Philosophical Problems re: Uploading your Brain to a Computer

There's been a trope for a long time now that people will some day be able to upload their brains to a computer and live forever. Even if this were possible, I think there's a lot of philosophical and ethical problems with this.

First and foremost, if your brain were theoretically represented and stored as computer code, wouldn't this make everything about your memories and personality editable to anyone with write access? As we've seen with politically correct "AI" chatbots recently, even if people were able to upload their brains to a computer or whatever, they would probably be stripped of the ability to say anything that is politically incorrect. There would also be issues with cyber attacks and what would probably be the necessary maintenance and bugs that would need to be worked out with such a complex system. In other words, editing these "people" would probably be completely unavoidable, at which point the sheeple would have to start pretending that no one would ever make an inappropriate edit to a digital haemonculus.

And this brings me to my second point, which would be, what would qualify as having successfully uploaded someone's brain to a computer? Surely later versions of such a technology would be better than earlier versions. So if a supposed AI system is 90% you, does that still count as you? How does it match up to a later model that is described as being 95% accurate?

Third, we can imagine even more obscure problems. Should we allow an admittedly imperfect copy of a person to exert their opinions upon the real world, such as allowing them to vote? When we consider the fact that these people will necessarily be editable and in many ways different from a flesh and blood person, it would raise a lot of dilemmas to have them making decisions regarding what should be done in a real world they no longer live in.
My personal opinion is that this will never really be possible, although enough people may want it to be possible that they start treating it as if it is real, at which point I think a lot of questions will need to be asked. To explain what I mean by that, it is already possible to create chatbots that can convincingly imitate people's social media presence. Assuming it was advanced enough and augmented with extra forms of data, someone might leave their will to their chatbot or something, thereby theoretically conferring some legal rights upon it. I think it'd be pretty interesting to see how people react to that in the event where the chatbot is able to argue that it deserves what has been bequeathed to it

 

The idea makes for some great science fiction stories but it seems completely ridiculous. Mainly because you wouldn't actually be able to upload your own mind, at best you would make a copy of it. And that's just code and assumingly whatever company you contracted with could read the code and take all of your secrets. That seems like of a dumb risk.

But this is important to transhumanists who really think they are going to live forever so there ya go.

 

Hate to tell ya, its already that way!
All the books are being digitized.
I just left a thread in 911 where I have an old video that by some strange coincidence is 7 seconds on my 20 year old video is now 4 seconds on the same video you see online today! Just by some strange stretch of imagination happens to correspond to precisely the alleged speed from 300 back then to over 500 today.

Im confident history is all being whitewashed, and of course no laws to protect anything.

 

Yeah, it gets to the core about what personal identity even means . . . but no one has a good answer for that. Honestly, I agree with the Buddhists on this: the "self" is likely an illusion.

 

The whole 'you can upload urself' thing is just gonna be part of the ploy to get undesireables to go along with voluntary euthanasia. 'You'll live forever ...just your body has to die.' Authoritarian collectivism doesnt work if the people who dont work continue to drain the system. But the elite cant sell machine gunning people into ditches as utopic anymore. 'Upload urself' is the new solution.

 

What version of "upload yourself" requires biological death?

 

None. But that'll be part of how they sell it.

 

So you weren't actually making an argument about what is happening but make a prophecy instead?

 

Oh, sorry, when I said '...is just gonna be...', that was a lazy way of writing '...is just going to be...'. Which, yes, is a prediction of the future and obviously not a statement of fact. ...unless you believe in fortune-telling, I guess. I dont.

 

makes sense, though its not possible to upload an identity only means and methods, self is not possible, and frankly never will be, even if you made a clone. the clone could carry on but once dead your original brain activity ceases, no different than passing the baton on to another person. not sure if thats stated very well