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Indirect Mind Uploading: Using AI to Avoid Staying Dead

Paul Almond

page 6 of 13

I invite you to form your opinions on just how far you could go with such a process and still be you. I did not mention all this as proof that mind uploading is a viable survival strategy; I discussed it to try to show that the issue of transfer human minds into computer programs is not as philosophically clear-cut as some people might think when they casually remark that the replacement would not be you.

Using "Indirect Mind Uploading" to Avoid Staying Dead
I use the term indirect mind uploading for a second method of attempting to preserve the mind as a computer model that does not actually rely on any sophisticated scanning technology, as opposed to the "conventional" ways of mind uploading, previously discussed, that I shall refer to as direct mind uploading.

The concept of indirect mind uploading was used by a science fiction writer, Alastair Reynolds. In his novel, Revelation Space[1], he referred to a computer model produced in this way as a beta-level simulation and this is how he introduced it: "Simply put, he arranged to have every subsequent second of his life monitored by recording systems. Every second: waking, sleeping, whatever. Over the years machines learned to predict his responses with astonishing accuracy."

Image 4: Alastair Reynolds' novel, Revelation Space.

In Reynolds’s story his character, living centuries in the future, has made a model of his mind, not by scanning the internal workings of his brain, but by having very powerful computers analyse recordings of his experiences and behaviour. The idea here is that the machines are given the task of producing a model of a brain based on external observations of its responses to inputs.

How Indirect Mind Uploading Could Work
To explore how this would work, we will start by considering the problem of getting computers to make human-type minds. Let us imagine that at some time in the future we want a computer to provide a model of a human brain, complete with the memories, skills and personality that it contains.

Let us first imagine that we want our computer to "find" your mind in this set. We could start by instructing it to select one of these possible minds at random. This mind is unlikely to have much resemblance to yours; there are simply too many possible brains that can exist, but what if we could give the computer some information to limit its search? Let us suppose that we decided to limit the computer to selecting only from those minds that could have been produced by living in the sort of environment that you inhabit. This would eliminate medieval minds and all those weird minds that contain memories of living on strange planets with flying dragons and so forth. What would emerge now is a model of the mind of a randomly selected fictional twenty-first century person. Of course, this would still not be very similar to yours: there are a lot of minds that we can imagine that are consistent with someone who has lived in the twenty-first century, but there would now be greater resemblance with your mind.

Footnotes
1. Reynolds, A. (2000). Revelation Space. London: Victor Gollancz. Chapter 7. (Fiction). (back to top)

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