| mind uploading research group |
| Koene, Randal A. |
| Leitl, Eugene |
| Strout, Joseph J. |
| Wiley, Keith |
| Koene, Randal A. | rak@minduploading.org - www.psych.mcgill.ca/perpg/stds/rk/ |
|
As far back as I can remember, I have always had a desire to experience the distant future, to travel to the most distant places, and to organize such projects and society.
Like many children, I could not truly fathom the idea of death, or that I would cease to exist at some time - and when that realization did come, it met with defiance. Sure, I knew all the little comforting notions that are presented once the concept of mortality is brought up: Living on through the memories of family and friends, living on through one's works, and so forth. But of course none of those could offer a means for me to experience what I really wanted to experience - namely everything! I loved everything, I wanted to do everything: Writing, composing, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, space travel, exploring Earth, exploring other realms, and many many more. It was obvious that what I really needed was more time! So, how to create time? My interest in life extension became my primary persuit. My first clear notion, how a reliable extension of life could be achieved, that offered physical renewal and safeguards against accidental as well as anticipated causes of death, was influenced directly by the book ``The City and the Stars'', by Arthur C. Clarke. I was 13. In the book, Clarke writes of two societies on Earth, millions of years in the future, when most of Earth has vanished under a great desert. The city, Diaspar, contained a society, in which 10 million at a time, of a collection of 100 million persons, was given a turn to live a life of 1000 years in physical form within the city. Between these recurring life-periods, their personal identities slept in the data banks of a Central Computer that maintained the city. All development of city structures, all creation of objects, and even of the physical bodies of its inhabitants, was brought about through direct manufacture of matter from energy - a concept later resurrected in Star Trek's ``replicators''. I decided that this was the ideal means of survival, if the existence of personal identity could be made independant of a specific physical substrate. Since our personal identity clearly resides in the mind, which is expressed through the specific structures formed in our brains (through genetic as well as environmental influences) over the duration of our lives, obviously that expression had to be obtained from the brain and represented in a more durable subtrate. Many backup copies could be made and the process could be repeated periodically. At age 15 I wrote a novel, ``Azuros'', that incorporated this idea of minds as representations of information and processes, freed from the dependence on the life-span of a single body. In the action-packed, ``Dune''-like setting of ``Azuros'', characters were reborn at so-called Matter-Data Processing System (MDPS) Banks. At 17, I began studying Physics at the University of Amsterdam, still in the belief that a replica at atomic resolution was the way to achieve the extended life that I envisaged - I did not know at the time that such methods would be called ``mind uploading''. Naturally, I also fancied the many other wonderful uses for a technology that could create arbitrary material objects from their molecular or atomic building blocks, or even directly from energy. I soon discovered that computing was far more essential to the information processing of the mind that I was interested in, than what the study of nuclear or particle physics could offer within a reasonable period of scientific and technological development. I later discovered that the more general freedom I coveted, to control the construction of material objects, such as wonderful new brains and bodies (vessels for the minds), may well be achieved as nanotechnology matures. That vision too can become reality, but replication of the brain is my priority. At 19, I switched into electrical engineering, where I steered into A.I., neural networks, and an interst in the functions of the brain. I obtained a masters degree in electrical engineering at the Information Theory group of the Electrical Engineering faculty of the Delft University of Technology. While working on my masters thesis at the Information Theory group, I discovered Joe Strout's Mind Uploading Home Page, contacted him and became involved. While I was temporarily out of touch for several months during the transition from Delft in the Netherlands, to McGill University in Montreal (Canada), I then joined the mind uploading mailing list (MURG), which Joe had set up in the meantime. I decided to switch from engineering to science, since engineering is directed more toward technological and production goals, whereas mind uploading still required a lot of important scientific research. The Ph.D. program at McGill's Psychology department gives me the freedom to explore neural and neuronal circuitry through computational neuroscience. Neurological reconstruction and emulation has become one of my reserach goals, as has the formation and identification of long-term memory. At this point, I have given sevaral interviews discussing mind uploading, including one television appearance on CBC's ``Undercurrents'' with the episode title ``Wired Flesh''. I am now heavily involved in computational neuroscience research for my thesis on the formation and identification of specimen specific long term memory and morphological behavioural memory in the general area of the hippocampus, as well as mind uploading through MURG, interviews, and the minduploading.org site. | |
| Nov. 21, 1999 | |
| Leitl, Eugene | |
|
I was reading nanotechnology papers (not Drexler) in the beginning of
the 1980's. It occured to me that one could create engineered proteins
which precipitate nanocircuitry within/around neurons, which could be
capable of emulating that particular neuron's function, after the
original is defunct. (Hey, don't blame me, I knew nothing about the
real problem set back then).
I then estimated the time frame (before I knew of any linear log plots), and decided the technology won't arrive in time to be of relevance to me. I then started thinking about bridiging the temporal gap, and decided than freezing the brain was the solution. (Again, silly youth). I decided I need to study either physics or chemistry or biochemistry to work on that problem. So I chose chemistry/biochemistry as my study subjects. Around 1987/88 (?) I've read Charles Platt's "Silicon Man", which had the Alcor address in it. (I already figured out enough about uploading to find certain pieces of it silly). This is how I found out real people were really doing it out there in the real world. Around ~1990 (memory is hazy) I got on the Net via my student account, and after a while discovered sci.cryonics (and Joe Strout). I've gotten Charles Platt to send me xeroxes of some Fahy papers, which at some point got me an invitation from Mike Darwin and my current job with 21CM. | |
| Nov. 21, 1999 | |
| Strout, Joseph J. | strout.net |
|
I'd been interested in AI since high school, but I realized that to
implement AI correctly, we must first understand more about how the mind
works. So in college I majored in Psychology, but continued my study of AI
on the side. Towards the end of my college years, after studying neural
networks and neurobiology (as well as a course or two in philosophy), I
realized that if one could copy a brain neuron for neuron, the result would
be a duplicate of the original person, exactly the same mentally as the
original.
This idea caught my imagination; I was skeptical of it at first, but as I looked into the details more and more closely, I grew convinced that it would work. I coined the term "mind uploading" to describe the process, since it's essentially like copying a program from one computer to another. I created the Mind Uploading web site to describe the ideas, post references, and generate discussion. By that time, I'd been talking it up a bit on various mailing lists and newsgroups, and the site was intended as sort of an FAQ to keep us from having to go over the same questions again and again. The site really hasn't been updated very much since then, apart from additional references. In October '94, Minsky's article in Scientific American appeared describing mind uploading; this was the first "established" scientist to give the topic any serious treatment. (It appeared briefly in one of Moravec's book, but as a side issue and with a wholly unplausible approach.) That was a big milestone for me. In graduate school, I tried to pursue topics related directly to mind uploading, and succeeded in gaining an appreciation for the technical difficulties involved. A few years ago, I started the MURG list, originally hoping we'd be able to divide up and do some real research -- watching journals, writing image-analysis software, etc. This has been partly successful. In the last year or so, I've been regrettably busy with other things, and haven't had as much time to put into MURG as I would like. I do stay as active as I can, however; I just gave a talk on the topic in Lucern last week. I also have extensive notes for a book, with about three chapters (of 12) written, but I don't know when I'll have time to finish it. | |
| Nov. 21, 1999 | |
| Wiley, Keith | www.cs.unm.edu/~kwiley |
|
Mind uploading isn't an idea that people come to grips with overnight.
I was a teenager of the 80s and 90s so I grew up with modern science fiction and the relatively valid (if not entirely likely) claims it made about the future. Despite this, the notion of what mind uploading really is and what it represents never hit home. Even in college as I studied biopsychology and became an adept artificial life programmer, the merging of the two ideas never made its full impact on me. For me, mind uploading was a classical epiphany, a moment of "wowness" which occurred when I suddenly realized what the future of human civilization really looked like. It is so much more dramatic and glorious than any science fiction plot to hit the book shelves or movie screen. It happened when I picked up the book _Beyond_Humanity:_Cyberevolution_and_Future_Minds_, by Gregory S. Paul and Earl Cox. I found the book intriguing, so I bought it...and I read it cover to cover, after which I was dazed with awe for weeks. Admittedly, this book has an optimism that is truly over-the-top and my cynicism about society has settled in somewhat since then, but that was what I needed to strike the idea home at the time. After that I started thinking about the real possibilities a lot. My college major of psychology with a biopsych emphasis and my serious interest in artificial life suddenly blended together in a way I had never before conceived. At some point I stumbled onto the mind uploading mailing list and discovered that other people have ideas similar to my own. It was a pleasant pearl to find in the midst of an otherwise myopic society that gets way too excited about such banal things as 500 MHz computer chips and HDTV. Lost is the magnificent love affair with adventure that existed in the 50s and 60s. We focus on clumsy Mars rovers and gene therapy in a time when the fossilization of both technologies lies just over the horizon. My mind uploading philosophy in its present mature form is fundamentally rooted in scientific reductionism and materialism. Without both of those tenants the ideas I have would border on absurd, but with them my wild ideas are inarguably valid. The details of the timeline on which mind uploading will unfurl are uncertain because they hinge strongly on political and societal factors, but their inevitability (and I dare predict in a short time regardless of the details) is an uncounterable fact. I highly recommend that everyone take the brief time necessary to be exposed to the true future of the human species and the society we will make up. Nothing in the media or in entertainment has done the future its due justice yet. Science is the only bastion of such unfathomable possibilities in our present day.
11/5/99 | |
| Nov. 5, 1999 | |