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Indirect Mind Uploading: Using AI to Avoid Staying Dead

Paul Almond

page 12 of 13

The privacy of people you meet is another issue entirely. Almond If you are recording your own life in minute detail, then you will incidentally be recording a lot of details about other people who interact with you. Some of these people may not like their personal conversations and habits being sent into the future.

Motivation
There is some element of chance in a process of this nature. Even if the philosophy and technological ideas are sound, you still have to rely on someone in the future wanting to go to the trouble of recreating you.

Another concern may be relevant: what about the possibility of your mind being reconstructed by a future society for motives that are not in your best interests? A future society could potentially reconstruct you as an altruistic gesture or may do it merely to demonstrate technical capability or to use the software model for entertainment, education or historical research. On the other hand, being reconstructed by a society of trans-human ultra-sadists with an interest in twenty-first century history would be undesirable.

As a word of warning, if any readers are engaged in war crimes or other such deeds and are thinking of trying this method, it could be a serious error of judgement. A software version of you, created in the distant future, could conceivably find that it has been resurrected merely to answer extremely serious charges.

Indirect Mind Uploading Versus Other Methods
Indirect mind uploading may appear to be a competitor to cryonic suspension. Both have the same feature -- the preservation of something, whether it is a human brain or information, with the hope that it can be used by a future society to continue your life.

There is not really any such competition. If an individual decides that the chance of revival from cryonic suspension is too low to justify using any resources on it, then he/she can make this decision independently of any consideration of mind uploading; however, if an individual decides that cryonic suspension is worthwhile he can pursue this, also independently of any decision he makes about indirect mind uploading.

An individual who has signed up for cryonic suspension may also create the archives needed for indirect mind uploading for another reason. Such archives may allow indirect uploading to be attempted if the cryonic method fails, but there is a possible extra use for them: If the cryonic method is only partially successful and allows a revival with substantial loss of information about the brain’s structure then it is possible that the computer model generated by indirect mind uploading could be used as a reference for making adjustments to such things as the strengths of connections between neurons in the brain. In this way, indirect mind uploading may complement cryonic suspension by increasing the accuracy and reliability of cryonic preservation of a human personality.

There is also no conflict between indirect uploading and direct uploading (in which the brain is actually scanned). If direct mind uploading were available with a sufficiently safe and reliable method, then it would be used in preference to indirect mind uploading. Data is only likely to be recorded for indirect mind uploading while direct mind uploading is not available.

Editing Your Own Archives
There is one idea that would occur to almost anyone who was attempting indirect uploading of him/herself: would it be possible, by editing your archives, or selectively withholding information from them, to modify the reconstructed version of yourself in a desirable way?

This could be a bad idea. If you are reconstructed, then it is very likely going to be by making the "most plausible" model. Getting this to be as close as possible to you is the main goal and interfering may not give the results that you want.

Courses of Action
What you should decide to do, when thinking about the possibility of indirect mind uploading depends on the philosophical opinions that you have:

If you have no aversion to being dead, then none of this matters.
If you think that a computer can never be conscious in the same way that you are and you also reject the idea that the information from your archives could be placed in any conscious machine, then you should view mind uploading of any type (direct or indirect) as futile, at least with regard to preserving your mind.
If you think that computer consciousness is possible, or that some sort of conscious machine could be produced, but that a model of your mind, complete with your memories, would not be a continuation of your identity, then you should again view any sort of mind uploading as futile.
You may find the concept of mind uploading as a way of preserving a human identity to be reasonable, but you may still find indirect uploading futile if you think that the differences between the software model and your own mind should preclude viewing it as a continuation of your own identity.
If you find the concept of indirect mind uploading to be workable, then this does not mean that you should automatically invest resources in actually archiving your life: there are still the issues of motivation in the future to be considered. Furthermore, if you decide that archiving for indirect mind uploading is reasonable and desirable this does not mean that you should rely on it as the only way of continuing your identity.

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