How I intend to outlive or upgrade my own brain.
I’ve named this process after the ship of Theseus. This is how I intend to ultimately escape the confines of my body without just making a copy.
I’m aware of similar processes, most closely Moravec’s, but his process is destructive and makes more assumptions than mine. I believe his process results in a copy, not a migrated original.
My process preserves consciousness equally well as passage of time in an original brain does. It’s less disruptive or risky in this sense than mere sleep is. Any argument against the result of this process being the original must apply to existing original brains as well.
The Process Itself
All that is required is a construct superior to original neurons in durability, behavior, and motion, that can position itself, follow these steps, and ultimately replace individual neurons such that adjacent neurons both synthetic and original can operate normally.
For a baseline Theseus transfer these synthetic (apprentice?) neurons (SN) must do the following.
- Swim up to existing neurons and take position nearby.
- Learn to predict their actions based on surrounding neurons of either type.
- Detect when the observed neuron dies.
- Move in and replace those functions fast enough to prevent disruption/detection at the conscious level.
Step 2 may not even require anything like processing power. It may be done mechanically or biochemically depending on what original neurons actually do. If they are entirely rule based themselves then production, positioning, and replacement becomes all that’s needed for a bare bones substrate migration. Ultimately this list and any upgrades to it are technical problems. And nothing about the baseline list is impossible.
Once that is accomplished, the mind is now going to slowly, cell by cell, migrate to the new substrate. The mind being transferred will no more detect these change-overs than it does now when a brain cell dies.
The Potential
What you can do with this foundation as a starting point quickly becomes staggering and assuming technical abilities starts to be more a set of philosophical exercises than technological projections. I’m reminded of the idea that sufficiently advanced technology appears magical. This is definitely related. I leave the Sci-Fi and fantasy repercussions to your imagination.
I strongly request you comment (as always) here if you see anything like a flaw in my logic or the concept.
