People have always dreamed of breaking the shackles, overcoming the limitations of their bodies: pain, illness and death. The new movement is disguising this ancient impulse into new technological clothes. The so-called transhumanism at its core holds the idea that science will provide people with a futuristic way to leave their mortal physical form and make dreams of the transcendent come true.
Perhaps one of the most interesting ideas of transhumanists is that consciousness can be digitized and loaded into an incredibly powerful computer. This will allow you to live in a world of unlimited virtual experience and become practically immortal (at least until someone takes your backups and decides to turn you off).
Nonetheless, transhumanists seem to ignore the fact that uploading consciousness has insurmountable obstacles before it. Practical difficulties mean this will not happen in the near future, but there are also complex problems at the heart of this idea.
The idea of brain loading is a favorite plot of science fiction. Google futurist and CTO Ray Kurzweil, for example, has put in a lot of effort to make this idea popular - he thinks mind uploads will be available in 2045. Economist Robin Hanson recently explored the implications of this scenario for society and the economy. He envisioned a world in which work fell on the shoulders of disembodied emulations of human consciousness that operate in simulated virtual reality using computing equipment the size of entire cities.
The thought that consciousness can be loaded is not far from the thought that it has already been loaded and we live in a computer simulation a la "Matrix". Recently, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk raised this discussion by suggesting that the chance that we are not living in a computer simulation is roughly "one in billion." Of course, the idea that this world is nothing more than an illusion is hundreds of years old.
A seemingly simple idea turns out to be immeasurably complex upon closer examination. To begin with, our brains have trillions of connections between 86 billion neurons (or so). It is not yet realistic to reproduce all these compounds in digital form. With the current speed of development of computers and visualization systems, in a few decades we will be able to do this trick only with a dead segment of the brain.
More than molecules
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Even if we could create such a "wiring diagram" for a living brain, it would not be enough to understand how it works. To do this, we need to quantitatively measure how exactly neurons interact with each other, and do all this at a molecular level of precision. We don't even know how many molecules are in the brain, let alone how many of them are vital. It might not be possible for a computer to reproduce all these processes.
And that brings us to even deeper complexity. Just because we can mimic certain aspects of the brain does not mean that we can completely emulate the real brain or consciousness. No amount of meaningful increase in computing power will allow us to model the brain at the level of individual molecules. Thus, brain emulation will only be possible if we can separate its digital, logical operations from the messy mess at the molecular level.
To understand the operations of a conventional computer, we don't have to keep track of the currents and voltages in each component, much less understand what each electron does. We designed the switching operations of transistors in such a way that the logic of their operation is basically simple: zeros and ones. But the brain was not created by us - it evolved - so there is no reason to expect simple logic at the heart of its work.
A dangerous idea
Even if uploading consciousness remains a pipe dream, nothing prevents people from discussing the harmful consequences of this process. All people at some point begin to fear their own death, and who are we to tell people what to do with their own fears?
The way transhumanism mixes religious ideas with science distorts our understanding of technology. Transhumanists see technology as a way to fulfill all our desires. And they justify this by the fact that they inevitably move humanity in a positive direction. Therefore, famous futurists prefer not to turn to the ideas of transhumanism and stay away from it. After all, science rarely benefits from an alliance with religion.
ILYA KHEL