Stephen Hawking: Brains Could Be Copied To Computers To Allow Life After Death

Well... back in the 90s IBM was doing R&D on building processors with leach neurons... which conduct electricity particularly well... and grow... and map themselves. Using cyborg like approach could very well prevail a method by which it would be nearly identical... and "you" is a transient state. Historical you is not the same as you as you read this.

Regardless... the lifecycle exists for a reason. Can't keep adding more people. So there is a limited number of people who can do it.

My head goes the other direction... what if you download to 4 or 5 yous? Only the wealthy could do it, and there would be wars for bots... there would be multiplicity. You can bet the cyborgs will not suffer the desires of the unwashed masses. Could spin a whole new set of man vs machine plots there.

 

never was all that impressed with this guy, not saying he isn't brilliant, but putting him on the level of historical genius akin to Einstein or Tesla for example.
Newton could run rings around him intellectually, or even Pascal...both ardent Christians.

Seems to me he's just another British snob more interested in theoretical physics than practical physics.
Invent the next practical and affordable energy source to replace oil, maybe I'll be impressed with his intellectual prowess beyond abstract theorizing and proselytizing atheism.

He ain't all that folks, he writes a couple books and the science nerds start swooning.
Brilliant yes, game changing...no.

He's no Einstein, a deist by the way.

 

He may be smart but he is certainly not wise.
A great man of science should not rule the possibility of something out purely as a personal prejudice. Interesting that as Hawking is dismissing
an after life as the stuff of "fairy tales" there is great scientific work going on that is establishing the very real possibility of transcendent life.

Hawking seems totally unaware or unconcerned by this.

 

ALS effects the brain, I had a cousin who suffered through the disease, and it's a terrible fate. It's a misconception only the motor function neurons are effected...frankly I think there could be a level of senility at this point. Probably not as noticeable from a superior intellect like Hawking has, but he's lost a step or two. Even in his prime, I thought he was intentionally anti-religious, to the point the argument was more emotional than simply leaving religion out of the discussion entirely, areligious. This guy is anti-religious...comes across like a jerk sometimes offending so many of faith. I think he's senile, quite frankly.

 

Please cite some of that work?

Personally, I find Hawking to be one of the genius's of our time.

 

Whats the use of dirty fantasies without the ability to masturbate?

 

He's telling the truth. Asimov was talking about this idea back in 60's.

 

Dementia in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease)

http://www.emedicinehealth.com/dementia_in_als_lou_gehrigs_disease/article_em.htm

He's a nutty old man, his fellow atheist's seem to revere.
Perhaps the common bond is mutual dementia.

 

I Think the super rich of the future will do machine augmentation, but I also think they might do something else far more... sinister...

Ever heard of the term "designer babies"?
In the future genetic engineering will get to a point where, if you have the money, you will be able to create a child in a laboratory with whatever genes and traits you want. You want a kid with an IQ of 200, blue hair, purple eyes, and four arms? You got it!

I think this sort of thing is going to lead to some maaaajor civil issues in the future. The debate over abortion will mostly disappear and instead there will be fighting over how much you should be able to change up your kid in the womb/lab. And you just know a lot of billionaires will create flawless heirs even if it is made illegal.

in 200 years we will be dealing with a whole other level of white collar criminals.

 

A genius with a serious problem with his own prejudices.
http://responsiveuniverse.wordpress...ce-prove-that-an-afterlife-exists-absolutely/

Research is not proof but any intellectually honest mind should admit only a fool discounts something he cannot hope to explain or definitely rule out.
Hawking is that fool.

 

I saw some guy on TV talking about this concept. His vision is that they will be able to download your brain and then edit all the parts that society does not value out of your brain bank and leave you as a perfect human in a computer. It is scary what they want to do, but I take solace in that they will never be able to do this the way people think. I certainly wouldn't allow it to be done to me.

 

If hawkings is so smart why is he in a wheelchair talking through a computer? Just sayin.

 

I have to agree. I do not want my memory, etc transferred to a flash-drive and exist in a "Tron" like state of electrons racing around a circuit board. The notion itself seems rather perverse to me. That is not an afterlife and there are still severe limitations regarding any comparison to actual eternal life. The Universe will experience heat death eventually, any sort of materialist approach to consciousness in the form of hardware is technically not eternal. Seems to me a "computerized" person can be unplugged and the motherboard melted down quite easily. good-bye Uncle Frank...nice to know you..."Intel inside" version

I don't fear the technology, I just find it amoral.

Count me out, even if was technologically possible. I think it's warped.

 

You would think that God existed in the person of Stephen Hawking to hear some people tell it. Personally, I think most of his admirers are caught up in a cult of personality. I think the debilitating disease has a lot to do with it. Sure, he's a genius but there are a lot of those. His genius doesn't approach that of Einstein or Bohr or Planck and his imagination and personality doesn't approach that of someone like Feynman so I just don't get it. He's more on the level of Sagan or Asimov in my opinion. Other than a couple of early successes, he managed to write some books about physics that are accessible to laymen.

As for the idea of uploading a human brain to a computer, I guess it could be possible in the very distant future. Who knows? I think that the capabilities of human endeavor are finite, an idea which I'm sure some people would disagree with. There are some things that are just beyond the human brain to comprehend. For thousands of years humans have been building on the knowledge of their predecessors. Eventually, I think we will reach a plateau unless some drastic circumstances kickstart human evolution again. The question is on which side of that plateau lies the very academic proposition that humans can unlock the secrets of their own thoughts.

 

I think the next step in human evolution will be machine/bio engineering based. Were advancing to fast for natural evolution to keep up. Once were a class one civilization in 100-200 years (according to the Kardeshev scale, colonizing other planets in the solar system, and mining Asteroids), were going to start moving even faster.
I am sort of glad, and sort of not glad I probably wont live to see it.

I like Einstiens opinion on death and prolonging it. When he suddenly suffered an organ failure in his old age Einstein refused surgery, saying: "I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly." He died in Princeton Hospital early the next morning at the age of 76, having continued to work until near the end.

 

Obvious troll is obvious.

 

True..... the Dr. Ian Stevenson research indicates that somebody with some serious technological capability has already done this on a large scale!!!!!????

...(Part 3 on birthmarks and moles corresponding to wounds is impressive)!!!!!???

http://www.near-death.com/experiences/reincarnation01.html

 

there is something wrong with hawkings.

you cannot compare the brain to the computer.
the brain exists well ahead of the computer.
but one could compare the computer to the brain.

the computer is only a product of the brain.
and the computer does not work/function in absence of an operator.

hawkings, better think again.

 

I think the key quotation is this:

"'I think the brain is like a program in the mind, which is like a computer,' Hawking said"

What is the mind if a brain is like a program in a mind? Hawking seems to be saying that the mind is more than just the brain. So to work, the computer would also have to be in a mind. Whether or not that is possible depends on what the mind is. At the moment, I don't know how this could be done.

There are science fiction books which describe what it might be like to be downloaded or uploaded into a computer. Scientists like to read science fiction books which have ideas in them, unlike rather mindless science fiction which is only about fighting monsters of some kind, but don't have interesting potential scientific ideas.

Of course, the majority of predicted scientific knowledge in science fiction books is probably incorrect, though one can never be sure because who knows what might be discovered in the future. Even the incorrect ideas expand the range of what one can think about, which sometimes I think makes it easier for people to discover some third idea which is true. Some people might not deduce that corner. By saying "third idea", I mean there is the science fiction idea and whatever idea that is parallel that we actually have today.

In any case, minds downloaded into computers are written as self-programming, so people in computers can have any environment they want and do anything they want. If they want to eat some favorite food, they can just create it. One science fiction writer came up with the thought that most people would just become hedonistic, only creating pleasures for themselves and ignoring any other possibility.

 

According to almost all religions we already live after death, be it by reincarnation or by becoming spirits. In my modest opinion only a man who has cast aside every spiritual meaning in his life can possibly think about reincarnating and surviving for eternity... in a personal computer. I mean, you have to be really messed up to think something like this. I already read about this, we can survive... by making an exact copy of our personality and download them in a pc, that's wonderful ( if even possible considering the infinite variables ) but by doing that you only obtain a copy of yourself, it's not you anymore, but a thing that imitates you, and does it badly.. really sad, imho.

 

means to me the people actually get something in return for their taxes, maybe we can cut spending on things like useless 10+ yeah wars in Iraq

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-- below is response to a second post, pf merged them for some reason --

some Atheists believe were nothing more then our bodies, our brains there for are us, so if we copy the brain, we make a copy of us...

others Atheists believe in reincarnation and a life force separate from our bodies

.

 

A copy of the mind is hardly the same thing as life after death, as it doesn't seem to me that your consciousness would somehow magically transfer over to the copy. You as a biological machine with a consciouness generated by it would still die. What would live on in the copy, though in some fashion similar to yourself, would still be something separate.

The only way to achieve eternal life is to keep the brain alive indefinitely, and so likely to keep the body going indefinitely as well. I would love to see this accomplished.

 

Now, I'm not saying this is the right track, but...

What if it's like walking down a hall lined with doors? Let's say that line ends at a wall with a door and window, a window that you can see though? Everything inside is frozen but you can see there is a room beyond the barrier. You walk through the door and you are in another world. The world is running. You exit the room and it stops.

Let's say inside this other world there are rooms within rooms, inside the room, there are more doors you can go to, and windows you can look through. many of them. It's like bubbles within bubbles, worlds within worlds. Everything is inset inside rooms. Maybe forever, maybe not, but just a lot of choices to make, to decide which one you want to visit. Perhaps the rooms are a story and you choose the ending by picking the room you want to enter, perhaps even a chain of them.

Now just to be crazy, let's assume that there is a space between each room, you can go through the room, or you can run around to the other side and change into what happens? Let's assume this change is random, you can never really know what happened in there unless you either enter it and follow it through to the end, or you can run around and have a random outcome happen? If you run around, you don't get to go through the room and choose what happens it's chosen for you..

Now let's assume that there are two rooms side by side. Inside both rooms is a door with a triangle shape, just to mark it. If we go into the triangle room on one side we find something... Now let's assume we run around to the same marked door inside the other room, but inside is a different something. Although the doors are marked the same, each door, in separate rooms, contains its own separate something. We can never really know what is behind it unless we look... It's like each room has its own version of the door.

Now let's assume that we open several doors with the triangle mark on them? We find a repeating pattern, but upon opening another door, thinking we'll see the pattern, it doesn't work this time? I guess it would be like we can never really know what's inside. Not until we check. And not only does each version of the door exist on its own, it exists with its own set of rules?

 

I'm not sure, but your thinking might be assuming a field of consciousness, with minds and other things located within it.

 

I agree!

It is amazing how much evidence exists that our personality/identity/ memories are all recorded on something far far far better than any PC!

http://www.carolmoore.net/articles/helenwambach.html