Mind Copying

[PythonProject]

Back last year I once watched a episode of Big Bang Theory, its where Sheldon predicts how long he's going to live for and he goes on about wanting to try and live to a certain point. Now this point that he wanted to live to is also where he predicts that humans will essentially be able to transfer or 'copy' people's mental content into machines and essentially creating true AI. Now yes I know all of this is hypothetical process and all that so I eventually forgot about it all together. Until last week. I started watching hemlock grove (pretty much a horror, werewolves and such) and basically there's this lass and basically without telling you the whole story, they transfer her concious (Again I know its all hypothetical). So I started researching about it and I think its pretty cool.

So I have to ask, what does everyone else think of it?

[Silicate Wielder]

Oooh! I read something similar in the current arc of the Sword Art Online Light Novel Series, and it depicted this very thing.


First off there is an issue associated with this, what happens if you clone your consciousness to a storage medium and try to interact with that duplicate, first off, it may not even know where "it" or "he/she" is, and will try to call out to someone, untill you open a com channel to the computer's audio input that houses this cloned consciousness, and assuming your duplicate will fully understand that it is a fake, you tell it the very thing. You were wrong, despite having been fully mentally prepared your duplicate cannot accept this, he/she will freak out, and depending on how it is implemented may end up self-destructing due to his/her emotions overloading.

So you successfully cloned your mind, however you now know the human mind cannot handle knowing that it is a fake, we have an uncanny fear of stuff like this, such as characters in PC or console games being too realistic, we will turn away from it because to us it seems too human for a fake.

Now, cloning a young infant's mind is an option, as he/she will be able to grow up in a virtual world and raised by people who tap into it like a VR game, but that is something I will leave up to you guys to discuss.

[Arkansasguy]

Back last year I once watched a episode of Big Bang Theory, its where Sheldon predicts how long he's going to live for and he goes on about wanting to try and live to a certain point. Now this point that he wanted to live to is also where he predicts that humans will essentially be able to transfer or 'copy' people's mental content into machines and essentially creating true AI. Now yes I know all of this is hypothetical process and all that so I eventually forgot about it all together. Until last week. I started watching hemlock grove (pretty much a horror, werewolves and such) and basically there's this lass and basically without telling you the whole story, they transfer her concious (Again I know its all hypothetical). So I started researching about it and I think its pretty cool.

So I have to ask, what does everyone else think of it?

Such is not possible.

[Miserabilia]

It's possible theoreticaly, with the use of neural network.

But basicly, the point is that to emulate the brain like this you'd need to have an efficient neural network which we only know as organic; the brain.
So you'd basicly be using a brain. It's not really possible to put it into a computer unless it's running some sort of neural network, but we'd have to map a person's entire brain structure first and then recreate it, which is technicaly impossible.

[amgb]

This happened exactly in a movie I recently watched called 'transcendence'. Basically as the main character is almost dying his wife decides to try and 'transcend' him into a computer network so that he wouldn't die. And it worked, even though the process was complicated. His wife hooked up wires to his brain - the wires entered into the brain through the skull - which was connected to the large AI machine and all his memories, thoughts and every single neural connection in his brain were essentially recorded and copied into the machine. Then he existed again as a digital replica of himself. I think that if we keep advancing with our inventions and technology, one day mind copying could possibly happen. It's not impossible with science. I've never believed that anything could be impossible, things are just difficult and hard.

[Vlerchan]

This idea is explored in a science fiction series I liked called The Commonwealth Saga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga).

In it people have the ability to store their memories in memory crystals. True AI existed in this world but rather than upload themselves into it - which was possible - people would insert it into a new body when the time called, achieving immortality. The book itself explored the social consequences of this occurring real well if I remember. Basically everyone became more hedonistic: families stopped existing, for example, <99% of people didn't divorce.

[sunnieseason]

Omg, this exact thing was dealt with in a British show called "Black Mirror." I highly recommend it, it's on netflix. The main character is a man who has a chip implanted in his brain to record his mind.

Anyway, I think if it ever were to happen that it would most likely be abused by the government. They would find a way to tap into it to read your thoughts or to implant thoughts into your mind. On the plus side, now people would really know what truth was. They could simply replay an event to see what actually happened instead of relying on memories which could fade over time. It might make people more accountable for their lies.