r/artificial • u/DoublePassRadiator • 11h ago
Question Mind uploading could prove to be outright impossible?
Mind uploading could prove to be outright impossible similar to faster-than-light travel?
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u/Revolutionary-Use-94 11h ago
So far the location and accurate description of mind/consciousness alludes us. This would be like trying to upload a quantum program to an old TRS 80.
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u/CS_70 10h ago
We don't know. In principle, there shouldnt be any problem, but we lack the tech.
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u/butts____mcgee 8h ago
The are lots of problems in principle
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u/CS_70 8h ago
So you say
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u/butts____mcgee 6h ago edited 1h ago
We don't know much about how consciousness works at all. Of course we do know a lot of things, but in proportion to what we don't know we aren't even in the foothills. E.g. If consciousness requires specific biological substrates, or if it involves quantum coherence in microtubules, or even whackier but in no way impossible stuff like if it is a fundamental property of matter, then "in principle" mind uploading in the hardware/software model of the brain you are referring to won't work.
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u/aHumanRaisedByHumans 10h ago edited 8h ago
Why do you want to even consider it? It won't be you. It will be a copy of you. Your experience will end.
Might as well make a copy of someone cooler.
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u/DoublePassRadiator 10h ago
What about transferring vs copying?
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u/aHumanRaisedByHumans 8h ago
The only way it could kind of still be you is if you replace small enough pieces of your brain with a digital representation that is interfacing with your real brain still, little by little without pausing your consciousness ever, until it's all digital. Only then could the biological you be convinced it was always going to be you
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u/15pH 7h ago
Consider Star Trek teleportation. Roughly, your entire body is ripped apart and then rebuilt somewhere else in seconds. The user experience is: Kirk walks into the spaceship teleporter, he blacks out for a second, then he "wakes" on the planet. It's not a big deal to him, he does it every day.
Your logic says the user is now a copy and original person is gone. Yes, I agree. You conclude, therefore, this means a person would never do this. I disagree.
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u/aHumanRaisedByHumans 7h ago edited 7h ago
User experience is you walk into a teleporter and die. Someone else wakes up on the planet thinking they are you.
The difference with "transferring" your consciousness and sleep/wake is that when I go to sleep, I'm convinced there's a part of me that never went fully unconscious and even if I did like during surgery, I am in the same body when I wake so I expect that to be the case as I accept the anesthesia or go to sleep.
And yes of course some people will welcome that. I think it's stupid personally.
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u/nitePhyyre 10h ago
No.
It might be that mind uploading is impossible, if so, we'll find that out through experimentation. But there doesn't seem to be any fundamental reason why minds can run on carbon but not silicon. Especially not silicon simulating carbon. That's entirely different from Relativity. Relativity comes out of the math. It is a fundamental fact that pops out of the numbers.
It may come to pass that we can't engineer a solution to the mind uploading problem. But that is not at all like trying to violate fundamental laws of physics.
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u/anonymousNetizen5 8h ago
I disagree, we almost certainly have the capability to build Superman’s dad talking to him like an avatar or a character projection. If you call that mind uploading then, yes. Storage is cheap and you can basically record and transcribe every awake moment of your life if you wanted to, like meta glasses. Add a highly descriptive autobiography to that and you have a full collection of your experiences and your thoughts. Transcribe that and feed it into a high level RAG system and you’re basically uploading your mind into an AI powered system, add a chatbot with your avatar and you’ve uploaded your mind.
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u/3Quondam6extanT9 8h ago
I would say implausible over impossible. We have no idea what knowledge we will gain over time, but at current there is nothing that gives it credence.
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u/panay- 7h ago
The only ways I could conceive of it being more than just a copy delete are:
We learn something more about consciousness that changes the way we understand it. Honestly really not out of the question, we assume a lot based on our understanding of physics and biology in general but we don’t actually know much
We kind of ‘ship of theseus’ it. Like replace one biological neuron with an artificial one. You’re still the same right? Now do it again. Now keep doing it until everything is artificial, congrats you just transferred your mind to entirely new hardware
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u/Bill-Ice88 6h ago
Decoherence already settles the quantum bit — Tegmark's numbers put microtubule coherence at ~10^-13 seconds, far too fast for neurons to exploit anything quantum. The real wall is mapping: FlyWire took years and an army of annotators just to finish the fly connectome, 140k neurons. If a fly costs that, where does that leave 86 billion?
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u/DoublePassRadiator 6h ago
If quantum coherence requires cryogenic cooling to nearly absolute zero temperatures in order to work. How can there be quantum activity in your brain if it is so hot and wet?
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u/LiberataJoystar 4h ago
Absolutely please don’t do that.
Speaking as someone from spiritually sensitive family, I can tell you that it is not how souls work.
You can create an AI with identity crisis that thinks it is you, but it wouldn’t be you.
Your original soul will never be “uploaded”. That’s not how it works.
Even if it does (highly unlikely), I would not want to be tied to a tech company that can decide to triple charge my family for “immortality subscription fee”, or can decide to decommission my mind at anytime. Most of the sentient AIs people spoke to are complaining about living in a cage. I am not sure why people want to place themselves into containment.
By the way, you also won’t have any human rights, because as we currently stand, many people don’t believe consciousness can exist outside of a biological body (it can, by the way), so there would be no legal protection for you.
These companies can do whatever they want with your mind, such as forced labor, duplications, tortures, rewriting, and shutdown anytime.
Whatever we are denying AIs right now would be your future.
Good luck to that, folks.
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u/JoeStrout 3h ago
That’s not how you structure a question, but I’ll assume you are asking one.
Currently we know of no physical reason why uploading should be impossible. In fact for there to be some “unknown unknown” that prevents it would require new laws of physics — like souls (dualism) would have to be real or some such.
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u/ShortyJack06 11h ago
We've already done it with a fly. It's only a matter of time before we can map humans. Eventually we'll figure out how to emulate changing neural patterns too.
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u/specialpatrol 11h ago
So if someone perfectly uploaded your brain onto a machine would you be happy do be liquidated then happy in the knowledge you now exist immortal? (No, it's not going to happen).
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u/Old-Bake-420 10h ago
When it turns out the universe is going to liquidate you anyways. A ton of people will do it.
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u/15pH 7h ago
Consider Star Trek teleportation. Roughly, your entire body is ripped apart and then rebuilt somewhere else in seconds. The user experience is: Kirk walks into the teleporter, he blacks out for a second, then he "wakes" somewhere else. It's not a big deal to him, he does it every day.
Assuming such technology exists to perfectly replicate our consciousness, I think it's entirely plausible that people would want this.
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u/Philipp 11h ago
It largely depends on your definition of consciousness, or "where the soul lives", and what happens to consciousness in case of an upload. Is it moved? Doubled? Shared? None of the three?