I don’t follow the last bit. If ghosts were real, the first-order news would be amazing: maybe humanity wouldn’t have truly lost the brain-information of any human, ever!
Yes, but that would (does?) also means a strict limit in how much cognitive abilities, including emotional amplitude, can be engineered. Neural engineering would has as its task improving a human body’s brain up to that limit, but not beyond, as after a point it would be (is?) incompatible with “human souls”.
So, the first-order news would be good, in that 42 billion or so human souls would be intact (barring something able to kill souls). The second-order news, however, is that the trillions to quadrillions of human beings that will still come to exist will all be, well, basically this, just spread around. So, for me, if those quadrillions of future human beings could have been orders or magnitude more at the price of all human beings so far existing not having a continuity into that future, the utility thus gained would also be orders of magnitude higher.
Sure current engineering wouldn’t have any idea, but discovering a new subtrate that humans exist on has also the promise of engineering that subtrate. If we discover a new field effecting muon g-factor we don’t mourn for physics having an upper limit we rejoice of inclusion of new exotic stuff.
True, and I do think that’d be quite exciting. My point is that humanity not being able to develop the option of, e.g., reloading a backup of oneself, or several then merging the results into a new integrated self, would be limiting. I do enjoy science fiction dealing on those topics after all, from Friendship is Optimal all the way to Iain M. Bank’s Culture series, passing through Star Trek’s endless transporter accidents, I find the idea of “identity as data” quite appealing. Having it tied to some kind of substratum is comparatively a kinda meh proposition, even if said substratum were to be shown to have quite interesting properties in other respects.
If human souls are generated by the human brain, which seems as likely as any other mechanism of creating them, then perhaps an upgraded brain will generate upgraded souls.
I don’t follow the last bit. If ghosts were real, the first-order news would be amazing: maybe humanity wouldn’t have truly lost the brain-information of any human, ever!
Yes, but that would (does?) also means a strict limit in how much cognitive abilities, including emotional amplitude, can be engineered. Neural engineering would has as its task improving a human body’s brain up to that limit, but not beyond, as after a point it would be (is?) incompatible with “human souls”.
So, the first-order news would be good, in that 42 billion or so human souls would be intact (barring something able to kill souls). The second-order news, however, is that the trillions to quadrillions of human beings that will still come to exist will all be, well, basically this, just spread around. So, for me, if those quadrillions of future human beings could have been orders or magnitude more at the price of all human beings so far existing not having a continuity into that future, the utility thus gained would also be orders of magnitude higher.
Sure current engineering wouldn’t have any idea, but discovering a new subtrate that humans exist on has also the promise of engineering that subtrate. If we discover a new field effecting muon g-factor we don’t mourn for physics having an upper limit we rejoice of inclusion of new exotic stuff.
True, and I do think that’d be quite exciting. My point is that humanity not being able to develop the option of, e.g., reloading a backup of oneself, or several then merging the results into a new integrated self, would be limiting. I do enjoy science fiction dealing on those topics after all, from Friendship is Optimal all the way to Iain M. Bank’s Culture series, passing through Star Trek’s endless transporter accidents, I find the idea of “identity as data” quite appealing. Having it tied to some kind of substratum is comparatively a kinda meh proposition, even if said substratum were to be shown to have quite interesting properties in other respects.
If human souls are generated by the human brain, which seems as likely as any other mechanism of creating them, then perhaps an upgraded brain will generate upgraded souls.