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Comment by wladimir | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought of mind uploading as a comforting lie. Like what you tell a small child about what happened to the old dog. "He's in a better place now".

The idea of the singularity implies that the complexity of technology moves above anything humanity can understand. It is unclear whether there still be any use for our kind of individual conscious mind. At what scale will cognition happen? Will the world itself turn into a kind of brain?

But I'm with you in hoping that the Minds will be like the culture's and keep us around as pets in a sort of enlightened hedonism :-)

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Does a cell in your body lack an independent existence? You can culture them by themselves, they evolved by themselves. Algae actually does exist as both single cells and collective colonies of the same organism.

There's nothing inherently contradictory of a higher intelligence being composed of many active smaller conscious experiences - arguably this is what the internet already is, just a very slow version of it. We need a better interconnect (and some more durable subprocessors).

Cells certainly have a kind of independent existence (consciousness is a different matter...). But our body needs its cells. It's not simulating cells in another substrate.

The 'cells' in the case of the hypothetical technological singularity will be computer hardware, not organic cells or human brains. There is the tacit assumption that silicon-based AI tech is somehow superior to our own carbon-based 'tech' and will displace it.

Human brains forming into a kind of super-organism would be a different phenomenon. It wouldn't even need AI, or much more advanced technology. It could indeed be argued that this is the case already with the internet and even printing press before it.

> There is the tacit assumption that silicon-based AI tech is somehow superior to our own carbon-based 'tech' and will displace it.

I doubt it's superior or will replace carbon-based tech (no quotes here; biology is but nanotechnology that was not made by us), but there are two particular improvements introducing human-designed technology could bring:

- electrical signals in the brain run at 200Hz; minds could in principle work much faster, were they made of something different

- human-designed technology is easier to modify, reprogram and adapt (mostly becasue we built it, so we know how to do it); the idea is that a mind built with it could be made to be able to rewrite/rebuild itself, with luck launching into recursive improvement loop, where a mind redesigns itself to be better, which then goes on to improve itself more, etc.

Only some time back in history you could have said the same thing about organ transplants.

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