Posted on 03/26/2003 6:34:11 AM PST by vannrox
Ghosts, computers, and Chinese Whispers
Toby Howard
This article first appeared in Personal Computer World magazine, November 1996.
"CLICK HERE to upload your soul" was one of the tamer headlines seen recently in reports describing the "new research direction" of British Telecom's research labs at Martlesham Heath. BT, it was reported by such authorities as The Guardian, Reuters, Time, and the Electronic Telegraph, is embarking on a huge new research project. Funded to the tune of 25 million pounds, an eight-man team is developing a "Soul Catcher" memory chip. The chip will be implanted behind a person's eye, and will record all the thoughts and experiences of their lifetime.
The idea that we might migrate minds from brains into silicon has been around for a while, and is usually referred to as "uploading". This might be achieved destructively, by visiting each neuron in turn, determining its particular characteristics and interconnections, and then replacing it with an equivalent microscopic computer based on nanotechnology; or, perhaps preferable from the patient's point of view, by non-destructively scanning the structure of the living brain and reproducing it elsewhere in silicon, like copying a complex drawing using a pantograph.
The amount of data involved would be immense, since the hardware of our nervous system is believed to comprise around 1012 neurons with 1015 synaptic interconnections. But the capacity of silicon for storing information is increasing at an almost unbelievable rate. "Moore's Law", first expressed by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1964, stated that the density of chips roughly doubles every year. Although the doubling period since the early 1970s is now more like 18 months, we are still seeing an explosive growth of chip-power. If the trend continues into the next century we might expect by 2025 to store ten million megabytes (ten terabytes, or 1013 bytes) on a single chip. If so, we might hope to record information about a brain's physical structure in a few of these chips.
But to talk about uploading thoughts and memories is quite another matter. When we talk about brains and minds, we must confront the classical "mind-body problem". We know that our brain is a collection of biological structures of (so far, at least) unimaginable complexity. Outwardly this "brain-stuff", once described by computing pioneer Alan Turing as like a bowl of cold porridge, is unmistakably physical. Deeper, a stained microscopic section of brain matter reveals a riot of interconnected neurons that looks like squashed rhubarb. How can this biology conjure or host the mystery of human consciousness? How can our minds influence the matter in the universe? Imagine: you're in the pub, and you fancy a bottle of beer. Within moments the bartender obliges. Your mind has somehow caused uncountable billions of atoms in the universe -- atoms in your muscles, your throat, the air, the barman's ears, his brain, his muscles, the fridge, the bottle, the opener, the glass -- to directly respond to your will. Quite a trick for porridge and rhubarb.
What is this "you" that has such power to disrupt the universe? Are "you" some ethereal entity -- a ghost, a soul -- operating the controls of the brain machine? Or is the machine itself just so complex that in our inability to understand its activity we seek refuge in the idea of a separate "soul"? For proponents of "Strong Artifical Intelligence", the answer is clear: human consciousness really is nothing more than the algorithmic bubbling of cold porridge, and in fact any sufficiently complex algorithm, running on any kind of machine, will lead inexorably to thinking and consciousness. Or so they say. A fierce debate rages over this claim.
If the "Strong AI" researchers are right, then we should one day expect to see computers which behave as if they are conscious. (It's the "as if" here which so antagonises the philosophers). But the possibility of creating conscious machines raises serious ethical questions. What rights would a conscious machine possess? Would concerned individuals form a Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Machines? Would those of a religious bent demand that a conscious machine be taught how to worship God? What if conscious machines did not like us, and turned nasty?
But we must, I regret, be sceptical futurists, and return to earth. Is BT really trying to cache our consciousnesses onto chips stuffed in our heads? "No!", says Chris Winter, the BT researcher quoted in the press as heading the "team of eight Soul Catcher scientists". "We are not building anything!", he told me. The whole story is a media invention, developed like a game of Chinese Whispers from its origins in an after-dinner press briefing Winter gave to local journalists, intending to enthuse them about the future-looking work at BT Labs. Winter's research group had simply undertaken a "technology trend analysis" to speculate on the future capacity of silicon, and using Moore's Law had estimated the 10 terabyte chip by 2025. To illustrate the immensity of such storage, Winter compared it with a back-of-an-envelope guestimate of the volume of data input through a person's sensory organs in an average 70-year lifespan -- 10 terabytes. The press took it from there.
Since current research into neuro-computational cochlear implants for the deaf, and retinal implants for the blind is proving successful, perhaps in the distant future something like the Soul Catcher will become a reality. However, the vision of Bob Hoskins saying "It's good to upload" makes me reach for another universe-changing beer. For more on uploading, visit www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Uploading.
Toby Howard teaches at the University of Manchester. |
Imagine a microchip implanted behind your eyes, able to record everything you see, anything you hear, all the sensations you feel. Imagine your whole life captured as electronic data for anybody to watch...
?This is not like TV only better. This is life, a piece of somebody?s life straight from the cerebral cortex... I mean, you?re there, you?re seeing it, you?re doing it.?
Scary, isn?t it, just how fast science fiction turns into potential fact?
That?s a quote from Lenny in Strange Days (a seriously under-rated film). And yet the basic technology?s already being developed. At Stanford University in the US a team is working on a way to cut and rejoin nerves, to form electrical links between on-chip microelectronics and axons of the brain. After the nerves regenerate, neural signals can (and have been) recorded.
But it was Dr Chris Winter from British Telecom?s Martlesham Heath Laboratories, near Ipswich who really upped the ante and sent science watchers into a spin last year, when he mentioned BT?s ideas for the ?Soul Catcher?. A micro-memory chip, designed to be implanted into the human brain to record life as it happens.
?This is the end of death... By combining this information with a record of the person?s genes, we could recreate a person physically, emotionally and spiritually,? announced Dr Winter. ?All we think, all our emotions and creative brain activity will be able to be copied onto silicon. This is immortality in the truest sense - future generations will not die.?
Except that, as Chris Winter now stresses, ?the Soul Catcher was a concept, an extrapolation of technology...? Although that doesn?t mean it won?t happen! In fact, Chris Winter?s view is still that ?sensory information capture? is perfectly plausible.
And given the amount of work quietly being done in the US, Japan and the UK on human/machine interfaces it?s hard not to think the scientists have just decided to keep the lid on it all, rather than face the feeding-frenzy of the press everytime they surface with a little snip of information!
The idea behind the Soul Catcher is that chips would collect sensory data for later use. So an optic memory chip behind the eye would be linked to other ?in-brain? chips until our five senses were captured.
?As proposed,? says Chris Winter, ?the chip could store the equivalent of video, sound, smell and touch files for you to replay.?
Think of it as making a back-up copy of your life...
Why would anyone want a back-up copy of every mistake, blunder and hangover they?ve ever had? Because, it would then be possible to give a new-born child a lifetime?s experience by giving it the Soul Catcher from a dead adult.
Pretty useful, if you?re wondering what to do with that clone you?ve been saving up for. And it sure as hell beats paying some West Coast cryonics company around $28,000 to freeze your head, plus annual storage costs of $200 or so.
(Always remembering that cryobiologist Arthur Rowe?s dictum that believing cryonics can reanimate somebody who?s been frozen is like believing you can turn a hamburger back into a cow!)
But if immortality isn?t your thing, then how about being someone else for half an hour instead? Because, according to BT?s ?artificial life team?, within 30 years we could be able to relive other people?s lives by accessing their ?soul catcher? chips and downloading their experiences to a computer, to a TV or maybe even direct to a VR set. And that?s where the real commercial interest will lie...
What price film and satellite TV when real life is on offer? Just imagine the bidding wars if instead of just talking about it, media junkies like Princess Di actually offered to let you inside the action.
It might sound impossible, but don?t forget that it?s not just Stamford who are working on direct neural interfaces, Japanese scientists are also busy growing actual neurons on the surface of addressable chips... And BT have already measured the flow of impulses from the optic nerve, as well as impulses produced by smell, taste, touch and hearing. And the maths stacks up, according to the calculations done by Peter Cochrane, head of research at BT Laboratories.
In the course of an eighty-year life the human brain processes roughly 10 terrabite of memory, equivalent to 300 million books or 7,142,857,142,860,000 floppy discs!
Which ten years ago would have been impossible to even realistically contemplate storing as data. But it seems there?s a basic law of miniaturization on Martlesham Heath side which states that the amount of computer memory a chip can hold is increasing by a factor 100 every decade.
No one really doubts that the human/machine interface will come. In fact, with the advent of pacemakers, artificial hearts, contact lenses implanted into the eye, and the recent announcement by Illinois? Northwestern University of plastic lungs many people believe we?re already there.
But the mind/machine interface is the Holy Grail of cyborg culture and however unlikely it may seem, British Telecom aims to be at the forefront of that technology. And there can be no doubt that the first company to patent a way of recording life as it happens would be sitting on a goldmine. And it?s easy to see why.
It?s not just the mind-numbing, scary applications like cloning yourself, or seeing if there isn?t some way to download that 10 terabites of life-data into a computer to produce a real ghost in the machine. The real money would be in entertainment.
Just think about, TV is saturated with real-life drama. Every emergency service imaginable has had a fly-on-the-wall documentary team trailing after it. There isn?t a hospital - adult, children?s or pet - that hasn?t hosted its own TV show. The channels are stuffed to the gills with crying chat-show and on-screen confessions...
Now just imagine that instead of some two-timed woman sobbing into her Kleenex, Vanessa features direct ?mind clips? from the woman, her two-timing partner, the other woman... Not just people talking about it, but the audience actually seeing, feeling, smelling it. The very idea would turn TV and entertainment upside down.
And how long before some latter-day Chief of Police announces on the 6 o? clock news that, ?If you?re innocent you?ll have nothing to fear from letting the police take a look at your chip.? Bang go elaborately-constructed alibis, either you were at the scene of the crime or you weren?t...
We already live surrounded by surveillance cameras, with our lives recorded on credit ratings, car licences, DHS records. Even some mobile phones can be used as tracking devices. Do we really need our secrets recorded for all to see? And do we want to live with our past ever fresh in our minds?
Which one of us is going to be able to resist re-playing that ugly argument or that nasty break-up until we know it word for word. One of the good things about life is that memories do eventually fade, good and bad, they?re designed that way to let us get on with the rest of our life. Having it on tape, in our heads may not be the best option, especially not if the police, governments, ever our employers are going to start demanding to know what we all do behind closed doors!
Getting back to Strange Days, there?s a line in the film where someone points out, ?the question isn?t whether you?re paranoid, it?s whether you?re paranoid enough...?
Last year, a well-known satanic perpetrator (Tony - pseudonym) targeted me with very lethal psychotronics technology. Before that I was perfectly functional. I'm told that the only way they were able to slip this by the military was because it wasn't meant to completely destroy an enemy target. Unfortunately they have now crossed the line and my case is precedent setting because of the sheer damage done to my body. I'm waging war with them as we speak, while they are taking me apart."Tony" and others are implementing mind control programs Ames Lab in Mountain View and Livermore Lab which they can place in the inner eyelid of a person from a distance. They can hypnotize, induce false memories, etc...They can also sexually violate a person from a distance and destroy the persons body entirely, apparently via some new advances in physics and Virtual Reality Technology. They can place computers into people, impact their body in an attempt to robotize them, via cybernetics, and basically implement a process of technelogical possession. Once a person is placed in a computer program the voices can be disguised as Artifical intelligence. The ability to do this is cited in a news article attached called the "soul catcher."
They can remove body parts now from a distance, which they did with me, and they put me on a computer, somewhat described in the news article below. I am now "connected" to a mainframe somewhere in Geneva Switzerland. The same place supposedly where the world financiers have been keeping track of the public, as described in a book written 20 years ago called "When your money fails." I had trouble believing this in the past but it is really what various people have written about which they describe as a New World Order. There was an attempt last year by many others to resist what was occuring but it all backfired. What has been brought into effect is an End Times or a contrived Armageddan.
Apparently the plans are to implement this technology en masse. I can't prove it, I am simply telling as many people as I can and I'm trying to get funds for medical testing to formally document. They can hide what they're doing from doctors to a great extent but in my case they took me apart too much. From what I understand, they didn't mean to ruin my body so completely but they were busy doing satanic rites on me from a distance and they got carried away. I cannot die a normal death because they went through a zombification process which in my case means they removed the ability of any of my organs to function- and I mean most of them - but they are keeping my heart beating from a distance.
At one point microphones were placed in my entire body cavity and genital area. "Tony" was doing a rite on me having to do with his mythology around the Temple of Seti. It is truly satanic and the technology is in the hands of many of the satanic groups around the world. He got carried away metaphysically (if this is within your belief system) and actually established communication with another order of demonic entities via a SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) type program. He is now being monitored by them also.
They also have the ability to destroy someone esoterically/metaphysically, via the technology, remove their astral body, etc...which they did with me.
They are too afraid of actually coming to my home and murder me in person for some strange unknown reason but they are just continuing to attack me from a distance, and I am not putting them through my own ritual called the Rite of the Coward.
Several Hollywood types are involved due to the fact that a faction found out about it, were curious, and then some of them got into deep trouble with "Tony"
Feel free to pass this along as you wish.
I can be reached at kevjon2@mailcity.com
SOUL CATCHER IMPLANTS
British scientists are developing a concept for a computer chip which, when implanted into the skull behind the eye, will be able to record a person's every life time thought ands sensation."This is the end of death," said Dr. Chris Winter of British Telecom's artificial-life team. He predicts that within thirty years it will be possible to relive other people's lives by playing back their experiences on a computer."By combining this information with a record of a person's genes, we could recreate a person physically, emotionally and spiritually."
Dr Winter and his team of scientists at BT's Martlesham Heath Laboratories, near Ipswich, call the chip "the Soul Catcher."
British telecom would not divulge how much money it is investing in the project, but Dr. Winter said it was taking "Soul Catcher 2025" very seriously. He confessed there were profound ethical considerations, butr emphasised that BT was embarking on this line of research so it could keep at the forefront of communications technology.
Dr. Winter said "an implanted chip would be like an aircraft's black box, and would enhance communications beyond current concepts. "For example, police would be able to use it to relive an attack, rape or murder from the victims viewpoint, to help catch the criminal... I could even play back the smells, sounds and sighs of my holidays to friends.
Other more frightening applications include downloading an older person's experiences into a newborn baby by transplanting the chip.
Sources: The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, 18 July 1996
The Melding of Mind With Machine
HEADLINE: PERSONAL COMPUTERS;
May Be the Next Phase of Evolution
BYLINE: By ROB FIXMER
BODY:WE humans have been trying to accelerate our own evolution for millennia, and while in some ways we appear to be getting away with it, biological computing could well test the forbearance of Mother Nature.
Until now, the most ambitious efforts to outwit natural selection have been cloning and the Human Genome Project, which sets out to map the results of random mutation and natural selection on our collective genetic inheritance. Scientists embark on these projects not out of mere curiosity but with the hope of remaking ourselves into organisms more fit for survival than our ancestors.
But photocopying genes and building a repair manual for them are only ways of tinkering with natural selection. Far more ambitious are efforts to meld machines and living cells being undertaken now in several areas of research. If these endeavors ever realize their goals, the personal computer will become very personal indeed.
Consider the work of researchers at British Telecommunications P.L.C. in the area of implanted chips. One project, somewhat ominously dubbed "Soul Catcher," seeks to develop a computer that can be implanted in the brain to complement human memory and computational skills. In addition, it would enable the gathering of extrasensory information -- in this case, data transmitted by wireless networking.
This area of research may seem farfetched, but it is really the logical extension of devices like pacemakers, implants that simulate hearing for the deaf, and neuro-stimulators, which send small electrical charges through nerves to alleviate certain kinds of pain.
In a metaphorical sense, the morphing of man and machine is already taking place. Among Silicon Valley digit-heads, the human brain and its products are commonly alluded to as "wetware," while intelligence is expressed in "bandwidth" -- as in, "A lot of valuable wetware was invested in that product, but we couldn't sell it to a bunch of low-bandwidth vulture capitalists."
At the same time that electronics is making its way into the human body, biological organisms are instructing chip design. British Telecom is investing in Soul Catcher not only for the long-term potential of brain-chip implants but on the assumption that, conversely, the workings of the human central nervous system can teach chip makers about network efficiency.
After all, while our information storage capacity and computational skills are limited compared with those of computers, the responses of even a 1-year-old child to stimuli like pain, light or sound suggest that the nervous system is a far more robust network that the fastest Ethernet.
Biology is already invading computer architecture. Two University of Rochester professors -- Dr. Animesh Ray, a biologist, and Dr. Mitsunori Ogihara, a computer scientist -- collaborated two years ago in building a rudimentary device that uses nucleotides to perform functions typically handled by transistors in a silicon processor.
And across the continent, in Santa Clara, Calif., engineers at a company called Affymetrix are making computer chips containing DNA to diagnose genetic mutations.
Will the merging of machine and organism bypass evolution or is it merely an extension of the evolutionary process?
Peter Cochrane, the head of research at British Telecom as well as a futurist and a specialist in "human-computer interfaces," embraces the latter view. In fact, he says the future of the human species depends on our continuing and expanding ability to process information. If not, he wrote in a 1996 column for The Daily Telegraph in Britain, "systems more efficient at information processing may supplant us."
In some ways, the spread of the Internet suggests that people are already on the threshold of a major evolutionary step as information-processing organisms.
Communication over the Internet breaks old time and space bounds, allowing those who are connected to share, interactively, an enormous and growing wealth of information. The technology is quickly evolving into a sort of global nervous system.
It is hard to imagine the full consequences of uninterrupted access to that network through an implanted computer that renders each of us a node in a global tapestry of information.
Without safeguards, for example, the enhancement of our brains could easily destroy our minds, leaving us unable to distinguish reality from virtual reality -- maybe even self from non-self. Powerful software would have to be developed to help us sort, sift and prioritize the constant deluge of information lest our brains degenerate into data landfills.
Many people already feel overwhelmed by information. One more billboard, radio jingle, dashboard gauge or spam E-mail and we suspect we will fry like an overloaded circuit.
In the end, perhaps the most frightening question in these futuristic visions of the mind-machine meld is who or what can be entrusted to run the system. Who among us would entrust our innermost thoughts and the plumbing for all this incoming data to an "encephalized" operating system? Windows 2028, anyone?
GRAPHIC: Drawing (Stuart Goldenberg)
LOAD-DATE: August 11, 1998
SECTION: Section F; Page 6; Column 4; Science Desk
LENGTH: 849 words
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
August 11, 1998, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final
Of course, a human and their perceptions are more than just an arrangement of brain cells. The whole spine & nervous system figure into how we think and act. Hormones (or the lack of them) are a huge influence as well.
Evolution is a physical process, isn't it? How could something immaterial evolve from an iterative physical process like evolution?
Ah, yes. Sum ergo cogito. The chimerical, unnatainable goal of the scientific materialists...
I hate when that happens.
--Boris
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