There are still many intermediate steps. What does it mean “to be conscious of a sensory input”? Are we talking system 1 or system 2? If the brain is composed of modules, which it likely is, what if some of them are digital and able to move to where the information is and others are not? What if the biological part’s responses can be modelled well enough to be predicted digitally 99.9% of the time, such that a remote near-copy can be almost autonomous by means of optimistic concurrency, correcting course only when the verdict comes back different than predicted. The notion of the brain as a single indivisible unit that “is aware of an input” quickly fades away when the possibilities of software are taken into account, even when only part of you is digital.
There are still many intermediate steps. What does it mean “to be conscious of a sensory input”? Are we talking system 1 or system 2?
The system 1/system 2 distinction is only tangentially related here.
If the brain is composed of modules, which it likely is, what if some of them are digital and able to move to where the information is and others are not?
It’s irrelevant whether the brain is ‘composed of modules’ or not. If what you mean is whether it is possible for consciousness to be distributed, well that’s a good question. If it’s possible for consciousness to be distributed then you could imagine being ‘spread out’ over a very large computer network (possibly many light-years in length). But the situation becomes tricky because if, say, your ‘leg’ was in one star system and your ‘eye’ was in another star system, stimulus from your eye could not cause a reaction from your leg in time shorter than several years, otherwise you violate the speed of light limit and causality. So either you cannot be ‘spread out’, or your perception of time slows down so extremely that several years seems instantaneous (just like the fraction of a second required for you to move your human leg seems instantaneous now).
I don’t use the word consciousness as it’s a complex concept not really necessary in this context. I approach a mind as an information processing system, and information processing systems can most certainly be distributed. What that means for consciousness depends on what you mean by consciousness I suppose, but I would not like to start that conversation.
The whole idea of uploading concerns human consciousness. Specifically, transferring a human consciousness to a non-biological context. If you’re not talking about human consciousness, then you’re just talking about building an AI.
The route to AI that you’re suggesting is a plausible one; people like Nick Bostrom have talked about scenarios like this at length. Scenarios where we gradually shift our ‘computational substrate’ to non-biological hardware over several generations. But that’s not necessarily what uploading is! As I mentioned, uploading is the transferring of a consciousness from some specific piece of hardware to another piece of hardware. The title and wording of your post implies that you are talking about uploading, but our discussion indicates you are actually talking about building an AI, which is an entirely different concept, and everyone who is confused about this distinction would do well to clearly understand it before talking about it.
There are still many intermediate steps. What does it mean “to be conscious of a sensory input”? Are we talking system 1 or system 2? If the brain is composed of modules, which it likely is, what if some of them are digital and able to move to where the information is and others are not? What if the biological part’s responses can be modelled well enough to be predicted digitally 99.9% of the time, such that a remote near-copy can be almost autonomous by means of optimistic concurrency, correcting course only when the verdict comes back different than predicted. The notion of the brain as a single indivisible unit that “is aware of an input” quickly fades away when the possibilities of software are taken into account, even when only part of you is digital.
The system 1/system 2 distinction is only tangentially related here.
It’s irrelevant whether the brain is ‘composed of modules’ or not. If what you mean is whether it is possible for consciousness to be distributed, well that’s a good question. If it’s possible for consciousness to be distributed then you could imagine being ‘spread out’ over a very large computer network (possibly many light-years in length). But the situation becomes tricky because if, say, your ‘leg’ was in one star system and your ‘eye’ was in another star system, stimulus from your eye could not cause a reaction from your leg in time shorter than several years, otherwise you violate the speed of light limit and causality. So either you cannot be ‘spread out’, or your perception of time slows down so extremely that several years seems instantaneous (just like the fraction of a second required for you to move your human leg seems instantaneous now).
I don’t use the word consciousness as it’s a complex concept not really necessary in this context. I approach a mind as an information processing system, and information processing systems can most certainly be distributed. What that means for consciousness depends on what you mean by consciousness I suppose, but I would not like to start that conversation.
The whole idea of uploading concerns human consciousness. Specifically, transferring a human consciousness to a non-biological context. If you’re not talking about human consciousness, then you’re just talking about building an AI.
Which in turn depends on what you mean by “artificial”.
The route to AI that you’re suggesting is a plausible one; people like Nick Bostrom have talked about scenarios like this at length. Scenarios where we gradually shift our ‘computational substrate’ to non-biological hardware over several generations. But that’s not necessarily what uploading is! As I mentioned, uploading is the transferring of a consciousness from some specific piece of hardware to another piece of hardware. The title and wording of your post implies that you are talking about uploading, but our discussion indicates you are actually talking about building an AI, which is an entirely different concept, and everyone who is confused about this distinction would do well to clearly understand it before talking about it.
You appear to be arguing about definitions. I’m not interested in going down that rabbit hole.