Speaker 1: Technology with text from dot com here and welcome to
Speaker 1: text to Hi am your host John from Strickland and
Speaker 1: sometimes I'm known as strick or Baldy by my guest
Speaker 1: host Josh Clark of Stuffy Chanel, j stri Jay Stretch.
Speaker 1: That's true. How are you? Thank you for having me,
Speaker 1: Thank you for being on the show. And when I
Speaker 1: asked Josh what he would like to cover when we
Speaker 1: started talking about the possibility of doing another tech stuff together,
Speaker 1: you came up with a great suggestion, digital immortality. Digital immortality.
Speaker 1: You know, I have a feeling the title of this
Speaker 1: episode will be who Wants to Live Forever? Right, because
Speaker 1: I'm a big fan of Queen. Yeah, who wants to
Speaker 1: Live Forever? That came from the soundtrack to the hit
Speaker 1: film Highlander. Oh cult classic. Did Queen do the whole check?
Speaker 1: They did Highlander and Flash Gordon? They did. I did
Speaker 1: not know Highlander and I saw Highlander the other day
Speaker 1: and I was like, not, hold up, No, the movie
Speaker 1: is one of those that I wish we could just
Speaker 1: wipe from history and redo because the concept is amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's not what we're gonna talk about. Although there
Speaker 1: are immortals in Highlander, yeah, yeah, there are. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that's the that's the connection, right, I guess so
Speaker 1: or Queen your love of Queen in Queen doing the
Speaker 1: Highlander sound check. The mortality. Yeah, it's ultimately it all
Speaker 1: goes back to uh tesla. No, we're gonna be talking
Speaker 1: about digital immortality, this concept of using technology to extend
Speaker 1: our lifespans indefinitely. Yeah, immortality. Yeah, to the point where
Speaker 1: essentially until the sun burns out right and the great
Speaker 1: heat death of the universe. Yeah, I mean yeah, because
Speaker 1: you could in theory, if you were had digital immortality,
Speaker 1: there's nothing stopping you from hopping on a spaceship and
Speaker 1: high tailing it somewhere else, or being transmitted it near
Speaker 1: the speed of light. Yep. Yeah, you could be beamed
Speaker 1: from one point to another and sure if you I
Speaker 1: wonder what that experience would be like. Well, maybe that
Speaker 1: it's that's the future of space travel. Physical space travel
Speaker 1: is as digital beings, rather than maybe that's the while
Speaker 1: we keep banging up against is the physical limitations, and
Speaker 1: then that will finally unbridle us and allow us to
Speaker 1: really do like interstellar travel, intergalactic travel, though presumably you
Speaker 1: would have to have something you're beaming into well you
Speaker 1: just purely digital, then you have to have something to
Speaker 1: house that information. I mean, I guess you could just
Speaker 1: be literally just information beaming around, but I don't know how.
Speaker 1: I wonder what that experience would be, like I wanted
Speaker 1: to be like going to sleep. Think about a laser.
Speaker 1: The laser doesn't have any sort of infrastructure, and you're
Speaker 1: trans meeting light information from one place to another at
Speaker 1: the speed of light. Right, Well, what if we figured
Speaker 1: out a way to digitize ourselves, as we'll talk about um,
Speaker 1: and we were able to beat ourselves in much the
Speaker 1: same way that a laser beams light. Right, But the
Speaker 1: question is then, because if we are digitizing ourselves, we're
Speaker 1: usually talking about that with the understanding that that digital
Speaker 1: information rests on top of some physical architecture. Right, just
Speaker 1: as software needs hardware to run off of, Right, you
Speaker 1: need like fiber optics. Now, yeah, I'm saying, what if
Speaker 1: you remove that, you figure out a way to remove it,
Speaker 1: then there's no leye. If you can get to a
Speaker 1: point where we become pure information and there is no
Speaker 1: need for physical infrastructure beneath that, then we're golden. There's
Speaker 1: no limit. Then I guess we would need some sort
Speaker 1: of receptacle to beam into even on the end, even
Speaker 1: if we don't have something connecting the two points that
Speaker 1: if you're just gonna send someone ahead like all right, dull,
Speaker 1: it's your job to set up all these these CPU talents, Bill,
Speaker 1: do not let us down. Make sure they're all plugged in,
Speaker 1: and please use one of those uninterrupted power supplies because
Speaker 1: if if there's a blackout, we don't want you know,
Speaker 1: we lost Lucy, and then make it over. Please don't
Speaker 1: smoke while you're setting them up, Bill, because we could
Speaker 1: smell it last time. It's dunk up the whole place,
Speaker 1: right right. So to get down to what we're actually
Speaker 1: talking about, you probably picked up on this. The idea
Speaker 1: of digital immortality largely revolves around this concept of somehow
Speaker 1: transferring human consciousness and experience into a digital format. Usually
Speaker 1: the way we describe it as uploading your brain into
Speaker 1: a computer. That's kind of the easiest way to explain it.
Speaker 1: And there are a lot of really smart people who
Speaker 1: have been talking about this possibility beyond saying it's hypothetical,
Speaker 1: saying it will be possible or it will happen. A
Speaker 1: lot of people strut around like they're just cock of
Speaker 1: the walks. They and it's gonna happen. And some sometimes
Speaker 1: they even put like dat on things like this, Oh
Speaker 1: ye know the guy we got to talk about to
Speaker 1: be at least ray Kurt's watch. Kurtzwile Uh famous for
Speaker 1: his futurism predictions, including the idea that we will reach
Speaker 1: what is called the singularity. There's the point at which
Speaker 1: technology is evolving so quickly that there is no meaningful
Speaker 1: way to describe the present because it's changing that fast
Speaker 1: and in the way I always think about singularities. Usually
Speaker 1: it's also the moment where UM one of two things
Speaker 1: has just happened. Either UM in AI has awakened and
Speaker 1: become conscious right and therefore we it is now the
Speaker 1: master of the universe as far as we're concerned, or
Speaker 1: we it's the moment we merge biology merges with technology
Speaker 1: at a point where we're able to UM remove ourselves
Speaker 1: the limitations of evolution and chart our own courts from
Speaker 1: that point on. Yeah, that's that's pretty accurate. I would
Speaker 1: argue that there's also there's the possibility of developing UM
Speaker 1: technology that allows us to genetically alter ourselves without having
Speaker 1: to directly incorporate like computers or electronics into our systems.
Speaker 1: That also can be It's transhumanism, is what we're talking
Speaker 1: about here. We're like right there. Yeah, we're already kind
Speaker 1: of happening, like very crudely, but it's we're like right there.
Speaker 1: As far as that last definition, yeah, yeah, we're there. Well,
Speaker 1: even with the incorporation of technology, we're getting there. You
Speaker 1: look at things like cochlear implants, and while this is
Speaker 1: this technology is specifically meant to give people who have
Speaker 1: either lost or never developed a particular uh sense or
Speaker 1: maybe some other form of neurological process. Uh you know,
Speaker 1: right now, it's meant to address that. In the future,
Speaker 1: it could be meant to augment, not just to to
Speaker 1: repair damage or to address a loss of something. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: the defining characteristic of trans humanism is that, um, you
Speaker 1: don't want a blade prosthetic leg because the one you
Speaker 1: were born with was removed. You want to blade prosthetic
Speaker 1: leg because you want to be able to run faster.
Speaker 1: It's not to it's not to make up for a loss.
Speaker 1: It's to further, right, it's to go to the next
Speaker 1: step exactly. So, Uh, this this singularity idea is very
Speaker 1: closely related to digital immortality, and largely because of Ray Kurtzwild, because,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, I think it's fair to say
Speaker 1: Ray Kurtzwild has an issue with the concept of mortality. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was wondering, like, I don't know that much about Kurtzwild.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm slightly familiar, but you clearly know a
Speaker 1: lot more about him than I do. And I was
Speaker 1: wondering if he is a like a fretful Annie, Like
Speaker 1: does he constantly worry about misstepping and dying? You know,
Speaker 1: people dying really weird, random mundane ways every day. And
Speaker 1: I wonder if he just lives in literal mortal fear
Speaker 1: of that. Well, he he is certainly taking great precautions
Speaker 1: to extend his life because he does believe firmly that
Speaker 1: we will reach this point in which technology will allow
Speaker 1: us to extend our lifespans indefinitely within his lifetime if
Speaker 1: he takes care of himself, so he he is determined,
Speaker 1: he doesn't. I mean, you would kind of feel like
Speaker 1: a like a dufus if you, you know, if you
Speaker 1: were capable of feeling if you died the day before
Speaker 1: they invented digital immortality. Right, it's the like the last
Speaker 1: guy to die in a war right after like right
Speaker 1: before there? Right, Yeah, there's a there's a great um.
Speaker 1: Have you ever seen there's a British sketch comedy show
Speaker 1: called that Mitchell and Webb. Look, have you ever seen?
Speaker 1: You've told me about it though, Yeah, it's it's a
Speaker 1: two comedians, uh, David Mitchell and Robert Webb who do
Speaker 1: this series. And one of the ones they they have
Speaker 1: is it's just supposed to be off the cuff conversation
Speaker 1: between the two so it's not in the context of
Speaker 1: a sketch, so basically like what we're doing kind of
Speaker 1: what we're doing now, except it's obviously scripted and ours
Speaker 1: is not. But in that case, they have a conversation
Speaker 1: where David Mitchell is very upset with the thought that
Speaker 1: his generation is going to be the last generation to die,
Speaker 1: and he is spiteful of the of the next generation.
Speaker 1: He's mad at them for being able to live forever
Speaker 1: while he has to die. Robert Webb is like, you
Speaker 1: could just be happy for them, and there's no same
Speaker 1: sort of thing I think with Kurt Swile is that
Speaker 1: he's um taking great pains to take care of himself.
Speaker 1: He's advocate for a healthy diet and exercise, which is fantastic.
Speaker 1: He takes something like a hundred and fifty dietary supplements.
Speaker 1: I'm going to have to correct you, and this is
Speaker 1: from the article that you two's constantly taking pill you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's uh. And and there there are plenty of
Speaker 1: studies that have suggested that unless you are suffering a
Speaker 1: deficiency of some sort, these supplements are not actually helpful. Well, um,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like um, vitamin A. I believe vitamin
Speaker 1: A H is known to help you see better. Pretty sure,
Speaker 1: it's vitamin A UM. And it's been shown that if
Speaker 1: you're especially like night vision is a little deficient, that
Speaker 1: if you eat some carrots your night vision will improve.
Speaker 1: So carrots do help you, But if it's already up
Speaker 1: to whatever your baseline night vision level is, you can't
Speaker 1: all the carrots in the world and it's not going
Speaker 1: to help it. As a matter of fact, you will turn.
Speaker 1: My wife turned a little orange because she like carrots
Speaker 1: so much when she was a kid. So, but she
Speaker 1: couldn't see any better beyond her baseline night vision level.
Speaker 1: So I think it's the same thing as what you're
Speaker 1: same thing with vitamin C. Right, once you hit a
Speaker 1: certain level of vitamin C. Anything beyond that you're such
Speaker 1: is just going to pee away. And in fact, vitamins
Speaker 1: can become toxic. Much of anything is is toxic to
Speaker 1: the human body because it speaks homeostasis. Right, So I'm
Speaker 1: wondering if kurts, well, surely he's smart enough to know, like,
Speaker 1: maybe I should cut this one out, or maybe I'm
Speaker 1: taking too much of this. Well, it's also possible that
Speaker 1: the reported number of supplements that he takes has been
Speaker 1: you know, exaggerated, as it's been reported over and over again.
Speaker 1: I am personally a little skeptical that he takes that many,
Speaker 1: But at any rate, the whole point is that he
Speaker 1: wants to make certain to live long enough to see
Speaker 1: the day when his prediction comes true, that that we
Speaker 1: will have the technological ability to port a person's mind
Speaker 1: into some kind of electronic construct. May I point the
Speaker 1: thing out I have, just while you were speaking, pulled
Speaker 1: out my calculator and Ray Chritswell takes a pill every
Speaker 1: five point seven six minutes a day, assuming he stays
Speaker 1: up all twenty four hours in a day, assuming again
Speaker 1: that that number is in fact accurate, that the number
Speaker 1: of supplements, not that I completely trust your math. Let's
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about some of the concepts here
Speaker 1: about how this could in theory happen. Now, obviously, we
Speaker 1: are not at the point where we can create any
Speaker 1: kind of hardware and or software that would allow us
Speaker 1: to to migrate and intelligence from our meaty brains, right,
Speaker 1: And that's a huge problem what you've just said, we're
Speaker 1: we are dealing in something called software hardware, when what
Speaker 1: the substrate that our our brains and consciousness exists on
Speaker 1: is what you would term wetware biological material, and where
Speaker 1: it's not necessarily analogous to a computer. Even though people
Speaker 1: and to think of the brain is such, that doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that it is the same thing. That's absolutely correct.
Speaker 1: I mean, let's let's take memory for an example. Memory
Speaker 1: is a great way to illustrate the difference between a
Speaker 1: computer system and the brain. All right, So in a
Speaker 1: computer system, you end up designating a certain space on
Speaker 1: some medium, like on magnetic tape or in certain you know,
Speaker 1: it all depends on whatever the form is that you're
Speaker 1: saving it too, But at any rate, it all ends
Speaker 1: up being zeros and ones, and it is unaltered. If
Speaker 1: you call up a file and you know you haven't
Speaker 1: done anything to it since the last time you looked
Speaker 1: at it's going to be exactly the same there, unless
Speaker 1: there's some sort of corruption in the file or you
Speaker 1: have made changes to it and then saved it again.
Speaker 1: You're not you know, it's gonna be the same experience
Speaker 1: every time. Human memory totally different a memory is, and
Speaker 1: we only sort of understand memory. Uh, we don't have
Speaker 1: a full grasp on how memory works. But based upon
Speaker 1: what we do know, when you experience something, your brain
Speaker 1: creates a certain neural pathway in response to the stimuli
Speaker 1: you are experiencing. So, for example, right here in this room,
Speaker 1: my brain is thin hair. Your hair, the heat in
Speaker 1: this room, the light in this room, little things, and
Speaker 1: I'm not noticing everything. My hair look pretty good, isn't it.
Speaker 1: You can start contrast with all the rest of the
Speaker 1: experiences is amazing hair. So the these these pathways are
Speaker 1: forming in my brain. Later on, assuming that I have
Speaker 1: converted this particular experience to long term memory, which is
Speaker 1: a pretty big assumption. Honestly, I can't remember what a
Speaker 1: podcasted about two weeks ago. Yeah, I think my hair
Speaker 1: is going to make it into your long term memory.
Speaker 1: The more you say it, the more likely it's going
Speaker 1: to happen. When when I think back on it, my
Speaker 1: brain will reconstruct that same pathway. So the memory is
Speaker 1: essentially representative and the physical relationship between the various synapses
Speaker 1: that light up when I have this experience. Right, So
Speaker 1: there is a physical pathway that is retraced when you recall. Right,
Speaker 1: but it's not like your memory of how great my
Speaker 1: hair looks is sitting in one little spot of your
Speaker 1: brain like it would be on a computer's magnetic tape.
Speaker 1: It's distributed, and it's faulty because when I remember the
Speaker 1: process of remembering, sometimes that that pathway doesn't form exactly
Speaker 1: the way it did, and sometimes it adds new stuff
Speaker 1: exactly I might fill in some gaps. Like imagine if
Speaker 1: you opened a power point presentation that you've made and uh,
Speaker 1: there are a few slides missing, but then there's some
Speaker 1: new stuff and maybe it was a little bit better
Speaker 1: than before. But you haven't done anything. Don't remember this transition,
Speaker 1: but all right, we'll go with it. Just the very
Speaker 1: act of retrieving it from your computer's memory and opening
Speaker 1: it again changes it. Right. That doesn't happen computer, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't human memories, right, thing, right exactly. That is
Speaker 1: exactly what I'm saying. And the reason why I say
Speaker 1: it is that that's a problem because if we are
Speaker 1: ever to move from wetware in center brains to hardware
Speaker 1: and software in the digital realm, unless we factor that
Speaker 1: in somehow, like we create an algorithm that mimics the
Speaker 1: experience of remembering something, the experience is going to be
Speaker 1: fundamentally different. The experience of remembering will be totally different.
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the reasons why I very much
Speaker 1: argue against eyewitness testimony for things, especially for crimes that
Speaker 1: might have happened a long time in the past, is
Speaker 1: that our memories are faulty. Now, if we were in
Speaker 1: this other experience where we had moved to hardware and
Speaker 1: software and our memories were more analogous to computer memory,
Speaker 1: that would not be an issue. Perfect. So, but that's
Speaker 1: a that's't just one illustration of how this is a
Speaker 1: tricky thing. It is tricky. And you say that, you know,
Speaker 1: comparatively speaking, it sounded like your take on it was
Speaker 1: that human memory is faulty compared to computer memory. I
Speaker 1: I would positive that there's also another way to look
Speaker 1: at it, that um, human memory is much more robust
Speaker 1: and rich than computer memory because think about it, when
Speaker 1: you say, smell something for the first time, and then
Speaker 1: you smell it again and again, that that memory of
Speaker 1: what something smells like is going to become more detailed.
Speaker 1: There's going to be more to it, it will become
Speaker 1: more refined, and it will be totally different from that
Speaker 1: first sent memory that you created of whatever it was
Speaker 1: you smelled. And so I would pose it again. Sorry
Speaker 1: to use that word twice, but it makes me sound
Speaker 1: pretty smart when I do um that that additional adding
Speaker 1: new material, adding new stuff to it when you recall
Speaker 1: things or when you experience something. The ability to make
Speaker 1: your memory more robust and more rich and and to
Speaker 1: be able to refine it just through recall, to me,
Speaker 1: is superior to just straight here's the information that a
Speaker 1: computer will give you, and it should be exactly what
Speaker 1: you have before. And also with memories, we can associate
Speaker 1: stuff that previously was not connected in our brains, whereas
Speaker 1: with computers, the way you do that as through meta data.
Speaker 1: You tag stuff. Right, you're like, Okay, well, let's tag
Speaker 1: this piece of information with all the metadata we can
Speaker 1: think of that that that describes what this information is
Speaker 1: really about. And then if I want to associate things,
Speaker 1: I have to look for similar tags like but but
Speaker 1: in my brain, it doesn't automatically, and it does it
Speaker 1: in ways that you cannot necessarily anticipate, which can lead
Speaker 1: to things like innovation, creativity. Yes, precisely, and you also
Speaker 1: kind of hinted at something that's the big problem facing
Speaker 1: the idea of uploading ourselves onto the internet strick. It
Speaker 1: is that with with men, we can figure out memory.
Speaker 1: Will will eventually figure out how human memory works exactly.
Speaker 1: And that's what There's a philosopher called David Chalmers. That's
Speaker 1: what he's pointed out as the easy problem of consciousness.
Speaker 1: We understand, we're going to understand how the mind functions.
Speaker 1: Sometime down the road. We will figure that out. There's
Speaker 1: a hard problem is what what Chalmers has also pointed
Speaker 1: out in figuring out how phenomenal experience, our experience of
Speaker 1: reality is produced from those processes. That that is the
Speaker 1: big issue that is facing us trying to upload ourselves
Speaker 1: onto the internet. It's like when you talked about meta.
Speaker 1: The computer is not writing meta itself. It might be
Speaker 1: able to simulate memory retrieval in its own way, but
Speaker 1: it's not writing its own tags. It's not making these connections.
Speaker 1: It takes a human consciousness to do that. And not
Speaker 1: only do we not know how to make a computer
Speaker 1: simulate that, we don't even know how we do that, right,
Speaker 1: we may never know. There's a lot of philosophers out
Speaker 1: there there like, we may never figure out the hard
Speaker 1: problem of consciousness. Uh. Neuroscientists would say that clearly the mind,
Speaker 1: which is what we could probably you know, use as
Speaker 1: an umbrella term for things like consciousness and experience and
Speaker 1: intelligence and the kind of stuff that that emerges from
Speaker 1: the physical construct of the brain, because you can you
Speaker 1: can observe changes to the mind when someone suffers an
Speaker 1: illness or injury that damages the brain. And therefore it
Speaker 1: stands to reason that the mind in fact is a
Speaker 1: product of the brain. So if you could figure out
Speaker 1: how to simulate a brain to a significant level of sophistication,
Speaker 1: hypothetically you could have intelligence emerge naturally from that simulation, hypothetically,
Speaker 1: hypothe Because we can't do it yet, the best we
Speaker 1: can do right now is to simulate a few thousand neurons,
Speaker 1: but there are know, we're talking about billions of neurons
Speaker 1: and synapsis in the human brain. Yeah, from what I saw,
Speaker 1: the low but average estimate is something like EIGHTI six billion,
Speaker 1: and the normal human brain I'm sorry, not synatha's neuron,
Speaker 1: it's trillions of synantha. Right, So it's it's incredibly complicated,
Speaker 1: and in fact, there's some people who suggest that it
Speaker 1: may be to truly simulate a human brain, you may
Speaker 1: have to go down to the molecular level, at which
Speaker 1: point the computational requirements for simulating that brain are going
Speaker 1: to be so vast as to be impractical or impossible
Speaker 1: to achieve. Well, you mentioned the Blue Brain project in
Speaker 1: this article that you wrote, um, and I was just
Speaker 1: kind of skimming their website and they mentioned that in
Speaker 1: their simulations it requires about a laptops worth of computing power.
Speaker 1: They didn't say what kind of RAM or hard drive
Speaker 1: for storage or anything it has. They just used a
Speaker 1: laptops worths You can kind of let your imagination from
Speaker 1: on with it, but that that was required just for
Speaker 1: one individual neuron to power. Yes, we're talking about billion laptops,
Speaker 1: which is that's you know, should be great news for
Speaker 1: the exactly any hardware manufacturers out there. Um, there are
Speaker 1: actually quite a few different uh projects out there that
Speaker 1: are attempting to simulate brains for one reason or another,
Speaker 1: not necessarily so that we can pourt consciousness to them,
Speaker 1: but also to just study things like, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: how our brains work, how we might be able to
Speaker 1: treat brain damage or illnesses that that damage the brain.
Speaker 1: That how how certain medications might react to our brains.
Speaker 1: Building these very complex simulations, so some of them. M I.
Speaker 1: T has a course on the emergent science of connect tomics.
Speaker 1: I've seen that lately too. It sounds so full of bs,
Speaker 1: but apparently it's it's a real deal and and once
Speaker 1: you look into it, that makes total the terrible name.
Speaker 1: Connectomics is all about the connections that happen within the brain.
Speaker 1: And yeah it does. Connectomics sounds like it's some sort
Speaker 1: of weird economics course or like maybe an l. Around
Speaker 1: Hubbard book. Yeah, like Dinetics part two. Connectomics. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: that's an example. There's the US Brain Project, there's an
Speaker 1: EU Brain project, there's the Google project. Yes, and there's
Speaker 1: the Google Brain project. They hired Ray Kurtzwile. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: their chief engineer, director of engineering. Yeah, for for specifically
Speaker 1: for the Google Brain project. They I mean, clearly Google
Speaker 1: has just put their cars in the table. They're like,
Speaker 1: we're putting some serious resources behind figuring out how to
Speaker 1: get people on to digital consciousness. Right. It's it's one
Speaker 1: thing to think about this kind of you know, armchair
Speaker 1: computer scientists neuroscientists sort of approach, but they're really putting
Speaker 1: actual money towards research and development and on this stuff,
Speaker 1: including hiring another guy named Jeff Hinton who is a
Speaker 1: British computer scientist who who specializes in neural networks. So
Speaker 1: they're looking at using neural networks for lots of stuff,
Speaker 1: not just to simulate a human brain. I mean that
Speaker 1: might be part of it too, but neural networks can
Speaker 1: be really useful for processing different types of information for
Speaker 1: all sorts of applications, right true. And also, I mean,
Speaker 1: if you think about it, just figuring out some of
Speaker 1: the efficiencies that the human brain is evolved to include
Speaker 1: as far as networking goes, if you could just even
Speaker 1: get some insider inspiration from that, that could help tremendously. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: There's some other great things I can mention. There's um
Speaker 1: Ted Burger, who is a professor at the University of
Speaker 1: Southern California's Center for neuro Engineering, who built a prosthetic
Speaker 1: of the hippocampus. Now, the hippocampus is uh, hippocampuses is large. Yeah,
Speaker 1: is lar argually associated with the formation of memories, also
Speaker 1: with incorporation of emotion. But memory is a big part
Speaker 1: of what hippocampus is involved in. So I think it
Speaker 1: also um takes in century information, determines what region it
Speaker 1: should be transmitted to, if it should go into long
Speaker 1: term memory or that kind of stuff. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like a big deal, big engineer in this case. And
Speaker 1: so in two thousand eleven came up with a proof
Speaker 1: of concept hippocampal prosthesis and tested it in live rats.
Speaker 1: In two thousand twelve tested it in non human primates,
Speaker 1: and supposedly sometime this year they're going to test it
Speaker 1: in people. Man, that is amazing. So like, if you
Speaker 1: have some sort of damage to your hippocampus and you're
Speaker 1: no longer able to form memories, then this would be
Speaker 1: the thing for you. Kind of yeah, I mean, this
Speaker 1: could end up being depending upon the nature of of
Speaker 1: the the problem. I mean, it could potentially be a
Speaker 1: treatment for things like Alzheimer's. Um Whether or not that
Speaker 1: turns out to be the case, we'll still have to
Speaker 1: wait and see, but it is very promising. Have you
Speaker 1: ever heard of Henry Mollison. He is like one of
Speaker 1: the one of the more facing, one of the more
Speaker 1: famous patients, or to save time, you could just say
Speaker 1: one of the more faiths um in as far as
Speaker 1: memory studies go, because he had some he had I
Speaker 1: believe epilepsy, and some old timey doctor gave him some
Speaker 1: brain surgery and messed up his his hippocampus and the
Speaker 1: guy was unable to form new memories from that point on.
Speaker 1: He could remember everything up to that point under the surgery.
Speaker 1: Then after that it was almost like his brain refreshed
Speaker 1: every I think something like thirty seconds. And he was
Speaker 1: just lived in an institution and was fortunately taken care
Speaker 1: of by a few doctors that like really studied him
Speaker 1: but also like really kept him from the public limelight.
Speaker 1: His name wasn't published in the life he died, but
Speaker 1: he yielded a lot of information about how memories are
Speaker 1: formed thanks to the hippocampus. But it sounds like he
Speaker 1: would have been a great candidate for that. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: reminded of and I have to trust other people's uh
Speaker 1: details of this, because I have no memory of it.
Speaker 1: I had There was a time where I had a
Speaker 1: kidney stone. It was so bad that I had to
Speaker 1: go to the hospital and they treat me with a
Speaker 1: very powerful pain killer that just knocked your hipocampus out
Speaker 1: of a convention, I couldn't remember things. I had no
Speaker 1: short term memory. Well, it makes sense. Like also, when
Speaker 1: you're drinking, um, your hippocampal function is is messed with
Speaker 1: your You are not forming new memories, and you require
Speaker 1: the hippocampus do this. So if you're doing something, if
Speaker 1: you're on drugs, if you have some sort of structural damage,
Speaker 1: if you have been drinking, like that's why you're you're
Speaker 1: not forming new memories. That accounts for a blackout, that
Speaker 1: accounts for amnesia. Your hippocampus is just not functioning properly exactly. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's another expert I want to mention, Enders Sandberg of
Speaker 1: the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford Universe. I am
Speaker 1: a huge fan of that institute. Yeah, yeah, one of
Speaker 1: my favorite people in the world works. There's names Nis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know of Nick Bostrom. So Sandberg had said this
Speaker 1: is a quote. The point of brain emulation is to
Speaker 1: recreate the function of the original brain. So this is
Speaker 1: talking about actually creating a copy of a of a
Speaker 1: person's brain, not just the concept in general, but in
Speaker 1: the specific case of this person's brain. We're going to
Speaker 1: recreate it digitally. If run, it will be able to
Speaker 1: think and act as the original brain. We are now
Speaker 1: able to take small brain tissue samples and map them
Speaker 1: in three D. These are at exquisite resolution, but the
Speaker 1: blocks are just a few microns across. We can run
Speaker 1: simulations of the size of a mouse brain on supercomputers,
Speaker 1: but we do not have the total connectivity yet. As
Speaker 1: methods improve, I expect to see automatic conversion of scanned
Speaker 1: tissue into models that can be run. The different parts exist,
Speaker 1: but so far there is no pipeline from brains to emulations.
Speaker 1: Now he thinks that it may be very difficult to
Speaker 1: ever simulate memory in a computer the way that humans do,
Speaker 1: for the very reasons we mentioned earlier. Um He also
Speaker 1: points out that there is a problem with this particular
Speaker 1: approach as the scanning essentially damages or destroys the brain
Speaker 1: tissue because there's not a non invasive way. It's like
Speaker 1: Heiberg all over again. Huh. You gotta pretty much crack
Speaker 1: the nogg and open and mush around in the gray
Speaker 1: stuff to find out, you know, to really scan it
Speaker 1: and get that resolution. This this scanning would either kill
Speaker 1: you or you need a freshly dead person, in which
Speaker 1: case there's no longer consciousness right right, exactly A big
Speaker 1: so you could make You can make a copy of
Speaker 1: a dead brain, which, as you point out, not really
Speaker 1: that useful. Or you could make a copy of a
Speaker 1: living brain, but in the process you kill the living brain.
Speaker 1: You are left with the copy. Now, theoretically, this copy
Speaker 1: would think and react in a way that would be
Speaker 1: exactly the way the original person thought and reacted, but
Speaker 1: the original person still dead. So, Josh, if you had
Speaker 1: this done, there would be a Josh computer Josh Bought
Speaker 1: two thousand and Josh Bought would think like you, would
Speaker 1: have quips like you, better hair, with even better hair
Speaker 1: than you, and feel somewhat smug about it. Meanwhile, Josh Clark,
Speaker 1: the human being would be no more. And this comes
Speaker 1: to another big problem in the concept of digital immortality,
Speaker 1: which is continuity. Sure, so continuity being the continuous experience
Speaker 1: of you as Josh Clark, whether you are in your
Speaker 1: meat body or poured it over to some digital format.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's that big of a problem. Really,
Speaker 1: think a man every day there we we have gaps
Speaker 1: in continuity. We go to sleep and then we wake up.
Speaker 1: But you're talking about functional continuity. There's also a physical continuity,
Speaker 1: and there's the real problem. So functional continuity is exactly
Speaker 1: what you're talking about. It's our our experience that we
Speaker 1: are having, and it does have interruptions, whether it's when
Speaker 1: we go to sleep or we are put under for
Speaker 1: exactly all of that. It could end up being a
Speaker 1: break in our functional continuity. We can recover from that
Speaker 1: because the physical continuity, the stuff that's in our brains,
Speaker 1: is still there, so that even though we have that reset,
Speaker 1: we can come back and everything will be fine. If
Speaker 1: the physical continuity is destroyed, as in the actual brain dies,
Speaker 1: then you have a problem. Now. An interesting thing is
Speaker 1: that I've looked at some neuroscientists uh and their work
Speaker 1: and what they have to say about this, and it
Speaker 1: was really interesting to me. There's a guy named Stephen Novella.
Speaker 1: He's a neuroscientist, works at Yale. He has a great
Speaker 1: podcast called Skeptics Guide to the Universe UM, and he
Speaker 1: is a critical thinker and a skeptic. Uh. He has
Speaker 1: talked a lot about this as well. He's blogged about
Speaker 1: it and his idea or his perspective. The way he
Speaker 1: communicates it is that as humans, we have brains that
Speaker 1: are divided into two hemispheres. Now, through drugs or through surgery,
Speaker 1: you can have one of those hemispheres separated from the other.
Speaker 1: It essentially is rendered inactive. But the two hemispheres are
Speaker 1: largely copies of each other. So even if this does happen,
Speaker 1: you can have a relatively normal experience. You might have
Speaker 1: find that some things are now very hard to do,
Speaker 1: like math if your colossum isn't there exactly. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: he says, but these two halves, which individually can act
Speaker 1: as a single brain, work together, and we have you know,
Speaker 1: even if you have the one shut down, the other
Speaker 1: one can continue to work. You're still you, largely you.
Speaker 1: So he says, what if we then extend this and
Speaker 1: we make the assumption that yes, we have created the
Speaker 1: hardware and software that will allow for the simulation of
Speaker 1: a brain in in some way we connect that to
Speaker 1: a person's brain so that it becomes an extension. It's
Speaker 1: another part of the brain, kind of like a third hemisphere.
Speaker 1: I guess. And and so this one is starting to
Speaker 1: form pathways that mimic what your brain does naturally, so
Speaker 1: over time it helps you think the way you think already.
Speaker 1: It also starts to build in redundant memories, so it's
Speaker 1: essentially backing up your memories. And gradually it's going to
Speaker 1: act like it another hemisphere of your brain. And it
Speaker 1: could even be more powerful. Potentially, you could do things
Speaker 1: like include algorithms that like make it way easier for
Speaker 1: you to do math. You'd be a math genius. I
Speaker 1: would hope that if I were uploaded on the internet,
Speaker 1: my math skills would just automatically improve. I would expect that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's certain little like base assumptions you want to make, right,
Speaker 1: that's one of them. It would be it would be
Speaker 1: funny to be digitally immortal, but crap at math. So
Speaker 1: I guess you get made fun of by all the
Speaker 1: other digital immortals. Very likely, you know, the Kurgan is
Speaker 1: just taunting you before cutting off your digital head. Uh So,
Speaker 1: the his point being that over time you would be
Speaker 1: relying more heavily on the AI version of your brain,
Speaker 1: that even while your meat brain goes to sleep, your
Speaker 1: AI brain could stay awake so that you know, you
Speaker 1: you as you could remain active all day long because
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's it's your organic brain that's sleeping.
Speaker 1: But your AI brain takes over, and it could get
Speaker 1: to a point where you don't even really notice that
Speaker 1: part of you as asleep, and you could theorectly reach
Speaker 1: a point where your AI brain is doing the vast
Speaker 1: majority of the work, so that the time when your
Speaker 1: organic brain dies is a non event to you. Okay, so,
Speaker 1: first of all, I could see the AI brain becoming
Speaker 1: very resentful of the organic brain right having to do
Speaker 1: all the work while it just lays around and sleeps. Right,
Speaker 1: I don't know that the left brain gets mad at
Speaker 1: the right brain. Mind us, they're always arguing they're at
Speaker 1: odds they're doing it right now. Hey, guys, Josh and
Speaker 1: I had so much to say about this topic that
Speaker 1: it turned out it was long enough to be two episodes,
Speaker 1: not just one episode. So we're going to stop things
Speaker 1: right here. You can find Josh's work at Stuff you
Speaker 1: Should Know, including the website podcast. They do live events,
Speaker 1: so check that out. And if you guys have suggestions
Speaker 1: for me, whether it's a particular type of technology you
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Speaker 1: a person or a company, or even just a suggestion
Speaker 1: for another guest host or interview, let me know. Send
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Speaker 1: soon for more on this and bathens of other topic,
Speaker 1: is it housefs dot com