Mind Backup technology: an introduction

1) The immense journey: how to map your mind
It will become our future obsession.
As technology improves, life will become better for those who can afford it.
That will also make it harder for them to die.

The only reasonable hope for an afterlife will be to copy your mind before you die (there are also unreasonable afterlife hopes).
After your death, this mind copy would be converted into a self-aware simulation.
A single mind simulation would require a computer as powerful as all of today’s CPUs combined.
Of course the logical principles behind awareness would have to be discovered first, but that’s beyond our main scope.
We just want to extract memories as efficiently as possible. Once they are digital, they are half-immortal already.

* The first principle of this blog is that direct brain scanning (as seen in scifi movies and popular science books) will be too difficult to achieve for many decades to come.
We don’t even know where to start. The human brain’s trillion neuronal connections are like a frozen explosion (I may be wrong, so lets keep all options open).

For now, reverse engineering is the way to go.
Could such an impenetrable brain labyrinth be reconstructed merely by observing its behavior?
It seems impossible, but the alternative is oblivion.
Basically, the human subject would be asked to tell the story of their life. A smart interrogator or special software could ask leading questions.

It helps that the layout of human brains is very consistent.
The basic architecture is much simpler than all the memories.
Mind reconstruction would be aided by comparing each human subject to many similar and different people.

* The second principle of this blog is that even reverse engineering a human mind is too difficult to reasonably achieve.
In fact it can be shown to be impossible: No matter how many years you spend answering questions about yourself, any reconstruction must be incomplete.
Even detailed recordings of every second of your life would be inadequate.

2) The Method: you must become the map.
Could there be a ‘magic shortcut’? That question will be our main focus.
To become digitally immortal to any extent, you will have to change yourself.
It may involve reorganizing, standardizing, and even simplifying your mind.

This process will reveal the irreducible and unique parts of your personality.
Only your most important memories and interests would be recorded, with many representative general scenes and incidents. You could discard many useless traits and biases.
This could give new meaning to a disorganized and unfocused life.

The first step of any mind backup endeavor will be to just start recording.
Keep track of your location at all times, scheduled activities, purchases, and Net habits.
That alone will require an all-encompassing software environment.
A new way of life from the start of the process.

The second and longest step (but easier to start) will be to create a memory folder.
It will be the most detailed autobiography possible. Begin with a single page, and keep adding data until the end.

Organizing this data into a mind copy will be exponentially harder, but that work may be done in the distant future by as yet unimagined computers. Digital records won’t decompose.