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A Workshop on Substrate-Independent Minds and Consciousness is taking place at
Towards a Science of Consciousness 2014, April 21-26, Tucson, AR
Members of the SIM and Whole Brain Emulation community, including carboncopies.org, are organizing a workshop at the Consciousness 2014 conference about SIM, WBE, mind uploading and related concepts and their connection with matters of Consciousness.
More information about the workshop appears below.
As stated on the conference web site: The Toward a Science of Consciousness (TSC) conferences are the pre-eminent world gatherings on all approaches to the profound and fundamental question of how the brain produces conscious experience, a question which addresses who we are, the nature of reality and our place in the universe. The conference is sponsored by The Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona.
Speakers at the conference in 2014 include: Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Karl Deisseroth, Petra Stoerig, Christof Koch, Henry Markram, David Eagleman, Ned Block, David Chalmers, Stuart Hameroff, Giulio Tononi, George Mashour, Susan Blackmore, Rebecca Goldstein & many more.
It is obvious that a major conference on consciousness is a good place to discuss matters surrounding consciousness in brain emulations, consciousness and uploading procedures, and similar topics.
Pre-Conference Workshop
Preserving Consciousness: How a missing science of consciousness hobbles life-saving medical research
Presenters: Kenneth Hayworth, Randal A. Koene, Max More
Date: Monday, April 21, 2014
Session: 2:00-6:00 PM
Room: TBA
When it comes to neuroscience, it seems science fiction is quickly becoming reality. Hundreds of thousands of people now benefit from direct neural interfaces in the form of cochlear and deep brain implants. 3D electron microscopy can now routinely map out the precise nanometer-scale synaptic connectivity of small pieces of fixed animal brains. Two-photon calcium imaging can record the exact firing patterns of hundreds of neurons in an awake animal. Prosthetic replacement of a cognitive brain region (beginning with a region of the hippocampus) are moving from rat to primate to human trials. And governments and private institutions are directing billions of dollars into massive neuroscience projects such as the European Human Brain Project, the USA BRAIN Initiative, and the Allen Institute’s Mindscope project, whose target goals are astonishingly ambitious. If progress continues at this pace it seems likely that we will have a complete mechanistic understanding of the brain by the end of this century and will possibly even have the technological tools necessary to record the anatomy and physiology of a specific brain so as to upload individual human minds by brain emulation in computers or neuromimetic hardware.
Given this backdrop, more and more scientifically minded individuals are asking whether there may be a way of saving lives through neuroprosthetic replacement, possibly even by preserving a brain in a static state able to last a century or more until such neuroprosthetic replacement is technologically mature. Could it be that we are closer to these life-saving medical procedures than most of us realize? And is the lack of a science of consciousness complicit in the absence of such a realization? Without an accepted science of consciousness most people dismiss the possibility of mind uploading even though that dismissive stance is not supported by science.
Questions abound: Would a mind with a neuroprosthetic brain be “just a copy” of the original mind, somehow falling short of retaining “identity”? Would it be a “philosophical zombie”? Our different subjective intuitions about the nature of consciousness and the continuity of the self lead to many possible answers and attitudes about medical life-saving technology. This workshop will explore the technical merits of such proposals as well as how they hinge on what is the correct model of consciousness and how it is mapped onto the circuits of the brain. It will also address some deep philosophical questions that these proposals raise, such as whether there is a “further fact” (Derek Parfit’s term) to an individual’s identity beyond the sum of their memories and personality.
Talk titles:
Kenneth Hayworth
Consciousness and the Connectome: How brain circuits encode the self
Randal A. Koene
The Functionalist Wager: Separating consciousness and personal identity from substrate
Max More
Consciousness Preservation through Cryopreservation: A Bridging Strategy
Additional workshop speakers to be announced.
The workshop web page is: http://consciousness.arizona.edu/2014WorkshopBrainUploading.htm
For more information about the Towards a Science of Consciousnes 2014 conference and about attending, please see the conference web site: https://sbs.arizona.edu/project/consciousness/
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