With technology increasing as rapidly as ever and people like Ray Kurzweil making predictions for us to be finished with reverse engineering the brain around 2030, the question arises, will we be able to recreate digital copies of our brain? if so, what does that mean for all of us? Will we see the start of human's uploading and downloading information directly to/from our brains via a central hub? Will we be able to send mental messages to our friends and transmit raw thoughts and feelings to one another?
Imagine this: say you live in a society where this technology exists. you also like a girl, but can't really bring up a way of telling her how you feel. wouldn't it be awesome if you could transmit to her the sensation of the butterflies in your stomach that you feel when you're around her? after all, this feeling is merely just your brain's interpretation of information received from your nervous system. Imagine your reaction to a beautiful painting for the first time and the emotional response it evoked out of you. Imagine being to tag that picture with this first time feeling, so that you can experience it anytime you want after that. Let's be honest, sometimes words just don't suffice for whatever you're trying to express. Maybe in the future, that will never be a problem because we'd be able to communicate our raw thoughts/emotions to whoever we wish. But what else can we do with these new digital brains of ours?
What if we could "live forever" by just re-downloading another full copy of our brain into a mechanical body once your current one starts to fail? I find this whole concept one of extreme interest because our society would be forever changed by this. Think about what would have to happen if we had the ability to never die. Well, for one thing, Earth would get crowded pretty quickly because people would stop dying but new babies would keep being born. This would definitely force us to begin settling on the other planets/moons in our solar system. Let's think of something else: when you trade your organic brain for the digital representation, is it really you? will your friends see any difference in the way you act? is there more to us than our brains? can we really accurately construct a mind? I don't know the answers to any of these questions. Maybe when we switch from our organic brain to our digital representation, it's really lights out for us, and the birth of an artificial intelligence which already has your memories and acts and learns just like you do, or maybe we actually will wake up on the other side. The answer if any of this will come to pass still remains to be seen, and I won't be holding my breath for it, but I'll be keeping a watchful eye on the development of technologies which might lead up to this.
Thank you all for reading,
-Carlos
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