memesis: meme-x and memetics
cybernetic immortality: part I

the successes of science make it possible for us to raise the banner of cybernetic immortality [Mori95]. the idea is that the human being is, in the last analysis, a certain form of organization of matter. this is a very sophisticated organization, which includes a high multilevel hierarchy of control. what we call our soul, or our consciousness, is associated with the highest level of this control hierarchy. this organization can survive a partial - perhaps, even a complete - change of the material from which it is built.
 

immortality

control

most of the knowledge acquired by an individual still disappears at biological death. only a tiny part of that knowledge is stored outside the brain or transmitted to other individuals. it is a shame to die before realizing one hundredth of what you have conceived and being unable to pass on your experience and intuition. it is a shame to forget things even though we know how to store huge amount of information in computers and access them in split seconds. further evolution would be much more efficient if all knowledge acquired through experience could be maintained, in order to make place only for more adequate knowledge. this requires an effective immortality of the cognitive systems defining individual and collective minds: what would survive is not the material substrate [body or brain], but its cybernetic organization.
 

one way to reach this ideal has been called "uploading": the transfer of our mental organization to a very sophisticated computer system. research in artificial intelligence, neural networks, machine learning and data mining is slowly uncovering techniques for making computers work in a more "brain-like" fashion, capable to learn billions of associated concepts without relying on the rigid logical structures used by older computer systems. see for example our research on learning, brain-like webs. if these techniques become more sophisticated, we might imagine computer systems which interact so intimately with a human use that they would "get to know" that user so well that they it could anticipate every reaction or desire. since user and computer system would continuously work together, they would in a sense "merge": it would become meaningless to separate the one from the other. if at a certain stage the biological individual of this symbiotic couple would die, the computational part might carry on as if nothing had happened. the individual's mind could then be said to have survived in the non-organic part of the system.

uploading

mind uploading home page

learning, brain-like webs

cybernetic immortality part I [y dead] part II [death]