“The brain is hardware, the mind is software. Therefore, to run the mind on different hardware, it just has to be “ported” or “emulated” the way a computer program might be. Timothy B. Lee (not the internet inventing one) counters Robin Hanson’s claim that we will be able to upload a human mind onto a computer within the next couple decades by dissecting the computer=mind analogy. […]
Lee got me thinking with his point that “natural systems don’t have designers.” Evolutionary processes have resulted in the brain we have today, but there was no intention or design behind those process. Our minds are undesigned.
[…] If the mind is an emergent property of the physical brain, then one can no more move a mind than one could move a hurricane from one system to another. The mind, it may turn out, is fundamentally and essentially related to the substrate in which it is embodied.”
see blog and comments: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/sciencenotfiction/2011/01/17/the-undesigned-brain-is-hard-to-copy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DiscoverMindBrain+%28Discover+Mind+%26+Brain%29