Transhumanism and the search for digital immortality


With enough scientific research, we could potentially become immortal.

Rapid advances in medical and cognitive technology, ranging from artificial skulls to mind-controlled prosthetic limbs, point to a time in the not-too-distant future when we may be able to replace our entire bodies with artificial, manufactured parts. After all, the human mind is nothing but software running on the “machine” of the brain—software that could potentially run on hardware made of chips and wires instead of neurons and blood vessels.

Sound intriguing? Welcome to the endless wormhole of biology and futurology that is transhumanism.

Science has been nipping at the heels of religion for millennia. As science has advanced, it has forced religious theories about the material world to evolve.

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Many religious people agree that transhumanism and religion are incompatible, and therefore conclude that the project of transhumanism is destined to fail. As Mike Adams wrote passionately in his article “Transhumanism debunked: Why drinking the Kurzweil Kool-Aid will only make you dead, not immortal,” it is absolutely impossible for a human consciousness to exist in, or be transferred into, a machine body. His logic is straightforward: Everyone knows machines have no free will and no soul. Since people do have souls and free will, it is impossible for humans to have machine bodies. Therefore anyone who tries to transfer his consciousness into an artificial body, Adams warns, will simply die.
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MarkS wrote:I'm sure this has been raised before - and correct me if I'm wrong, but surely any "upload" would simply be a copy - I would still have to die.

MarkS wrote:I'm sure this has been raised before - and correct me if I'm wrong, but surely any "upload" would simply be a copy - I would still have to die.

Made of Stars wrote:Re. Mike Adams' claims cited above: Any argument that starts with 'Everyone knows...' has already lost.

I think transhumanism, as described here, is doomed to fail, not because it conflicts with religion, but because the electronics industry is becoming mature, with the failure of Moore's Law (see another recent thread), and the complexity and plasticity of neural connections in a human brain is currently too great to emulate.

By 2005 the first single cellular model was completed. The first artificial cellular neocortical column of 10,000 cells was built by 2008.
By July 2011 a cellular mesocircuit of 100 neocortical columns with a million cells in total was built.

A cellular rat brain is planned for 2014 with 100 mesocircuits totalling a hundred million cells.

Finally a cellular human brain is predicted possible by 2023 equivalent to 1000 rat brains with a total of a hundred billion cells.[8][9]

Now that the column is finished, the project is currently busying itself with the publishing of initial results in scientific literature, and pursuing two separate goals:

construction of a simulation on the molecular level,[1] which is desirable since it allows studying the effects of gene expression;
simplification of the column simulation to allow for parallel simulation of large numbers of connected columns, with the ultimate goal of simulating a whole neocortex (which in humans consists of about 1 million cortical columns).[contradictory]
Funding[edit]

The project is funded primarily by the Swiss government and the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Flagship grant from the European Commission,[10] and secondarily by grants and some donations from private individuals. The EPFL bought the Blue Gene computer at a reduced cost because at that stage it was still a prototype and IBM was interested in exploring how different applications would perform on the machine. BBP was viewed a validation of the Blue Gene supercomputer concept.[11]

Documentary[edit]
A 10 part documentary is being made by film director Noah Hutton, with each installment detailing the year long workings of the project at the EPFL. Having started filming in 2009, the documentary is planned to be released in 2020, after the years of filming and editing have finished. Regular contributions from Henry Markram and the rest of the team provide an insight into the Blue Brain Project, while similar research tasks across the world are touched on.[12]

Macdoc wrote:

By 2005 the first single cellular model was completed. The first artificial cellular neocortical column of 10,000 cells was built by 2008.
By July 2011 a cellular mesocircuit of 100 neocortical columns with a million cells in total was built.

A cellular rat brain is planned for 2014 with 100 mesocircuits totalling a hundred million cells.

Macdoc wrote:

I think transhumanism, as described here, is doomed to fail, not because it conflicts with religion, but because the electronics industry is becoming mature, with the failure of Moore's Law (see another recent thread), and the complexity and plasticity of neural connections in a human brain is currently too great to emulate.

... Plasticity is an advantage not a barrier.

...

Macdoc wrote:HAve not seen it - might be worth chasing...

Here is their blog

http://community.frontiersin.org/people ... ject/54186

Latest article is more than a year old

http://www.frontiersin.org/news/Neural_ ... _Waves/369

Larger scale combined effort

https://www.humanbrainproject.eu

But if computing speeds continue to develop at their current exponential pace, and energy efficiency improves, Markram believes that he’ll be able to model a complete human brain on a single machine in ten years or less.

Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you’d need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data (peta being a million billion, or 10 to the fifteenth power). That’s about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google’s servers. (Given current technology, a machine capable of such power would be the size of several football fields.) Energy consumption is another huge problem. The human brain requires about 25 watts of electricity to operate. Markram estimates that simulating the brain on a supercomputer with existing microchips would generate an annual electrical bill of about $3 billion.

home_ wrote:

MarkS wrote:I'm sure this has been raised before - and correct me if I'm wrong, but surely any "upload" would simply be a copy - I would still have to die.

Maybe you could just redirect electricity from brain onto silicon chips, and the activity of the brain would just cease.

Thommo wrote:

home_ wrote:

MarkS wrote:I'm sure this has been raised before - and correct me if I'm wrong, but surely any "upload" would simply be a copy - I would still have to die.

Maybe you could just redirect electricity from brain onto silicon chips, and the activity of the brain would just cease.

Redirect electricity?

If you "are" electric activity in your brain (and assuredly this isn't the case anyway, with chemical interactions forming a large part of the picture in addition), then redirecting electric activity from the brain (so that there is no longer electric activity in your brain) is still death, it's still the end of "you". The particular electrons are not the key element here.

Steve wrote:More brain research is needed. Lets face it - wetware computers move slow and mostly they fake the results.