Apollo45 said:
Iron Lightning said:
Apollo45 said:
One step closer to immortality. Refine the chip over a period of twenty years, then allow cloning of human bodies and you'll be able to download yourself in to the chip, then transfer yourself in to your new brain; instant immortality.
Hell, even if you die you can just re-download a backup copy of yourself.
I'm excited.
Man, I'm tired of hearing this fallacy. Perfect replication of humans does not grant them immortality. If I were to make a perfect clone of you would that clone be literally you? Of course not, if you die and somebody makes a copy of you then you're still dead. If you were to die your consciousness would still end and it wouldn't restart just because there is a dude out there exactly like you. Sure, I could pass your perfect clone off as you to your friends and family but it wouldn't be you, it would just be a copy.
The only way to achieve effective immortality through cloning is to physically transplant the dying person's brain into his/her new clone, and even then I'd wager the person would still lose a bit of himself/herself.
Hate to say it, but you misread the post. The clone obviously isn't you, but the chip is. Instead of transplanting the brain, you download yourself in to the chip, then upload yourself (or transplant the chip) in to the new person. The chip, acting as a human brain would, is you. Hence the immortality.
How is the chip you? Downloading is still copying. If you download a file off of Mediafire then the original file still exists and you have merely made a copy of it.
I admit, that's a bit of a nebulous point and we really don't know enough about consciousness to know if it's just the sum of the information in one's brain. Let's suppose that it is, if that was the case transferring the information that makes up consciousness would still necessarily result in its destruction if the process is non-instantaneous. A non-instantaneous transfer rate would break up the information that makes up consciousness in to two parts, one in the brain and one in the chip. If consciousness is the sum of information in a cognitive object then the aforementioned two parts would each form into individual consciousnesses. This would cause the consciousness in the brain to cease (and therefore die) when the transfer process concludes.
The only way to transfer information instantaneously is through the use of entangled photons. However, the brain contains no entangled photons so information in the brain would have to be "downloaded" by the use of conventional electric propagation which travels very fast (at the speed of light) but not instantaneously. Of course that's making the assumption that instantaneous transfer would not kill the original consciousness, I'm not sure about that.
Even if it was magically made possible to transfer information from a brain without destroying its consciousness you'd still have to find a way around the fundamental incompatibility of information in a brain and information in a computer. The brain does not think in binary; it thinks through a multitudinous variety of neurotransmitters. While action potentials are an all-or-none affair the chemical effects of the neurotransmitters emitted into the synaptic cleft are not produce different effects in the neuron itself that are not directly related to action potentials. Neurotransmitters also affect the probability of an action potential firing (e.g. 90%, 70%, 10%) whereas a computer only deals with 100% or 0% probabilities of a signal being transmitted. I remember something in the article about the variability of "intensities" of the connections between the chip's computer cores but I'd guess that refers to the frequency of signals and not the probability of their initial transmission. Translating the brain's information into binary (if such a thing is possible, which it may not be) would effectively rewrite all the brain's information and destroy consciousness.