's worth of research left to get to the point you are talking about, ragarth.  Of course, with computer power growing exponentially...that should speed up research in all of the sciences compared to a decade ago.

[ragarth]

I remember when I was in elementary or middles school I read an article that in the next 10 years there would be a computer chip we could plant in our brains and just download all the knowledge we need.  Although I know we are making great advances in understanding the mind it seems like we have a lot more than a life time's worth of research left to get to the point you are talking about, ragarth.  Of course, with computer power growing exponentially...that should speed up research in all of the sciences compared to a decade ago.

Not to be a downer, but what magazine was this, do you remember? Even today there's a lot of publications that claim to report science, but they have a horrid tendency to misinterpret facts, or jump to wild and zany conclusions that are utterly silly, and the situation isn't helped by a lot of the peer reviewed journals requiring fees for access. Given what we know now, being able to download your memories is something that will take longer than my natural life to accomplish due to the way we theorize memory is stored, but that doesn't mean we won't be able to digitize the brain. What it does mean, however, is that a transition from neuralnet to symbolic ai would be quite impossible in the short-term, which does increase processing needs and impose certain limits on the functionality of AI.

To give an example, hopfield neural networks are really interesting things. In a hopfield, all nodes (ie neurons) are connected to all other nodes, every node acts as both an input and an output, and all the input values are given as a binary, where 1 represents an input strength of 1 and a 0 represents an input strength of -1. The network is then trained using a number of techniques to recognize certain patterns. Once trained, this particular type of neural network is capable of taking partial or noisy data and highly efficiently reconstructing the original stored data. It can store a number of patterns within it based on the complexity of the patterns and the number of nodes within the network, the patterns could be a picture, a sound, or a string of binary bits. To give you an idea of this, it's like hearing a piece of a tune, and suddenly remembering the lyrics, or seeing a prescription in bad handwriting and still being able to read 'penicillin' or seeing a piece of a picture of your mother, and your mind instantly recognizing her and filling in the details of her face. This is what a hopfield neuralnetwork does, and while we cannot extract the data from it, we can run it on our computers.

Expanding this farther, it's a matter of computational scale and sensory capacity to handle a large neural network like a mammalian brain. You need scale to handle the sheer size and complexity of the network, and you need sensory capacity to accurately measure and map the synaptic connections. The Blue Brain project has the scale for a neocortical column consisting of 10,000 to 100,000 neurons in the form of a Blue Gene/L super computer, and they solves the sensory problem by choosing rats with a relatively simple neocortical column structure, that can be tested while complex algorithms are applied to the computer model to reverse engineer the structure of the column from the results of specific stimuli, ie, treating the column like a black box "We input this signal, and get this signal, given this set of signals producing this set of outputs, what are the most likely structures to produce this?" They feel they have produced a rat's neocortical column with sufficiently tested accuracy to move on to the next stage of their project, applying chemical reactions to their virtual model. That is how close we are to this. I believe we will see mammalian brains replicated in silico within your lifetime, and once we get the structure down for concsiouness (the sensor problem again, pulling this from test animals by reverse engineering their neural structure), it's only a matter of time before it's scaled to the size needed for human level AI.

[rlrose328]

Hi ragarth... I'm Kerri from Oregon.  We like longwinded here.  :banna:

[ragarth]

Hi ragarth... I'm Kerri from Oregon.  We like longwinded here.  :banna:

That's good! I like fitting in!

[Kyuuketsuki]

Roanoke? That was the name of a cruiser in "Babylon 5" as I recall ... anyway welcome to the forum

Kyu