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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Our brain interface tech is so primitive, but it holds incredible promise if we're able to solve it.

Imagine being able to virtualize consciousness, back up memories, live forever...

The problem is how invasive it is, and how little reward there is initially. We have to solve the chicken and egg problem, but unfortunately cracking open the skull and sticking electrodes into the brain is not something one typically wants to do if they're conscious about their health.

I hope we can gain traction with medical applications and then begin to make steady advances. It'd be neat to have fully virtual, synthetic senses before we die.

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Digitizing consciousness is a much harder problem, because we don't really understand how much of the brain works, the areas involved with conscious thought in particular, and the exact learning mechanisms the brain employs. The way we do deep learning these days is a very rough approximation of how the brain might work, and backpropagation is not really biologically plausible. So IMO, digitized consciousness is probably two to three orders of magnitude harder than this demo we're seeing here. Could unfortunately be a century away or more.

However, the medical applications should come much sooner. What they've shown is amazing. The monkey's control of the paddle seems to be precise and fast. If people who are paralyzed and wheelchair bound just had a way to operate the wheelchair, a robot arm, and communicate with the outside world reliably, that would already be amazing. If we could somehow reconnect their nerves or give them some kind of mechanized suit, it could be even better... And if Neuralink's tech works, that could be only 10-15 years away.

The thing i always think about with digital consciousness is that it would just be a clone that can’t distinguish itself from the OG consciousness that’s still resident in the brain.

The way this idea came to me was in a weird day dream thinking about the first experiment to attempt it... Patient lying on the table all wired up, a Dr. Frankenstein moment of ‘the upload’ followed by a screen witnessing the boot of the relocated consciousness. The doctor interacts with the persona, asking what it’s like and getting direct responses saying how amazing it is.

Meanwhile, amidst the commotion and celebration, you see the ’donor’ patient wake up in a reflection on the monitor and hear them faintly ask ‘did it work?’

I would argue that there is one consciousness, which is split into differing perspectives. I call that the multi-perspective being. This solves the teleport paradox (if you clone someone then where is the consciousness). The consciousness is everywhere, but split into differing perspectives.

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