MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading

Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by mateosu on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @03:05PM (#16748023)

There's no real evidence that the human brain functions anything like an Information Processor and, in fact, a growing body of evidence that suggests it's not. We still know so little about the brain and comparing a brain to a computer is is at best a flawed metaphor and at worst an outright falsehood. The idea that any sort of human consciousness can be uploaded or stored by a computer is asinine

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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by EamonnMR on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @03:23PM (#16748192)

The brain is implemented by physics and physics can be simulated by a computer, so I'm not sure I follow you here.

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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by mateosu on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @03:56PM (#16748478)

The operative word here being "simulate." I will admit however that that opens a debate about the nature of consciousness in which I'm not prepared to resolutely say would not count as true consciousness.

So I will reframe and clarify my argument -- I believe that we do not know enough about the brain and the nature on consciousness to be able to conclude that taking this kind of "snapshot" of the brain will in anyway preserve any of the necessary information needed to reproduce or even accurately simulate consciousness, and that the argument that it is or will is based on the flawed assumption that the brain is or functions like a information processor (a flawed metaphor that is very quickly reaching it's limitations).

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Re:MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading by Retra on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @05:31PM (#16749498)

You didn't clarify an argument, you simply made baseless assertions while claiming we don't know enough to make extrapolative arguments.

Literally everything that humans understand is understood in a framework of information processing. It is probably not even possible to understand something without being able to model it as an information-handling process. What basis do you have to say consciousness is different? Because we haven't figured it out yet? It's 2018. There are billions of years of thinking that have yet to happen on the subject.

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