There's no reason to roll over and just accept death from aging, accident or violence, any more than we accept death by flu or any other curable disease. Things which would've outright killed people 200 years ago merely cause a few days of a runny nose to us, so to speak. You cannot deny that medicine is, after all, basically the quest for immortality, and that is where it's going to end up.
Therefore, no computer that is composed of components which interact with the electromagnetic field and which operates at a temperature comparable to Earth temperatures will ever simulate a human mind to complete accuracy. It will always be an approximation.
• We can already clone mammalian bodies.
• I'll assume that "growing" an adult human body, with a "blank" or "default" brain, isn't too inconceivable.
• Your real, natural brain can access the information within itself.
• At the moment of "copying", we figure some way to biologically link the two brains together, and write some biological software to pull data from the source brain to the destination brain.
And growing a body with a "blank" brain, what does that mean? Your conscience is absolutely intertwined with your body. If you take my mind and put it in Usain Bolt's body, that Frankenthing won't run 100m in <10s.
https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
The brain is, as far as we can tell, more like that circuit than a disk. Information is encoded within the structure of the processor itself, rather than being one of 2^N easily defined conformations of a memory device. As such, there is no way to copy the memories of brain A into brain B -- it simply isn't a thing. It would be like saying: copy all of the stains on this shirt, but the stains are integrated into the fibers and are unique to the stitching. In particular, this statement is false:
>Your real, natural brain can access the information within itself.
It cannot, for example, I cannot fully describe how to walk, given a pair of human legs and a butt. My brain can only encode information into language in the particular ways in which it is "designed" to do so. There is no way at all for the brain to report, e.g., the number of synapses within it, even if the firings of some neurons are recorded electronically.
I say "design" in this sense because the structure of my brain is contingent on its fitness-for-purpose in a way that affected its formation, via biological evolution, similar to the way that the structure of an intentionally designed object is contingent on its fitness-for-purpose, which affected its formation as it was constructed by the entity which made it.
A single brain, in a secure location, remotely controlling multiple bodies (one at a time, but able to switch between them.)
• Identify all the points of contact – the I/O pins – between the brain and body.
• Identify the medium and format of communication between brain/body/senses. I think most of this has already been achieved.
• Grow a body, a shell, without a brain.
• Take your brain out and keep it alive in a vat.
• Put wireless transceivers at each I/O point on the controlling brain and the shell body/bodies.
Will anything like this be remotely (<pun) possible?
You'd have to get used to lag but in the case of a fatal accident/violence* and most diseases your brain would be safe and able to switch to a new body..
I expect something like that would be very valuable to soldiers and workers in hazardous environments, like space.
"I'll assume that "growing" an adult human body, with a "blank" or "default" brain, isn't too inconceivable."
is problematic as well.
I invent a machine that "scans" your body in such a way that I'm able to create a perfect replica of the state your body was in, nearly to the atom. Molecule, by molecule, the machine can rebuild your body, within a near infinitesimal margin of error.
I put you inside this machine, and scan your replica file, and then I save it to a massive storage device, and, when called upon I can rebuild that version of you whenever I want.
Now, after being successfully scanned, you exit the device. I blow your head off with a shotgun, and your headless corpse slumps on the floor. No witnesses.
Do you really think you'll come back to life, if I print out your replica from the file?
As I said in other comments, once such technology is available, our laws and ethics will have to adapt to it one way or the other.
I think you have your calculations off for the amount of energy required to store a human brain. Assume 8.6 x 10^10 neurons (more accurate number as its simple density measurement) each holding a 64-bit weight which gives us 5.5 x 10^12 bits. This multiplied by the lower bound e.g. k(1)ln2 or 9.56 x 10^-24 J, gives us 5.3 x 10^-12 J which is lower than the energy required to type a letter on this keyboard. Now even if we increase this by body temperature say 37 C we get 310.15 K or about 1.7 x 10^-8 J. This is of course a lower bound on the problem but even if you pump up the number of neurons or weight value you still get less than a joule of energy required.
There is no way in hell you're going to store the entire physical state of a neuron in anything near 64 bits. The question is not "information stored in the brain". The question is "information required to recreate the brain". In fact a single neuron has many more than 64 synapses, each of which itself has a highly intricate structure. All of the information describing this structure must be retained intact in order for the image brain to be equivalent to the substrate.
We live in the future where we all use fancy teleporters. You happily live in Amsterdam and commute to the Bay Area every morning. The way the teleporter actually works is by making a quick copy, deconstructing the object and the recreating the exact copy some place else. One day you go to the teleporter and realize it's broken. You contact customer service and are totally missing that 9 o clock meeting. Customer support says: "We're sorry but there has been a malfunctioning. You were teleported but not deconstructed properly. Could you please step back in the teleporter so we can deconstruct you?".
Body and self are intertwined in ways we don't yet fully understand. But it will be verry difficult to transfer consciousness. In the case of copying, you are for sure just dying and a new copy of you will be born.
A scarier thought even: Perhaps this is the case when we go to sleep and your consciousness dies and a new one wakes up every morning. Sure would explains why I always have a hard time falling asleep ;)