Monday, January 17, 2011

Ugly Living Forever

From BBC

 

Dr Sandberg believes we could be living on hard drives along with our digital possessions in the not too distant future, which would allow us to shed the trouble of owning a body.

The concept is called "mind uploading", and it suggests that when our bodies age and begin to fail like a worn or snapped record, we may be able to continue living consciously inside a computer as our own virtual substitutes.

"It's the idea that we can copy or transfer the information inside the brain into a form that can be run on the computer," said Dr Sandberg.

He added: "That would mean that your consciousness or a combination of that would continue in the computer."

Dr Sandberg says although it's just a theory now, researchers and engineers are working on super computers that could one day handle a map of all the networks of neurons and synapses in our brains - and that map could produce human consciousness outside of the body.

He says if a complete map of our brains was uploaded to a computer and a conscious, digital replica of ourselves was created, we could, in theory, continue to live forever on a hard drive along with our MP3s and e-books.

When asked, Mr Yurista says mind uploading sounds like a very hard concept to grasp but admits getting rid of one's body and living inside a computer "truly sounds like the ultimate form of minimalism"

 

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