Consider these points:
1. In a few years, we are able to write a program that perfectly mimicks one single neuron in the brain. (Not currently possible, as we don’t completely understand every possible response to every possible stimuli in a neuron).
2. In 30 years, via nanotechnology, we are able perform surgery on individual cells. I don’t mean “nanotechnology” in it’s current, frequently misused form. I mean fully functional machines on the order of a few dozen to several thousand atoms. (Quite a ways off, but far from being fundamentally impossible).
Now, consider this scenario:
Using atomically sized surgical tools (automated perhaps, although I’d hesitate to say “robots”), a surgon could disconnect one single neuron from the brain, and replace it’s tiny little armsies with atomically thin wire; wire that runs to a computer, which is running a perfect simulation of a neuron.
Now, stop and consider for a moment. If you were the “brain,” how would you know a neuron had been replaced by a simulation? You couldn’t. THAT’S how.
Continuing. One of that simulated neuron’s still-biological neighbors is replaced via the same process. And then another. Throughout the process, the brain never ceases normal function. The organ is so massively redundant that a neuron here and there would cause no perceptible difference to the owner of it. After awhile, a small clump of “brain” is running 100% on simulated neurons.
What is to stop the replacement of EVERY neuron in the brain with a simulated neuron? At any point in the process, it’s functionality would never even hiccup.
And this is where things would get bizarre.
First of all, a purely technical consideration. I have no idea how fast computers will be running those days. I have no idea how fast neurons can work compared to how fast they can be simulated. I think it’s safe to assume, however, that the speed will be orders of magnitude faster than the biological operation. What does this mean for a human whose brain has been transfered, in its entirety, to a computer? Imagine if YOUR brain speed increased 10-fold. What would it be like? My guess is – you wouldn’t notice that you were thinking faster. You’d simply wonder why the bloody heck your mouth was moving so slow when you tried to talk…. like when you’re outside for a long time on a frigid day, and your face muscles get stiff and slow. “And why is my vision so jerky?” Because we replaced the neurons, you dolt, not the eyeball. If you hook up a 2008 webcam to a 2050 Pentium 32 with 512 Peta’s of RAM, the image is still gonna be a crappy 2008 webcam image.
At least it probably won’t be the other way around, and you won’t find your body flailing around with your brain always one step behind.
So anyway, you would be horribly annoyed by your body (asumming you were still even hooked up to your physical body) and the world around you moving in super-slow motion. But that just brings us to the REAL whacky stuff -
Can someone be “annoyed” if that someone is not self-aware?
This is more speculative than the rest of this already-speculative post, because – we don’t really have a firm grasp on what self-awareness is, biologically.
If self-awareness IS lost, at what point is it lost? Is it a gradual transition as the transfer takes place? But whatever happened to the brain being incapable of noticing it’s neurons are being transferred?
If self-awareness is NOT lost, how weird would THAT be? You could save the state of your brain to a file, send it over the net at nearly 186,000 miles per hour (with the new fiber-optic internet backbone), and have it loaded up into a computer somewhere else. Absolutely no break in awareness would occur between shutting the brain off, saving it, transferring it, and fireing it back up. You’d just… “suddenly” be somewhere else. But then, physical location would be pretty meaningless, wouldn’t it? You’re just a bunch of ones and zeroes, for crying out loud! You can go anywhere. Or you can bring anything to yourself. Want to visit the moon? Just link in to one of the robot bodies sitting up there in the moon dust. Now it’s YOUR body.
All of that sounds pretty far-fetched, yes. But it’s all based on those first two points – both of which are well within the realm of possibility, albeit not achievable for a couple decades or so…
Freaky huh?
