Human Minds Becoming
Digitizable
BY: HALEY PARKHURST &
MARCUS HEARD
Concepts of the Brain
 The human brain contains about 100 billion nerve cells called
neurons, they are individually linked to the other neurons by
connectors called axons and dendrites.
 Neuroscientists have said that learning, memory, and
consciousness which are important functions performed by the
mind, are due to purely physical and electrochemical processes
in the brain
 The concept of mind uploading is based on this mechanistic view
of the mind, and denies the vitalist view of human life and
consciousness. Many computer scientists and neuroscientists
have predicted that computers will be capable of thought and
even have consciousness.
Transhumanism
 Trans humanism is an intellectual and cultural
movement that gives the possibility of transforming the
human mind by developing and making widely available
technologies to get rid of aging and to enhance human
intellectual, physical, and psychological
capacities.(Beyond humanity)
 A Neuroscientist called Salim Ismail and his ilk are
working to produce extreme technologies, to re-engineer
the brain, upload the mind, copy people, and more. These
are the technologies that lie at the heart of a movement
called transhumanism. Tran humanism views sickness,
and death. Our bodies, frail and unpredictable, are just
another problem for these engineers to solve.
Copyright © 2012 ProQuest LLC
Wikipedia
 Tran humanists see the body as a machine, and the brain
as a computer. With the right tools we could be able to fix,
improve, and upgrade ourselves.
 "The current definitions of death are basically incorrect,"
Merkle said. "The current systems all focus on whether
the tissue is functioning. They completely ignore whether
the information is still present. This is like announcing the
computer is dead when you pull the plug, or even throw it
out the window. Even then, while the RAM, the shortterm memory, is gone, the hard drive is still there."
Merkle said.
 Merkle reasons that if the data is still encoded in the
patterns of our brain tissue, it can be copied, backed up,
and transferred. Or as trans humanists like to call it,
"uploaded."
Copyright © 2012 ProQuest LLC
Pro’s of Trans humanism
 It may be able to cure human disease
 Supports the abolitions of world wide suffering
 Provides standard civil rights for all
 Supports democracy and liberalism in a hybrid form
 Ability to affect the technological singularity for
bettering mankind
 Then technology can be incented to cure the world of
environmental issues.
Con’s
 There could be a strong corporate control
 Segregation between the privileged and the poor
 Genetic lines would be eliminated
 It could cause worse over population(lead to food
shortage)
 Too technology driven.
 It would blur the lines of human identity
Cryonics
 Cryonics is the preservation of the human
body, and the brain, after what we would
call death, in anticipation of possible future
revival. Cryonics is an important
transhumanist technology not only because
it is already available today, we can reliably
stop cells from decaying.
 This is financed a life insurance policy (for
people under 40 may cost as little as $100 a
year to own), patients can be ‘cryopreserved’ for as long as the cryonics
company stays afloat. Eventually revival
does not require the technology to become
available tomorrow, as long as the liquid
nitrogen keeps replenished, you can stay in
the ice for as long as it takes.
Mind Uploading
 Our minds are defined
more by the information
pattern they embody than
the particular hardware
they are implemented on.
© 2002–2012 Lifeboat Foundation
 People don’t want to think they’re “just” data
structures being implemented. Its hard to think
of it in any other way: when we forget the
possibility of an immaterial soul, we must
acknowledge the mind as a material pattern
implemented in physical parts of the brain, and
if other substances can meet the requirements
for these configurations, then there is no reason
why intelligence and consciousness could not
exist on another substrate. For a humorous look
at this argument, see “They’re Made Out of
Meat” by Terry Bisson.
© 2002–2012 Lifeboat Foundation
Negative Examples of Mind uploading
 The Self-Erasing Murder:
In life, Albert Fish was one
of the most vile murderers and
pedophiles of all time. After his
brain was scanned and uploaded
into virtuality he orchestrated a
series of chilling assassinations
against all those who had ever
been involved in convicting him.
Once he had finished
gloating over his own success, he
accessed a freeware brain-editor
and pasted a copy of a Buddhist
monk’s volition module over his
own sociopathy. The present
Albert Fish is pleased with
himself, could not hurt a fly, and
no case against him would stand
in court.
Copyright ©2012 - ScienceFiction.com
 Become hacked, Blackmail,
virus’s, etc.
Positive Examples of Mind Uploading
 We could live forever in computer systems;
Immortality.
 You could live anywhere in the universe as long as
there’s a computer system there.
 The laws of physics could be determined by humans.
 Up loaders believe all the information that makes us who
we are : our knowledge, memories, habits and secrets , are
data encoded in the brain. This information can be
successfully captured run on the right computer program,
and then you are alive in the machine, running like
software.
Copyright © 2012 ProQuest LLC
Procedure
 The brain is frozen into a solid state
 The brain is cut into thousands of very thin slices
 Each slice is scanned by an electron microscope
 A computer uses the data to reconstruct the
brains circuitry
 The data would then be uploaded to a new body
Works Cited

Gelles, David. "IMMORTALITY 2.0." Futurist 1(2009):34. eLibrary. Web. 10 Apr. 2012.

Lifeboat.com “Trans humanist Techonologies countdown” © 2002–2012 Lifeboat
Foundation Web. 10 Apr. 2012
Seel, Nigel. “The Perils of Mind Uploading” Copyright ©2012 - ScienceFiction.com Web.
10 Apr. 2012
 Wikipedia
