Indirect Mind Uploading:
Using AI to Avoid Staying Dead
Paul Almond
page 5 of 13
Gradual Uploading and the Identity Issue
If you are skeptical about the idea of replacing the brain, let us look at a slightly less severe process, gradual replacement of the brain. Imagine this situation: You have some sort of degenerative brain condition and your brain cells are gradually dying, starting with the ones that perform simple autonomous functions in the body and eventually involving the death of those that deal with your high level thoughts.
Doctors have found a way to grow replacement brain cells and they can select any one of your brain cells and grow a similar replacement, which they can then painlessly implant in your brain, replacing the original cell before it dies. When each replacement cell is placed in your brain it is connected to the cells around it in the same way as the original cell and duplicates its behaviour, so that your memories and the organization of your brain should remain intact. If your doctors wanted to install a small number of these machines in your brain to replace cells that they knew were going to die in the next few days, how would you respond to this? Would you consider it to be of any benefit? Would you regard it as having any "cost" to your identity?
Let us imagine now that you continue to visit the hospital. Your doctors replace only a very small number of your brain cells in each visit, but your medical condition continues to deteriorate so that the doctors, in desperation, replace more and more of your brain. Is there any cut-off point at which you would say that the whole philosophy of the process is pointless and that so much of your brain has been replaced that you have effectively been killed?
Let us now suppose that we took this further and started to provide very specific information about you; for example, we could use your school report card from when you were eleven years old, any letters that you have written that are available, your bank statements and so forth. If you have kept a diary, this would be excellent. We could now give our computer these instructions:
We have this information about a specific human and this information about how human brains work. Search the set of possible human brains and "find" us a brain, subject to the constraint that it must be consistent with the experiences and behavior for the specific human that we are considering.
At the end of this search, the computer would provide a model of a fictional brain that could exist and we could use a computer to run a simulation based on this model. This brain would now have much more similarity with yours: it would be one of the possible brains that a human could have if he had lived in the twenty-first century, received the same school report when he was eleven years old, had the same spending habits and wrote exactly the same diary. I suggest that the mind described by this model, while it would not be exactly the same as yours, would still have much in common with it.
The implication of this is obvious: if we could make a large number of observations of a human and then use these to create a plausible computer model of that person’s mind, and if the detail with which the person was observed was high enough, the computer model created in this way may be close enough to the real person’s mind that we may actually consider his/her identity to have been copied into the computer model to a significant degree. This seems to suggest that indirect mind uploading, in which we do not need sophisticated means of scanning the brain’s structure, but instead base the modelling on large numbers of external observations, may actually be seen by a rational human as being a viable way of keeping his/her personal identity in existence after the destruction of his/her biological brain.