What will happen if our creation can exist on the Internet forever

Imagine that the human brain can bescanned in the smallest detail and recreated in a computer simulation. The mind of a person and his memories, emotions and personality will be duplicated. In fact, a new and equally reliable version of this person will now exist in a potentially immortal digital form. Is it possible? And what “pitfalls” can be in this process, if such a thing ever happens?

Is it possible to exist in a virtual environment?

Is digital immortality possible?

The scientific community increasingly suggests that“Digitization” of consciousness and loading it into a virtual environment is more likely than not. The technology is likely to be created in the distant future, but considering how much interest this topic causes, loading consciousness into something like the Internet seems inevitable. Of course, we cannot be sure how this can affect our culture, but as the technology of modeling artificial neural networks develops, we can guess what this future may be. One possible outcome is described by psychologist Michael Graziano in his new article, conducting the thought experiment described below.

How to digitize the brain

Suppose one day you goto the clinic to perform a similar operation. Let's be optimistic and pretend that the technology works just fine. After the “digitization” procedure (let's call it that), you still remain yourself and do not receive any new abilities. At the same time, your virtual copy “wakes up” in the virtual world. She possesses your set of knowledge and skills. Your life experience and all your memories. The last thing your double remembers is how he went into the clinic and went through the digitization procedure.

I prefer the "geometric" way of reasoningabout this situation. Imagine your life is like the letter Y. says Mr. Graziano. The base of the letter is the moment of birth. And as you grow, your personality is formed. Then you allow yourself to be digitized, and from that moment the letter Y branches. Now there are two trajectories, each of which is equally you. The “biological” branch will inevitably die, but the “digital” one can potentially live forever.

Having a digital double is a very complex philosophical and ethical issue.

Each of us is already present in the virtual worldwith a constant flow of information passing through social networks, YouTube, Twitter and so on. We live in a kind of digital multiverse, and each of us lives in our own “virtual bubble”, where the parts of the multiverse are the “pieces” of the Internet into which we enter, and the “bubble” is our personal space. Confidential information.

Read also: Facebook’s new neural interface reads thoughts almost without delay

If the opportunity is created to live in digitalthe world in its entirety, and even so that people in it were with the same personalities and needs as in real life, while not having the drawbacks of existing in reality like diseases, most of the population can agree to this. What do you think about this kind of digital immortality? Tell us about it in our chat in Telegram.

As it lives in a virtual worldmore and more people, the balance of culture from reality will shift in this direction. Considering that most people will undergo the process of transferring consciousness, at some point physical existence can become only the initial stage of personality development, and real life will begin only after digitization.