X-Message-Number: 8563
Date: Mon, 8 Sep 1997 08:40:12 -0700
From: "Joseph J. Strout" <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #8559: glandular effects in uploading

In Message #8559, Olaf Henny <> wrote:

>Certainly the most important component of the "I" is contained in
>our brains, but we are not a purely cerebral beings.  When I am
>revived I want to take with me all the other components of my
>'self', my fears, my adrenaline turn-ons, my hopes, my anxieties,
>my sensualities, the comfort of a hug, my sexuality, both in
>giving and in taking, and the optimism...

Me too.

>If we are uploaded, we will have no doubt ample
>excess computing capacity left to strictly assess every move we
>make in terms of probability of success.  Our life will be as dry
>as the - ahhmm - exhalation of an Egyptian mummy and as
>exciting as watching laundry dry.

What makes you think this?  If we can upload a brain at all, implementing
emotions, hormones, neuromodulators, etc. will be almost trivial subparts
of that problem.  Uploading will not be successful until these problems are
solved, and there is no reason to suppose they are unsolvable.

An uploaded human will be as much like a computer of today as a human is
like a paramecium.  Don't impose your prejudices based on today's computers
on what uploads will be like.  They will be far more human than machine (as
these terms are generally used in today's english).  Mind uploading does
NOT mean converting you into a logical, Spock-ish symbol processor
executing well-defined algorithms in your head.  It simply converts your
neurons (and glands, and so on) from biological to artificial.  Their
functioning is exactly the same, or the upload is not functionally
equivalent, and therefore not successful.

Now, once uploading is accomplished, I'm sure there will be some folks who
will start tinkering with their brains, trying to enhance intelligence,
surpress instincts, etc.  But I won't be one of them, and you won't either
if you don't want to be.

>No, I am afraid I want my glandular system with me, with all the
>mix-up its contradicting hormones bring to me.  It may not enhance
>the intelligence, which has been given so much predominance here
>recently, but it will give me my 'humanness' and for that I will
>accept a small curtailment of my intelligence potential.

Well said!  The primary goal of uploading is to stay alive, not to become
superhuman.  If some people feel a need to become superhuman, that's their
business, but I'm with you -- give me only enough superiority to avoid
unwanted death, and let me hang on to my humanity.

,------------------------------------------------------------------.
|    Joseph J. Strout           Department of Neuroscience, UCSD   |
|               http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/  |
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