The same thing that’s so magical about the electron that its velocity and position cannot both be measured exactly. That variance makes a prosthetic equivalent impossible.
For an example, we have just learned (within days) that the brain has a lymphatic system on top of its electrical (neurons and whatnot) and hormonal (neurotransmitters) systems. Those systems are, in their totality, the brain. Even if the brain was the seat of mind, that as-yet-unfathomably complex system, where the neuron/axon system both responds to and controls the neurotransmitter environment, could not be measured closely enough to understand it to the level necessary for replication, even if static. The fact that those systems are in a very high-speed electromagnetic and bio-molecular flux is the coup de grace.
They don’t have to because they are precisely what they are, in relation to what all their neighbor cells precisely are, as grown from the joining of egg and sperm in their developmental past.
They don’t have to because their job is not to replicate the totality of the organism they are contributing members of.
This is why we are a human being.
This difference is why making a robot arm reach out and pick up an apple is still so dang difficult, yet simple for a five-year-old.
You are assuming limitations on the functionality, generational methods, replacement processes and any other properties of the prostheses which support your position.
Synthetic biology may not currently exist but I see no reason to suppose it will be any less functional than the meat.
I’m not referring at all to the capabilities of the “destination” body. It is the process of capturing the source living system’s data representation and then mapping that state onto the destination system that I am arguing is not possible.
How well the replacement meat can function is irrelevant if the source cannot be measured accurately enough.
Isn’t such a daft idea — we are constantly repairing and renewing ourselves anyway, yet our conscious I lives on. A gradual replacement of brain tissue by some other tissue or technology that fulfils the same function would probably have the same result.
Copying a mind state in one body and then imposing it on another surely requires the existence of a transferable soul —one that that can recognise that it needs to move to the new body— in order for the transfer to work the way we’d want it to? Otherwise you would just be creating a copy with the memories of the old. The old one would continue to be and the being that decided to make the copy would still die, taking its consciousness with it.
Gradually transfer the function of a cell to it’s prosthetic equivalent, which is linked to the original cell’s connected cells through a connection that allows comparable connectivity.
I suspect that quite a few would-be-immortals would be very unhappy when a Perfect Immortal Copy of them steps out of the growth chamber/cybernetic patterning unit/whatever, no mystical soul transfer occurs, and then that asshole who is precisely them; but stripped of feeble mortality, starts laughing hysterically at the sucker who thought he would personally be evading death.
Actually, depending on the temperament of the original, and their age at time of copying, you could probably get a number of very, very, strange interactions; not all of the adversarial, though some definitely would be. The copy would probably find coming to terms with ‘their own’ death, as died by somebody else, pretty weird as well.
So yeah it from bit… which is a gedanken experiment and untestable and apparently a lot of people disagree with it because it states basically the universe was created for us. Umm nope. The universe if it could give a fuck certainly does not give a fuck about humans as it is a pretty fucking hostile environment for humans.
The number of humans alive today is considerably larger than it was for most of human history. So if every human body is just a vessel for a reincarnated soul, why are there roughly 20 times as many human souls residing on the planet today than there were 500 years ago? Do souls reproduce? Do they multitask? Are some of us former whales who were recently demoted for bad behavior?
I know you are being both generous and colloquial in the use of theory, but it is really Untestable Hypothesis.
When life can be defined, when consciousness is measurable, when we understand intelligence, and after we solve that pesky Free Will conundrum, then we will have the tools to ask meaningful questions about reincarnation.
Do you think that the only beings in the universe are on earth?
As many lifeforms as are produced on earth to be used by life, there is always more life in the universe to operate them.
But in more specific answer to your question, those who exist can continue to receive new lifeforms when the old one’s wear out, while new life continues to be created. Those who reincarnate do not necessarily reincarnate on earth, and the fastest way to travel to another galaxy is to die again, and just reincarnate there.
And that. dear children, is why you don’t go the clone way but the gradual replacements/rebuild of your own parts way. It’s safer against the null hypothesis that there is no soul.
The “being” here is just a word coined by philosophers.
The latter machine has quite more processing units in a 3d matrix than the former one. The latter kinds of machines are under intense research for biological engineerint and its part, biomimetics. With quite interesting results so far.
These two variables at quantum level aren’t two variables but one, with two flavors. The natural systems are built from the same elementary particles as the artificial ones. No reason why one should be limited more or less than the other one by the quantum effects.
So there’s another kludgy network that the evolution crudely slapped together to the hack known as brain. So big deal, there will be more such networks to discover and integrate to the concept. Some will not be needed for the replacement due to the different operating principles, others will be required instead; for example, silicon chips don’t need oxygen nor glucose, nerve cells don’t need +3.3 and +1.8 volts power rails.
So modify it in situ. Replace it cell by cell, always keeping enough of the configured, in-situ old parts so the small proportion of the new parts can be integrated using existing self-repair mechanisms. Once these are in, replace some more. Continue until all are done.
Another possibility is infiltrating the brain with little monitoring/dataprocessing nanoparticles. Or gene therapy, get the brain to produce the necessary mechanisms by its own cells. Get every neuron to report its state in real time. You do not need all the quantum states of every atom in the every cell; pick just what’s relevant. Research is being under way here as well. As a glimpse of the possibilities, check the ways how neurons are made to emit light when they switch, or made to be light-sensitive, so they can be selectively activated or monitored in the experimental animal.
High speed my ass. Check out the firing speed of a neuron; 200 pulses per second at a good day. Do you actually understand at least vaguely how neurons work? Action potentials? Depolarization? The kinetics of the reactions involved? How slow is a release of neurotransmitters? How abysmally slow a signal travels through the axons? Now compare with the blazing speed of the humble mainstream silicon slivers. The thinking rocks are hindered by their non-reconfigurability (they are set in stone, etched into the surface, are you familiar with photolithography processes?), and even FPGAs need to have every interconnect in place already and just enable and disable them instead of growing them only as needed, and by their planar, 2D nature, but that’s about it. These limitations will also get conquered.
Likely yes.
Whiss, whiss, whiss… that’s the sound that the Ockham’s Razor makes when it is being sharpened.
There is nothing in the entire field of digital physics that would seem to bolster your hypothesis. The consciousness can be an emergent phenomenon, born from the structure of the host, as well in any of the physics frameworks.
I am a bit out of my depth in the fields of alternative physics approaches, but your phrasing is similar to pop-science books that often mix things up. I may be wrong here.
It’s a bog-standard biochemistry. Fancy words used for describing local intermolecular interactions. The same rules for protein folding, for plastics solidification and crystallization, for metallurgy. And the codons don’t modify the amino acids in any way, they just are there to select the proper amino acid bound to the tRNA complementary to the codons so it can be held in place for a while. As of “essential fold topology”, you may witness some quite interesting self-assembly of large structures with a shampoo or liquid soap; the high viscosity is mostly caused by the right ratio of the surfactant vs water and ions (and I fool thought, some time ago, there have to be thickeners added).
Nothing that would work differently for a natural vs artificial system. A molecule is a molecule.
You get the same interactions and the same system-in-flux in a building brick. Or in a cup of tea, if you want something with more actual movement of the particles, as they are baked into a crystal lattice in ceramics and are pretty much static. Nothing magical on it being a living cell.
You don’t need an exact copy. You need a functionally good enough copy. That gives much bigger wiggle space.
Also, some rudimentary progress is already there, in the field of neuroprosthetics.
Who deceived you into thinking that brain is something magical and impossible to duplicate the function of?
No need to keep track of something that keeps track of itself. See the law of energy conservation, and E=mc2 which binds energy and matter into being two sides of the same coin. The particles, including the photons, and the associated fields, are there. The information just rides on them, an emergent property.
Now this I find hard to parse.
Ideas are cheap. Good ideas, slightly less so. Citations are there to save us the effort of going through reevaluating or rediscovering everything on our own. They are also helpful for finding criticisms of the hypotheses, which are often helpful in finding if they hold water.
And, from the engineering point of view, many of the hypotheses are just speculations, good to kill time at a coffee room but of little practical usefulness until further developed - a process that kills hypotheses rather reliably, only the few good ones tend to survive.
