Is it possible to transfer consciousness to a computer. Simple creation of believable simulation…

What will happen when we are moved to computers. and can we call “this” by us?

At the end of the XVIII century, masters learned to make musical boxes. small intricate mechanisms that themselves lost the melodies. Some of them built bells, drums, organs and even violins, everything was regulated by a rotating cylinder. The most daring example is miniature orchestras: for example, the Panharmonicon, invented in 1805 in Vienna, or the orchestra, which was first built in 1851 in Dresden, and then began to be produced massively.

However, the technology had restrictions. In order for the “violin” to sound convincing, the master had to create a small simulacrum of violin. and this is a whole achievement of engineering thought. How to recreate thrombone? Or go to? Just as they are arranged, of course. The artisans suggested that in order to get a characteristic tone, it was necessary to copy the tool entirely. Metal, wood, shape, accurate echo. all this had to be simulated. Well, how else to create an orchestral sound? The task was discouraging, writes Michael Graziano, the composer and professor of the University of Princeton.

Then, in 1877, the American inventor of Thomas Edison presented the world the first phonograph, and the history of the musical record changed.

It turned out that in order to save and recreate the sound of the instrument, you do not need to know everything about it, its materials or physical structure. The office does not need a miniature orchestra. All that is needed is to focus on one key part. Write down sound waves, turn them into information and provide them with immortality.

Imagine your future where your consciousness is immortal. When the body begins to break up, the machine scans your brain in sufficient details in order to capture its unique “filling”. The computer system uses this data to recreate brain activity. She will not need to copy every detail. Like a phonograph, it will discard all physical structures, leaving only the information essence of your template. And then you get the second. with your memories, feelings, way of thinking and making decisions, transferred to computer hardware equipment. As simple as we are copying a text file today.

The second version of you can live in the world-symulation-unable to feel the difference. You can walk along the street of a simulated city, feel a breath of breeze, have lunch in a cafe, speak with other simulated people, play games, watch movies, enjoy life.

It may seem that the second part. imitation is more complicated, but in fact it has already been solved. Equipment for her is ready. Artificial neurons and neural networks are in use.

If it will be necessary to add additional types of synapses or calibrate the effects like hormonal, then this will not present fundamental complexity for imitating.

Even neural networks are known and understandable, consisting of millions of artificial neurons. Firms around the world strive to create systems that could compete with complexity to the brain.

For example, the Blue Brain project using supercomputers imitates massive clusters of neurons, similar to those present in the brain. Research groups of the Human Brain project, as well as the Allen Institute, Google Brain, DeepMind, Cogitai and many others are working on the creation of large.scale systems from artificial neurons networks.

The construction of a network of 86 billion neurons with 100 trillion synapses still exceeds the possibilities of today’s technology. But they develop very quickly, especially with the onset of the era of quantum computers. Undoubtedly, we will soon have enough “firepower” to simulate a neural network comparable in scale to the human brain.

Such stormy technological progress is one of the reasons for today’s optimism regarding the digitization of the psyche. The most noticeable and large fragment of the riddle is practically solved.

But it is important not to forget that the artificial neural network of the scale of the human brain, albeit a tremendous achievement, is still not the same as an digitized personality. The network itself, without the correct scheme of the connections between its 86 billion neurons, is a useless accumulation of numbers.

This is as if we developed a printer that can print the artificial brain, and came up with the material from which to print it, but did not solve the task of how to measure the necessary data in the real brain to load it into the printer. Without data, we will print a meaningless mess.

If you use the expression of David Chalmers, we can say that we have a genuine difficult problem of personality transfer: scan the brain with a sufficient degree of detail.

Imagine that somehow we managed to build an imitation of your brain. We scanned it and recreated neural networks. At the next step, it is supposed to instill a copy of the brain into the body. without it it is not clear what experience will accumulate in your artificial brain floating in a digital barrel.

After all, if imitation of the brain has the same properties as the brain of a living person, then in such a situation, as I think, it can feel disorientation and lose the feeling of her own “I”. Your personal “grounding” is rooted in your body.

You know where you are physically, where your arms, legs, torso. this gives you the primary support. If she does not, as well as contact with the world around you, bodily incarnation, I suspect that you will have to experience confusion, resembling a narcotic BEDRIP.

But now you need to decide what an artificial body to you give: a material robot that can walk around the real world, or an imitation of a body that lives in a virtual world?

When my laboratory studied how the brain controls the movement, we created an imitation of the human hand. The limb of the robot was not made from the substance. it could not be shaken, she could not feel objects. It was a virtual hand created from data on a computer. Everything we saw is a matrix of numbers on the screen.

The hand had everything necessary thanks to the scans of the real human limb. All bones, all ligaments, all muscles. She had a muscular force, viscosity, inertia, gravity. Her muscles consisted of individual fibers- fast and slowly subtle.

We gave the hand sensory neurons, alpha-metoneurons, beta-metoneurons and gamma-metoneurons. To construct a robot hand, which repeats the human hand at such a high level, it would cost millions of dollars and years of development-and not the fact that we would have succeeded. The virtual hand cost only a few thousand dollars for the computer and several months of work.

If we managed to simulate the human hand, using limited computing resources of the middle of the first decade of the XXI in., then it must already be possible to create a realistic virtual human body. in all the details of its bones, muscles, nerves and skin.

I have not heard that someone was doing this, but we must assume that you can create a super-regional avatar in a computer game, similar to a person from the inside and outside.

When we create an imitation of the brain and the virtual body, we will remain to integrate these elements into the virtual world. You can turn to computer games with the effect of presence, where three.dimensional worlds are imitated with their own “physics”. Technology has already developed almost to the level desired for this.

A truly convincing virtual world developed to the smallest visible details-in which the sound realistically spreads through the virtual space, the breeze touches virtual leather, perhaps even smells and tastes affect virtual nostrils and languages-does not yet exist. But he could.

No need to invent fundamentally new technologies. This is a matter of improving existing virtual worlds. The restriction here lies in the capacities of information processing.

Is it possible to move the human mind to the computer?

In many scientific and fantastic books and films, it is telling how in the future with the help of some unit engineers transfer the intelligence, consciousness and personality of a person to a computer or a special robot created for this, but is it possible today, today? The director of the Scientific and Council of the Center for Science and Technology of Artificial Intelligence MIPT, author of the book “Education of Machines” Sergey Shumsky answered this question.

The biggest difficulty arises in the reconstruction of human physiology: how to transfer the biochemistry of living systems to the field of semiconductor physics? The human body is constantly changing, hundreds of neural impulses pass in the brain, and it is unrealistic to scan it even during sleep. Our brain in the eternal movement, the maximum that we can do is to photograph it superficially.

At the same time, of course, science seeks to at least partially imitate the work of the brain. So, in Switzerland, scientist Henry Macrames conducts research to transfer the mouse brain to digital space. To do this, cuts the size of a micron were removed from the dead brain, photographed and created according to these data a computer model. So far, even with the help of a supercomputer, it was possible to make a model of only one millimeter of the surface of the brain. At the same time, it really looks like a mouse brain. However, in order for him to “heal”, it is necessary not only to recreate the whole brain, but also to teach it with the help of the surrounding world, which will also be virtual.

In addition, our brain speaks in the language of the outside world, therefore, for its full.fledged work, it is necessary to transfer the whole world to virtual reality. Therefore, the question is: is it worth creating a second world when we already have our own real?

plausible from an economic point of view is the idea, on the contrary, to enter artificial intelligence into our reality to improve people’s lives. Robots are created that, using machine learning, learn to be in society and provide certain services, for example, well.known voice assistants.

At the same time, artificial intelligence is brought up like people, but it is people who are introduced to all human values, morality and law. With the proper level of computing power in theory, it is possible to create artificial intelligence, not inferior, but in many areas and superior to human intelligence. In addition, the entire array of knowledge can be transmitted from the robot to the robot. this is the difference and exclusivity of machine learning.

Thus, artificial intelligence can be educated, and this mind will be immortal. However, unlike artificial intelligence, nature and evolution have not “worried” that the mind of a living being could be transferred from one body to another. There is no such integration, and it is unlikely to appear.

Комментарии и мнения владельцев

Question: Ivan died. His memory (soul, consciousness) was leaked at the same time in three computers. Which computers will continue to live in? T. e. What computer will continue its immortality? Answer: In no.

No soul, this is a fiction of believers. He will not continue to live, he will continue to live his consciousness, as a result of an experienced, or rather copy of consciousness, and the farther from the date of copying, the more different these consciousnesses will be, subject to the work of the “computer” and provided that the data entering the computer are different, and \ or that the nucleus emulating consciousness and subconscious work at least like the human brain. Puts errors and inaccuracies of interpretation.

To create AI, it makes no sense from the memory of the brain since it is a bad tool to think, it has a single.core processor, small RAM, it cannot reproduce the video, and the built.in memory is arranged so that it is poorly extracted from the vault.The crown of the creation of God

Neurolins Ilona Mask (and far from one) is engaged in the transfer of information from the brain to digital media.Individual memory in the smallest details is the “soul” of a person.When creating an digitized memory of a person and his body, we can say that a person is ready for virtual reality.,And this is already a permanent life.If you save human stem cells, then if you can transplant memory from digital media to the brain, we can talk about not virtual life, but about natural.

Roger Penrose in his book “The New Mind of the King” talked about the fundamental calculation of the brain and the processes taking place in it, t.e. The question is not in the plane of technical implementation, but in whether thinking can be considered a computational process. Its evidence of inexplicability is very popular and verified to the use of Gedel’s theorem about incompleteness to the virtual machine of Thuring, t.e. that closed axiomatics cannot prove the incompleteness of itself, in other words, the system of algorithms cannot conclude that in addition to them there may be another way to build thoughts. Therefore, the very possibility of creating true AI under a big question. Also, AI itself is also divided into several types: 1. Self.recognizing and behavior is indistinguishable from a person 2. Non.self.aware and behavior is indistinguishable from a person as easy to guess, both of these types cannot be distinguished from each other. After all, even the reality of the consciousness of someone except their “I” cannot be proved (hello, solipsists). Therefore, even if the brain is completely digitized and implanted, it will be completely incomprehensible whether it is alive or not. T.e. He can experience emotions, cry, fall in love, go crazy with the “awareness” of his immortality, can even make attempts of “suicide”, but even then no one will ever know: that he is actually. And every dying billionaire will not know what awaits him after such a housewarming. And even a scenario is possible that all people move to iron bodies and will be like real, only dead. But this is only if AI is generally possible

You have no technical education ? Mention the ideas of Gedel, a man who died half a century ago, as a way of solving modern problems? Seriously? No, Gedel’s theorems are proven, I do not argue, but in AI recently used wider concepts than just numbers of quantum calculations. Even according to your reasoning, you draw the wrong conclusions. Roger Penrose, according to your opinion, is not able to describe the human brain with the help of Gedel’s theorems, and even more so, which is an attempt to reengineering. This is not at all as not applies to an attempt to recreate it, only indicates one of the mistakes on this path.

Artyom, you are right, I really have nothing to do with AI and I got an education in a completely different area and perhaps my knowledge about this area is tired, but I only allowed myself to doubt the fundamental possibility of creating a full.fledged AI, citing the author of the respected author and a scientist whom he read at the institute. Since you are deeply immersed in the topic, it is interesting to know your opinion: is it possible to distinguish real consciousness from its imitation? After all, this directly applies to the theme of the article. That in your understanding true AI?

The real consciousness is not distinguished from its full imitation (you can even program errors and “creativity”), moreover, the best option for imitation can be more perfect. The concepts of true AI do not exist, since there is no clear distinction between reasonable, unreasonable (as an example, I will give people with mental pathologies, which are in terms of intelligence, monkeys or even crows overthrow). And the so.called freedom of will, it is a system of assessing the external environment regarding its state, and, depending, on that. how much it is developed, it will be more like a person, or surpass him, such as, for example, images recognition systems. Search for persons with the worn medical masks. We must also understand that people of old hardening, as a mentioned person in the article, cannot be at the peak of science. Either you are flexible and take a new one, or has already behind five steps (by analogy, the higher education of students in the IT field lags behind five years immediately after release)

Therefore, even if the brain is completely digitized and implanted, it will be completely incomprehensible whether it is alive or not. T.e. He can experience emotions, cry, fall in love, go crazy with the “awareness” of his immortality, can even make attempts of “suicide”, but even then no one will ever know: that he is actually. As soon as you limit it by obtaining blessings for further existence, as you immediately get all the above emotions and even attempts. And you can find out what he really is or who is he

It feels like Sergei Shumsky has an extremely mediocre attitude towards science. Inappropriate for whom? For the state to have immortal people who remember all? Because for the “extra” word “you can’t punish such? The moment of consideration of the human brain was completely missed as a carrier of information, and not only as a biological whole hardware and software device. The brain is a plastic structure changed over time, and not a “disposable blank” for a single record of information without the possibility of its change (by analogy with DVD-R, or the latest quartz crystals, to whom it is more convenient). Again, even in this case, for some reason he considers the transfer of reason without changes, and not unification from AI, which in any case is more suitable and close in time of implementation than the working version of the simple Ctrl C V. We must clearly understand that in our world there are a lot of people interested in this, and to move away from this topic. This is an even greater lag in science in the future. One way or another, AI, it seems, will not be able to control 100%(in terms of errors), which in the future can be critical, as well as the disconnection of the Internet now or electricity (I do not mean ordinary consumers, and we are talking about About hospitals, schools, and other emergency response facilities, a violation of the activities of which can lead to disaster). Therefore, the irreversible transfers of the mind and their fusion with AI (hybrid AI) are the only options for the possible development of mankind. Progress allows you to accumulate information in unimaginable volumes, and human logic may not be enough to process such a quantity of data in real time, and, I repeat, simple AI, it may be mistaken for incoming or outgoing.Among other things, hybrid AI with a living person living both in his body and in the computer system is also not considered (I am not at all about virtual worlds, but banal duplication of consciousness). This is even more prospects, since sooner or later the electronic part of the consciousness will be more “more” because a person will not be limited by the genetics of his brain. And in the event of the death of an organic body, a person will continue to exist, feeling the death of a biological component as a sick state, and quite reversible, if you look even further into the future in the reversibility of terminal states, and the seal of the organs, up to the brain, where it will already be one of the replaceable options for the carrier of consciousness.PS: Part of course it sounds nonsense now, but a couple of years ago many copying of the mind was called nonsense, now the same people say about the “inappropriateness” PPS: it’s easier to make hybrid AI out of a person than to create AI (but one does not interfere with the other)

When we can download the brain into a computer

Machine training specialist, the creator of one of the strongest chess programs Sergey Markov gave a lecture on the prospects for moving consciousness to another medium. On progress in the field of neurointeases, the first cyborgs and prospects of neural networks. in the material of the “futurist”.

Crysta and Tatyana Hogan are a unique pair of Siamese twins. They are lively proof that neurointeans are possible. The sisters from Vancouver stopped their heads in the womb. Unlike most other similar cases, they did not die, but formed what the researchers called the Talamic brain. Although Crysta and Tatyana are individual personalities with their character, they have a mixed nervous system. When one of the girls cried in childhood, it was possible to give a second nipple, and the first fell silent. They know each other’s desires, and if you put a screen between them and show Christy a certain object, Tatyana will be able to answer what her sister saw. A thick canal of neural processes is visible on the X.ray. the very integration that connects two brains. If possible in nature, then what prevents the phenomenon in the laboratory prevents? over, which prevents the second sister from using a computer as a second sister?

Two main questions arise here: 1. How difficult should the computer be so that the brain is placed in it? 2. How to transfer the brain without destroying it? In other words, how to scan the entire Connectomus. a system of ties of neurons?

The first question is a little easier to answer. At the dawn of neurology, researchers were struck by the number of ties in the brain. We have about 86 billion neurons and about 150 trillion synapses in our heads. nodes in which processes of one neuron are approached by the processes of another. Is it possible to measure the computing power of the brain? The pioneers in this area were Nobel Prize winners Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Haxley. In 1952, they developed a model to describe the transmission of a nerve signal in a giant squid of squid. On average, one synapse contains 1000 molecular switches, or triggers. This is an analogue of 150 quadrillion transistors. Calculations give us the limiting performance of the brain of about 1.5 x 10 20 Hz-t (that is, Hertz-Thieggers).

At the same time, the most perfect supercomputer today reaches about 1.7 x 10 19 Hz-T. Despite all the efforts of engineers, the brain is still superior to processors in its performance.

Here it is necessary to take into account the difference in “architecture”. In the brain, each synaps is an independent computing device, and all of them work simultaneously. Computers are built on the architecture of von Neumann, which is distinguished by a small number of computing nuclei, but a large number of memory cells. Be that as it may, sooner or later iron brains will overtake protein. According to Raymond Kurzweil’s forecasts, this will happen in 2025-2027-it is then that the Law of Moore predicts the appearance of a computer that can emulate the human brain in real time.

Last spring, Futurist, like everyone else, actively discussed the victory of the Alphago program over one of the strongest players in the world. Unlike Deep Blue, which in 1997 defeated Kasparova in chess, Alphago is a development based on neural networks. Deep Blue was a program sharpened on one specific task; Alphago learned to play almost from scratch. Of course, there are many other evidence of that neural networks are effective. from speech recognition to the creation of chatbots. This area is rapidly democratized: in October, Bonsai promised that anyone could create a neural network for educational purposes. If a person’s consciousness will ever manage to load into a computer, then it is precisely the one that works on the principle of neural networks-as close as possible to the brain.

Next, we move to the second main question: how to copy the structure of neural connections. to reconstruct a connector? One of the most interesting projects in this area began several years ago with a dead mouse. The work is carried out at the Massachusetts Technological Institute and the Max Society Planck in Leipzig. Experts took the brain of the rodent and cut in layers, and then placed in a scanning electron microscope. So precious information about neural connections was obtained. Now it remains to decipher it, draw a map where all the cells would be connected with each other. Scientists decided to focus on only one field. retina. Even to create its full scheme, the team would take about 200 years. And then the power of the Internet and civil science came to the rescue.

Geniuses from MIT launched the Eyewire website, which was invited to everyone who wanted to play a simple game. Users need to paint the processes of each neuron and trace the paths along which the signals go. All this is loaded into the neural network. Since the launch in 2012, the project base has grown to 200,000 players in 150 countries. The mouse and human retina are very similar, so the ultimate goal of the initiative is to learn more about our own vision mechanisms. By the way, two years ago, a book of one of the authors of the study by Sebastian Seunga was published in Russian: “Connect: how the brain makes us what we are”.

Much more ambitious Blue Brain project IBM. Within its framework, already in 2008, work was completed to create a cell model of one neocortex column. this is about 10,000 cells. In 2011, researchers reached a million neurons result, and in 2014, it was supposedly reconstructed the full brain of the rat. True, the data has not yet been published, so it remains only to guess whether scientists have achieved success.

However, not everything is so rosy. The human brain is the most mysterious object in the universe, and our knowledge of it is changing and enriched at the very moment that its “exact” copies are being built in laboratories. In 2015, the French from the Polytechnic School fenced his colleagues with a discovery that nerve signals can spread through astrocytes and glia cells, which were still considered auxiliary tissue of the brain. Then there was an even more amazing study on the possibility of spreading photon signals in glia. Brain researchers know that neurons can generate light impulses (like bio.mesentant cells of deep.sea fish), but in order for such signals to transmit information. no one is ready for this.

than molecules

Even if we could create such a “connection scheme” for a living brain, this will not be enough to understand how it works. To do this, we need to quantify how the neurons interact with each other, and do all this at the molecular level of accuracy. We don’t even know how many molecules are in the brain, not to mention how many of them vital. For a computer, reproducing all these processes may not be able to.

And this leads us to even deeper complexity. Only the fact that we can imitate some aspects of the brain of the brain does not mean that we can completely emulate the real brain or consciousness. No meaningful increase in computing power will allow us to simulate the brain at the level of individual molecules. Thus, brain emulation will be possible only if we can separate its digital, logical operations from dirty mixing at the molecular level.

To understand the operations of a regular computer, we do not have to monitor currents and stresses in each component, and even more so you do not need to understand what every electron does. We have developed transistors switching operations in such a way that the logic of their work is basically simple: zeros and units. But the brain was not created by us. it evolved. therefore there is no reason to expect simple logic at the heart of its work.

Dangerous idea

Even if the loading of consciousness remains a pipe dream, nothing prevents people from discussing the harmful consequences of this process. All people at a certain moment begin to be afraid of their own death, and who we are in order to tell people what to do with their own fears?

How transgumanism mixes religious ideas with science, distorts our idea of ​​technology. Transgumanists see in technology a way of fulfilling all our desires. And justify this by the fact that they inevitably move humanity in a positive direction. Therefore, famous futurologists prefer not to turn to the ideas of transgumanism and stay away from it. In the end, science rarely benefits from the union with religion.

Mind transfer to a computer. The key to immortality

The idea of ​​digital loading of human consciousness into a computer that will allow people to exist without a physical body is very popular among futurists, neurobiologists, and those who want to live forever.

The issues of finding immortality were already in the spotlight earlier this month, not least thanks to the new, far.reaching project “Calico” from Google, which intends to concentrate on studying the aging process. and how it is stopped.

Larry Page is just one of the many influential and wealthy people who have recently poured millions of dollars recently in a study of immortality.

But although Calico is aimed at slowing down the process of our physical extinction, many futurists believe that the key to extending human life is not in the body, but in the brain.

Such rulers of thoughts in the field of cybernetics gathered this summer in New York at the Global International Congress “Future 2045”, organized by Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Iskov.

Itskov attracted the attention of all newspapers in the world with a statement that he intends to provide humanity with digital loading of consciousness into robotic avatars by 2045.

One of the most famous futurists and transgumanists in the world Ra Kurzweil expressed his opinion on Congress that we can learn how to load whole human consciousness into a computer over the next forty years.

“Based on the conservative calculations of the volume of calculations that are necessary in order to functionally simulate the human brain, we will be able to multiply our intellect by millions of times,” Kurzweil said at the conference.

Indeed, the ongoing successes in the field of cybernetics make you think that it is in the transfer of reason that the key to the immortality of the human race is located. Huge supercomputers learn to simulate the human brain better.

Experts in artificial intelligence are developing more and more smart machines that can reason, think, and study, imitating the work of the cerebral cortex. And in addition, man-machine intenses-that is, actually computers that are able to read your thoughts-develop a rapid pace.

However, it should be emphasized that the concept of digital preservation of the human mind is based on what is theoretically possible, and not on an accurate step.by.step map.

One of the main gaps in theory (and there are a lot of them) rather a philosophical than scientific: will the consciousness be able to survive its digital resettlement, retaining its integrity? And what will happen to your soul, or what makes you exactly you, and what goes beyond the amount of the biological bricks of your being? And is it possible to download emotions into a computer? And if not, then is such a digital immortality of its price worth?

Complete assimilation

You come to the conclusion (and do it incredibly quickly) that since you have not lost internal experience, you should go down to the rabbit hole and replace everything else. In the end, everyone around is doing this.

It becomes more difficult for a person with an incomplete upgrade to find a job. Over the next three years, you gradually add new digital neurons, leaving biological in the past.

So it’s still you? At the end of the procedure, you become a genius by all traditional standards. Only the most advanced concepts in mathematics and philosophy make you think for a second. You can instantly access everything that you have ever experienced for every thought ever recorded in your brain (biologically or not).

You took possession of each existing musical instrument. just for the sake of fun. Yes, at first you had to get comfortable. about ten minutes for each tool. Nevertheless, you are still a social being and continue to experience sadness, love, nostalgia and other human emotions. But just as the note played on the Stradivarre violin differs from a simple electronic generator of functions, your emotions are also unimaginably deep. Your former, unrequited personality could not fully realize them. Even close. You are a god who has evolved a person with a child’s curiosity. Perhaps you have never been a religious person, but a sense of communication, spiritual unity fills your complex mind. This is at the same time the lack of a body, and an understanding of the universe, and the re.accepting of ideas, always open to a revision.

Consciousness on digital media: Future or rock?

Years pass. Thanks to the same technology that made it possible to easily replace neurons and which the whole planet of supersantes has improved over time, you can replace most of the biological body. You are almost immortal. But it is practically, because a comet the size of a small continent rushes to the ground with a violent speed. The air is annoyed from the fact that the Earth is about to be destroyed (and this immediately after we wiser and finally put it in order), but there is no obvious existential horror in society.

Everyone will be in order because people will leave the planet. But how civilization, even very reasonable, can evacuate billions of people from the planet in just a few years? To do this, you will have to build huge cars rotating around the sun, and then literally load everyone in them.

Download? Of people? Well, of course, by this moment the entire population (or almost) will already have one hundred percent electronic consciousness, simply software. In fact, consciousness has always been to them. Only now it is always available, but what is even more important. it can be duplicated.

Billions of bits of people’s minds are transmitted through the open spaces of the solar system. to where computers and their gigantic solar panels are hung up in anticipation of guests. Of course, this is a gradual process that is similar to how you replaced the neurons of the brain many years ago. When replacing neurons, their “originals” are removed from the skull. The only thing you feel is a serious delay in thoughts, sometimes longer than a few minutes, due to a distance of millions of kilometers between two halves of consciousness. As a result, the transfer is completed, and when you wake up, you find yourself in a familiar place.

Virtual worlds imitating land to nanometer permits are prepared in advance for the population of the planet. In the real world, the unimaginable hordes of robots of megasopic and microscopic sizes are ready to build new computers, spacecraft, as well as new robots, while humanity is preparing to dispel intelligence in space. We have not yet developed technologies for moving at over.light speed (as well as with light), but our consciousnesses and boundless virtual realities create enough space for development and in no way depend on time. But did you stay?

What will happen if our consciousness can exist on the Internet forever

Imagine that the human brain can be scanned in the smallest details and recreated in computer simulation. Man’s mind and his memories, emotions and personality will be duplicated. In fact, a new and equally reliable version of this person will now exist in a potentially immortal digital form. Is it possible? And what “pitfalls” can be in this process if this will ever happen?

Is it possible to exist in a virtual environment?

Is digital immortality possible?

The scientific community increasingly suggests that the “digitization” of consciousness and loading it into a virtual environment is rather possible than not. The technology will probably be created in the distant future, but given how much interest this topic causes, loading consciousness into something like the Internet seems inevitable. Of course, we cannot be sure how this can affect our culture, but as the technology of modeling artificial neural networks develops, we can guess what this future can be. One of the possible outcomes is described by the psychologist Michael Graziano in his new article, conducting a mental experiment described below.

Suppose one fine day you go to the clinic to perform such an operation. Let’s be optimists and pretend that the technology works just fine. After the “digitization” procedure (let’s call it like that) you still remain yourself and you will not get any new abilities. At the same time, your virtual copy “wakes up” in the virtual world. She has your set of knowledge and skills. Your life experience and all the memories. The last thing your double remembers is how he entered the clinic and passed the digitization procedure.

I prefer a “geometric” way of discussing this situation. Imagine your life is like the letter y says Mr. Graziano. The foundation of the letter is the moment of birth. And as you grow, your personality is formed. Then you allow yourself to digitize, and from that moment the letter y branches. Now there are two trajectories, each of which is equally. The “biological” branch will inevitably die, but the “digital” can potentially live forever.

The presence of a “digital double” is a very complex philosophical and ethical question

Each of us is already present in the virtual world with a constant flow of information passing through social networks, YouTube, and so on. We live in a certain digital multiverse, and each of us is in our “virtual bubble”, where parts of the multi.senior are “pieces” of the Internet that we go into, and the “bubble” is our personal space. Confidential information.

If the opportunity will be created in the digital world in full, and even so that people in it are with the same personalities and needs as in real life, without having the shortcomings of existence in reality like diseases, most of the population can agree to such. What do you think about such digital immortality? Tell us about this in our chat in telegram.

As more and more people will live in the virtual world, the balance of culture from reality will shift in this direction. Given that most people will undergo the procedure for transferring consciousness, at some point physical existence can only become the initial stage of personality development, and real life will only begin after digitization.

“This is as unrealistic as in the 60s it seemed unrealistic transplantation of the authorities” of the editorial

Scientists have not yet learned to use the achievements of science to improve mental and physical capabilities. Craftsmen independently implant nFC chips under the skin, and scientific organizations design new versions of prostheses that can copy the reaction to external stimuli. But these are trifles. the top of transgumanism is the transfer of a person’s consciousness into the body of the robot. Observer VC.ru told when humanity can live forever and what companies seek to ensure this.

Bebionic prostheses have 14 grip, can tolerate goods up to 45 kg and cost from 25 thousand

special year. According to the futurologist and inventor Raymond Kurzweil, this year will be the year of technological singularity. Technical progress will advance so that it will be an incomprehensible human understanding. In theory, this moment will laid down to artificial intelligence, which will be wiser than a person, improving the brain due to biotechnology or even unification of human and computer.

Kurzweil assumptions most often justify themselves. He predicted the appearance of virtual reality helmets, Bluetooth technology, voice assistants and smartphones. However, not everything came true. Predictions about a supercomputer with the power of the human brain and virtual reality, in which all the feelings of a person are involved, still sound like a science fiction.

The main achievement of the technological singularity of Kurzweil, like many other futurologists, calls the unification of the human brain and computer. For example, the creation of a neuro-computer integrate is a technology that will allow the brain and computer to exchange information. Or by transferring human consciousness to the robot, which will save humanity from disease and aging. And, of course, he will give a person the right to decide for himself whether he wants to die or not.

The main cause of death is the aging of the body. Many studies and experiments are aimed at slowing these processes. In this area, amazing discoveries often occur. For example, the most effective remedy against aging can be a cure for diabetes metformin, which has been on the market for 60 years. At the end of 2015, researchers found that the risk of age.related cancers decreased in diabetics who took it.

Researchers also found that diabetics who took metformin lived longer than those who do not get diabetes. Despite the fact that diabetics, on average, live 8 years less than healthy people.

Metformin helps to increase the number of oxygen molecules that enter the cell. Due to this, a cage, and therefore a person, lives longer. Mice on which the medicine tested, lived 40% longer. For humanity, this is equivalent to 120 years of life instead of 80.

Significant extension of life with the help of medicines is a matter of a sooner future. In the case of metformin, only the study of his influence on a person will last until 2021. over, the audience of the study is narrow. they will observe three thousand elderly people who suffer from cancer, heart disease or Alzheimer’s disease. If research is successful, the turn of another control group will come. Then another and so on.

Almost all medical studies on the extension of life are still on animals. For example, in early February 2016, the life expectancy of several mice was increased by 35% due to the removal of aging cells. Some publications have issued articles with headlines “Scientists have found a remedy for aging”, which is far from the real situation. To confirm the effectiveness of this medicine, dozens of experiments will be required. And this is not reaching the stage of testing in public.

Transgumanists-robotics working on the transfer of a person’s consciousness to the robot also do not stand still. Of course, there are no working technologies for the transfer of consciousness, but suitable robots already exist. One of the most impressive projects was developed by the Laboratory of Robotics Osak University in Japan. Their Geminoid HI-1 is a copy of the director of the Laboratory of Hiroshi Ishiguro.

Hiroshi Ishiguro (left) and his robot-double

Geminoid really looks like Isiguro, but any person will immediately distinguish them. the movements of the robot are too sharp and often meaningless, and the facial features are slightly lubricated. When observing it, the effect of the “ominous valley” arises. although the robot acts as a person, but not exactly as real. Because of this, others can cause hostility, disgust or even fear.

The robot is controlled by the operator on whom special sensors are worn. They read the facial expressions and movements of the operator and transmit the robot that repeats them. Geminoid is not so much a robot as a doll on the control panel.

Geminoid is an improved version of the Aktroid robot developed at the University earlier. Inside it are 47 sensors that are responsible for the reaction to external stimuli. He knows how to move his eyes, head, imitate the process of breathing. There is a training system-if a person facing a robot makes some movements, he can analyze them and repeat them. To do this, a person should be put on a person.

Such robots are able to reproduce and copy movements, but do not have a sensory organs. And this is one of the main problems. who wants to be locked in a metal box, not having the opportunity to touch the surrounding things and feel them?

But the technology of copying the nervous system already exists. The founder of 3Scan Todd Huffman believes that for 5 years it will be available for clinical trials. There are many volunteers, especially among owners of prostheted limbs. The latest developments in the sphere of prosthetics are amazing, but the prostheses still do not allow the owners to feel the world around him. 3SCAN, which is engaged in 3D scanning and analysis of the smallest objects, in particular, nervous endings, will play a significant role in solving this problem. The company is not yet heard, but already attracts external funds. since the founding in 2011, only one investment round has been closed in the amount of 6.67 million.

The problems do not end there. For example, what will happen to sexual life? Reporter Motherboard Fruschina Erdo asked Hiroshi Ishiguro this question. In his research, Ishiguro is focused on communication and empathy, but believes that “love is also important.”. He asked Erdo a counter question.