$arr_19 ), array( 3, false, $arr_20, $arr_24 ), array( 2, false, "\" />", $arr_25 ) ) ); ?> $arr_27 ), array( 3, false, $arr_28, $arr_30 ), array( 2, false, "\" />\n\n", $arr_31 ) ) ); ?> array( 2, false, false, $arr_9 ), array( 4, $arr_10, "if", $arr_245, $arr_248 ), array( 2, false, "\n", $arr_249 ) ) ); ?> rr_466 ), array( 4, $arr_467, "if", $arr_482, $arr_484 ), array( 2, false, "\n", $arr_485 ) ) ); ?> Brain Dump » Linux Magazine
 

Brain Dump

Brain Dump

 

Dear Linux Magazine Reader,

I always perk up when I hear new information about the brain, with the hope that it will improve my own brain, or, at least, provide it some exercise. The brain has been in the news recently. All of our brains improve when we read about brains in the news: Slashdot covered it; the BBC covered it. The news is, they found a 2,000-year-old skull with part of the brain left in it [1]. No one actually has any hope of jump-starting this brain, but it is still interesting to scientists. The skull with part of a brain was found in a muddy pit, where it appeared to have been part of some kind of ritual offering. According to the experts, "There is something unusual in the way the brain has been treated … ."

You can learn a lot about a culture from how it treats its brains. The ancients Egyptians believed the brain was totally unnecessary for the afterlife; therefore, they extracted it through the nose with a long wire hook as part of the mummification process [2]. Closer to our own time, Albert Einstein's brain [3] was extracted in the hospital where he died by the pathologist who was on call for the evening. The pathologist took photos of the brain and later divided it in several pieces, storing the pieces in two large jars. He had plans to investigate the properties of the brain, or possibly, to get a brain expert to investigate it, but he lost his job at the hospital, and the brain was left in his basement until his ex-wife threatened to throw the jars away if he didn't move them.

[...]

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  • Cliffhanger

    How was the brain treated? The article never answers the question, but digresses into the future of virtual brains.

  • Uploading the mind

    You interpret Mr Kurzweil's vision as a kind of electronic funerary urn containing the disembodied mind, which you evidently regard as "the departed", floating embalmed and isolated so long as someone else pays the bills.

    This is a long way from what Mr Kurzweil is suggesting. He sees the uploaded mind as liberated from the constraints of a cumbersome and increasingly irrelevant organic body, in direct contact with an on-line world of systems and other uploaded minds, and working to pay the bills. Programmers will continue to program, accountants to account, journalists to write, astronomers to scan the heavens. Bee-keepers may have a problem, I admit.

    Nobody yet knows what the mind will be like when removed from the organic body, what it will be capable of, or how it will adapt and evolve.

    However it does not take much imagination to come up with some interesting consequences. Environmentalists will be delighted, as food production will be wound down, manufacturing will follow mining to the asteroid belt, and non-organic human life will find being off-planet far more convenient, leaving the Earth as a huge wildlife reserve. Long distance space travel will finally be possible, without the need for Earth type environments and the multi-generational ships so beloved of SF writers.

    In what I see as an essentially Open Source future, we may be able to form a properly cooperative, borderless, society. But another of Kurzweil's visions, the historical singularity, makes such speculation futile. Of one thing I am sure, we are in for an interesting century.
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