The Quest to Upload Your Mind into the Digital Space

The "you" reading this is extremely unlikely to not be the "you" ending up on, or in depending on how any of us thinks about it, the new upload target platform. This is the now classic, "STAR TREK" transporter problem:

Bones, the doctor, insists it is murder, while Kirk says it is not and he says he feels like Kirk before and after. Spock is away doing research to help resolve the disagreement. (And I suggest a possible solution in like kind here)

Now, to either "you", waking up will be a similar experience. To the one on the digital stuff, it will be different in however ways it is different, and it will feel continuous too, like no real death of a "you" happened. And given tech works to expectations, no death would have happened! On the plus side, this does give us a verify capability during development, with the downside of new and complex, serious moral questions associated with a new conscious entity, rights, agency... New law and potentially super exciting for legal minds to contemplate as it is for tech minds.

That digital "you" will carry on, ideally after wetware "you" comes to a natural end. While there are two?

Let us think about how digital tech works in brief:

We have a MOV instruction, for example, but no move happens! What does happen is a copy. I always found the load store type designs more coherent in this way:

$FACE = $08

LDA $FACE

A contains $08

STA $BEEF

$BEEF contains $08

When it is all done, the value $08, represented by electrical states ends up in all three places. Copies of that state are made.

Now a direct memory design might look like:

$BEEF = $08 $FACE = $00

MOV $FACE, $BEEF. (dest, source)

There may be a transition register, like the load store makes explicit, or it may happen directly between memory stores too.

When done, the value $08 ends up in two, maybe will have existed in three, places. Copies.

Now, it can be useless to think about a specific electron, just as it is almost always useless to think about a specific atom, or photon. They all are the same and always perform to spec. Because of those properties, we generally think in terms of them being present, not so much about a specific, individual one. Entanglement suggests the universe does make that distinction and given how poorly we understand consciousness, I wager copying is a create new consciousness act, not a real transfer.

When we scale these ideas up to our Macro scale, suddenly we bump into whatever being conscious is, and the thought problem associated with consciousness being attached to, or an emergent thing associated with the state in your body reading this right now.

Moving it may not be a thing we can ever do, like entangling an entire being or even significant quantity of matter is very unlikely to be a thing we can do.

Copying is something we are likely able to do, and that is the basis for whatever this line of research leads to, and that is what upload means, and how our digital tech works on a fundemental level.

The race to move the brain into a different home, then slowly digitize parts of it to bring the conscious entity along without a copy, or clone, and or delete, or full consciousness death event being necessary, may in fact be the more desirable path!

In that scenario, a part of us does die, in that a specific state and fragment of consciousness is lost, but the greater whole could adopt the copy, reintegrate and carry on much like we imagine happens today with various brain injuries and a healing or repurposing we have seen happen to people so affected. A continuity of effective state could potentially be achieved! Perhaps the order of things done, amounts or parts killed off and digital copies positioned to be adopted can be arranged over some period of time such that the mind remains coherent amd lucid.

Maybe. Maybe...

There you go, my sunday thought lark. Enjoy, get outside, feel better as maybe we are finally getting past the pandemic.