45 Comments

Good questions about mind-uploading, Claudia! But they're just the first we can ask. Many more questions lurk under the surface. For instance, can one digital model of the human brain (that is, the framework for mind-uploading) truly represent all minds? Besides selecting which memories to keep and which to toss out, how much fidelity can we achieve in a digital representation of a memory? This whole area of inquiry is the focus of my essay series "Infinite Lock-In," now in progress at Singular Dream. Pardon the shameless self-promo: singulardream.substack.com/p/infinite-lock-in

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I have a whole upcoming novel diving deeper into this from the very utopian to the very dystopian. My mini-series 'Initiation' deals with mind-body interfaces. So yeah, lots to explore.

There are so many questions, I think we're only getting into this as well as extending our senses with the help of tech. Your series sounds exciting and don't worry about the self-promotion. Unlike other people, I welcome it! Fiction readers don't read only one author! 😁

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I'd very much like to read your forthcoming novel, Claudia! Please keep me posted!

I'm on the dystopian end of the transhumanist spectrum (in my novel too). But I'm not unaware of its utopian potentials, not opposed to them. I just think many tech innovators and futurists are thoughtless, sometimes unbelievably so, about ALL likely ramifications of their proposals. They tend to indulge their biases and either miss or minimize downsides. But utopia and dystopia are two sides of the same coin: every dystopia (real or imagined) emerged from an attempt to realize a utopian vision that went badly awry.

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Margaret Atwood thinks the same, she invented her own term: ustopia. She said that in every utopia there's a dystopia and the other way around. It makes sense.

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I really enjoyed this. It's thought provoking and even though based in the future, I think its really relevant to even the way we curate our lives in social media.

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At the same time, there's also a pressure to reveal everything, to bare ourselves naked in front of the world.

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Deeply moving and lovely story. It makes me think of this game Soma (thought starkly different) which poignantly reflects on uploading consciousness someplace digital and living on like this.

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When you start thinking about the details, I even wonder if that's possible. There's actually a scientist to says that human consciousness comes from a different dimension. If that's true, do we need a human body to access it?

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That is a good question. Maybe in the future we would be able to access it without a body with the right technology. It’s unbelievable, but not necessarily improbable.

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I would love it if we could access it only from a human body...

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Great story, love the concept. One that has been explored, of course, one that keeps getting closer to reality. Would make an excellent Black Mirror episode, too.

BTW, have you watched "Upload"?

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Thanks Alexander, I dropped out of watching Black Mirror after the second episode dealing with child abuse after the first one was about a prime minister have intercourse with a pig... I did, however, enjoy the Star Trek episode.

I haven't watched 'Upload'? Is it good?

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Upload S1 was mildly entertaining, forget S2 and 3.

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Really beautifully written, Claudia.

It's an excellent concept and the personal aspect of this works really well.

I recently read Blindsight and there's a similar concept in there, although we witness it (mostly) externally not internally.

Anyway, loved the piece. Great work.

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Thank you, Nathan! It started with the personal aspect and then developed into this. I don't know Blindsight... is it good?

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I enjoyed it, yeah. It wasn’t quite the blockbuster mind-bending scifi many had made it out to be, but it’s a good, tense story and interesting premise and generally very well written. Definitely on the “hard” side of scifi.

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I like your book reviews, it tells me if something's worth reading or not. 😁

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Nice! Is that girl AI or a real picture? It does matter to me because she looks real but if she is not - I don't like 0s and 1s manipulating my emotions and wish there was a common sense law to have a watermark indication on all AI content. Made me think of my far out father who was trying to figure out how to upload himself before he died of cancer. For me, I will glad to leave this human mess all behind and head to the next hopefully better situation. No bad vibes or major regrets but this is my personality. I look forward much more than backwards.

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I love how you've made this so personal and human, despite all the potential to dehumanise the process down to the basics of an online photo album. But I do wonder, is filtering out all of the bad memories a bad or good thing? Does it depend on if they made you a better or worse person? And who is best placed to decide even that aspect?

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In this case, I think that each individual should decide for themselves.

What kind of entities are we anyway as digitalised minds? It's a construct, right? We don't have a physical body therefore we are not ourselves anymore.

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My current thinking is that we can't be human without both a brain and a body. Our brains might be the best real-time hallucination machines in the known universe, but they still need to sense their surrounding environment to avoid non-consensual hallucinations and a crippling descent into insanity. So the same goes for any AGIs or similar artificial neuroid constructs.

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I also don't believe that we can be human without a human body. Interesting thought on the AGI needing also control data to remain coherent.

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It seems obvious to me. Current LLM-based AIs are cut off from internal and external sensations. They can only act as textual and statistical ticker-tape machines. That makes it very hard to learn new things and cope with the unexpected in real-world settings. It would also be dangerously irresponsible to allow (potentially psychotic) hallucinations to exist by default within sentient machines with no external stabilising references.

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I wonder if humans are even capable of fully controlling machine 'hallucinations'.

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We struggle even now with explaining why an LLM outputs a certain string of words, so I doubt we'll be up to the task. It's more likely we'll use one set of machines to control others.

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i feel sure that this tech will come to pass. the pieces are already assembling.

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I think that uploading a mind to the cloud is going to be more challenging than Silicon Valley wants us to believe. But who knows, maybe we'll meet other life forms who can teach us how to do it? 😁

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This is so thought-provoking. I guess I feel ‘Change our memories (or carefully curate what is saved), change our very selves’. Is that good or bad? Both? There are certainly memories I’d be tempted to curate out of my collection, but the lessons attached to them would go, too. Then who would I be? I don’t know. Would a sanitized version of me be happy/happier? Again, I don’t know. If saved for posterity and public sampling, what good would they bring without their shadows? Fascinating concept!

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We would certainly not be the same without our memories. But this also opens up the possibility that by changing our memories we could change ourselves for the best in some cases. Who knows?

How about the idea of a partial upload as is the case in this story? A little sample of our lives for future generations?

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Do we already do this a bit now, this curating of self on social media? The picking of what we share, how we share, retaking or filtering of photos, the leaving out the “ugly” of our life and highlighting only the “pretty” parts? I’m lookin forward to your next serial!

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It depends, this reminds me of a film with Robin Williams, one of his few dramas: The Final Cut. It's about a man who makes films for the family of deceased people from material recorded via memory implants. What do we want to share with the world? Today's social media is motivated by financial gain. The memory logs in the Museum of Life will be personal stories. I guess it all depends on what stories the curators want to tell and what motivates them to tell those stories. As well as, what each individual wants to immortalize.

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The idea of not just whole-hog uploading your mind, rather curating parts, is so unsettling to me. It's the scifi continuation of the whole Instagram lie trend where everyone you see through social is a tailored version of themselves. It's spooky thinking that there's some far future where digital humanity descends from this play-pretend humanity.

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The piece wasn't meant to go in that direction, but your comment raises some spontaneous questions.

Is there a moral requirement that we must strip ourselves naked in front of others? In our flesh and bone existence we have the privacy of our thoughts. Once we upload our mind as data, it can be accessed by other people. Digital existence strips away privacy by definition.

Can we even upload our memories as bulk? Is there a place in our mind where all our memories are stored as accurate, independent data? Or do we have to recall those memories in order to upload them? If so, how accurate and unbiased are we in recalling those memories?

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This idea of "The Museum of Life" is so interesting. And this piece so beautifully written.

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I'll open up the 'Museum of Life' for readers next year to add their own entries.

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Great idea. :) I'll submit, if ever asked to.

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That's great, I'll let you know when it happens!

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Claudia, this is phenomenal. Captivating and so beautiful and sad.

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Thank you, Shaina, really appreciate this! 💚

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Beautifully done, Claudia.

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Thank you, Brian, really appreciate it coming from you 🙏🏻.

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Great piece, Claudia, looking forward to seeing where this goes for you and where Life and Death leads you in the world of the Dust Road. As an aside, Don DeLillo’s novel Zero K has what i would call an interlude that comprises about 15 pages in Part II that is a reflection of consciousness uploading. It actually stands out from the rest of the novel. It’s one example of writing disembodied consciousness that may give you some thoughts on how others are trying to process what consciousness or mind uploading, without a physical body, could be like.

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Thanks for the recommendation, Brian, this sounds like an intriguing piece. I don't know this writer.

A disembodied consciousness... it's an intriguing thought. Can we exist without our physical body? And if yes, what are we?

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What memories would you keep and what would you curate out? Great questions. Sounds partway between therapy and creativity. 💗

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When I started writing this piece it did feel like part therapy, part creativity. So many questions arise: If we curate our mind before uploading it, who are we in the digital world? Is this a collection of data that can be accessed by others? Do we exist as an entity in the digital world? Are we still the same person?

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