You undergo the procedure to have this prosthetic implanted. (later it might be an injection of nanites that build the device in situ).
It backs up your existing memories to your brainframe cloud device, and sets as default the storage of all future memories to this device, as well as all data retrieval.
For you the experience is no different than having your appendix out, you wake up from the anesthetic and feel no different. With the exception of much better recall. You never forget where you left your keys again etc.
But apart from that, you feel like you do now.
Are you still you ?
I’d probably say “more or less” in this case. Though I shudder at the potential for long-term changes in personality and so forth. I tend to think that we evolved to have a fairly fuzzy memory for good reasons. For starters, forgetting is a wonderful form of forgiveness: I don’t generally forgive people who screw me over, I just slowly forget how angry it made me at the time, so I get over it (in most cases, but certainly not all – there is a point of “no return”). On the other hand, it’s also probably a good thing that I can’t recall my fondest memories with flawless fidelity; if I could, I’d probably dwell on those memories constantly, and be less interested in moving forward with life to make new joyful experiences.
And that’s just the obvious stuff that comes to mind – god only knows what kind of unforeseeable and disastrous things could happen to a human being as a result of some well-meaning but horribly misguided modifications to the brain.
I think that if we start modifying brain function with fancy new technology, we’re going to be in for some extremely nasty surprises, and may stand to lose some of the most vital aspects of our humanity along the way.
One day you go in for heart surgery, you get given the general anesthetic like we do now, but there is a complication. You die on the table. So they simply thaw out a clone and link your "mind" to it.
Are you still you ?
Nope, you died. They may be able to create a reasonable facsimile, but that’s a new individual – the mind can’t be transferred, imo. We tend to regard the brain as some generic organ like the heart or stomach, but it’s not: every brain is actually a unique network of roughly 100 billion neurons woven together in a very specific way over the course of your lifetime, and a trillion glial cells, among others. I can’t foresee any way to replicate that network – it’s structurally so complex, astonishingly complex – cells and enzymes and all kinds of unfathomably complex neurochemical feedback systems, all highly individualized in each person. I can’t imagine any way to clone that wildly elaborate neurological ecosystem. They might one day be able to get fairly close somehow, but I can’t see a way to clone it down to every last neuron and molecule. And in any case, it’s just a copy.
And I’m not saying that synthetic intelligence is impossible, I’m just saying that it’s fundamentally
different in nature. Who knows? Maybe a silicon system could become genuinely conscious, rather than simply mimicking consciousness, with the right chemical processes and adaptive mechanisms.
Last week I listened to a strangely intriguing interview with David Adair, on Heather Wade’s new podcast
The Kingdom of Nye. He told a story on Art Bell’s show back in 1997 or 1998, about an experience that he claims he had at Area 51 about 20 years before anyone in the public knew about that base. But in this recent interview he describes a detail that he avoided back then. He had said that he was shown a weird organic-looking fusion engine the size of a school bus, that had suffered a containment failure. And in this interview he elaborated on that: he claims that this engine was conscious, and it communicated with him. It even had a name: “Pitholem.” Evidently it was surviving by absorbing some of the thermal energy in the room, and it was not happy about being held prisoner by the military people in command, which it referred to as “black hearts.”
It’s a really interesting story. Obviously it’s very difficult to believe – but I look forward to seeing the documentation that he has to support his story, which will come out soon in the form of a documentary. But here’s the thing: now that we know that the average age of habitable earth-like worlds in the cosmos is around
3 billion years ahead of us, it’s easy to imagine that there are sentient technologies out there in the universe. Heck, it’s possible if not likely that most of the AAVs being reported, represent a highly advanced and sentient form of technology. After all, an organic pilot or remote operator would likely be a poor method of controlling a device that changes position faster than the human reflex time. But a living biomechanical computer equipped with a sophisticated gravitational field propulsion technology would be ideal for safely navigating hairpin trajectories in close quarters, as we’ve heard about many times.
I dunno if the civilization creating the devices we’ve seen are post-biological from top to bottom, but I doubt it. Because I think you’re over-looking a key fact: we’re a form of technology. And a supremely advanced form of technology at that: we learn and adapt and grow, and our systems can regenerate with amazing efficacy. What we do every day is vastly superior to any technology that we can manufacture, or will be able to manufacture, in any foreseeable timescale.
In a weird way, I think this reverence for technology is a form of human conceit: by revering the capabilities of technology, we’re revering our own minds because we make it. But even the most advanced computers in the world are still complete crap compared to the sublimely advanced organic technology that we represent, which is the product of billions of years of natural selection and evolutionary processes. One scratch and a silicon chip is garbage. But we can cut pieces of a human brain out, and the damn thing will heal itself, and gradually restore its functions. All the while learning and adapting to new knowledge and stimulus. We may never be able to produce a technology with that level of capability.
So like I said before, I think we should master the organic technology of our own bodies; fix the flaws that evolution has missed, optimize our systems for maximum healthy longevity and regeneration, and become the best form of humanity possible...not try to devise some kind of substitute. Because we have a much better shot at getting awesome results by hacking the wondrous organic systems of our own bodies, than by going back to the drawing board and trying to figure out something entirely new from scratch.
They can work together and in unison in various ratios, but individuals or groups at some point resort to using the outer solely and as a crutch, whereas others may completely achieve all the outer tech can and more, organically from within by mastering the so called "siddhis or superpowers", breath control and tuning one's consciousness with the universal vibration of Om.
I used to write off this kind of thing as lunacy, but then I read Paramahansa Yogananda’s book
Autobiography of a Yogi, and found his accounts of Babaji and his sister Mataji, and some other accounts of transient materialization and such. Now I don’t know what to think. He man was so sincere that it's palpable, so it's hard to believe that he was confabulating all of that stuff.
One thing I’m absolutely certain of is that this state of consciousness that we’re in now, is only a faint shadow of the level of consciousness that we’re actually capable of - we're all basically sleepwalking. But does that awakening entail any supernatural powers, like immortality or teleportation? I wish I knew for sure. But I’m inclined to believe that a dramatic shift upward in consciousness doesn’t imbue one with any transcendental physical powers, because the known avatars like Christ and Buddha and Mohammed and Lao Tzu, and more recently Jiddu Krishnamurti, apparently lived outwardly normal human lives, and died just like everyone else (although their experience of it was much different, no doubt). And I’ve never heard a single story of Krishnamurti performing any kind of miracle, although the depth of his insight was pretty miraculous.
Ultimately it probably doesn’t really matter: everyone should experience at least one moment of enlightenment in their lifetime, so they can see the unvarnished truth for themselves. I think that’s far more important than the flashy stuff we’ve heard about in legends.