Privacy or immortality? Google thinks it can upload our minds by 2045

Ray Kurzweil wants to bring back his dead father. He has gathered many of his fathers old journals and diaries. He wants to upload all of this data and try to re-create his fathers personality so he can interact with him again.

It is technically possible. It may seem cool for a few interactions with his father but will end up feeling empty and disappointing.

I wonder what would happen if you could transfer your mind as far as ones consciousness is concerned.

To an outside observer it would seem person A was immortal if every time person A died they transferred his/her mind to another vessel, but I wonder what that would be like from person A's perspective. Would his/her awareness disappear from the first vessel at death, then reappear when it was transferred into the new vessel? Or would it be a completely new awareness, just with the same thoughts and memories?

Interesting to think about the philosophical aspects of it, but I really can't understand why anyone would want to be immortal.

I could also imagine a lot of scary uses for this technology. Nowadays, if you're convicted of a crime and sentenced to 140 years, you may serve out 40 years then die. But if they had something like this mind uploader going, they could forcibly keep your awareness around after the first death to ensure the entire sentence is served out. o_O Death is no longer the final escape. They can just load up a new copy to keep your ass around.

Yeah I don't like this trans-humanist stuff. Too many distopian outcomes.

Last Edited by KonspiracyKitty on 06/20/2013 10:26 AM

consciousness trap

That's what scares me about it.

The desire for immortality - as old as man.

Morally, if you change the nature of man, you change the nature of morality.

It all hurts the brain. Think I'll stay in the cave :P

let them go for it