Henry’s Comments (group member since Jul 07, 2011)

Henry’s comments from the Ask David Eagleman group.

David wrote: "Brian wrote: "What are the major hurdles to "uploading" a human brain (memories) as seen in so many science fiction stories?

There are three hurdles: one technological, one
empirical, one theoret..."

I am reminded of a quote by Woody Allen, “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.”

Let's assume that we can upload 100% of a person's mind into a computer. That is all well and good for the new me churning away in the latest Intel chip, but the same old flesh and blood me here in this biological bag is still going to be faced with death and taxes. I am not sure that I find much comfort in knowing that some other me will live on, but the me that is the me right now making the decision to upload or not is either not going to survive the process or will live in a parallel existence and still face death. I guess it comes down to what is me? Is there anyway around this? This might make a chapter in Sum II. "In the afterlife all the souls can sit in Intel's Corporate headquarters and monitor their mind's continuing existence in the cloud..."

BTW this discussion group is totally cool. Thank you very much for taking the time to do this.

I read Incognito & loved it. Working on Sum. I have turned into a neuroscience junkey as result.

I have two questions.

1) I read recently that the triune brain model, popularized by Carl Sagan's Dragon's of Eden, has largely been abandoned by neuroscience. What replaced it and why?

2) In the July 2011 issue of Scientific American in the "The Limits of Intelligence" Douglas Fox offers some convincing arguments that the evolution of the human intelligence may be close to its physical limits. Do you agree? Is this a concern? Fox's arguments ran on physical problems (hardware). Is there something in the software world, methodologies of thought or learning, where we could in your terms "burn" some forms of learning or thought into the "automatic zombie subroutines"? If we are stuck in hardware space as a species, can we develop better software to utilize the existing hardware?