Stephen Hawking: Brains Could Be Copied To Computers To Allow Life After Death

At our current level of medical knowledge, researching "immortality" would be a waste of money, not much different than diverting research funds into alchemy. People still die by the tens of thousands from the flu, so we are not even in the ballpark of reaching for immortality. Let's try to work on curing the diseases we have first before worrying about extending the life of people who in human terms have already enjoyed a good life.

I'm not sure why you have a problem with medical research for profit. That's the reason we have almost everything we have in medical science. If there was magical immortality elixir, the profit of it would lead private industry to seek it out. On the other hand, immortality has nothing but downsides for the government. They don't want us living forever. If they could kill us off as soon as we became eligible for Medicare, they would do it.

 

Maybe researching immortality isolated from longevity and better health is unwise, but researching it as a whole is not.

Of course 'they' don't want us to live forever. Which is exactly why we need public funding of research, transparency, and public distribution of the results. Otherwise any benefits will be kept for the rich and denied to the rest of us.

 

I'm not sure you understood what I said. The "they" who have an interest in us dying on schedule (if not earlier) is the government i.e the public. If the government did have such a magical elixir, they wouldn't give it to you or I.

 

All of this is moot anyway if we don't get control of our government away from wealthy interests and make it work for us. But I assume we will eventually do that. If we don't, immortality wouldn't be worth striving for anyway, life will simply continue to be too miserable for most of the world's people.

 

If 98% of the atoms in your body are exchanged every year, are you ever really the same person you used to be? Maybe what we think of as "ME" is nothing more that a pattern that emerges from the interactions of all those atoms.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11893583

 

ouch. My brain

 

But at least the movie "Transcendence" starring Johnny Depp does a good job of
dealing with it.

In my opinion this fits in with............

http://www.politicalforum.com/showthread.php?t=378756&page=19&p=1066287580#post1066287580
Thread: Religious and Moral Implications of Artificial Intelligence.

.....

 

very possible, but I want to believe we are more then that

 

What the human soul really is......
and the capabilities that it has .....
is nothing less than shocking.

Helen Wambach Ph. D. regressed people only
4000 years under hypnotic trance but I suspect
that she could have went back far far far far more
than that and still gotten fascinating information
about history...... and pre-history.

http://www.politicalforum.com/showthread.php?t=401732&highlight=Christian+Andreason+throne
The Man on the Throne by Christian Andreason.... is he onto something important?

 

There is no viable theory of mind (consciousness, thought, etc.). There is not even a workable definition of these terms. No way to identify or study the phenomena, much less identify its workings.

The basic idea, adapted from information theory, is that consciousness is a program that can run on any universal Turing computer. This is not testable at our present level of understanding, and there's no real indication that any such understanding is on the horizon.

 

Here are some good quotations on basic String Theory.......

www.CarbonBias.blogspot.ca/

Combine the geometric progression in levels of energy as you go to higher and higher dimensions
with the Law of Complexity Consciousness......
and it would seem that THOUGHT would be a natural occurring phenomena in fundamental
or nearly fundamental energy in the most ancient forms of energy that would exist long before the most
recent Big Bang event of 13.72 billion or so years ago?!


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Complexity-Consciousness

 

Stephen Hawking Ph. D. may actually be a closet Theist......
or at least an Agnostic and this could perhaps be his way
of hinting at something that could lead us rather logically to
certain conclusions.

String Theory......
+ The Law of Complexity Consciousness.....
+ a planned and choreographed Cyclic Model of the Universe / Multiverse
would tend to =
an intelligence.... composed of fundamental energy.... .who has invested so much time.....
and effort into designing what we can observe......(not to mention what we can't observe).....
that we not only should have eternally pre-existence intelligence...... but also......
nearly eternally pre-existing emotional attachment....... by the most ancient of fundamental or
nearly fundamental energy Intelligences?!?!


http://www.near-death.com/reincarnation/experiences/mellen-thomas-benedict.html#a05

Like Stephen Hawking Ph. D..... Mr. Mellen Benedict was an Atheist before his near death experience......

 

wouldn't it be something to find that time means nothing to the soul and all life that we know is just us reborn at different times

 

Awesome! Can they give me a really badass cyborg girl body too?

 

Most mainstream theories about how the brain processes information are not in conflict with what Hawking claims, but he is making some huge extrapolations about what would be practical. For example, a typical structural MRI of a brain is at a resolution of around 1 to 2 mm. This gives a picture of course structures ofthe gyri and sulci of the brain. These scans take up about 7 mb of data after being compressed. To get down to the scale needed to completely capture the structure of the neurons and all of their connections, you would need to get down to the nanometer scale. That is a difference of a billion times in each of dimension of the image. So if we were able to have that resolution (we are not, the best resolution for MRI is 100's of micrometers), we would need something that could store a file that would contain over a billion terabytes of data. This is just to store the structural information of the brain. Another practical issue is that to have an accurate MRI, you must not move for the entire duration of the MRI. As you increase the resolution, the time needed to collect the data increases. Right now, the average structural scan takes about 4 to 6 minutes. To get down to nanometer scale, the scan times would be months at best. This is merely the basic technological issues. Most likely, we will have better neuroimaging techniques, but the data restraints will be the biggest issue.

 

I am assuming that you are referring to the integrated information theory of consciousness. This theory is proposed by Gulio Tononi and his collaborators. This theory is adapted from information theory, but does not assume it is just a program. It basically claims that consciousness is integrated information. This integrated information is different than information posited by information theory. It is information generated by a system over and above the information generated by the individual parts of the system. This is basically saying that not only the parts matter, but the connections between the parts. This system generates this special information, but the composition of the parts does not matter. They could biological material or artificial. What matters is the function of the parts and the causal interactions of the parts. There are many tendentious claims in this theory, such as, integrated information is fundamental in the universe, but the practical applications are a huge hindrance to the theory. The calculations involved make it only viable for very simple systems. The biggest hurdle is generating methods to reduce the calculations to make it computationally tractable for current neuroimaging data. Another problem is current neuroimaging is not capable of collecting data at the scale hypothesized by integrated information theory. There have been applications of the theory on some neuroimaging data, but the methods used to calculated are much different than the ones proposed by integrated information theory.

 

Hawking is an idiot that is losing his mind...

I'm me because I'm me and he is who he is....

You can't copy my personality or my soul...

 

The computation problem is indeed formidable. Particularly when you consider computation alone may not be capable of representing a mind system.

This assumes that mind is a computational problem (even including epiphenomenal effects). It is possible, for example, that some particular physical arrangement of the brain's physical structure is required for consciousness. If this were true, it might not be possible to reproduce mind on any platform.

 

You are absolutely correct. It is merely an assumption that mind (I hate using that term) is purely computational, but to test the basic claims of IIT, the computations need to be used on biologically plausible systems. For example, does integrated information change as the levels of consciousness change during anesthesia? That simple question is not testable without using modified versions of the computations posited by IIT. I advocate to first gain empirical evidence that the computation performs as hypothesized before approaching tougher theoretical problems such as you mentioned. If the computations fail to perform, the problem of linking the mind to a pure computational problem will not have to be addressed.

 

If you're really interested in how the brain works you should read "The root of thought" by Andrew Koob. We used to believe we only use 10% of the brain because we measured electrical signals 100 years ago and said "aha only 10% of the brain fires electrical signals we use 10% of our brain".

Glial cells is 90% of our brain and we now know this is not just lard sitting in your head, it's the root of our imagination, astrocytes communicate via calcium waves not electrical signals like neurons therefore scientists neglected them for so long... a bit of an embarrassing "oops" if you ask me.

Neurons obviously fire electrical signals in order to communicate with muscles, thus merely translating instructions to the muscles via messages received from glial cells.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-root-of-thought-what/

ps. that's why movies like Lucy really annoy me, they harp on about how we don't use the brains full capacity and how much more powerful we can become if we use all of our brain all rubbish of course, you do use your entire brain

 

One near death experiencer stated that there are 14 members of the Elohim.....
the seven spirits of G-d.. .but seven male and seven female.......
Aurora Ray stated that each and every human being to ever be born
has one of these Elohim as their "over - soul"....(for lack of a better term).......

I thought her theory was fascinating............
and there are many ancient writings that sure would make more sense in light of
her assertion.......

Jhn 10:34
Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?
If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken;
Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?

- - - Updated - - -

It has been done millennia ago.... according to some ancient manuscripts.....
if I remember correct one of the Books of Enoch....(I think it might have been the Secrets of Enoch)
implied that the "Gregori" had gotten to that level of technology....

 

I'm thinking in order to copy a brain into a separate system the separate system must also be a brain. All that our brains might be, no matter the intricacies, no matter the unknowns, no matter the physiology, the receiving unit would need to have identical functionality. Logic kind of says that the reason we can't copy a brain today into a computer is because the computer is not yet a brain itself...

 

We are all far more than neural connections and memories. We can never understand what that "More" entails and thus cannot duplicate it. This unknowable aspect of ourselves is often called the Soul and imagined to be whatever we decide to make it. Much like the God hypothesis....anyone who claims they know it is either lying to themselves and you or insane.

 

Have you read about the Dr. James Winnery research?

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/triggers/extreme-gravity.html

 

Well you have to admire the guy for his relentless attention-seeking?