Dobromir Rahnev: Can you send your mind awareness to your computer? The concept, frigid, but maybe a bit terrifying, is known as sending the mind. Think about how to create a copy of the brain, transfer mind and consciousness to a computer.
You would live digitally, maybe forever. You would be aware of yourself, you would keep your memories and you still feel like you. But you wouldn't have a body.
In this simulated environment you can do everything you do in real life – eating, driving a car, playing sports. You can also do impossible things in the real world, for example walking on the walls, flying like a bird or traveling to other planets. The only limit is what science can realistically simulate.
Feasible? Theoretically, it should be possible to send a mind. Still, you may wonder how it can happen. Finally, scientists barely began to understand the brain.
However, learning has experience in transforming theoretical possibilities into reality. Just because the concept seems terrible, unimaginably tough does not mean that it is impossible. Take into account that science took humanity to the moon, sequentized human genome and eliminated smallpox. These things were also once unlikely considered to be.
As a brain scientist who studies perception, I fully expect that sending a mind for one day will be a reality. But at present we are not close.
Life in a laptop
The brain is often considered the most convoluted object in a known universe. Recreating all this complexity will be extremely tough.
One requirement: the sent brain needs the same input data he has always had. In other words, the outside world must be available.
Even arranged on a computer, you would still need a sensory simulation, reproduction of the ability to see, hear, aromatic, touch, feeling – as well as moving, blinking, heart rate detection, setting circadian rhythm and doing thousands of other things.
But why is it so? Could you just exist in a pure mental bubble, inside a computer without a sensory insert?
Depriving people of their senses, such as putting them in total darkness or in a room without sound, is known as sensory deprivation and is considered a form of torture. People who have problems sensing body signals – thirst, hunger, pain, itching – often have challenges in the field of mental health.
Therefore, in the case of sending the mind to work, the simulation of the senses and the digital environment in which you are in, must be extremely precise. Even slight distortions can have earnest mental consequences.
Scanning of billions of pinheads
The first task of a successful message of the mind: scanning, and then mapping the full 3D structure of the human brain. This requires an equivalent of an extremely sophisticated MRI machine that could determine the brain in an advanced way.
At the moment, scientists are located only at a very early stage of brain mapping – which covers the entire brain of flies and petite parts of the mouse's brain.
In a few decades, a full map of the human brain may be possible. However, even capturing the identity of all 86 billion neurons, all smaller than Pinhead, as well as their trillions of connections, is still not enough.
The message of this information will not achieve much to the computer. This is because every neuron constantly adapts its functioning and should also be modeled.
It is tough to know how many scientific levels scientists must succeed to make the simulated brain work. Is it enough to stop at the molecular level? Nobody knows at the moment.
2045? 2145? Later?
Knowledge about how the brain calculates can be a shortcut. This would allow scientists to simulate only basic parts of the brain and not all biological idiosincrasions. It is easier to produce a recent car, knowing how the car works, compared to an attempt to scan and restore an existing car without knowing its internal operation.
However, this approach requires that scientists learn how the brain creates thoughts – how collections of thousands of million neurons meet to make calculations that make the human mind come alive. It is tough to express how much we are from it.
Here is a different way: replace 86 billion of true artificial neurons, one by one. This approach would make your mind much easier. At the moment, scientists cannot replace even one true artificial neuron.
Remember, however, that the technology rate accelerates exponentially. It is reasonable to expect a spectacular improvement in computational power and artificial intelligence in the coming decades.
One thing is certain: sending a mind will certainly have no problem finding financing. Many billionaires seem to satisfy that they parted with a lot of their money to a shot forever.
Although the challenges are huge, and the path is uncertain, I believe that one day the message of the mind will be a reality. The most confident forecasts indicate 2045 in just 20 years. Others say the end of this age.
But in my opinion, both of these forecasts are probably too confident. I would be shocked if sending a mind works in the next 100 years. But this can happen in 200 – which means that the first person who lives forever can be born in your life.
Dobromir Rahnev, professor of psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology
This article is published from Conversation under the Creative Commons license. Read Original article.
Image Source: Pixabay.com
