Do you want to be Transhuman?

I'd be quite fine with replacing all of my sensory organs with artificial ones, but I wouldn't be hooking my body up to the internet - or any other open network - and giving the link the facility of over-riding my senses.

No more than I would currently allow an untrained person to have access to my internal organs to practise their mad surgical skills on.

I would wonder where the input (into the brain) is going to go if people want internet access with their brain.

Presumably it'd be a feed into the relevant senses - sight and sound to emulate what we get now with touch, taste and smell added "because we can".

It'd be able to use the same technology as allows a person to have artificial eyes/ears/full body - the devices that take data from machines (cameras, microphones, touch sensors) and convert that data into something the brain can process

If the person already has artificial eyes, it could just be plugged into the existing interface box alongside the feeds from the eyes.

Another box would take instructions from motor control sectors of the brain to allow navigating the web, visiting the sites, interacting with whatever's in them.

It'd basically just replace screen, speakers, keyboard, mouse and add extra functionality.

I still wouldn't want it - I'd be tapping away at a keyboard with mechanical fingers and letting my artificial eyes look at a screen.

Presumably, it would need some sort of processor and OS with "browser" software to read the sites and output the data to the relevant brain interfaces for processing, and that OS and browser would need frequent updating as "new and improved" things become available on sites or patches are required to fix bugs (we're now in OS and application territory so this is bloatware, buggy crap and unexpected glitch territory).

And I'm just plain opposed to have something inside me capable of running executable programs written by someone else and hooked up to my brain.

edited 23rd Mar '14 10:36:17 PM by Wolf1066

That's where the "hacking into the bionic sensor" problem is.

edited 23rd Mar '14 11:48:29 PM by IraTheSquire

Having a wi-fi-enabled computer built into your artificial body and hooked up to feed data to the brain via its interfaces with the various sensory inorgans (well, they're not organic any more, are they) is where otherwise "harmless" bugs in the interfaces become exploitable.

That's when some prick can say "hey, this model of audio processor permanently shuts down if subjected to sounds above 70KHz in pitch. It's usually not a problem as the microphones they're using can't transmit more than 60KHz but if we set up our site so there's a constant background noise at 75KHz, it'll seriously fuck people's hearing modules.

Bugs that aren't triggered by normal conditions aren't generally a problem (which is why it's so hard to detect the fuckers, you have to wait for the abnormal conditions to manifest and you can't test every possibility). So long as the prostheses work reliably within the bounds for which they were designed (hopefully that's also outside the bounds of what they're expecting people to use them for), they're fine.

If it turns out that the visual processor board between the artificial eyes and the bits of the brain its attached to wigs out and shuts down when subjected to a bizarre shifting pattern that never occurs in nature (or even in Expressionist art shows), and only if the change frequency is far higher than what the artificial eyes are capable of capturing, it's not likely to be a problem for the average person.

Unless they've got a feed from an internal computer linked to the internet that plugs directly into that processor board and someone decides to be a dick.

What about artifical or genetically enhanced eyes that have more than 3 cones and a tapetum lucidum ?

In theory if we could construct cybernetic eye enhancements superior to the human eye, we'd probably see more colors than we do now and perceive more spatial dimensions. Unfortunately I think people would Go Mad from the Revelation.

edited 25th Mar '14 9:57:38 PM by ParadoxialStratagem

We'd have a shitty time trying to think up names for the new colors.

We'd have a shittier time conceptualizing a display that didn't analogue it to visible-spectrum colors that you presumably also want to keep seeing.

There are already tetrachromatic people so I don't think those are real problems. Granted they're very rare, but they dint seem insane or frustrated to me

That would just become another form of synesthesia.

edited 26th Mar '14 1:19:26 PM by IraTheSquire

Given that CCD cameras are sensitive to IR, I would expect that any artificial eyes based on that technology would enable the user to see a wider range of "colours".

Likewise, I'd expect frequency response for hearing would be better - and wouldn't degrade with age as our own does.

If the problem of continuity of conciousness is solved (and juice/other liquids dtreimental to performance prohibited from where the data is stored) i would go for a brain upload then i could live in Shibuya and maybe other game lands or hell do a sort of VR D&D.

If not i would prefer immortality, While seeing friends or family that have not chosen immortal life pass on would suck it would pass eventually. I'd love to see the end of the universe and persist on. If we could get a community of some sort after the universe ends there's no reason we should be bored...i hope. but being alone yeah i'd like a killswitch please.

Yeah Cessation of Existence is pretty much the reason i am not a full on christian. Without real hard evidence that the events in the bible actually transpired that is a leap of faith i am not willing to take. Cessation of Existence enters my mind and for a good half hour im scared out of my wits until i get my mind on something else.

edited 3rd May '14 12:35:26 AM by TwilightFalchion

BEHOLD MY WORK OF ART!

It's... an empty room.

WOW YOUR SENSES MUST BE REALLY OUT OF DATE. SORRY, LET ME PULL OUT SOMETHING MORE PRIMITIVE FOR YOU. CAN YOU SEE BLUE?

As long as I'm me, why not?

...Though I'm not sure I'm more than a decision-making gestalt of memories and assorted data. Huh.

And I still don't see what the problem is. Most of the tech is sill in the research phase. As long as science is an open and ethical procedure there won't be a problem.

They've already made inroads into controlling machinery - robot arms and such - by monitoring brain activity and I'm given to understand that it needn't be invasive - a skullcap with a matrix of sensors on the head is sufficient to detect activity accurately enough for a computer to send the right instructions to a robot arm.

Where the "fun" bit starts is getting sensory information from those machines back to the brain to create a feedback loop so that the person "knows where their limbs are" without having to look and can tell how much pressure they're exerting, the texture of the object they're handling etc.

My understanding is that they have made steps in getting the brain to accept very low resolution artificial vision, so that's a good start as well.

I expect that the areas of research would benefit each other - inroads into accepting simple video and audio would help with sensory feedback from limbs and improvements in that field would also improve what they can do with video and audio.

Direct stimulus of the brain with electricity is not new - Olds and Milner were doing it on rats back in the 1950s - and scientists have spent a lot of time mapping what parts of the brain do what and what responds to what.

Surely it wouldn't take too much to get basic sensory feedback to the right areas of the brain, after which it'd just be a matter of refining it so that more precise and subtle information can be conveyed from an artificial source to the brain.

Start out with rudimentary sensory input (how hard you're gripping something) and refine it until you've got sensors that can pick up the difference between, say, cotton and silk cloth and convey that data to the brain.

[Sorry, new accounts cannot post external links.]

I'd be transhuman if it was an Asuras Wrath style of transhuman.

Have almost near identical human feelings and being able to reproduce, but have the Like of cyborg parts, Superhuman strength, speed, agility and others on a cosmic scale (Like, punch out a planet scale), and being near immortal.

Superhuman physical abilities and immortality. I also want to become more intelligent.

Ah but there will always be the crowd, ( the Sore Losers Club) that will insist that you suck as much as they do. "Guys! Haven't you seen The Terminator? This will end badly!"

Silly meatsacks...

I'd be able to beat stuff up without arms, and just ankle bit everything to death If I were to fall.

That level is probably a bit too far off to be feasible though. We haven't built any machines yet that can those things on a "cosmic" scale.

Improvements on what we have right now, sure. But let's not get too ahead of ourselves here.

No problem. I have time. I will live forever!

So recently I've come across something that might be pertinent to the endless question of whether or not there would be continuity of conciousness in Mind Uploading. Note that the link is to a scholarly article which is about as dry as you would expect, but in a nutshell, it's a neuroscience model/theory which attempts to quantitatively describe the consciousness.

It also implies that philosophical zombies could be real, and that any AI running on a system using the contemporary logic-gate based method of processing would necessarily be a zombie.

The Paper:

From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0

For those not interesting in reading through an extremely long paper, one particularly interesting issue raised by the authors of the paper in the discussion is that, based on their model, it would not be possible with current computer architecture to create a truly conscious being, regardless of the amount of computational resources available, within a finite amount of time. However it would be possible, with sufficient resources, to create a philosophical zombie, which would be indistinguishable from a conscious system in terms of input and output, but would lack any genuine qualae. Said zombie program would do far more work and be far more complicated than an I/O equivalent conscious system, which, as mentioned by the authors, gives an evolutionary basis for the development of the consciousness.

edited 25th Jun '14 11:03:09 PM by Archereon