# Would you upload your brain to The Cloud?



## Phyrebrat (Mar 16, 2018)

Saw this on LinkedIn and thought it’d be of interest here. (Simultaneously making me look clever but also dim)

LinkedIn


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## Brian G Turner (Mar 16, 2018)

Sorry, can't access - it's forcing a login to read.


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## Vladd67 (Mar 16, 2018)

Brain Uploading To Cloud? Your Mind Uploaded in a Computer Would Not Be You - Web Top News


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## The Crawling Chaos (Mar 16, 2018)

While it is a very interesting topic for SF aficionados, I think ultimately this conundrum only exists because our vision of identity is still deeply rooted in age-old socio-religious traditions that maintain that we are inhabited by a soul (The 'real' me) and it is something distinct from our body (the vessel I inhabit). To me this concept is the new, slightly more scientific, expression of the desire of people tainted by centuries of religious teachings to try to access Heaven after death.

I am of the view that we are our bodies and nothing more. If you were to find a way to upload your consciousness (But what is that? Your memories? Your brain's computing power? What?) to the Cloud, that's all you would do: upload data. Others might be able to access it, but it wouldn't be alive, it wouldn't be conscious, it wouldn't exist. And it certainly wouldn't be you, as the article states.

We have to outgrow this simplistic view of what being alive means. We are not ghosts piloting a machine: We are the machine, and the machine creates and upholds the system that we perceive as our identity. Without the machine to sustain their existence, consciousness and identity cannot survive.

So, yeah. Take care of your body. It doesn't belong to you, it is you.


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## Mouse (Mar 16, 2018)

No.
1. Don't see the point.
2. Couldn't be arsed.


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## Phyrebrat (Mar 16, 2018)

Thanks @Vladd67

What I thought was funny is how this is old hat to anyone who watched the outstanding sci fi drama Caprica.

@Mouse good! We don’t want your sloppy coding infecting the servers with the Div2 Virus 

pH


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## Lumens (Mar 16, 2018)

How do you know you're not... Never mind.


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## night_wrtr (Mar 16, 2018)

The Crawling Chaos said:


> So, yeah. Take care of your body. It doesn't belong to you, it is you.




You summarized my thoughts exactly, so I won't repeat. Its a hard no from me, unless we are talking some kind of Avatar upload, but that is the point I think. It takes everything, not a mere copy. 

I'll say that this reminds me of another article (From the clever Wait But Why)with a similar aspect. Teleportation. 

The whole article is about "What Makes You You?" and is here:
What Makes You You? - Wait But Why

The teleportation example that I find very interesting is quoted below:


> The Teletransporter Thought Experiment
> 
> It’s the year 2700. The human race has invented all kinds of technology unimaginable in today’s world. One of these technologies is teleportation—the ability to transport yourself to distant places at the speed of light. Here’s how it works—
> 
> ...


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## Luiglin (Mar 16, 2018)

I can't even boot up my local offline brain.


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## REBerg (Mar 16, 2018)

Why not? It would only be a copy of my mind which would survive the death of my body.
Assuming my cloud mind could remain sane without physical sensory input, the technology might be developed to download copies back into other bodies -- say newborn clones with minimal memories of their own or twenty-somethings who had been kept in stasis before the download.
If these procedures would become reality, I would anticipate only the very rich could afford them. I would hope exceptions could be made to preserve extraordinary minds, such as that of Stephen Hawking, for the future benefit of humanity.


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## The Crawling Chaos (Mar 16, 2018)

REBerg said:


> Why not? It would only be a copy of my mind which would survive the death of my body.
> *Assuming my cloud mind could remain sane without physical sensory input*, the technology might be developed to download copies back into other bodies -- say newborn clones with minimal memories of their own or twenty-somethings who had been kept in stasis before the download.
> If these procedures would become reality, I would anticipate only the very rich could afford them. I would hope exceptions could be made to preserve extraordinary minds, such as that of Stephen Hawking, for the future benefit of humanity.



The issue though is that nothing points to disembodied life being even remotely possible and I would even go as far as saying it is impossible (not because we haven't yet figured out how to do it, but because it is physically impossible).

There is nothing of you that can be retained after your body is gone. Nothing you would identify as "you" anyway. Your identity, your consciousness, are not separate entities that live a happy eternal life on the spiritual plane, they are by-products of your organic life as a human body. You cannot live outside of your body, you do not live a separate, parallel existence to that of your body, you are your body.

So whatever data would be stored there on the Cloud, it certainly wouldn't be you and could never be re-uploaded as you into anything. It would just be a lifeless stream of 1s and 0s destined to remain forever trapped in digital form.



			
				night_wrtr said:
			
		

> I'll say that this reminds me of another article (From the clever Wait But Why)with a similar aspect. Teleportation.
> 
> The whole article is about "What Makes You You?" and is here:
> What Makes You You? - Wait But Why
> ...



Yes, that reminds me of the movie The Prestige, in which...



Spoiler



a magician looking for the ultimate teleportation trick gets Nikola Tesla to build him a machine that creates an identical copy of him a few feet away from the original. The magician becomes extremely famous by performing that trick in which he enters a cabinet to instantly reappear somewhere else in the room, but at the end of the film we find out that every night he has been drowning himself for the copy to live on as the only version of the magician until the following night, etc. His backstage area is filled with water containers inside which float the corpses of his previous selves. Spooky.


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## REBerg (Mar 16, 2018)

The Crawling Chaos said:


> The issue though is that nothing points to disembodied life being even remotely possible and I would even go as far as saying it is impossible (not because we haven't yet figured out how to do it, but because it is physically impossible).
> 
> There is nothing of you that can be retained after your body is gone. Nothing you would identify as "you" anyway. Your identity, your consciousness, are not separate entities that live a happy eternal life on the spiritual plane, they are by-products of your organic life as a human body. You cannot live outside of your body, you do not live a separate, parallel existence to that of your body, you are your body.
> 
> So whatever data would be stored there on the Cloud, it certainly wouldn't be you and could never be re-uploaded as you into anything. It would just be a lifeless stream of 1s and 0s destined to remain forever trapped in digital form.


I'm not so sure about that. I'll let you know after my first download.


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## Edward M. Grant (Mar 16, 2018)

I don't think uploading is going to happen in the traditional SF sense. I think we're just going to add so much electronic wizardry to our brains that eventually the organic brain becomes redundant.


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## Anthoney (Mar 16, 2018)

I don't even trust the cloud with my photos.


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## HareBrain (Mar 16, 2018)

One argument against the point of this is, if you can upload your "mind" after death from a digital record of it, you could also upload a digital record of it into another body while you were still alive.

And if you do that, where does your awareness reside? Are you going to be aware of being in two places at once? I suggest not. What I think is the case is that the new upload would believe itself to be a continuation of you, but your existing self would perceive no change.

Which means that if you relied on doing this after your death, the new upload would, again, perceive itself as being a continuation of you, but your old awareness would still be extinguished. This is not a route to immortality, any more than creating a clone with your memories would be.


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## Brian G Turner (Mar 16, 2018)

And we're firmly in the territory of _Otherland _and _Altered Carbon_.


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## Phyrebrat (Mar 16, 2018)

Or _Caprica_ then _Battlestar Galactica_...

As I said... 

pH


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## Venusian Broon (Mar 16, 2018)

HareBrain said:


> One argument against the point of this is, if you can upload your "mind" after death from a digital record of it, you could also upload a digital record of it into another body while you were still alive.



Actually, if the universe is truly infinite in some manner (i.e. there are infinite numbers of other 'universes' out there, just so mind-boggling far away, we will never ever see any interaction with them - so some sort of inflationary 'multiverse' for example) then there are infinite identical minds/bodies that are 'you' anyway. Right now.

Do you feel that your awareness resides across the multi-verse?


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## Jo Zebedee (Mar 16, 2018)

Pretty sure they’d reject it as basically incompatible. With anything.


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## REBerg (Mar 16, 2018)

Brian G Turner said:


> And we're firmly in the territory of _Otherland _and _Altered Carbon_.


Plus _Westworld_, _Battlestar Galactica _and probably a few hundred other sci-fi works.
I answered "yes" to the question posed because uploading my mind to the cloud seems like a shot at some sort of immortality. I can understand how others would answer "no" because they might not like their new or continued existences  -- or the use to which the cloud management might put their mind copies.
Digital slavery could become an issue.


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## Vladd67 (Mar 17, 2018)

Digital slavery brings to mind Black Mirror episode White Christmas.


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## REBerg (Mar 17, 2018)

Mind copying could add a whole new level of meaning to the concept of intellectual property.


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## Dave (Mar 17, 2018)

I was thinking more of the Black Mirror episode San Junipero. 

I'm not sure which would be worse though, dying or living forever stuck in 1987.


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## Danny McG (Mar 17, 2018)

Dave said:


> 'm not sure which would be worse though, dying or living forever stuck in 1987



Well we did have Edwina Currie saying "Good Christians won't get AIDS"


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## Stephen Palmer (Mar 17, 2018)

The Crawling Chaos said:


> While it is a very interesting topic for SF aficionados, I think ultimately this conundrum only exists because our vision of identity is still deeply rooted in age-old socio-religious traditions that maintain that we are inhabited by a soul (The 'real' me) and it is something distinct from our body (the vessel I inhabit). To me this concept is the new, slightly more scientific, expression of the desire of people tainted by centuries of religious teachings to try to access Heaven after death.



How rarely do we see common sense like this in the general online discussion around this area (I'm not referring to Chrons specifically).
Well said, C.C.


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## Stephen Palmer (Mar 17, 2018)

The Crawling Chaos said:


> The issue though is that nothing points to disembodied life being even remotely possible and I would even go as far as saying it is impossible (not because we haven't yet figured out how to do it, but because it is physically impossible).



This too. Our consciousness is 100% supported by our senses and by the society around us.


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## HareBrain (Mar 17, 2018)

The Crawling Chaos said:


> To me this concept is the new, slightly more scientific, expression of the desire of people tainted by centuries of religious teachings to try to access Heaven after death.



I think this would be inevitable even if there had been no religious concept of Heaven, because the egoic self finds it very difficult to cope with the possibility of not existing any more. We have whole worlds in our minds -- we can create entire galaxies -- how dare anything destroy that! And I think this particularly afflicts those who spend all their effort heaping up power, money and possessions, which they try to use as a wall against extinction, and they are the people with the desire and ability to pour their riches wastefully into funding such pointless technological schemes (which as I pointed out above almost certainly wouldn't work anyway, although this would be impossible to prove).


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## Brian G Turner (Mar 17, 2018)

Stephen Palmer said:


> How rarely do we see common sense like this in the general online discussion around this area



It's simply because we don't encourage discussion of religious or spiritual issues - and I'd like to see that continue, even if someone has already posted a reductionist viewpoint.


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## Alexa (Mar 17, 2018)

I don't like the idea of having to battle against my old self in the future, so I will definetely stay away of the Cloud.


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## LordOfWizards (Mar 17, 2018)

For me it conjures up an old line by Bob Dylan: "And if my thought dreams could be seen, they'd probably put my head in a guillotine."

On one level I'm joking, but on another I guess I'm wondering: Does this mean other people could hear/see my every thought?
If so, I would agree with Bob. I would be in some serious trouble.


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## Stephen Palmer (Mar 18, 2018)

Brian G Turner said:


> It's simply because we don't encourage discussion of religious or spiritual issues - and I'd like to see that continue, even if someone has already posted a reductionist viewpoint.



As you know, I think that's a shame, but I entirely understand your motive for doing it.
btw, I did mention that I wasn't specifically referring to Chrons in my original comment!


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## HanaBi (Mar 18, 2018)

Good for brain storming I suppose


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