The following interesting article i have taken from MURG site.
The Prospect of Mind Uploading
by Graham Hearn
(Editor's note: This is a draft version of an article submitted to Open Scientific Publications for review and publication, January 2000. Please quote and reference the final version of this article, as it appears at Open Scientific Publications.)
ABSTRACT
Mind uploading is a hypothetical and actively pursued technology whose purpose is to achieve the transferral of a human individual identity into an artificial system via whole brain emulation. Stated another way, mind uploading aims to create "software with human-level intelligence, yet created using little understanding of how the brain works, on anything but the lowest levels of organization." [1] The author will refute the arguments denying the possibility of mind uploading to show that there are practical routes to the attention of whole brain emulation.
INTRODUCTION
Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) (or mind uploading) is a technological objective that has been used as a motif in science fiction for a considerable amount time, [2] but was not mentioned in a widely read work of nonfiction until 1988 by Hans Moravec in Mind Children [3]. Currently, there is an expanding field of awareness being payed to the objective of mind uploading, including the recently established Whole Brain Emulation Research website [4]. Conversely, as with all technologies that are difficult to conceptualize in advance, mind uploading has also been a target of ridicule [5].
In order to develop science from science fiction, it is necessary to establish that it is theoretically possible to transfer the mind into an artificial system. The transferal is done by scanning the brain, analyzing the scan to extract relevant features and constructing an equivalent reprensentation of the mind in an artificial system with brain emulating behaviour [6]. Objections at this level arise mainly from the fields of philosophy, physical anthropology, and psychology.
Once it is established that mind uploading is scientifically realizable, there are myriad philosophical questions regarding the future status of ethics, law, morality, and public policy to consider. There are also many issues for futurists to deal with, concerning cultural anthropology, economics, and the future effects of answers to the above issues [7]. This level of study goes beyond the scope of this paper, as is the question of how to realize WBE scientifically.
THE MIND-BRAIN RELATIONSHIP
In order to reproduce a person's mind such that their identity and self awareness remain unchanged, Whole Brain Emulation requires (a) that the mind is an emergent property of the human organism; (b) that the mind is localized to the brain; and (c) that both personal identity and self awareness are properties of mind [6]. These assumptions combine to form the major assumption of WBE: that personal identity comes from the matter making up the brain (or the behaviour thereof).
To show (a); we know that each living human body with which we communicate is correlated with a unique mind. It is worth noting that identity comes from primarily environmental and not genetic factors; Identical twins that are an accidental occurrence of early splicing of the same fetal cells do not share the same mind. [6] Thus we cannot reproduce a persons mind simply by cloning her.
To show (b); "Exchanging (or losing) any part of the body - except the brain - is not fatal to the sensation of" mind. "Conversely, any drastic damage to the brain...has a major impact on" mind [6].
The proof of (b) also applies to (c). In other words, something affects personal identity and self awareness only if it affects the brain. Thus the mind is defined to include self awareness and hence personal identity (and not vice versa). To clarify that personal identity comes exclusively from the mind, consider adding a prosthesis to your body (but not your brain). Your personal identity remains the same. Do this to your brain and the issue becomes debatable.
With regard to the mind-body ontological problem, the assumption that personal identity comes from the matter making up the brain amounts to physicalism, or more precisely non-dualism. Physicalism includes the theories of reductive materialism, eliminative materialism and funcitonalism. What each physicalist theory has in common is that it holds matter (or the behaviour thereof) to be the sole cause of consciousness. Dualism, however, contends that consciousness comes from a nonphysical form of existence that is in no objective way perceivable from this universe [8].
For dualism to be compatible with the assumptions made by the pursuers of mind uploading, a further assumption must be made that shall be coined here as functionalist dualism. Dualism holds that a human soul or spirit is an essential property of a person's identity. Functionalist dualism would hold that the soul is "attached" to whatever matter acts the role of a person's material brain. Thus, an uploaded mind would maintain its soul in the new medium for the mind. "Popular dualism," [8] however tends to be of the non-functionalist variety which is a severe hindrance to the acceptance of WBE.
Since dualism is based upon asserting the unknowable, it cannot be proven (or even argued using logic) whether functionalist or non-functionalist dualism is correct until mind uploading is actually attempted. The only source of appeal is God who is not known to have written on the subject. The main arguments for dualism [8] and their simplified refutations are as follows.
The argument from religion and the argument from introspection are arbitrary assertions because they are not falsify-able. In other words, there is no scientifically valid evidence for either argument, nor can there be. Arbitrary propositions such as these are not admissable for consideration, i.e. they are neither true nor false [9].
The argument from irreducibility, however, is falsify-able. The Cartesian and Platonic views that knowledge can be apprehended "directly" from its non-physical existence both require that consciousness possesses primacy over physical existence. The primacy of consciousness can be proven wrong given the axiom that "existence exists" [9]. To avoid going into the long, boring proof (see the reference "[9]" for this), notice that the term physical existence is redundant and that non-physical existence is an oxymoron. The argument from irreducibility uses contradictory terms which implies that it is false.
The next most difficult ontological theory for mind uploading is materialism, both reductive and eliminitavist. Their main difference, over the Semantical problem [8], is not relevant to WBE. Since materialism holds that the specific form (rather than function) of the brain is essential to consciousness, artificially constructed hardware for the mind must be an exact duplicate of the natural, biological human brain.
This understanding is problematic for certain approaches to mind uploading because is raises problems for using non-organic materials and chemicals to improve the performance and adaptability of the brain. The question of specifying the exact physical properties that must be possessed by the matter used for uploaded brain hardware become crucial to solving these problems. The purist materialist answer would be, "All of them!" which makes it very difficult to replicate the human brain.
However, materialism is compatible with certain approaches that try to form a perfect reproduction of the brain down to the smallest possible level of detail using tools like scanning tunneling electron microscopy. Such an approach would require advances on par with mature development of nanotechnology, which are not predicted until betweeon 2010 and 2050 A.D. or more [10].
The author finds pure materialism to be unlikely, given the recent successful use of a cortical implant for a man who was previously incapacitated by a cerebral hemorrage. The form of the brain was altered when brain tissue grew around the implant and the brain developed a new function to interface with the implant [11] to move a cursor on a computer screen. This implies that the brain's form is far more malleable than materialists assert.
The most uploading friendly ontological view of mind is that of functionalism. Functionalism is essential to the Strong AI Postulate [12], which basically states that an intelligent machine can be built, at least in principle.
Functionalism has the advantage of not only being compatible with the materialist approaches to mind uploading, but it also presents the possibility of developing intricate cortical implants and auxiliary systems to enhance cognition once a strong understanding of the information processing relationship between mind and body is developed.
The author considers this to be the best view by elimination of the other two, but finds validity in the materialist idea that certain physical properties of the matter composing the brain are integral to the operation of mind. Functionalists also hold this view, to a certain way which is expressed by their strategy of modeling the brain using silicon instead of Play-Doh. Functionalists do not deny that an intelligent system can be built out of Play-Doh, but the material properties of silicon are a nearer simultation of the carbon based brains.
I will now discuss what amounts to a subtle difference between these two theories, whereby one logically leads to the other.
THE ADAPTABILITY OF THE MIND-BRAIN RELATIONSHIP
Another problem for Whole Brain Emulation is the "emulation" part. Even after conceding all of the above, one might still say that one's personal identity comes from the specific matter of which one is composed. This, literally, is what the major assumption of WBE (as stated above) says. However, this is a misinterpretation of what is meant, as I shall explain.
This argument only applies to the materialist position. A functionalist would say that since the properties of the matter are not limited (provided they serve the proper function in mental operation), the exact molecule of a certain type is surely irrelevant! And a popular dualist, would of course say that matter doesn't count at all -- only the spirit does.
The argument becomes especially interesting if a mind if reproduced by non invasive means. That is, if your mind were perfectly emulated (down to the atomic level) by a means that did not destroy the body you now have (including the brain), then which copy one would be you? Or suppose that your current body were destroyed in the process but an atomically perfect copy were created. Can you be said to have died? [16]
The problem presented here is that the "new" matter of which your brain is composed is not identical to the original matter. The emulated brain, it is claimed, is therefore just a copy and not really the same person as before--even if it possesses consciousness and claims to be the same person.
For Calvin and Hobbes fans, this problem is much the same as the title cartoon strip in Scientific Progress Goes "Boink" [13], where Calvin replicates many copies of himself with a cardboard box. A more abstract version of the same idea is the joke:
"This is a very old axe. It belonged to George Washington... But it got old, so I replaced the head and the handle. [i.e. All of it.] <laughter> It occupies the same space."
- Michael Davis, Juggler/Comedian
This problem calls for an explanation by the philosophical principle known as the Identity of Indiscernibles [14]. This principle comes from Liebniz's Discourse on Metaphysics and it states (essentially) that no two objects have exactly the same properties. If this principle is true, then your newly uploaded self cannot be perfectly identical to your earlier brain: There must be some discrepancy with which you can discern the two. The difference, however, can theoretically be reduced toward a limit of zero and it then becomes a matter of degree as to whether your uploaded self can be said to have the same identity you had before the upload.
If the Identity of Indiscernibles is not true, and there is evidence from quantum mechanics to that effect [14], then the problem theoretically goes away because it is possible to replace one arrangement of molecules forming a brain with another system of molecules that are identical in every way.
Recall, though, that there is a certain amout of uncertainty already existing in the brain from both Heisenberg's quantum uncertainty and from Brownian motion due to the kinetic energy of particles within the brain [15]. Recall also that the human body (,including the brain at the atomic level,) replaces itself periodically with the food that one has ingested [16] (,which of course consists of different matter than you do previously.) Thus you are constantly being replaced by "different" matter. So even if your uploaded brain pattern is not molecularily identical, it can still be sufficiently near to act identically to the way it did before.
To the attentive reader, that last sentence (which came from an argument that presupposes materialism) will sound suspiciously like functionalism; And indeed it is exactly what functionalism states!
To reiterate: If a system of molecules that produce mind are acting in the same way as a natural brain would, without being identical to that particular brain, then at least one of the actions of the molecules in that system must be different by the identity of indiscernibles. Thus the sameness of action that associates these two systems is a relational one; i.e. they are creating the same result from a different organization of molecules. Therefore, materialism reduces to functionalism.
THE ADAPTABILITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Assuming that a human mind is successfully uploaded, there remains the question of what sort of system to attach to the sensory and motor control centers of the brain. There are four general possibilities: the use of an artificially designed and constructed body, the use of an artificially constructed body using the design provided by nature, the use of an organic body that has already been designed by natural selection, or letting the mind exist as software within a computer generated world. The most important scientific fields to consider in selecting how to approach the body problem are those of engineering, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology.
Engineering and neuroscience each deal with technical challenges in constructing an artificial body and connecting it to an uploaded mind. These areas are less important at this stage, as this paper concerns whether uploading is possible in principle. Since we have already covered the philosophical objections to the practicality of WBE, philosophy can only pose problems for law and morality which are also not relevant to the issue at hand. Psychology, however, is crucial in maintaining personal identity in a new medium.
The mind is utterly dependent upon the body in which it resides for gathering information through the sensory-perceptual system and for carrying out instructions through the motor-control system of the brain and body. Since a human brain has never been observed to function completely independently of the rest of the body, we can only theorize as to what the effects be might be. The effects upon the mind of the individual can be classsified into social psychology and cognitive psychology.
The difficulty presented by social psychology is that of interacting with other people while existing in a bodily form that is alien to our natural form [16]. An artificial body creates potential difficulties in communication due to losing or altering the subtleties of facial movements and body language. There is also a problem concerning a change in the ability of the body to experience touch in a social context using non-organic materials (eg. sex). This poses a major problem for catering to human values, which is essential to its practical application.
This problem can easily be translated into a technical one, because of potential advances in genetic engineering and material engineering that allow for effective emulation of human expressiveness and haptic emulation. There already exists a robot at MIT known as Kismet [17] that performs rudimentary social interaction via its facial expressions. Developments in the computer animation of humans and in facial recognition software also contribute to the understanding to facial expression. It is easy to imagine an extended and more sophisticated simulation of body language from an artificial system combining these three areas of research.
Cognitive psychology concerns WBE with the matter of maintaining sanity under new conditions of the mind-body interface. Because the brain is continuously interacting with the rest of the body, a change in the input and output systems of the body would significantly affect the functioning of the brain. At a conscious level, there is the constant flux of sensory information entering and of motor neuron signals exiting the brain system. At an unconscious level, there are continuous procedures dedicated to operating routine bodily functions such as the beating of the heart and regulating body temperature. The problem here is that the brain is intimately tied into the central nervous system and does not operate independently of it.
For unconscious bodily operations, the absence of a bodily subsystem to operate (,as in the case of respiration for a non-cellular and non-organic body,) does not interfere with the conscious mind and will therefore not affect consciousness. In other words the lack of lungs due to no longer having need of them will not cause automatic panic or shock to the uploaded person. This happens on a smaller scale now, where someone may lose the use of a lung or kidney. As for the brain's systems that give and take the brains input and output, these will have to be connected to the centers of the brain that already handle these protocols and made to simulate motor neuron activity as closely as possible. Similar breakthroughs exist that allow a person's brain waves to control a prosthetic hand [19].
CONCLUSION
In the end, the crucial inhibiter to actually uploading one's mind is that the technology just doesn't exist yet. It has just been shown that Whole Brain Emulation is an attainable technology given that that personal identity comes from the matter making up the brain (or the behaviour thereof).
Also essential is the ontological position of functionalism; or, using more limited techniques, materialism. This condition is valid because the competing theory of dualsim is an erroneous theory of mind. Functionalism is the more tenable theory and it requires less advanced technology to emulate a brain functionally.
When uploaded it appears likely that the mind will be able to adjust to the new situation. In 1970 a rhesus monkey's head was successfully transplanted onto the body of another rhesus monkey. "When the monkey awakened from anesthesia, it regained full consciousness and complete cranial nerve function." [20] This procedure is now feasible for humans and more advanced surgical methods may allow for the transplanted head to integrate itself with the new body.
All we need now is the desire to pursue the scientific development necessary to achieve immortality by whole brain emulation. Traditionally popular religions have long preached metaphysical immortality which is the immortality of the soul and life after death. According to the Principia Cybernetica Project: "The decline of traditional religions appealing to metaphysical immortality threatens to degrade modern society. Cybernetic immortality [which subsumes Whole Brain Emulation] can take the place of metaphysical immortality to provide the ultimate goals and values for the emerging global civilization." [21]
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