Tuesday, July 7, 2020

Continuation

The book The Brain: The Story of You, by David Eagleman, discusses two sorts of scientific physical immortality. An old idea involves freezing the body, carefully and specially to avoid damage to await the day when that body could be thawed or unfrozen, repaired and ready to go.  The other approach is to upload the brain into a cloud that can contain all the circuits, interconnections and memories in the brain.  This approach is rather well depicted in the fictional series on Amazon's Prime Video called "Upload".  


I am willing to expire as have millions of humans and other forms of life before me.  Freezing and waiting doesn't sound like it will work out to me.  However, as time goes by, I imagine greater understanding of how the brain works, despite its daunting complexity.  So, at some point in the future, I can imagine a person's thoughts, memories, fantasies, fears, tendencies, etc. being successfully recorded and installed in software that does a good job of "being" me, of acting as I act and of convincing people who know me that a pretty good replica of me continues on.  


This software could allow questions and comments to be constructed by my artificial brain.  The output would remind people who knew me when I was alive of how I acted and thought.  Some of them will say,"Yep, that is the old Kirby all right."  I suspect that it is the emotional and background me that will remind people of me, not necessarily the logical or reasoning part.  It will not work if the uploaded version starts discussing my joy of knitting or mountain climbing. But there do need to some new subjects and new books from time to time.

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