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by theoh
2903 days ago
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It would also be The End for physical museums. If the appearance of the painting (the "frontal" lightfield under optimal illumination) has been recorded and securely stored... the physical substance of the painting becomes something that is only maintained for sentimental reasons. It's a basic premise of science and engineering that, if you have the recipe, you don't need the artifact. See Walter Benjamin etc on the idea that the original has an "aura" that can't be cloned. Of course it is nonsense, but it foresees the condition of mind-scanning and conversion into digital selves. There's no way any one of us currently alive will exist, consciously, in an electronic system. There's no way to transfer consciousness from the biological to the electronic substrate, though one can dream (as Greg Egan has) of shifting a conscious brain from one system to another. In brief, human consciousness and artistic judgement isn't going away, for a couple of centuries at least. |
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Transferring? You are thinking small. What about expanding beyond your brain, so that it becomes a small part of a whole and by the time it starts failing it's just a peripheral input preprocessing device/local motion planner/unreliable redundant memory storage/small vote in global decision making and not you.
The possibility is still pretty far. Reliable biocompatible high throughput brain computer interfaces aren't there yet.