Daniel Burger

My new listicle is mental 🤖 "Six Wild Ideas for Perpetuating Your Mind" 🧠 Head Transplant w/Sergio Canavero Mindclones w/@skybiome Brain-in-Jar w/Bexorg Brain Upload w/@NectomeResearch Gradual Replacement w/@Replacing_Aging Synthetic Neortex w/@danburonline 👇for link

Great being in Shenzhen for the @LBF_org hosted by @realNathanCheng and @EricMagro2, congrats on building such a passionate community. It was also wonderful discussing a progressive science/project-funding strategy with @danburonline to support unique ideas and people.

AI, mind uploading, neuromorphic computing, biocomputing and neurotech may seem like separate, somewhat overlapping disciplines, yet I think their trajectories are converging towards a single point that I call "synthetic consciousness". – AI research seeks brain-like efficiency (from CPUs to GPUs, and now perhaps towards more exotic hardware and approaches such as reservoir, thermodynamic and quantum computing). – Biocomputing has come full circle: the brain is already good at efficient cognitive computation, so let's tap into that. But understanding neural tissue and its cytoarchitecture, and improving our ability to interface with it, brings us straight into neurotech: working with our existing brains to, e.g., let AI tap into us and us into AI (i.e., BCIs). – Neuromorphic computing sits somewhat between all these fields, asking how we can build an artificial/synthetic piece of brain whose computational dynamics we can steer. Some are already thinking about integrating such systems into the human brain as neuroprosthetics, bringing us back into neurotech (and also mind uploading). – Lastly, mind uploading people still focus too much on the neurocomputational functionalist layer. I think confronting the (hard(er)) consciousness question will push them further into physics and the substrate, putting them on the same convergence path as everyone else (trust me on that one, mind uploaders will soon "discover" mechanistic functionalism by Gualtiero Piccinini. Come back in a few years...). The ambition (of AI and mind uploading) at that point extends well beyond life extension. Longevity research, biotech and pharma aim to repair the biological substrate; substrate transition aims to overcome its fragility altogether – since even a perfectly rejuvenated brain remains a single point of failure. And a substrate we can build is a substrate we can steer, which means steerable phenomenology (basically the wet dream of transhumanists). Much of this is the same promise AI makes for itself: prosperity, vastly greater access to knowledge, faster information processing and richer interconnectivity, but in phenomenal space, as part of our own experience. For me, the crucial part is the gradual replacement aspect: a brain we can become without breaking personal continuity (gradual reorganisation principle and serial lesion effect from David A. Barrett), along the lines of Hans Moravec's proposal but on a physical substrate rather than in simulation (the aim of our @synconeticsorg programme). That's why I suspect this is bigger than AI itself, as I tweeted earlier today. We would be engineering our own continuation, with intelligence growing as part of us rather than next to us, which also leaves nothing external to align. AI could turn out to be an early precursor, like alchemy was to chemistry: some of the ambitions survive, but the underlying ontology changes. What we thought we were building as a machine outside ourselves becomes a way of continuing and expanding what we are.

Wild. Perfused pig brains for preservation from @eightsixscience @danburonline talk at @MiraiTechCity

I wonder how many people read, e.g. a complex foundational work on consciousness when they "were a bit younger", were impressed by its intellectual breadth/depth, stuck with it as their core theoretical commitment, and then basically never read, to the same depth, other complex foundational works that come from a totally different angle/try to refute the one they read outright. It takes A LOT of courage and time and intellectual naivety (which gets harder to regain the older and "well-read" you become) to "believe" in one theory for many years, defend it and try to understand it more deeply, and then, via proper Bayesian updating, come to the conclusion that another theory fits the evidence better and reject the previous one/switch to the new one