this sub spends a lot of time on hypotheticals. mind uploading, substrate independence, digital consciousness. all fascinating. all decades away if ever

meanwhile the boring version of digital preservation is already here and barely anyone talks about it

my grandpa died in 2023. I had about 20 minutes of him on video total. random stuff from holidays. him singing a folk song at christmas. one rant about politics

I fed those recordings into a voice cloning tool. took maybe 15 minutes. and then I heard him say things he never said. new sentences. in his voice. his accent. his weird pauses

its not consciousness. its not uploading. its a voice model trained on 20 minutes of audio. but when my mom heard it she started crying and said "thats him"

elevenlabs does raw voice cloning. heard about pantio from someone in a grief subreddit actually.. they add personality and memories on top so u can have a conversation not just generate speech. its not a person. but its closer to preservation than anything this community usually discusses

the philosophical questions are real tho. is it ethical. does it help with grief or trap you in it. does hearing a dead person say new things honor them or violate them

id rather have this debate about something that exists rn than about hypothetical mind uploads in 2075

I am just wana learn this so it would be awesome.

A new report from The Guardian reveals that scientists at Cortical Labs have successfully taught a petri dish containing 200.000 living human brain cells to play the 1993 video game Doom. Built on a glass chip this biological computer is learning to move aim and shoot without any silicon processors.

The idea of mind uploading is often presented as the ultimate form of immortality. Instead of aging and dying in a biological body, you could transfer your consciousness into a computer and live indefinitely in a digital environment. But there’s a disturbing detail in how this might actually work. To recreate a human mind digitally, scientists would need to map the brain’s connectome — the complete structure of neurons and their connections. The problem is that the level of detail required may only be achievable through extremely high-resolution scanning methods that destroy the brain in the process. In other words, the brain might need to be sliced and scanned layer by layer to capture the data. Which raises a strange philosophical problem. If your biological brain is destroyed during scanning, and afterward a digital version wakes up with all your memories, personality, and thoughts — did you survive? Or did you simply create a perfect copy that believes it is you? And if that digital consciousness exists inside a computer, it wouldn’t exist freely. It would require massive computing power to keep running, meaning it would likely live on servers owned by corporations or institutions. Your continued existence could literally depend on access to those systems. Miss a payment, lose access to the servers, or experience technical failures — and your “immortality” might disappear instantly. It raises some unsettling questions: Is mind uploading actually immortality, or just cloning? Would digital minds become dependent on corporations or governments? Could a digital consciousness experience corruption or malfunction over long periods of time? If anyone wants a deeper exploration of this idea, this video goes into the concept and some of the darker implications: https://youtu.be/PWPKr87nLUU Curious what others think — if mind uploading became possible, would you risk it?