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A good many here are atheists* - non God believers, and the spin off from that usually is a lack of belief in spiritual life, or the existence of souls.
Given the above we must conclude that our sense of "I Am" or self awareness results from our material being. Is it possible we may be able to transfer this sense of "I Am" to another material receptacle? This could be another being or perhaps a computer.
With powerful enough computers it should be possible. But will the 'sense of "I Am"' be enough? The human mind needs a lot more than just self-awareness to function properly. Most of our brain activity is subconscious, and is shaped by nerve inputs, hormones etc. Could a disembodied conscious mind exist by itself? Perhaps not - or at least not without immediately going insane.
But even if it could be done, it would still rely on us accepting it.
Imagine a friend of yours was dying, but had the opportunity to transfer his mind into a computer to get 'life after death'. Now his body has died but you can still talk to 'him' via a keyboard and screen. Would you believe that it was really him, or just a computer program simulating his personality? If you got bored with it and erased the program, would you be guilty of murder? What about if you copied 'him' onto another computer - would there now be two of 'him'? Would it be OK to use the copies as NPCs in a commercial game, or as 'slaves' to control industrial equipment?
It is said that 'corporations are people'. Imagine if corporation heads could transfer their minds into a computer and make that literally true. Rich and powerful people could effectively 'live' forever. We might have whole countries run by 'people' who died millennia ago. Their personalities may change over time to the point where they think more like machines than humans. At what point do we decide they aren't 'people' anymore, and pull the plug?
I think 'mind transfer' will happen eventually, but gradually rather than in one leap. As we use more and more sophisticated electronic devices to augment our minds and bodies, they become part of us and we become part of them. As people age more of their body parts will be replaced with artificial parts until they become cyborgs. And if the part replaced is the brain...
How we'll become cyborgs and extend human potential
Should we perfect such technology it will force a pretty big debate.
A few simple examples:
I make a copy of my own brain, but do not die. Now there are two versions of me. Who legally owns my stuff? Can copy-me empty my bank accounts to pay for his power needs?
I own a nice house, die and upload myself. Do I still own the house? If so, I could keep it without ever selling it on, quickly blocking the housing market.
In such a situation the dead would quickly outnumber the living, but even though a computer costs less resources to run than a human, they still cost money. Meaning I'll have to do some job to keep on living. So rather than looking forward to retirement I will have to do some job for the rest of eternity. Or should the burden be put upon the non-uploaded humans?
If uploaded humans get voting rights, they will *very* quickly assume control of all democratic governments due to their sheer numbers and enact laws to their own benefit etc.
In theory we could work such details out in advance, but given human nature my guess is we will implement such technology the moment it is discovered and deal with all the problems retroactively.
You really can't give it up, can you?! For some atheists, the only point of being one seems akin to Trump's need to claim again and again that he's a 'very stable genius.'
With powerful enough computers it should be possible.
(...)
Imagine a friend of yours was dying, but had the opportunity to transfer his mind into a computer to get 'life after death'. Now his body has died but you can still talk to 'him' via a keyboard and screen.
You are already imagining that you're alive after death, which nobody has ever accomplished, and yet, despite Siri, Alexa and Google Assistent, you can only talk to somebody through a computer and screen? I'm surprised you didn't choose punch cards!
(I'm still not impressed by Youtube's transcriptions, which I sometimes resort to because I'm hard of hearing, but even with my inferior hearing it's usually easier for me to make sense of mumblers than it is for Youtube's subtitling software.)
I feel no need to compete with religion, so they can keep their monopoly for all I care. The monopoly on pie in the sky is worth nothing when you can have pie in real life.
But this discussion is already beyond sense and sensibility:
Influenced by seminal works of science fiction, the transhumanist vision of a transformed future humanity has attracted many supporters and detractors from a wide range of perspectives, including philosophy and religion. Transhumanism (Wikipedia)
Lara Prendergast has stated that goals of transhumanism, such as trying to cut out food and sex, are inauthentic, because doing so would remove two of the great joys of life. She called transhumanism a part of 'the new narcissism'. Authenticity of transhuman goals (Wikipedia)
Atheistic transhumanists remind me of science fiction fans who persuade themselves that they are better than fantasy readers and more in touch with reality: 'My wishful thinking is superior to your wishful thinking!'
They desire the comforting idea of religion's life everlasting, but they insist that their own fantasies are so much more not-beyond-this-world than religion's idea of Heaven.
May the rapture be with you! I'm pretty sure that the singularity won't disappoint you since you won't be there to be disappointed.
ETA: The level beyond human:
ETA: This thread belongs in Religion and Philosophy. It has nothing to do with science.
Having written a book with a decent readership is a kind of immortality.
Having raised kinds is a kind of immortality.
Having been a teacher to students is a kind of immortality.
Having an A.I. approximation of your thought processes that can be queried and interacted with is certainly a is a kind of immortality.
If it is also self-aware, that would be a nice bonus.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment. Woody Allen (GoodReads)
A great book about this theme is Brian Alexander's Rapture: A Raucous Tour of Cloning, Transhumanism, and the New Era of Immortality (2004).
I read it in 2005 when I had a discussion with transhumanists, but an added bonus nowadays, 15 years later, is that you can google the real-life characters in it to find out how much they've aged since then - if they are still alive. Sometimes even the modest idea of longevity isn't very realistic.
A good many here are atheists* - non God believers, and the spin off from that usually is a lack of belief in spiritual life, or the existence of souls.
Given the above we must conclude that our sense of "I Am" or self awareness results from our material being. Is it possible we may be able to transfer this sense of "I Am" to another material receptacle? This could be another being or perhaps a computer.
Back in the 80s, when Omni magazine was still publishing, they ran an article by a fellow detailing his ideas as to how we might be able to someday “upload” our consciousness into a suitable computer.
Naturally, he was postulating considerable advancements not only in computer science but also neuroscience... As we can’t yet explain the “emergent property” of consciousness.
However, he speculated that if you had such a machine, with analogs of human sensory input equal to or better than the natural items, one could gradually refine the interface to the extent that the person couldn’t tell if “they” were in their body or in the machine.
At which point you could let your presumably aged and rickety body go.....
And hope you had a very reliable operating system.
I recall that Fred Pohl explored what such an existence might be like in his “HeeChee” novels. Conversation with a living human would be boring because the human would be on “brain time”, while the person who was now machine intelligence would be “thinking” ever so much faster.
One downside is that someone will have to pay for the storage and CPU cycles needed to keep your consciousness going after the transfer. You may need to find employment in order to keep yourself running. Otherwise you may be relegated to a backup tape somewhere.
On the other hand, people might pay to keep multiple instances of popular personalities running simultaneously.
My ideal is that, very imperfectly, a program can create a me-in-the-machine that I could then task to make decisions for me when I can't be bothered. It could also undergo all kinds of tests for which I don't have the time or imagination, to see what I'm good at or suck at, and warn me when I'm about to make a decision I'll probably regret.
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