Put a man’s brain in a women’s body and you got a Heinlein book.
Actually the list has only one insignificant Heinlein book. No good list is complete without I Will Fear no Evil and Stranger in a Strange Land.
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positronic man was 1992, the film 1999. pretty sure that short story is not on i robot
Larry Niven! I love the way he threads the Pierson’s Puppeteers through his stories.
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I am fascinated by the concept of consciousness upload.
Imagine the ability to upload yourself to another body or a synthetic organism.
Recently in the series “Picard” Picard dies but is uploaded into an identical construct.
Would that then be still a human?
“Altered Carbon” the book not the series explores this concept as well.
And who is to say, perhaps we have already done it and we live in a computer program, how could you tell if the program was good enough?
It’s not my review, it was Andrej Karpathy’s review. I actually loved the 3 body series: mostly for the little gems dotted throughout which had some mindblowing imaginative concepts. I enjoyed the story overall, but understand others have noted some flaws. But the imagination shown throughout already sold me.
What fascinated me about the 3-body problen was the implications of the nano wire, Arthur C Clarke had something similar in Fountains of paradise.
With that kind of technology, used not just for slicing and dicing ships, spaceflight would be common
That has been on the minds of scientists for some time now. I was reading an article (I can’t remember where exactly), where various mathematics / IT expert research groups had reached a similar conclusion – there is a 50/50 chances that we are living in reality, or in a simulation…
There have been a few movies on this topic. The 13th floor for instance showed this really well.
If it were a possibility then we would be anle to see pixalallation at some level.
And we do, at the Planck level we see a form of pixallation.
I do wish that they would do some bug fixes on this version though.
RoFL, i believe technology will be so good in the coming 100+ years, that pixelation will be like this to us…
Doesn’t the Schrodinger theory revolves about it, in any case?
Is that PAL or SECAM?
Or in a black hole
The Red Men by Matthew De Abaitua … very good…very UK centric .. one of the few publshed novels to mention Ormskirk
Image technology has reached singularity. Meanig although it could get better there is no reason for it to do so as the screens and rrcording technologies have already surpassed the ability of the mark 1 human eye to see.
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If you accept human consciousness being an emergent property of the human brain then no, no upload possible. You might one day be able to transplant the brain but to download the data? Computers are very good and often better than humans at handling large amounts of binary data but brains beat computers all day long when it comes to really complex interactions.
As to alternative realities. Donny lives in one of those, so do all socio/psychopaths.
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If that is the case then, if your computers are powerful enough and you can map all the synaptic connections, memories and all, then I suppose you could make a 1:1 copy of a human consciousness.
I dont think you would need much, figure out how much of the brain is used for keeping you alive and kicking and that bit at least could be standardized and only the bits that make you… YOU… are part of a custom job.
We know tbat it can be done as our brain is already doing it now if you can transpond the wetware to software; bingo an artificial brain that is so identical to tbe real thing that is doesn’t know the difference.
Think what the operators could do with such a thing.
Let is see what you want, make it suffer, make it happy. You could do all the things attributed to a god with your toy brain.
And who can tell, perhaps this is already the case, how can you tell if you haven’t been running for just a few minutes and all memories and feelings you have had up until now came pre loaded in an extension package.
The problem is the hardware, the operating systems and the software. Increases in computing power have enabled modern AI. We are about to experience the limits of this advance.
Even quantum computing, if and when it manages to solve the error problem, is unlikely to be able to achieve human levels of consciousness.
I don’t think this logically follows. If consciousness is an emergent property of some or all elements of the human brain, then it implies that simply replicating those properties would be enough the consciousness to emerge.
In the book “The Broken God”, ‘Gods’ were those who transferred their brains into computers which could then be expanded to grow their power and intelligence. In the book, this process of reading and transferring the brain (which they called ‘carking’) was destructive.
Isnt that similar to what we have with the internet?
Does a growing complexity develop consciousness at some point as a result, or is the discussion if the internet can become sentient moot if you add all those human brains that are connected to the web at all times into the equation?
H.G. Wells postulated the world brain and I can imagine that if you add thesemillions of humans then, yes, I think that this symbiotic relationship between humans and the machine already has resulted in a form of sentience.
If we consider the brain to be the control unit of the body, I guess at some point, being aware of the physical mass you are controlling must have been found beneficial to survival and I guess evolution did the rest. I believe consciousness to be an evolved trait.
Some animals eat their own brains (like the sea squirt).
That’s not science fiction, it’s science. Humans (human society) have become very specialized (division of labor) and we practically can’t survive individually for long periods. We are a superorganism that displays emergent behaviors which may be defined as “resulting from human actions but not from human design”.
So, human society has displayed emergent behavior before the internet. Computers have only accelerated what already existed.