Transition to Forever

I have these strange visions of the future. I often go through an extremely oversimplified approach to solving a problem by accepting that there are certain variables or functions which at the current state of human intelligence and technical ability, are not yet doable. Through this, I tend to mix fiction and reality to hopefully imagine what the future might hold for us, should we ever figure out the remaining variables or functions of such a theory.

For this post, I am assuming that we are not far from implementing a new form of living forever. Simply by way of transitioning to a much better long-term-compatible and durable medium.

It basically requires solving three challenges. They are as follows:

Storage

The ability to store our brain capacity (with all neurons and their respective connections to other neurons) to permanent read/write storage. With roughly a billion neurons in our brain, and each having around a 1.000 connections to each other, it is commonly assumed that a brain’s capacity ranges at around 2.5 petabytes. So that’s roughly 2.500 hard-disks (1 TB), a capacity that is currently available (all major cloud providers are probably storing a lot more data than that).

So that’s cool, we could theoretically store a brain’s contents (and therefore weights and decision making trees) on disk. This already is most of what makes a personal character – if you are willing to accept the transition to a less visual state.

Duplication

Now, the problem is that empty disk won’t do any good. But imagine we could solve the second problem (duplicating), by triggering all existing conditions/decision situations in a human brain and recording the result on our disk. There are a few input factors we can utilize, namely the senses of the human body. A simple example would be: Simulate the electrical/chemical response of an eye to a given picture, say, an apple. Record the result and the stimuli. Store it on disk. And so forth. The problem here is the infinite possibilities we face when thinking of images that can be shown to a human eye. It’s probably impossible to show everything and find every combination of color and situation to trigger even the last hidden neuron path. But, what about approaching this from a much more basic top-down perspective: Forget about sight for now. A person who was born blind might have stored things very differently, but does have quite a similar character as a human person, regardless of visual ability. So let’s (for now) drop eye-sight and disregard. Start by focusing on the most common senses and triggers (maybe “joy, pain, fear,…”).

All types of frequencies, sounds, words, languages. Combined with all types of smells, temperatures and so forth. The goal is not to get a perfect 100% duplicate image of the decision-making tree of a brain, but to get the essence of it.

Now, imagine we could trigger a real brain with all these inputs, through imitating the multitude of combinations of triggers and recording all the reactions and responses – and store all of this to disk.

Even when the system is only partially copied/duplicated/imitated, it might most certainly be enough to see/notice a difference between two such experiments, basically resulting in two different characters. That would be phenomenal. On to the final challenge:

Input and Output

Solving the ability to stimulate a copy of a human brain requires the imitation of input sensory and ability to express (output) reactions. A real brain triggers bodily functions through electricity and chemical adjustments. Speaking, shaking hands, looking, smiling. Measuring and imitating these has already been achieved through robotics and artificial eye-sight or other human sensors. It’s a rough imitation, but it’s a great, great start. Then we would take most “actions” a person can do, speak, use hands and feet, facial expressions – and translate them through software to result in some form of output (that could be a simple line of text, i.e. ‘waves hand’, or an actual robotic figure imitating the movements).

This would allow to run all decision making through that copy of a character, the one we have stored on disk, not as an exact replica that particular brain was originally trained with, but possibly a close experience. Eventually, that copy might forget (not need) the intelligence and knowledge of reacting to typical human sensors anymore and develop its own adjusted set of sensors, possibly even just reacting to messages, i.e. text and communication. It would allow that character to fully live on and transition wholly into a new form of life, it might be a digital one, but everything is just matter, so digital or chemical doesn’t (shouldn’t) really make a difference anymore anyways.

That would be amazing.