h+ Magazine

Cybernetic immortality – fantasy or scientific problem? I can answer that right away. It is a scientific problem – of approximately the same type as the problem of people going into outer space, which was proposed by Tsiolkovsky at the turn of the 20th century.

“Imagine a world where London is the world capital of transhumanism.” ~Bruce Sterling

This past weekend I attended the Alcor 40 conference, hosted by the cryonics organization Alcor to celebrate its 40th year of operation, and I was extremely impressed.

1. Chemical brain preservation is a technology that may soon be validated to inexpensively preserve the key features of our memories and identity at our biological death.
2. If either chemical or cryogenic brain preservation can be validated to reliably store retrievable and useful individual mental information, these medical procedures should be made available in all societies as an option at biological death.
3. If computational neuroscience, microscopy, scanning, and robotics technologies continue to improve at their historical rates, preserved memories and identity may be affordably reanimated by being “uploaded” into computer simulations, beginning well before the end of this century.
4. In all societies where a significant minority (let’s say 100,000 people) have done brain preservation at biological death, significant positive social change will result in those societies today, regardless of how much information is eventually recovered from preserved brains.

It will not take long until most people will be connected most of the time to a set of devices that can read their thought processes and emotions and record what they do and say to whom at the same time.

Video and Transcript of the interview conducted with Dr. Randal A. Koene by Adam A. Ford at Fitzroy Gardens, Melbourne, 16 August, 2012. (The interview was part of the events surrounding the Singularity Summit Australia 2012.)

SIM stands for Substrate-Independent Minds. It is the notion that you can take the functions that are going on inside of our brain that produce mind and have them carried out in different kinds of implementations…

Last weekend (Sunday May 28) I spent the day at the annual conference of the National Space Society — giving a talk, taking in the other talks, and generally absorbing the space-y energy. I came away with the clear impression that at some point in the not too distant future — in particular, once the cost of launch is decreased a fair bit — we’re going to see an incredible explosion of commercial, scientific and recreational activity in near space.

Space travel, particle physics, cosmology. These are just some of the endeavors humankind has embarked on, trying to understand the great mysteries of the universe. But why haven’t we been able to decipher those puzzles yet? Is it because they are vast and we are so small and insignificant? Well, yes.

The idea of mind uploading is an idea that many transhumanists believe will one day become a possibility. It’s an intriguing notion, being able to cast off the shackles of our earthly ties and transcend into another, purely digital form.

Mind uploading would involve simulating a human brain in a computer in enough detail that the “simulation” becomes, for all practical purposes, a perfect copy and experiences consciousness, just like protein-based human minds.

Ben Goertzel converses with Hugo de Garis on his transhumanist argument for the reality of a Creator.