1: A future where, when a person is diagnosed with degenerative mental disease, one with a structural or physiological basis, the treatment is to upload their 'conciousness' and archive it while the dysfunctional brain is removed from from the body and a new one regrown in its place. When this is complete the original conciousness is 'reloaded' into the 'new' brain within the old body.
2: There is a 'high grade' recording of conciousness and a 'low grade' or 'positional' recording made and used in the formation process.
3: There is a group that believes the recordings are 'a life' and as such are sacred and must not be destroyed, even after they have been reloaded into the new brain.
Implications? Thoughts? Suggestions?
[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited October 15, 2006).]
#1 made me think that the consciousness is transferred out of the original brain to an intermediary storage medium, and then transferred again into the new brain. But then, #2 explained that the consciousness is not transferred, it's copied. So wouldn't that mean that the 'original' consciousness is still in the original brain? Wouldn't that make it wrong to destroy that brain after it's replaced, according to that group?
[This message has been edited by sojoyful (edited October 15, 2006).]
Maybe the group prefers the original brain to die a natural death first. Perhaps this allows scope for the 'uploaded conscious copy' to have ongoing conversations and interaction with it's deteriorating and dying prototype.
Maybe a brilliant doctor's uploaded conciousness works out a cure for his own condition while waiting for the 'original' to die. Would he mention it? Would you?
[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited October 15, 2006).]
quote:Star Trek is an awesome source for brain/consciousness transfer plots.
This is a bit like the is captain kirk annihilated everytime he gets 'beamed up' and the one that arrives is just a perfect copy conundrum.
quote:In a certain light, that could almost be considered assisted suicide.
Maybe the group prefers the original brain to die a natural death first.
quote:That's a really cool idea. Wish I had thought of it.
Perhaps this allows scope for the 'uploaded conscious copy' to have ongoing conversations and interaction with it's deteriorating and dying prototype.
quote:That's a really REALLY cool idea. I REALLY wish I had thought of it.
Maybe a brilliant doctor's uploaded conciousness works out a cure for his own condition while waiting for the 'original' to die.
)If you write it well, I have no problem with any of your ideas and would be interested in reading such a story/novel.
My concept is that if you record the chemical position of every atom in the brain, and had a way to erase and reset that chemical position, one could easily transfer self between people. My story involved transferance of the mind between the customer and the trainer, so the trainer can get the customer's body into condition. the storage of the data is only long enough for the transfer.
I also figured that there would be a time limit before the old pattern tried to impose itself. The person would eventually go crazy as their mind would change.
I don't remember the title or author, but I remember reading a book back in the 1980s where society would save people's personality in storage. Periodically over time, they would be brought back to life and live. The system kept track of native personality types and pull them out when their types were needed, including criminals.
One thing you might be deal with is the death of the real personality. I did read a story involving that as a minor point.
I also read a book where people's brains themselves, would be put into storage, and later be inserted into the bodies of babies. the poor were put into children created in vats.
There is a lot you can do as long as you stay within reasonable plausibility, and are consistant with your rules.
There is a description of similar technology in the Halo Universe, the the backstory of how the artificial intelligence Cortana is captured. The consciousness capture destroys the brain that is being "uploaded." It may be that the storage brain would also be destroyed. If the storage brain is made from stem cells, that would be gross.
The problem I have with consciousness transfer is that the structure of the brain is so complex, and I do believe it changes with experience. So growing a new brain just seems improbable to work to me. Why have an old body with a new brain? I could suspend my disbelief if other aspects of the story were compelling enough, but it would be on the order of, you know, Wolverine having an adamantium-clad skeleton.
Someone had a similar thread not long ago, I guess the one about "The Void", was it?
Now if we take this not from a longevity standpoint, but a healing mental illness standpoint, that could be interesting. Like if you had some scientist so commited to the idea that mental disease is caused by traumatic events that they pursue this reasearch, that could be odd. Maybe it could be set back in the 70's, before genetic determinism had taken such hold. Or maybe I'm imagining such a time ever existed.
In fact, it seems utterly irrational to even consider going to the effort of downloading that personality into a fresh biological brain if it can function at a high level in the virtual medium. The only one which works is to say that a biological brain is cheaper than the computational power/storage required for running the copy. By the time this would even be possible, it would be highly unlikely this could be true.
It also makes sense to say that the freshly grown brain is a separate life in its own right (albeit an infant life), thus making the downloading process, which would wipe out that life to make a copy of a copy, somewhat morally questionable.
On the other hand, it also makes perfect sense to regard the "functional copy" as an abomination and regard any further copy of that back into flesh as another abomination.
If the copy is passive, such that it cannot experience anything or carry out any kind of mentation until transferred into a new brain, then the question is much less important. It's much easier to see it as an inanimate object, albeit one that contains a human soul for a short period of time.
From a religious perspective, I think that's the question you have to consider, what happens to the soul during all this? From an ethical perspective, I would consider it wasteful to delete a working intelligence capable of carrying out high level mentation, even if it weren't a "person" as such.
One thing to consider, if the person has a degenerative mental disease, the copy is already going to be of a damaged brain. If you simply cured the underlying cause of the degeneration, that should do just as much good as copying the brain. Of course, this works out to another argument against having people living in flesh rather than electronics. If it is common for flesh-brains to suffer degeneration that has to be cured by such a drastic method, much better to live somewhere a bit safer. If it's not common, I don't see much of an issue.
[This message has been edited by franc li (edited October 17, 2006).]
It may be the case that some persons already follow this logic, but I think they'll always be a minority in any remotely civilized society. Indeed, civilization depends utterly on motivating loyalty to an abstraction.