1) No. My reasoning: You can come up with technology to scan pages from a book into a computer (scanner) but it is an entirely different technology to create an entire bound book from a computer. And before you bring up printers, they produces pages, not bound books. It might already possible in MGT to have something similar to a scanner and the printer with a wafer jack transferring data between human and computer.
2) I would think that the copy would have memories of growing up as a person all the way up to the day it was transferred. If possible, it would know it was a copy and not the original.
3) First, is the person aware that the technology exists? If so, I would think this would be like waking up to find you have artificial limbs. Some people would go into more shock than others. Less so if you are prepared and aware of going in to have the procedure before hand.
4) huh? All these questions seam separate from the brain into computer topic. A psion could probably do all these things to someone else. Brainwashing, interrogation, subliminal messages and many other methods are available already to create the things mentioned.
A bad data wafer in a wafer jack could probably cause all kinds of problems. That language program is a hacked version and everything you try to say is an insult or swear word.
Is it common for battle armor be crashed, hacked, implanted with adware, trojans, viruses and spyware in your TU? I'd think even more protection would be in place for the human brain. If this type of stuff is too possible then I'd doubt the technology would ever go into 'production'. Where would the money be if all you get is law suits. Can computers sue?
5) Does the computer AI treat inferior data coming from faulty human brain as corrupt and a possible virus and delete them making the process impossible even at the highest tech level?
6) What is to stop mass duplication of hundreds or millions of copies? What are the implications to the 3IU?
1) Yes. Although the process may be simpler in one direction when compared to the other. Using the computer->book analogy.... it already happens on a daily basis where data from computers are made into books. I am unaware of any author that does not use a word processor for writing these days. The interface is clumsy and involved, yes, but files from a word processor ARE made into books today. The main reason it is so unwieldy is that you are not only encoding data, but you are also constructing the storage media when moving from computers to books.
2) Good one!. But would the perfect copy of conciousness, complete with ego and self-awareness be able to come to terms with the fact that it is an artificial construct, possibly/probably modified in some fashion? Considering how adept humans are at rationalizing situations for self serving reasons, would a perfect copy not rationalize its situation and possibly convince itself that it is the original? paranoid killer robots, oh-boy.
3) I think it would be far worse than waking up to find you've now got artificial limbs ( which can and has led to severe depression, feelings of worthlessness and suicides among humans ). Its like waking up to find you've now got artificial limbs AND finding out that you are not unique in the world, that you may have had you're mind tampered with, and that you might be only a copy of someone else. Paranoid EMO killer robots..yay.
4) If data can go from the brain to a computer then, imho, data can go from the computer to the brain.
" It might already possible in MGT to have something similar to a scanner and the printer with a wafer jack transferring data between human and computer. "
I don't think the human brain can tell good data from bad when it comes to filtering out spam and virii. After all, the human brain has never had to evolve a firewall before as such a thing had never been possible before DNI's. Hacking the brain is possible and has been heavily research before with mixed results ( CIA's Project MKUltra, for example, which copied USSR and PRC's efforts during the cold war ). And as you've pointed out, a psion is more than capable of doing this; wetware infecting another wetware system with a wireless connection. No doubt, 'those in power' would be researching psions abilities in this matter and perhaps testing to see if psion capabilities are transferred along with the consciousness transfer/copy; is psionics 'hardware' based of 'software' based, so to speak
wetware crash = coma or death
wetware reboot/warm_boot = coming out of a coma
But can wetware by cold_booted once a copy is installed? or is it dead....
Could a transfer/copy have a backdoor installed to make the pc into a Manchurian Candidate?
IMTU, any non-biological system can be hacked, and biological systems with DNI's can be hacked although by their nature it is extremely difficult to do anything useful and such systems do have added hardware firewalls separate from the wetware to protect the DNI ports. But anything is possible depending on the needs of a story.
Can computers sue?
How about ...
Can an individual prove that he is the original and not a copy?
What about transferring the original to a computer to save the consciousness and then transferred back into one or more cloned bodies? How to prove the original then? A watermark of sorts in the data?..then it would be 'hacked' in a way.
5) what constitutes 'bad data'? Would such an AI firewall prevent the copy/transfer of a consciousness having a mild pyschotic condition? Would there be a 'safe' level of sanity?
6) the only things stopping millions of copies are hardware requirements.
The brain is ~100% synaptic processing/storage which the OTU says is possible beyond tech 18 ( tech 18 allows 95% synaptics according to book 0 ) by which time true self-aware and imaginative AI's are possible anyways.
Who knows?..maybe this is the reason that the OTU's computers are so weak by real-world standards. It keeps commonly available hardware below the hardware requirements for this sort of thing.
DNI = 'direct neural interface'
This link also mentions neurochips briefly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain–computer_interface
I guess I should mention that MTU looks a bit more like 'Ghost in the Shell' than the usual Third Imperium.
Personally, I think that Trans-Humanism would probably lead to psychological problems were it actually put into wide-scale practice, so I don't do too much with it past some cyberpunk trappings.
hmmm project 2501....
if the general standard of beauty is the average of all faces, then perhaps project 2501 could be thought of as a average of all uploaded consciousnesses, which would then approach an idealised level of perfect sanity?
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_n19_v137/ai_9028391/
