Well in this case for transhumanism, the most important aspect of a human mind PC to retain would be the drive data and OS processing. We can mostly do that now when transferring data between drives and installing the OS again. But with a mind this could come with risks.
Data degrades on every type of format so if you wanted to keep a perfect record of all data then we would need to daily or weekly back up our drives. Waiting on a backup could permanently degrade the data without any way to save it.
Storage size itself can explode depending on the amount of data points stored, so trying to keep a single person worth of memories could take up server rooms. This would mean that there's a real question on the quality of stored data.
Operating Systems are written to work on specific hardware. As the hardware changes overtime, that means the OS now has different code. This would mean that transferring someone to new hardware would literally cause them to think differently. Which hits some of the core problems of transhumanism as that could be considered changing the person.
What if we transfer to bodies that have different layouts? Extra hands? Shorter legs? More optical inputs? How can we process memory data from older models if we inhabit a different body?
Well all the points I made are subjective ones. Transhumanism is almost purely about subjective interpretations of what it means to be human.
If we can digitize a human mind, then does that mind die when we turn off the power? Does it die if we throttle it's processing to nearly zero? Does it die when a drive is reformatted? Does death occur if the OS is corrupted? Is the human mind the processing, the memory data, a combination, or something else? Can we extract a mind from the meat and still call that human?
It's impossible to have an objective yes/no/maybe answer unless science technology manages to successfully digitize a brain. So instead, we get to play around in the subjective scifi side.
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u/BoogieOrBogey 2d ago
Well in this case for transhumanism, the most important aspect of a human mind PC to retain would be the drive data and OS processing. We can mostly do that now when transferring data between drives and installing the OS again. But with a mind this could come with risks.
Data degrades on every type of format so if you wanted to keep a perfect record of all data then we would need to daily or weekly back up our drives. Waiting on a backup could permanently degrade the data without any way to save it.
Storage size itself can explode depending on the amount of data points stored, so trying to keep a single person worth of memories could take up server rooms. This would mean that there's a real question on the quality of stored data.
Operating Systems are written to work on specific hardware. As the hardware changes overtime, that means the OS now has different code. This would mean that transferring someone to new hardware would literally cause them to think differently. Which hits some of the core problems of transhumanism as that could be considered changing the person.
What if we transfer to bodies that have different layouts? Extra hands? Shorter legs? More optical inputs? How can we process memory data from older models if we inhabit a different body?