Slight spoilers below for the movie Avatar Spoiler Ok in Avatar the entire planet (moon) was a neural network and when people die, they usually transfer their consciousness and memories into the neural network. And then I started thinking about how cool it would be to have the ability to have neural network and be able to go around in well anything. I was thinking of Pandora because of how beautiful it was. Then the real idea struck. Living for as long as you want. If you could move the consciousness to a network (computer) you could live forever without taking up the space of a human. A virtual heaven. Now here is the depressing bit, I'm afraid that this tech is not going to be developed in my lifetime. Which is fine if you believe in an afterlife, but I don't because I'm atheist. Its a bit depressing. But if I'm lucky I will live long enough for neural networks to exist.
Another Immortalist, and possibly a Transhumanist too! Have you heard of Theseus' paradox or "Copying vs. moving"? Essentially, by uploading your mind to a neural network "you" aren't living on, it's merely a clone of your mind that thinks it is you (think the movie "The Prestige"). All the effects of aging are physical however, and can be definitely be treated, even if not in this decade. Even if strides aren't made in my lifetime in preventative aging, cryonics is definitely going to be advancing significantly in the next few decades, and as wary as I am of mind-uploading, I see no particular problem with cryonics. Live forever or die trying.
There are so many sci-fi books that incorporate this concept. Especially in a lot of cyberpunk works.
I have thought about it before and think about it again I realize that you are right. The closest thing to my idea would be to just have the brain floating in a tank. And in a response to the post above, I'm not saying that I'm try to be live for ever, I'd rathe just live as long as I want.
True that, i mean if you had the ability of living forever wouldn't that just suck the true meaning of life away? I mean to fully live life you have to have a concept of mortality, to truly live it to its fullest you have to know accept and understand that eventually you cease to exist. (well not entirely depending on your views on religion) Also this makes me think of the Anime/Manga Ghost in a Shell, they could upload their consciousness to the web, hell that's what a Ghost in that series was, just a cloned consiousness that was uploaded and randomly floated around forever.
I loved how Ghost in the shell covered this topic. Ever read or heard of it? I loved the movie avatar as well. Basically you could copy mind person to person but crime and such would get out of hand alone with it. ... but yeah I see what you mean about living past death, I would love to take some samples as you mean but it is out of reach.
Perhaps if you connected your brain to a computer and let your consciousness spread so that you had more brainpower and slowly bit by bit move out of your brain into the machine.
Mind uploading - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Will get a real thing to say in a bit; have to scan through this really long essay)
I think people shouldn't cheat death, think of all the bad things that would/could happen. I for one, like the idea of dying and going to an afterlife, it makes you want to live every life to the fullest and realize how far you have come during your last days.
I think people should cheat death, think of all the good things that would/could happen. I for one, like the idea of living forever and parallelizing my consciousness into separate entities, it makes you want to explore everything in the universe that there is to know and realize how far you have come during every single day. Subjectivity!
Why don't we take it a little further than neural networks? Why not the possibility that death occurs after every change in thought? Your saying that person "x" dies because he no longer exists and that what does exist is a copy of "x". Wouldn't the same be true of a shift in perspective or of mind. For instance if your consciousness changes from wants "y" to wanting "z" then haven't you done exactly what copying over would accomplish? You have shed the old mind or consciousness for a new copy with slight modification. Are you the child you were 12 years ago? Do you think the same? Do you even remember yourself at that age? Your wants and desires have changed. Your core beliefs have changed. Your identity has changed. The only thing that remains constant is what hosts you. Does a change in hosts allow for the death?
To inject my own argument, not even the host remains constant. The human brain constantly changes its particles and energy states. The patterns are the things that comprise your consciousness; not the gray matter that hosts them. That gray matter dies, sheds, and is replaced by other atoms. This was all explained in that quote I put up earlier, but apparently almost no one likes reading my posts. :/ Here's my thought on your post, though. Say that a person's original consciousness 'A' wanted object 'Y' and disliked object 'Z'. But because of a conversation with me, that person now wants object 'Z' (and dislikes 'Y') instead. This consciousness will be labeled as 'B'. Consider the idea of two distinct copies of a person's consciousness 'A'. We'll make a copy of the person's consciousness 'A' into consciousness 'A2', when it still wants object 'Y'. We then persuade the copy 'A2' to want object 'Z'; we'll call this modified consciousness as 'B2'. If consciousness 'A' were shown 'B2', wouldn't 'A' feel as if I had manipulated 'A2' into liking 'Z' when 'A' dislikes 'Z'? And yet in the first example, 'A' does not even notice that he had been persuaded/manipulated; or if he does, the effect of the manipulation isn't thought of as bad by 'B' after the fact.
I am very much intrigued by this whole concept to be honest, though I am uncertain how much of the human body would be left in order to maintain it being "me" Assuming that copying consciousnesses is possible, I would also assume that if I made a copy of my consciousness, it would act just as I do at that specific time, however, if I were to die, I would not continue to live as that consciousness. Rather, it would continue living as I would have. So, the closest I want to get to this whole neural network idea is brains in artificial bodies, or just brains in a network.
Actually they do this in the Venture Bros all the time. Since Hank and Dean are constantly killed Dr. Venture backups their minds for cloning purposes. We are constantly changing, every second we change a little bit from the person we used to be. The idea of using a backup to bring someone back would mean bring someone back who is a slightly older version of someone. Think about people who suffer from memory loss. Everything that defined their personality has been reset. So yes this would work because all we are is an array of electrical signals. If you put them back in the same order in another body you have the same person. At the time I originally posted this thread I was depressed about the inevitably of death. This is also when I first thought of myself as an atheist. The loss of an afterlife really brought me down. But I've accepted the inevitability of death since then.
In addition to transferring all the person's memories over to the computer network, you would have to entirely replicate the structure of the person's brain on the computer otherwise it would essentially be a new person with the same memories. When you "move" the consciousness, it's really just "cut and paste" which works in avatar because the avatar is built for the person so I would assume the brain functions the same, and the consciousness can effectively be cut and pasted into the new brain and body. Once you think about the detail of exactly how you would go about pasting the consciousness into the computer or new body, you'll realize there's no way we're going to be able to do this any time soon. Build a self conscious computer, maybe, but not transfer a person into one.
As Nitrous already mentioned though, anything made of particles (i.e: everything) is under a constant barrage of change, and philosophically speaking, change is death.
2 things. 1: It wasn't really copy pasting into the avatars, they controlled them much more like the 'dream self' that was focused on so much in the matrix. Effectively every time they went into those coffins (heh) they went to sleep and then walking around in the avatars was a very in depth dream with none of the benefits of actual sleep. Much like when you have a very intense dream you don't usually feel rested afterwards. What Grif was talking about was at the end of the movie when their consiousness went through the big tree thing. Or when any Na'vi died and then 'joined' with the network (even though when they died they were more than likely not connected through their hair penises) 2: Technology advances exponentially. Meaning the more we advance our technology and sciences the more it helps us make further advancements. Look at where we are now versus 40 years ago. Even 10 years ago. Things that were sci-fi then are everyday common items now. Who knows what advances we will make tomorrow that will allow us to move forward faster than the rate we are going at now. That done, the only reason I read this whole thread was after reading Grif's first post I wanted to see if anyone mentioned Ghost in The Shell.
As was I Actually technology doesn't advance as fast as most people think. It just seems that way because in the present we can see each little advance happening and even the small advances are noticeable while in the past we only can see the major advances. Looking at the big leaps forward in technology, we now use electricity instead of fire as a usable energy, and we've started to use fission instead of combustion as a source of energy, but you can't really say there's an exponential curve with so few real reference points.