The end of me.

Imagine there was a prosthesis that could replicate a human brain and allowed one to 'upload' their mind into said brain. Imagine one went out and I got their can opened and one of these brain-o-matics installed. Imagine it was me.

I think most people I know would then claim that I wasn't really me anymore, even if I acted and talked exactly the same way. There would always be some underlying sense of me being a replacement in their minds, and I'm sure a lot of distrust and ostracizing would follow, with accusations of me being pale shadow of my former self.

But lets say I used a different approach. Suppose I went and had only 1/4 of my brain thus replaced instead. In this case most people I know would view me as having a prosthetic or augmentation depending on the level of emulation achieved. I would seem to be the same person in their minds, and because the remaining portion of the original me would lend me an air of continuity.

Carrying this forward, lets say I then successively replaced the remainder of my brain in 1/4 increments. Or say at 1/1000 or 1/100000 or some arbitrary portion as an increment.

Then at what point would I cease to be seen as me? At the ultimate replacement? If the amount successively replaced is small enough, wouldn't it be more likely that the biological component of the remainder would simply be an unused segment? So the demarcation line is fuzzy in certain cases.

But the idea that I had shared my bio and mechano portions in my noggin for a while would lend credence to the notion that I had survived the transition, and that the me people were dealing with would be the real me. My brain would share its entire experience with the new brain, and if there were both in there for a while experiencing together, I could easily claim my brain-o-matic portion carried my original mind. Eventually, even after total replacement, the continuity of the transition would diminish any fears my colleagues and acquaintances that I had been replaced.

In my mind ( the current, bio one) the best approach to the 'upload' is the graduated, slow transition. It allows my monkey self to transit the self preservation urge and pass into a new level of being. It allows my monkey group to satisfy the group include familiar/cast out the alien urge and maintain the same social dynamics.

I began to think about these things after reading transhumanists and several other blogs comments about how in the very near future we would have enough understanding of the human mind and its interfaces in order to allow such uploading. Some estimates puts it at about 15 to 30 years away, which is not that much all things considered. Someone potentially born in 1938 could survive to this event if they lived to 100 ( which is something else looking very feasible with modern medicine.... but that's another post).

The idea put forward by Kurzweil et al. is that we would simply upload ourselves, and that the continuation of the thought image would constitute immortality. But thats like copying a DVD and claiming the new one is the original.

That idea of Kurzweil's quite frankly freaked me out! That wouldn't be immortal me, but only a cheap copy who talked and dressed like me in cyberspace! ( or worse yet, had improved social graces and stole my friends).

But if I went gradually as outlined above, when would I really cease and the copy begin? If was able to take the 'fuzzy' route, then it would be an indiscernible moment and not noteworthy. This is in the same way as our constant cellular replacement is unnoticeable.Therefore I am not considered a clone of myself from 6 months ago, but still the same being.

I think that that the continuum of experience is a necessary component to the process of immortality. Without using a continuous process, when the flesh passes, then it is cessation and death of the original. The copy is a new being, with different experience from the point of reproduction onward. More like offspring than immortality.