IJMC Mind Uploading Special Issue published
The International Journal of Machine Consciousness recently published its special issue on mind uploading. The papers are paywalled, but as the editor of the issue, Ben Goertzel has put together a page that links to the authors’ preprints of the papers. Preprint versions are available for most of the papers.
Below is a copy of the preprint page as it was at the time that this post was made. Note though that I’ll be away for a couple of days, and thus be unable to update this page if new links get added.
In June 2012 the International Journal of Machine Consciousness (edited by Antonio Chella) published a Special Issue on Mind Uploading, edited by Ben Goertzel and Matthew Ikle’.
This page gathers links to informal, “preprint” versions of the papers in that Special Issue, hosted on the paper authors’ websites. These preprint versions are not guaranteed to be identical to the final published versions, but the content should be essentially the same. The list below contains the whole table of contents of the Special Issue; at the moment links to preprints are still being added to the list items as authors post them on their sites.
Does anyone have a copy of this? I thought I did, but an hour later I still can’t find it.
EDIT: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85192141/2012-bainbridge.pdf
I’m very sceptical of the idea of mind uploading or at least the usage of the word mind uploading. It suggests a very dualist way of looking at what a mind is. To my understanding mind is a process of physical interactions, in which individual minds(as distinct processes) are localised to individual bodies. Admittedly I have to read the material but what are the proposing uploading will achieve.
Edit:
Wow that is an extraordinary claim. Does anyone agree?
With the claim, or it being extraordinary? Anyway, I agree with both.
The idea that the mind is in essence about patterns. Does that include the metabolism of the neurons for example? The idea that the mind is separable form any given brain and body is where I call shenanigans.
Consider an analogous situation. It doesn’t matter whether a heart valve is made of biological material grown by the organism containing it or is made of plastic, as long as it behaves in the right way. One might express this by saying that its function is separable from its form. That doesn’t mean that one is postulating function as some mysterious and ghostly entity which causes the physical object to perform (i.e. dualism). It’s just that any physical object which performs the right way will do.
This is what is being claimed of uploading. Any physical object that performs the right way will be a mind, regardless of its physical constitution. Take any person, and a physical object that performs in the right way will be a copy of that person’s mind. We know very little about what it takes to perform the right way, but we have no reason to suppose that what evolution came up with is the only possible physical substrate.
So is there any consideration in uploading thought given to subjective experience and it’s relationship to the substrate? Certainly there is no reason to suppose that what evolution came up with is the only possible physical substrate I agree.
We don’t know how subjective experience arises, so the hope would be that simply modelling all the physical stuff that we can find will be enough to capture that process, whatever it is. A photocopier doesn’t need to understand what it’s copying.
I don’t know, uploading still sounds like a transhumanist fantasy devoid of a solid understanding minds and is kind of jumping the gun, in terms achievable h+ technologies.
I think everyone agrees that it’s a long way from present capabilities. We haven’t even done C. elegans yet.
That sounds like saying “we don’t understand this thing yet, so we shouldn’t research it” (even if researching it will lead to a better understanding of it, given enough time).
It does to an extent and that’s bad. Research and finding things out are good if not always then most of the time. If it leads to better understanding minds then great, I just think uploading suggests a conclusion about what minds actually are.
I like how “My brain, my mind, and I” uses the word “cyborgization.” Although, as usual, James Brown has already taken it a step further :D