On the contrary, the concepts of conscious computers and ‘uploading consciousness’ from a biological brain have exactly zero basis in science or fact.
If you can point me to a scientific paper indicating any kind of consciousness whatsoever in a computer, or suggest any kind of physical mechanism for ‘uploading consciousness’, I’d love to see it.
This is just religious faith in a different form, a kind of atheistic substitute for religion. It’s not science.
No, it’s science. It follows directly from a major premise in cognitive science.
In the history of scientific advancement one has always had to distinguish between the theoretically impossible (a physical object or any information exceeding the speed of light would require us to fundamentally redefine our understanding of physics) and things just presumed impossible because they seemed so strange, like the once-popular idea that supersonic aircraft were impossible.
The idea of a full brain upload in any particular timeframe is far from certain and it may have yet unknown limitations, but from an information standpoint it really is just a transfer of information. If there is more in our brains that constitutes our being than information, please tell us what it is, in scientific terms. And answer my original question: what is it about uploading the mind that you believe is a scientifically supportable inconsistency with our understanding of physics?
IMO (because none of this can be done experimentally)…
We think ‘identity’ is a very special thing because in our experience (and barring death or brain injury etc), it appears to follow a single persistent thread/narrative. We are the same people we were yesterday, because we remember being the person of yesterday - we exist as a thing that has a very compelling reason to imagine that this continuity of memory has some sort of substance thread of its own. We imagine ourselves projecting or pushing our ‘self’ onward into the future, but in fact we are just retrospectively patching together the past into our story, at any given moment.
In the transporter/replication/mind upload scenario, we have situations where two different things can wake up with equally compelling reasons to imagine that they are the primary recipient of that thread of continuity. We don’t have the ability to viscerally understand what that really means, or what it would be like.
What it would be like, is the same as it is for us most mornings - we wake up and remember being us - except happening to two different people. There is no valid, meaningful sense in which we can ask “which one of the two do ‘I’ go into?”, because that’s based on the notion that ‘I’ am something that can be pushed or sent into the future in some form other than memories. I’m something that is ‘pulled’ out of memories of the past - and there’s no good reason why more than one instance of ‘me’ couldn’t pull the same memories, and claim to really be me.
This is only one of many theories (as you will see if you go to your Wikipedia link and look at Criticism and Alternative theories). There is no consensus at all, only speculation.
Over many decades of discussion, debate, and research, scientists have reached no conclusion at all except that we currently do not have an adequate understanding of consciousness.
It’s impossible to do any serious reading on the subject and not know this.
You could start by reading through these articles:
The empty brain
Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer
by** Robert Epstein**, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California, author of 15 books, and the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today.
Is Matter Conscious?
Why the central problem in neuroscience is mirrored in physics
by Hedda Hassel Mørch, post-doc at The Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University
“The nature of consciousness seems to be unique among scientific puzzles. Not only do neuroscientists have no fundamental explanation for how it arises from physical states of the brain, we are not even sure whether we ever will.”
Minding matter
*The closer you look, the more the materialist position in physics appears to rest on shaky metaphysical ground *
by Adam Frank, physicist and professor of astronomy at the ***University of Rochester in New York
Serious criticism of what they say is welcome, but not childish dismissals in a sentence or two, after a two second glance at the articles.
First of all let’s be clear and accurate. I don’t dispute that consciousness is not a phenomenon that we can yet fully explain, except to hypothesize that it’s an emergent property of intelligence and that both phenomena are at their core computational. Secondly, I don’t claim that the computational theory of mind – CTM, related to what is also called the computational-representational theory of thought – is without challenges or controversy. I claim that it’s currently one of the leading theories of how the mind works and may very well be empirically correct, and therefore your casual dismissals like “It’s not like we’re talking about actual facts or real possibilities” are unjustified and wrong.
I did look at the Epstein article, and three things about it struck me immediately. One was the strident, arrogantly presumptuous way he makes his claims, as if there was no room for doubt that he alone has discovered the truth. The second was just how wrong he is. And the third, which is neither here nor there, is just my observation that the former editor of a popular magazine of pseudo-science is hardly qualified to defy the mainstream thinking on CTM.
Fortunately I don’t have to waste time criticizing the article point by point as this guy has done a pretty good job of it, and ironically, this is someone who argues against CTM and just thinks that Epstein’s arguments are so bad (“virtually every key passage is mistaken”) that they’re undermining his case. Epstein’s article is, indeed, embarrassingly bad. In trying to demolish what he calls the computing metaphor of mind, he demonstrates that he not only doesn’t understand how the mind works, he doesn’t understand how computers work, either.
I didn’t look at the other two articles but if you have to resort to the writings of a grad student and an astronomer I don’t imagine there’s going to be much substance to undermine the work of highly respected figures in cognitive science like the late Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor who have developed theories of functionalism and CTM to the point that they are currently arguably the most useful approaches to the theory of mind that we have. If you genuinely want some serious reading you might start here.
You’ve either misunderstood the status of the science you’re describing or you’re misrepresenting it by muddling together results from different experiments.
Yes, flatworms can regenerate. The experiments from the 60s showing the regenerated worms retaining memories has however failed replications and suggestions for flaws in the original research that explain those results are many.
The July 2013 research involved decapitating the worms, not chopping them into small pieces, and the decapitated worms did not have the memories they tested for, but the memories appeared to be possible to reactivate.
This looks like a decent pop-sci writeup. Decapitated worms regenerate heads with old memories — Neurofantastic
Just to throw another notion out onto the table, consider our personal identities prior to any such experiment and ponder the question of whether we are different or are in fact the exact same self having divergent experiences.
Or…we do the Analog Version.
Brain Transplants!
Much more plausible.
Will differing hormone outputs from the glands in the new body alter the transplanted brain’s personality?
BTW–what about transplanting only one lobe?
How much of the personality gets transferred?
There’s a god-of-the-gaps vibe to the argument you are dealing with/opposing here. Because we can’t explain something, it could be anything, therefore it’s this other magical thing.
We can’t say exactly how multicellular life came into being, but since we can observe extant examples of life doing the same sorts of things as would have been necessary for multicellular life to form, we can rule out the idea that the steps necessary are inpossible.
Likewise, we can’t say how consciousness and thought works, but if you look at the results of some of the experiments that are based on models and theories of the brain, of thought, and cognitive processes, you can see that the research is leading in a promising direction. We’re not in the position now to explain the mind comes into being with anything like the confidence we have when we explain how multicellular life came into being, but we didn’t get to that latter position by complaining that the problem was too hard to even try.
His argument smells of straw to me. I know ‘the brain is like a computer’ is just the modern equivalent of ‘the brain is like a telephone exchange’, which in turn us the newer version of ‘the brain is like a clock’ - popular magazine type science will probably always have a tendency to compare the brain to the most complex manmade thing available at the time - just because we know the brain is pretty damn complex.
I don’t believe there are many people seriously espousing the views that Epstein says he disagrees with. The brain is not a computer. The brain is not the mind. The brain is a thing in which a mind can come into being.
But the mind is definitely in the brain, because damaging the brain damages the mind. If the brain were merely a radio receiver for a metaphysical mind, then it would be really weird that damage to specific areas impairs mental function, rather than just reception of the signal.
I see the answer to this as being so obvious that I have a hard time seeing how anybody could hold a different perspective. Consider two completely different people: Yourself now, and yourself before reading the previous sentence.
Both these people claim to be you, and have a sense of personal identity that (against all evidence) claims that they’re both the same person as you from thirty-six hours ago. They do this despite having the vast majority of their molecules in completely different positions from the you from thirty-six hours ago.
However, despite having a shared sense of identity, these two people are quite different from one another: one of them has read the first sentence of this post, and the other has not. This is a clear divergence between the two; the one who has read that sentence will find that their life will never be the same again; they will never be able to return to the state of being a person who has not read that sentence.
So, clearly, the mere act of living causes all people to change and diverge from their prior selves. This would of course continue to be true if the person suddenly and inexplicably found themselves waking up in a cloning chamber. The original and the clone will promptly start becoming different from one another as they bump into different air molecules, enter different rooms, talk to different people, and differ in whether they’ve read my forum posts. These differing experiences will cause them to have different memories, which could result in different knowledge, opinions, and beliefs over time. We can see this in a single person’s life; it make no sense to assume it would be different if there were suddenly another person around who looks just like you.
Wolfpup apparently does, which is why I posted it. He is the one seriously arguing that the brain is like a computer, as is Ray Kurzweil, whom he apparently agrees with.
I suggest you read the two other articles I posted.
The second gives an insight into problems in consciousness research, along with some interesting theories.
The third is an excellent summary of where physics currently stands with quantum mechanics and consciousness.
These are only samples of hundreds of articles and papers by academics along similar lines.
No, I do not. As for the articles you posted, I already showed you that the first one is garbage (“so wrong it hurts” I think was the operative phrase) and I didn’t look at the other two given their source. Now that you seem to say that the third one tries to make a linkage between quantum physics and consciousness, it’s even worse than I thought. That’s not even remotely science, it’s pure woo. If you want to know something about cognitive science you can start with the book I linked for you. If you want to stick with this kind of junk pseudo-science that’s up to you.
I concur. No one I know of is making that claim. The hypothesis of the CTM is that cognitive processes are fundamentally computational in the sense of operating on the syntax of a set of mental representations in a way that is analogous to how computers operate on symbols. This leads directly to the separate but related question of multiple realizability, which is the core tenet of the philosophy of functionalism; if you accept this premise, it suggests an affirmative answer to the critical question of whether the brain can be fully emulated by computational processes in a sufficiently capable digital computer. But to extrapolate from this the ridiculous notion that the brain is literally a digital computer is as absurd as claiming that a 747 jetliner is literally a sparrow.
An important thing to say to the OP is that this is not a solved problem.
I don’t mean that in a wishy-washy way where really neuroscientists know the answer, but people who believe in magical thinking want to believe otherwise. I mean scientifically-speaking, there is no established model of consciousness that can answer these type of personal-identity questions. We don’t know if the person who was reading the start of this sentence is the same as the person who is reading now (and we use “same” in this kind of sentence, we of course don’t mean qualitatively the same, which is trivially false, we mean numerically the same identity).
It’s a fascinating debate to have, I’m just saying that first, because so many people seem to join this debate with the conviction that the answer is obvious, and it’s the other side who is guilty of magical thinking.
The point of the first article was simply that the computer analogy of the brain is not helpful, and is misleading.
They do say that non-intellectual people always judge an argument by who makes it. Intellectual people judge arguments on their own merits, whoever is making them.
I suppose it must be threatening to find that some intelligent and reputable scientists don’t share your views, so it’s better to avoid reading what they say. Rather stick with sensationalist claims by people trying to sell books.
I see that the actual title of one of Ray Kurzweil’s books is “The Singularity Is Near”. This made me laugh because prophets of doom have been saying “The End is Near” for centuries, and this is just one more version of that tired meme, updated for materialists. 
‘Soon the Rapture will come and the virtuous will be lifted up to heaven and become immortal!’
‘Soon the Singularity will come and people will upload their minds to a computer heaven and become immortal!’ 
I’ve found that arguing with Singularity proponents is like arguing with Jehovah’s Witnesses or UFO enthusiasts - it’s a waste of time. They already Know The Truth. So no more posts from me on this thread.
You’re the only person to have mentioned the singularity in this thread.
The OP’s question about mind transfer assumes the singularity. Uploading a mind to a machine would only be possible on the basis that intelligent consciousness could exist in a machine, leading to the singularity.
Also, Ray Kurzweil is the prime advocate of the singularity, and he was mentioned with approval in post #20, so it was implied there.
What testable predictions does CTM make? Have any actually been tested? Right now it’s more philosophy than science and indeed Putnam and Fodor are philosophers. They’re smart guys and worth paying attention to, but they aren’t doing science.
There is a long trend in intellectual history of comparing natural things to the most advanced piece of contemporary technology. In early modern times the clock was new, so of course the mind and the universe were like clockwork. Then the universe became a steam engine. Now computers are the most sophisticated pieces of technology, so of course the mind is nothing more than a computer. That’s metaphor, not science.
Also, your last paragraph begs the question. You can’t use “The mind is a computer” as a settled point in your argument if that’s what you are trying to prove.
He didn’t say the mind is a computer; he said the mind has information in it. Not quite the same thing.
Thought processes are a process. Regardless of what they’re running on, be it brain cells or an ineffable soul, thoughts happen. Processes can be simulated, if they can be observed enough to understand and replicate those processes that take place.
It’s the observing and understanding that’s the tricky part.
There are people who believe that mind transfer is possible but think that “The Singularity” is nonsense (and plenty of people who believe that consciousness is a purely physical process, and that Ray Kurzweil is a kook)
The criticism I pointed you to succinctly describes why, even if this was true (and it isn’t) Epstein’s arguments are so deeply flawed that he clearly has no understanding of any of the things he’s arguing about. It’s telling that all three of the articles you cited are from similar shaky – if not downright comical – sources, while you ridicule the research findings of some of the most prominent contributors to cognitive science since its inception more than fifty years ago.
The “computer analogy of the brain” is not at all the point here, something that you still have not grasped. But the representational hypothesis that is at the core of CTM is both an essential foundation of our understanding of cognition while also inadequate or, at least, currently incomplete. Jerry Fodor highlights this dichotomy in the introduction to one of his books:
[The computational theory of mind] is, in my view, far the best theory of cognition that we’ve got; indeed, the only one we’ve got that’s worth the bother of a serious discussion. There are facts about the mind that it accounts for and that we would be utterly at a loss to explain without it; and its central idea – that intentional processes are syntactic operations defined on mental representations – is strikingly elegant. There is, in short, every reason to suppose that the Computational Theory is part of the truth about cognition.
But it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone could suppose that it’s a very large part of the truth; still less that it’s within miles of being the whole story about how the mind works … I certainly don’t suppose that it could comprise more than a fragment of a full and satisfactory cognitive psychology …
– Jerry Fodor, The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology, MIT Press, July 2000
That’s frequently but not always true. In the real world, in which time and patience are limited, one frequently finds it necessary to apply the maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and extraordinary claims coming from unqualified crackpots usually deserve to be summarily dismissed not just because they’re wrong, but because they’re so uninformed that they’re not even interesting or worth refuting. Your third cite is a particularly striking example of that – the ruminations of an astronomer, no less (!) who claims that the key to consciousness is to be found in quantum mechanics. We’ve already had a number of discussions about blatant nonsense like that in these forums,like here, for instance. It’s pure woo.
There do exist some reputable scientists who don’t share my views on CTM, but you didn’t cite any. You cited embarrassingly misguided unqualified quacks. There are far more competent sources of opposition to CTM, like Stephen Kosslyn, for example, but even those are frequently short-sighted and most often come seem to come from philosophers like Dreyfus and Searle who are far removed from empirical research.
The “sensationalist claims by people trying to sell books” thing is pretty funny. The book I cited is an advanced theoretical text by one of the handful of individuals who, like Fodor and Putnam, is regarded as one of the foundational contributors to modern cognitive science. If you think it’s “sensationalist” and written by someone “trying to sell books”, and that this is the market of the MIT Press, you are once again sadly uninformed. If you want an example of someone “trying to sell books”, check out the many works of your pal Robert Epstein, whose prolific drivel you can find at any corner bookstore and at airport newsstands.
Kurzweil has advanced some interesting ideas and also a lot of very speculative and kooky ones. His business is speculative futurism, not science, and to consider him an actor in serious debates in cognitive science is once again evidence of your failure to distinguish credible scientific sources from purveyors of speculation that is often baseless.