E-people - about being immortal in the future
By zeedo666
@zeedo666 (150)
Poland
November 14, 2012 3:25pm CST
It occured to me once that in 100 or 200 years advanced technology could let people preserve their minds by porting it to cybernetical world. After we discover how our brain works so we may finally create an artifitial intelligence, we will be able to 'save' a copy of our own minds with all life experiences, memories, personality traits etc. and keep it in the cyberspace actualizing from time to time to continue our being after death.
This discussion is to provide an incentive to your imagination. I invite you to philosofy about the issue. Just imagine:
Your grandpa dies of cancer. The last copy of his mind was taken a day before his death so now your family turns a special computer on to run a special software which is in fact... now, that's a good question: your grandpa or just an AI similar to him?
Let's think for a while. Computers are similar to us; they use eg. binary sistem while we have DNA etc., they work thanks to artifitial (metal etc.) counterparts while our body parts are organic. Nevertheless, we sometimes replace our organic parts with artifitial ones. If the technology developes sufficiently we could replace even such complicated organs as the brain. We would only need to port information from the organic brain to the artifitial one. Or we could resign from the body completely and port the information to a virtual place such as the special software I mentioned.
So, there is our grandpa-software with whom we can talk whenever we want. Grandpa decides to communicate with us, because he believes it's good that he can still impart his knowledge to his descendants etc. He can react emotionally to what we say, but he doesn't have to. Indeed, Grandpa is now something better than he used to be having a mortal body. As a software he have a complete power over his emotions so if there is something bad happening in his family he won't suffer because he can always turn his emotions off. He is also protected from being expoited (eg. as a slave worker) because he can deny to be "turned on" by putting himself into a sleep mode for let's say the time of 20 years. (therefore they would never harm the living people because of some possible kind of depression caused by inability to die. they could shut down for ever if they wanted or turn their emotions off).
This technology enables us to contact with our dead ancestors, which have many advantages. They would gladly cooperate with us by offering various help either based on their knowledge or new capabilities (let's ask our Grandma to find a good university for our children in the Internet, since she has access to it and can find it much faster than we). Our dead ancestors could also communicate each other and maybe even meet with us in some virtual caffes. You have watched many sci-fi movies, so you can imagine real people putting on special helmets to enjoy activities done in cyberspace as they sleep.
But the fundamental question is:
Would they still be our family or just a perfect copy of them? Would you treat your virtual granpa as your grandpa who has only lost his body but has survived and it's present in the virtual world? Would you like to survive in such a form?
1 response
@writethem (96)
• United States
15 Nov 12
I don't know. The virtual world is pretty crazy to begin with, and getting crazier by the second.