Indirect Mind Uploading:
Using AI to Avoid Staying Dead
Paul Almond
page 9 of 13
The process has to generate a model of the brain and, to a limited extent, the world in which the brain existed. This is because the data that is archived will only be partial. There will gaps in the recordings, especially before the recording of data actually started. The data is also of limited resolution. As examples: video recordings will not indicate exactly how the each individual receptor in your eye was stimulated by light and audio recordings will not indicate the nerve impulses that your brain transmitted to speak words.
The first step could be to create a physics model. This would allow another process to use it to perform general simulations of reality. The physics model would be constructed by using what is known about how things behave in reality at a general level. It would contain various assumptions about basic things such as the laws of nature.
The next step would be to create a general world model. This would use the physics model to simulate the sorts of things that are encountered by humans in the world and it would make use of the physics model to achieve this. It would also contain assumptions, as the physics model does, but these would be at a higher, more abstract level.
Following this, a time-specific world model would be made. This would use the general world model and would enable a higher-level process to use it to simulate the world at the specific period of history in which the person (whose recorded data we are analyzing) actually lived. The time-specific world model would not contain specific details about the person’s experiences; it would simply be derived from what is known about the world during that period of history.
As well as simulating the environment in which the person’s brain existed, we also need to simulate the brain itself; in fact, this is the main objective. To do this there would be a general brain model that could be used by a higher-level process to simulate a human brain. This model would not contain information about any particular human brain; rather, it would be made it by using what is known about human brains in general.
The ultimate goal of the process is to simulate a human mind and its environment. To this end, there would be a person-specific brain model that can simulate a specific human brain. The person-specific brain model would contain assumptions about the specific brain that it is simulating and it would also make use of the general brain model. There would also be a person-specific world model, which would simulate the world as experienced by a particular human being. The person-specific world model would contain some assumptions about the environment inhabited by a particular person and the sorts of things that can happen in it and it would make use of the time-specific world model.
The person-specific brain model and the person-specific world model would interact with each other. The person-specific brain model would produce, as outputs, the nerve impulses that the individual may use to control his body and these would be transmitted to the person-specific world model as an indication of the actions of the individual in his/her environment. The person-specific world model would, in turn, provide outputs in the form of the sensory nerve signals that would be received by the person’s brain in that environment and these would be sent to the person-specific brain model. In this way, the two models would work together to simulate the thought processes and behavior of a human, as well as the events that happened in his/her environment.
Some of the simpler parts of this system can be made by using knowledge that is already available about the world, but the person-specific brain model and the person-specific world model are not as easy to make. For the process to have any point at all they need to be consistent with the data that was recorded about the individual’s life. This means that they need to be made by analyzing this recorded data.