Mind Upload: Scientists forecast successful digitisation of human consciousness by end of 2023

[Vmedvil]

It seems Scientists forecast the successful digitisation of human consciousness by the end of 2023, read more at https://www.firstpost.com/world/scientists-forecast-successful-digitisation-of-human-consciousness-by-end-of-2023-12437542.html and https://www.dailystar.co.uk/tech/news/immortality-possible-year-upload-brains-29682546

 

Do you think it is achieveable to digitize the human consciousness by the end of 2023?

Edited May 8, 2023 by Vmedvil

[Moontanman]

11 hours ago, Vmedvil said:

It seems Scientists forecast the successful digitisation of human consciousness by the end of 2023, read more at https://www.firstpost.com/world/scientists-forecast-successful-digitisation-of-human-consciousness-by-end-of-2023-12437542.html and https://www.dailystar.co.uk/tech/news/immortality-possible-year-upload-brains-29682546

 

Do you thin it is achieveable to digitize the human consciousness by the end of 2023?

I'm not real sure anyone gives a **** if I live another day much less forever but I'd like to see this concept hashed out in a more respected scientific journal before we really take it seriously. The method of "digitization" seems a bit shaky.   

[Halc]

The articles encourage you to make recordings of the person to be 'uploaded' for the purpose of an GPT being able to imitate them. This is just a pimped-out version of having old recordings of them. The 'uploaded' thing isn't going to actually be the person, enough to say what the combination to the safe is. If it's done to you, 'you' wont be immortal at all. But your kids might be able to talk to something that can mimic you to an extent that say they'd not forget your voice and such. It is complete misrepresentation to label this an 'upload'.

[OceanBreeze]

7 hours ago, Halc said:

The articles encourage you to make recordings of the person to be 'uploaded' for the purpose of an GPT being able to imitate them. This is just a pimped-out version of having old recordings of them. The 'uploaded' thing isn't going to actually be the person, enough to say what the combination to the safe is. If it's done to you, 'you' wont be immortal at all. But your kids might be able to talk to something that can mimic you to an extent that say they'd not forget your voice and such. It is complete misrepresentation to label this an 'upload'.

It may qualify as an upload but it is a complete misrepresentation to label this as "consciousness "

We don't even understand what consciousness is!

[Halc]

16 hours ago, OceanBreeze said:

It may qualify as an upload

Kind of like calling a Vegas Elvis impersonator an upload of Elvis. Looks and acts like him, has the right accent, but doesn't care for (or even recognize) his own family members. OK, the Elvis might since said family members are famous to a point, but the grandma imitation certainly isn't going to recognize anything.

[OceanBreeze]

An upload can be anything. Any file uploaded to the Internet, attached to an email or just uploaded to a computer from a printer is an upload. That word is not key to this discussion. I don't understand why you are focusing on it.

The key word here is consciousness.

The claim is that consciousness will be digitized and uploaded by the end of 2023.

That is complete nonsense as we do not even understand the nature of consciousness or where it resides in the brain or even if it does reside in the brain.

Until we understand that, ( and it is possible that we may never really be able to achieve such an understanding ), uploading consciousness and achieving immortality remains a pipe dream.

 

[write4u]

AFAIK,  

"Thoughts are a form of active energy transformation in the brain.
In the process of thinking the conscious experiential mind emerges"

"Thought is a process where sensory data is cognized and codified before it is
retranslated and comparative cognition is experienced on a biochemical
emotional level. A moment of conscious self-awareness. "

This is how I understand Roger Penrose et al, proposal of ORCH OR (Orchestrated Objective Reduction)

 

Edited May 7, 2023 by write4u

[Halc]

20 hours ago, OceanBreeze said:

An upload can be anything. Any file uploaded to the Internet, attached to an email or just uploaded to a computer from a printer is an upload.

Because creation of a file with nothing but the same desktop icon is not an upload of the file originally tagged with the icon. It's just a copy of the icon and a different file, which is why I focus on the word upload. Not claiming that is the key point.

20 hours ago, OceanBreeze said:

The key word here is consciousness.

The claim is that consciousness will be digitized and uploaded by the end of 2023.

I think the article says that, but the digitization of a conscious thing has been going on since audio and video went digital from the prior analog format. It's not exactly a strong claim. It's a recording of your loved one is all, one that you can talk to. GPT doesn't currently seem capable of learning anything new, so the thing you talk to probably won't remember the funny thing Brittany did yesterday that you told it about. Maybe they'll upgrade that and let it form new long term memories.

What they hint at, and seemingly don't claim, is that this created thing will be itself conscious. They never say it. First article avoids the , but finally says "If an entity, let alone a single individual, passes the Turing test, that person is conscious", which suggests that if it doesn't pass the Turing test, it isn't. I mean, a rabbit is conscious by most definitions, but it no more passes the Turing test (testing the ability to imitate a human) than I pass a test of my ability to convince a rabbit that I'm one of them. Machines will be conscious long before they pass the Turing test, but what they're creating here is hard to sell as a conscious thing.

I'm not sure of where you define the threshold of consciousness. Most of the online definitions focus only on human consciousness (like awake vs asleep), and not some kind of criteria that can be applied in a non-anthropocentric way. They seem to center around introspection. Not sure the extent to which a rabbit does that.

 

6 hours ago, write4u said:

"Thoughts are a form of active energy transformation in the brain.
In the process of thinking the conscious experiential mind emerges"

Interestingly, they've found a form of thinking in slime molds. They can learn to follow a maze, solve geometric problems, and best of all, teach that ability to another one that hasn't yet been trained. All this without any sort of nerve system or other 'digital information processor'. I'm not asserting that slime mold has human sentience, but it 'thinks' in its own unique way. The things are so alien (green bread mold is a closer cousin to you than it is to a slime mold) that it makes a great example of how we might handle an encounter with an actual ET life form.

[write4u]

6 hours ago, Halc said:

GPT doesn't currently seem capable of learning anything new, so the thing you talk to probably won't remember the funny thing Brittany did yesterday that you told it about. Maybe they'll upgrade that and let it form new long term memories.

I believe that may not be strictly right.  GPTs talk a lot about things they have learned when they have access to the internet. Their program is designed to find pertinent information about many complicated science or philosophy. 

6 hours ago, Halc said:

I'm not sure of where you define the threshold of consciousness. Most of the online definitions focus only on human consciousness (like awake vs asleep), and not some kind of criteria that can be applied in a non-anthropocentric way. They seem to center around introspection. Not sure the extent to which a rabbit does that.

Objectively, even a chemical response to the introduction of an active chemicals may be considered a form of "awareness" .  

Consider that the eye, one of our most important information gathering senses, started as a light-sensitive patch. 

When a flower does not feel well, it wilts, a clear sign of distress.

Our empathic system allows us to experience another person's emotion without being affected by any physical association. When we observe a person hit his thumb with a hammer, we wince as if the hammer hits our thumb.  The brain responds immediately by producing the associated chemical response such as pain, pity, sadness, happiness, etc. etc.

Thus there are several different forms of sensory awareness or "consciousness", in various stages of evolutionary sensitivity and response behaviors.. 

6 hours ago, Halc said:

Interestingly, they've found a form of thinking in slime molds. They can learn to follow a maze, solve geometric problems, and best of all, teach that ability to another one that hasn't yet been trained. All this without any sort of nerve system or other 'digital information processor'. I'm not asserting that slime mold has human sentience, but it 'thinks' in its own unique way. The things are so alien (green bread mold is a closer cousin to you than it is to a slime mold) that it makes a great example of how we might handle an encounter with an actual ET life form.

Yes, I love the slime mold.  It is a multi-nucleic single celled organism, that has proven to have a rudimentary sense of "learning" and using mathematics to solve problems. It is a relatively new  science that studies  cellular communication facilitated by "microtubules", a simple dipolar coil consisting of a dimer of 2 tubulins. It has been proven that microtubules are involved in ALL information sharing functions of Eukaryotic organisms. 

IMO, here is where sensory awareness began and eventuallly evolved into consciousness, an extreme and distinct form of chemical response to external information. 

 

One biologist calls a naturally learned evolved ability for "problem solving", which is basically based on mathematical chemistry and "natural selection" for survival abilities.

Edited May 8, 2023 by write4u

[OceanBreeze]

16 hours ago, write4u said:

AFAIK,  

"Thoughts are a form of active energy transformation in the brain.
In the process of thinking the conscious experiential mind emerges"

"Thought is a process where sensory data is cognized and codified before it is
retranslated and comparative cognition is experienced on a biochemical
emotional level. A moment of conscious self-awareness. "

This is how I understand Roger Penrose et al, proposal of ORCH OR (Orchestrated Objective Reduction)

 

That is all well and good as far as it goes.

The problem is, it doesn't go very far at all and is a very simplistic view of a very difficult problem.

What needs to be solved is The Hard Problem of Consciousness.

In brief, the Hard Problem  "is the problem of explaining why there is “something it is like” for a subject in conscious experience, why conscious mental states “light up” and directly appear to the subject.  The usual methods of science involve explanation of functional, dynamical, and structural properties—explanation of what a thing does, how it changes over time, and how it is put together.  But even after we have explained the functional, dynamical, and structural properties of the conscious mind, we can still meaningfully ask the question, Why is it conscious? This suggests that an explanation of consciousness will have to go beyond the usual methods of science."

Stated another way: "No matter how detailed our specification of brain mechanisms or physical laws, it seems that there is an open question about whether consciousness is present.  We can still meaningfully ask if consciousness occurred, even if we accept that the laws, mechanisms, and proper conditions are in place.  And it seems that any further information of this type that we add to our explanation will still suffer from the same problem.  Thus, there is an explanatory gap between the physical and consciousness, leaving us with the hard problem."

Anyone who claims consciousness can be "uploaded" is a crank.

 

[write4u]

43 minutes ago, OceanBreeze said:

Anyone who claims consciousness can be "uploaded" is a crank.

I agree.

But I am in Max Tegmark's camp of first accumulating "hard facts", before we even ask the "hard question".

At one time the expression of "life" was a hard question, until we knew all the factors involved that allowed for life to emerge.

I believe that when we know more about quantum scale neural processes the question of consciousness will become easier and acceptable as a naturally emerging level of sensory awareness, that is already evident in slime molds at a very fundamental level.

[OceanBreeze]

58 minutes ago, write4u said:

At one time the expression of "life" was a hard question, until we knew all the factors involved that allowed for life to emerge.

 

I must have missed that breakthrough!

Can you please provide a link to “The full scientific explanation for the origin of Life”?

As far as I know this is still a hard question and remains unsolved

 

 

Quote

I believe that when we know more about quantum scale neural processes the question of consciousness will become easier and acceptable as a naturally emerging level of sensory awareness, that is already evident in slime molds at a very fundamental level.

I expect the hard problem of consciousness to become easier with time and more research, but I have serious doubts that it will ever be scientifically solved as it seems a complete understanding may lie beyond the reach of the scientific method, as the link I provided attempts to explain.

[write4u]

Enlarge / Stanley Miller with the original laboratory equipment used in the 1952 Miller-Urey Experiment, which gave credence to the idea that organic molecules could have been created by the conditions of the early Earth's atmosphere.

In 1952, a University of Chicago chemist named Stanley Miller and his adviser, Harold Urey, conducted a famous experiment. Their results, published the following year, provided the first evidence that the complex organic molecules necessary for the emergence of life (abiogenesis) could be formed using simpler inorganic precursors, essentially founding the field of prebiotic chemistry. Now a team of Spanish and Italian scientists has recreated that seminal experiment and discovered a contributing factor that Miller and Urey missed. According to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, minerals in the borosilicate glass used to make the tubes and flasks for the experiment speed up the rate at which organic molecules form.

In 1924 and 1929, respectively, Alexander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane had hypothesized that the conditions on our primitive Earth would have favored the kind of chemical reactions that could synthesize complex organic molecules from simple inorganic precursors—sometimes known as the "primordial soup" hypothesis. Amino acids formed first, becoming the building blocks that, when combined, made more complex polymers.

more.... https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/scientists-recreated-classic-origin-of-life-experiment-and-made-a-new-discovery/

 

It seems to me impossible to find fossil remains fdrom when the earth was just forming and was a chaotic soup raw chemicals roiling in a burning surface.

But if we can do it in a lab then the odds are that the earth has already performed that experiment trillions of times, each time slightly different, until "probability" finds the right combination.   There is no magical elan vital necessary.

This is one of the high probabilities that Robert Hazen speaks of.  Universally occurring planets like earth make the spontaneous assembly of living polymers almost a certainty given enough time.  The Universe is the greatest chemical laboratory in existence. Unfortunately the Universe has changed so much that original conditions are difficult to replicate and we're stuck with a stochastic system in labs.

Perhaps AI will be able to help science in predictive abiogentic processes.

 

Edited May 8, 2023 by write4u

[OceanBreeze]

21 minutes ago, write4u said:

Enlarge / Stanley Miller with the original laboratory equipment used in the 1952 Miller-Urey Experiment, which gave credence to the idea that organic molecules could have been created by the conditions of the early Earth's atmosphere.

In 1952, a University of Chicago chemist named Stanley Miller and his adviser, Harold Urey, conducted a famous experiment. Their results, published the following year, provided the first evidence that the complex organic molecules necessary for the emergence of life (abiogenesis) could be formed using simpler inorganic precursors, essentially founding the field of prebiotic chemistry. Now a team of Spanish and Italian scientists has recreated that seminal experiment and discovered a contributing factor that Miller and Urey missed. According to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, minerals in the borosilicate glass used to make the tubes and flasks for the experiment speed up the rate at which organic molecules form.

In 1924 and 1929, respectively, Alexander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane had hypothesized that the conditions on our primitive Earth would have favored the kind of chemical reactions that could synthesize complex organic molecules from simple inorganic precursors—sometimes known as the "primordial soup" hypothesis. Amino acids formed first, becoming the building blocks that, when combined, made more complex polymers.

more.... https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/scientists-recreated-classic-origin-of-life-experiment-and-made-a-new-discovery/

 

It seems to me impossible to find fossil remains fdrom when the earth was just forming and was a chaotic soup raw chemicals roiling in a burning surface.

But if we can do it in a lab then the odds are that the earth has already performed that experiment trillions of times, each time slightly different, until "probability" finds the right combination.   There is no magical elan vital necessary.

This is one of the high probabilities that Robert Hazen speaks of.  Universally occurring planets like earth make the spontaneous assembly of living polymers almost a certainty given enough time.  The Universe is the greatest chemical laboratory in existence. Unfortunately the Universe has changed so much that original conditions are difficult to replicate and we're stuck with a stochastic system in labs.

Perhaps AI will be able to help science in predictive abiogentic processes.

 

Nice smoke screen and does nothing to answer the question I posed.

You wrote: "At one time the expression of "life" was a hard question, until we knew all the factors involved that allowed for life to emerge."

Clearly, you are claiming that we now know all the factors that allowed life to emerge.

And yet the origin of life (OOL) problem remains one of the more challenging scientific questions of all time.

The origin of life: what we know, what we can know and what we will never know

The question of the origin of life is a tenacious question that challenges many branches of science but is also extremely multifaceted.

The origin of life on Earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science. Various answers have been proposed, all of which remain unverified.

Do you still believe we know all the factors involved that allowed for life to emerge?

[write4u]

4 hours ago, OceanBreeze said:

And yet the origin of life (OOL) problem remains one of the more challenging scientific questions of all time.

Only if you consider it an unexplainable  mystery, which I don't.  We are still surrounded by abiogenetic processes.  Mitosis is one.

And the argument that only life can create life is unwarranted. Dynamic chemistry can turn into dynamic biochemistry, which can turn into say viruses, part alive part pure biochemistry.

That we cannot exactly recreate a 4 billion years old event or events does not negate the "hard fact" that abiogenesis did happen and no amount of sophistry can deny "hard facts".

Quote

Do you still believe we know all the factors involved that allowed for life to emerge? 

As Tegmark explains, all necessary ingredients where available, the rest was a matter of time. Just because we can't duplicate it in a lab does in any way imply it cannot be done.

Hazen estimated that since the beginning of Earth's formation, Earth has performed 2 trillion, quadrillion, quadrillion, quadrillion chemical experiments, a truly astronomical number. Chemistry needs no chemist. Life needs no life-giver. It just emerges as an expression of the infinite potential of the Universe.

Life is not a theory, it is an axiom and before life there was only chemistry, that's also an axiom.

Edited May 8, 2023 by write4u

[write4u]

DNA is not a living organism.  And while it contains instructions for self-duplication it needs another non-living biochemical pattern (microtubule) to form the mitotic spindle that is actually responsible for the faithful replication of genetic information and the formation of a living daughter cell. Until the cell is formed it is not alive.

DNA Is a Structure That Encodes Biological Information

 

 

 

Quote

What do a human, a rose, and a bacterium have in common? Each of these things — along with every other organism on Earth — contains the molecular instructions for life, called deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA. Encoded within this DNA are the directions for traits as diverse as the color of a person's eyes, the scent of a rose, and the way in which bacteria infect a lung cell.

Quote

EGGS: TESTING THE EDGES BETWEEN LIVING AND NON-LIVING FORMS

APRIL 21, 2017

But, how do we define the egg? Is the egg inanimate? If the egg is not inanimate — but not alive — what state does the egg occupy? Does this render the egg into a liminal, in-between space, straddling the line between a life form and a non-life form?

https://blogs.brown.edu/engl-1900j-s01-spring-2017/2017/04/21/eggs-testing-the-edges-between-living-and-non-living-forms/

 

This is the illustration of ongoing abiogenesis by a biochemical process for forming a living cell.

 

Edited May 8, 2023 by write4u

[OceanBreeze]

2 hours ago, write4u said:

Only if you consider it an unexplainable  mystery, which I don't.  We are still surrounded by abiogenetic processes.  Mitosis is one.

And the argument that only life can create life is unwarranted. Dynamic chemistry can turn into dynamic biochemistry, which can turn into say viruses, part alive part pure biochemistry.

That we cannot exactly recreate a 4 billion years old event or events does not negate the "hard fact" that abiogenesis did happen and no amount of sophistry can deny "hard facts".

As Tegmark explains, all necessary ingredients where available, the rest was a matter of time. Just because we can't duplicate it in a lab does in any way imply it cannot be done.

Hazen estimated that since the beginning of Earth's formation, Earth has performed 2 trillion, quadrillion, quadrillion, quadrillion chemical experiments, a truly astronomical number. Chemistry needs no chemist. Life needs no life-giver. It just emerges as an expression of the infinite potential of the Universe.

Life is not a theory, it is an axiom and before life there was only chemistry, that's also an axiom.

You can make up all the axioms you want.

The "hard fact" is abiogenesis remains an unproven theory of how life began.