Hagakure Posted October 5, 2005 http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1 hold onto your hats guys i personally wouldnt mind downloading my mind into a computer. if it reaches that level then we will have control over the reality we experience inside the computer. one big lucid dream with interactions with real people - hell yeah no shit though this is freaky stuff. this planet is turning into pure information and its only a matter of time before this information spreads across universe. perhaps what are peoples thoughts? edit: subtitle should be exponential development of technology or some other fitting word. humans are approaching the point where we will develop ourselves at exponential rate but not quite yet. edit2: Got this site through stumble upon add on for mozilla. should start shaman group on this. join the hive mind people. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
occidentalis Posted October 9, 2005 i personally wouldnt mind downloading my mind into a computer. if it reaches that level then we will have control over the reality we experience inside the computer. one big lucid dream with interactions with real people - hell yeah Your mind is inside a computer. It's called your body. And life is already one big lucid dream with interactions with real people. It's just that we attach way too much importance to it and take it too seriously. You don't need to be inside a computer to enjoy existing. And who looks after the computer? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Hagakure Posted October 9, 2005 a material world can be a bit annoying sometimes. if we lived in virtual reality we could reach a kind of utopia - no haves and have nots (actually im sure human nature will somehow make that possible). hell you could download the state referred to as "elightenment" to every mind. would it not be as fun though? reminds me about something alan watts said. have tried typing the concept a few times but cant do it justice. will get back to you when i find what mp3 its in. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
faustus Posted October 9, 2005 yeah, been following ray kurzweil's stuff for a while. i highly recommend subscribing to his weekly newsletter for updates on cutting-edge technology. he's got a new book out called "the singularity is near: when humans transcend biology" we're entering the most exciting phase of human development... within our lifetimes we'll attain material utopia, or either complete and utter destruction of the human race. aren't we neat little buggers! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
spacetrucker Posted October 9, 2005 If we had the tech to be able to download a mind into a computer, what would would it feel like? I imagine that to scan a brain to the level of detail required to recreate a virtual functional copy of your brain, your real brain may need to be destroyed. But assuming that it is possible without destroying your brain... Imagine you go to the mind-scan clinic and hop into a machine and get your brain/body scanned. The data is downloaded into the host computer and the simulation is started. Your copy running inside the simulation, if actually aware of its existence, would remember being scanned one minute then suddenly be inside a totally different world. It would have all your memories of the external world, more or less up to to point of the completion of the scan. It would be as if your subjective stream of experience has branched into two seperate streams. So now you have a copy of yourself experiencing existence inside the computer. From your point of view you would not experience existing inside the computer. You would be more or less the same as you were before the scan, but would now have an interesting toy to play with. From the simulations point of view it could be interesting. For one thing its perception of time would be dependant on the speed of the hardware it was hosted on. So if it were running on a really fast box, it could operate many times faster than a organic brain. Time in the outside world would appear to slow down. Also if it didn't want to wait for some future event, it could temporarily halt its own program until some future point in time, thus not experiencing the passage of time. But the again, maybe the simulation would find that a human brain is far from an ideal architecture for a consciousness in a digital world. The human brain is quite adaptable, but imagine... A simulated brain running in a computer could have a million eyes, a million ears, radar, sonar, etc, many more types of sensors than the human brain is equipped to process. The only way I can imagine actually experiencing my awareness existing in a pure digital information world would be something more like where you have a bunch of wires hooked into your nervous system, or maybe something less invasive like some precise high tech magnetic brain stimulation device. But that would be more like VR with an advanced brain-computer interface than actually downloading mind into the computer. But your body could still get sick with you mind in the virtual world, so its not a pure informational existence. Reminds me of a Red Dwarf episode where they have a game "Better Than Life", where people spend years living out their fantasies in a virtual world, while their bodies exist as a node of wasting flesh wired into a computer network. What could possibly go wrong? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Hagakure Posted October 17, 2005 ive said it once i'll say it again hive mind browsing is the bomb. thanks "stumble upon" for this topical link http://www.ibiblio.org/jstrout/uploading/MUHomePage.html will search for that alan watts quote again Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
