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Why Our Brains Will Never Live In the Matrix 35

Posted by samzenpus from the show-me dept.
destinyland writes "Professor Athena Andreadis answers the question, 'Why Our Brains Will Never Live in the Matrix,' contrasting "mind uploading" predictions with 'the major stumbling block to personal immortality' — namely, that our biological software is inseparable from our hardware. There's practical problems. ('After electrochemical activity ceases in the brain, neuronal integrity deteriorates in a matter of seconds.') But she also argues that what we call 'the mind' is also an artifact of a specific brain, and copying it 'is an excellent way to leave a detailed memorial or a clone-like descendant, but not to become immortal.'"
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Why Our Brains Will Never Live In the Matrix More

Why Our Brains Will Never Live In the Matrix

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  • "I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.
    Microscopic spiders had woven a fine gold web through my brain, so that the jewel's teacher could listen to the whisper of my thoughts. The jewel itself eavesdropped on my senses, and read the chemical messages carried in my bloodstream; it saw, heard, smelt, tasted and felt the world exactly as I did, while the teacher monitored its thoughts and compared them with my own. Whenever the jewel'

    • I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull

      Hey! My parent also told me that.

      Then I tried to find my little brother's jewel but with all the red mess I couldn't find anything.

    • Is it a worthwhile read? I'm always looking for good storied to read, and have never heard of this one.

      -- and to Slashdot. Your search engine sucks. i typed matrix into the search bar, chose stories, and this one doesn't come up. Matrix is in the submission title. It is in the body. Yet your search engine doesn't find it. It did find one about a Toyota Matrix ad campaign.

  • Reading Doctorow's 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom' to my daughter as a bedtime story when he published it, I recall that somewhere around the middle of the book she started asking me how it was that restoring from a backup to a new body, no matter how fresh the backup, would result in a continuity of awareness for the individual involved. Not my girl's words exactly, but that was her meaning. I had been struggling with this question since almost the beginning of the book, and to some extent had been for
    • (Okay, seems I made a mistake... or Firefox did. Result is a truncated posting, no idea why, to which the entire original text is now my reply. Perhaps some good moderator can mend this mess?) Reading Doctorow's 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom' to my daughter as a bedtime story when he published it, I recall that somewhere around the middle of the book she started asking me how it was that restoring from a backup to a new body, no matter how fresh the backup, would result in a continuity of aware
      • dont think so. if in a course of 7 years all your cells are replaced by new ones, it says that you are a diferent person that the one 7 years ago? if you have a perfect copy of an object, how can you say who is the original and who is the copy? even if the original is still alive! My opinion is that memory dumping/uploading enables not only personal imortality but personal multiplexing too
        • Personal multiplexing to be sure. But how is it personal continuity? In a philosophical sense perhaps? But one can perceive two identical beings as being identical in every way... yet still point to the fact that they are two distinct beings, whose awareness is not linked. Think of identical twins. When they are born, are they the same being? Of course not. And experiential divergence makes them less and less alike by the second, as would be the case with a dumped copy of ourselves. While the ego insists t

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by gox ( 1595435 )

            There is no 'germ' or 'spirit' to be passed along, no soul to drift out of one body and into the next.

            Both beings are continuations of the same being. If multiplexing never happened, only one being would be a continuation of its referred self. Just as you don't have a physical link to your previous instances, you wouldn't have a link to other branches. There is no soul to drift out, or get duplicated, because there *is* no soul.

        • Forgot to comment on the "if in the course of 7 years" bit. The key there is the 'if' as in fact brain cells are NOT replaced every 7 years. Not replaced at all. While as the essay author notes there is some evidence of useful brain cell growth, supplanting the older wisdom that we stop growing brain cells in early childhood, the vast bulk of our brain cells are with us until they die and then not replaced. So continuity at the cellular level is, sorry to say, a part of the nature of what makes us 'us.'

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by dov_0 ( 1438253 )
        I agree with you. Once one person dies, even if a full copy of their mind, will etc is rendered into another body, the continuity of being is broken.

      • I've thought the same things about the teleporters in Star Trek.. creepy.

      • The successfully transferred memory or being or self into the new machine or clone is simply starting a new life... which happens to have the same memories as the poor sap who just died, and considers itself to _be_ that same guy. Of course that latter part is an error of awareness, of perspective, very tempting to think of as continuity but it is an error to be sure.

        The thing is, it's the same "error of awareness" that we all make every day. I consider myself to be the same guy as yesterday, as a year or a

      • Sleep. Your stream of conscious experience stops when you go to sleep, and resumes when you wake up. Sure, there's some brain activity during sleep -- but during the deepest phases, there's nothing like "consciousness". In fact, given the consolidation processes and whatnot that happen during sleep, you could make a very convincing argument that the person who wakes up in your body tomorrow morning will not be the "you" that falls asleep tonight.

        Sweet dreams!

        • Some activity during sleep, really? It has been said by many sleep researchers that the brain is actually more active during sleep than when we are awake, though the activity is of a different nature. Then there is the discovery of the structure of benzene and related compounds, dreamt by Kekulé. Our conscious selves continue through our unconscious selves. There is no shutting off of the self during sleep. The only absolute discontinuity of the self comes with death... and it is said that many brain c

  • There's always the problem of continuity of consciousness. Even if you make an identical copy of your brain, another consciousness emerges. TFA states:

    > This is an excellent way to leave a detailed memorial or a clone-like descendant, but not to become immortal.

    I don't buy that at all. Couldn't you say that the new emergent consciousness would be identical? That wouldn't be a copy, but a fork.

    But what is so special about consciousness in the first place? One could say that the emergent thing, the conscio

    • No, of course not. Because the flesh continues. Just because a physician may not fully comprehend the dynamics of cellular integrity at low temperatures does not mean that the individual involved has not survived as the same individual, with the same awareness. The freezing thing is similar to the arguments regarding sleep, anesthesia, or coma. The individual awareness persists, so long as there is tissue integrity and surviving functionality. I do understand the temptation to assess identical awareness as

  • Nobody tell Ray Kurzweil!

    • I look forward to reading his obituary. "I wanna live forever!" Annoying and infantile.

      The very thing that gives life meaning is that we die. Simple economics. Limit the supply and it becomes more precious.

      If we all lived forever, then we would all become obnoxious trolls. I mean, if YOU also lived forever, YOU would also become obnoxious trolls.

    • What, and deepen the poor man's midlife crisis?

  • Immortality, but not for us... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Guppy ( 12314 ) on Thursday October 22, 2009 @11:17PM (#29842795)

    Since the brain makes little distinction between hardware, instructions, and data, perhaps the crux of the problem is that it wasn't designed with any way to do a read-out from the big squishy mess. If an "upload" of any sort ever becomes possible, I think it will require a brain engineered from before birth, to contain specialized features that will enable a dump.

    Perhaps it'll be in the form of some little chemical tags that will accumulate in cell bodies, produced in varying mixes whose profiles reveal what the cell did when it was still alive and who it was connected to -- stable enough to be scanned out of diced sheets post-mortem. Or maybe they'll pulse out their secrets encoded in bio-luminescent flashes. Or maybe they'll be a mesh of nerve fibers splayed across the brain of this new human, bio-engineered to output something a computer can understand, with characteristics to help mitigate problems like requiring precise electrode placement, or incompatibility with artificial materials.

    In any case, there would be immortality, but not for us...

  • ok... (Score:1)

    by xmt27 ( 903031 )
    If the brain is irrevocably connected to the body, then simulate the body alongside the brain on your supercomputer.
  • that you would go 'crazy' without the neruological stimulus from your 5 main senses. People who loose one or two of their senses in accidents have had their personalities greatly altered. The biggest impact is sight, second is touch. In essense, starving your brain that is hardwired for sensory input could drive it mad within days and weeks. Not to mention, how would your intuition, sense of reason and rational work in an artifical environment? How could you day-dream?
  • So, here's a thought experiment, say you made an artificial equivalent of a neuron that behaves the same way externally. Now, you swap out the neurons with the artificial ones, while you're still conscious. You wouldn't know if one neuron was replaced, but at some point all your neurons will be artificial, you've just transferred your mind to a different platform. In reality, we'll likely develop machines which can behave like the brain and interface with the brain. Once we start getting augmentations, the

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