> Steve Nichols or somebody wrote:
> >>...send a flood of nanites into your head to
> > >nondestructively record the connections and relative positions of all
> > >neurons in your head, then use the same or different nanites to model
> > >the upgraded body's brain the same way, and see if that person can
> > >pull off a reasonably good imitation of yourself.
This jogged a memory of college days, 20 yrs ago, when
fellow students and I discussed an ancient variant of the
current uploading idea. This was before nanotech and
Drexler and such as that, but we did have rudimentary
computers, sort of, and neural nets were all the rage then.
We had the notion that if an appropriate neural net computer
could be carried around with one, then the computer would
observe all conditions and how the person reacted under
those conditions. This observation/learning phase would go
on for many years, creating a giant state-machine-like
table, that would tell the computer how the person would
react in any given sitch. Then when the human perished, the
software would immitate the human, perhaps even being
loaded into a droid with the appearance of the deceased,
thereby easing the mourning process for the bereaved survivors.
In those days we had no concept of actually downloading
*ourselves* into a machine, only creating a self-like process
to carry on, in a sense. spike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:59:46 MDT