Imagine that a human brain can be scanned in great detail and recreated in a computer simulation. A person's mind and memories, emotions and personality will be duplicated. In fact, a new and equally authentic version of this man will now exist in a potentially immortal digital form. Is it possible? And what "pitfalls" can be in this process, if something like this ever happens?
Is digital immortality possible?
The scientific community increasingly assumes that the “digitization” of consciousness and uploading it into a virtual environment is more likely than not. The technology is likely to be created in the distant future, but given how much interest this topic is generating, uploading consciousness to something like the Internet seems inevitable. Of course, we cannot be sure how this might affect our culture, but as the technology for modeling artificial neural networks develops, we can guess what this future might be. One possible outcome is described by psychologist Michael Graziano in his new article, conducting the thought experiment described below.
How to digitize the brain
Suppose one day you go to the clinic to have a similar operation. Let's be optimistic and pretend the technology works just fine. After the “digitization” procedure (let's call it that), you still remain yourself and do not get any new abilities. At the same time, your virtual copy "wakes up" in the virtual world. She has your set of knowledge and skills. Your life experiences and all your memories. The last thing your double remembers is how he entered the clinic and went through the digitization procedure.
The presence of a "digital twin" - this is a very difficult philosophical and ethical question.
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Each of us is already present in the virtual world with a constant stream of information passing through social networks, YouTube, Twitter and so on. We live in a kind of digital multiverse, and each of us is in his own “virtual bubble”, where parts of the multiverse are “pieces” of the Internet that we visit, and the “bubble” is our personal space. Confidential information.
If an opportunity is created to live in the digital world to the fullest, and even so that people in it have the same personalities and needs as in real life, while not having the disadvantages of existence in reality like diseases, most of the population can agree to such a thing.
As more and more people live in the virtual world, the balance of culture from reality will shift in this direction. Considering that most people will go through the process of transferring consciousness, at some point physical existence may become only the initial stage of personality development, and real life will begin only after digitization.
Vladimir Kuznetsov