Submitted by Mark (not verified) on Mon, 09/14/2009 - 08:16.
While I look forward to a future of cybernetics, the notion that uploading our brains to a digital format seems flawed to me. As thousands of years of meditative, magical, and mystical insight show, the mind is not limited to the brain. There is actually a ton of scientific evidence for this too, although this is not generally known. The ESP Enigma is a good book that summarizes these findings. The mind and the brain are very very closely meshed, in that brain damage will affect the mind, drugs will affect the mind, and what's going on in the mind will affect the brain. And in most people's daily lives, it seems that the brain is all we've got. However, I've personally experienced a lot of various forms of ESP and know people who do also. Rationality can be shown to directly inhibit these forms of consciousness. Unfortunately, mainstream science has an a priori that rationality is king and mystical states are all in one's head.
I think that planning a future wherein we rely on technology to stimulate our brains, ultimately uploading them into digital format, ignores the wisdom of millions of the most creative and intelligent people to have lived on this planet, many if not most of whom were scientists of a different sort.
While I look forward to a future of cybernetics, the notion that uploading our brains to a digital format seems flawed to me. As thousands of years of meditative, magical, and mystical insight show, the mind is not limited to the brain. There is actually a ton of scientific evidence for this too, although this is not generally known. The ESP Enigma is a good book that summarizes these findings. The mind and the brain are very very closely meshed, in that brain damage will affect the mind, drugs will affect the mind, and what's going on in the mind will affect the brain. And in most people's daily lives, it seems that the brain is all we've got. However, I've personally experienced a lot of various forms of ESP and know people who do also. Rationality can be shown to directly inhibit these forms of consciousness. Unfortunately, mainstream science has an a priori that rationality is king and mystical states are all in one's head.
I think that planning a future wherein we rely on technology to stimulate our brains, ultimately uploading them into digital format, ignores the wisdom of millions of the most creative and intelligent people to have lived on this planet, many if not most of whom were scientists of a different sort.