very interesting concept. so basically you are intending to use the blockchain as memory? each transaction is an update on an idea being processed by the active mining nodes and the relay nodes are single repositories of delegated information for the network; By doing it this way, Bitcoin has a memory that allows it to be self-aware, seeing how it has changed it's thoughts about the world as it has lived. Each person providing nourishment in the form of computation or relays of stored information. By allowing the A.I to form it's own rules it can begin to program it's own views about life, the universe and everything... granted that it can code the appropriate system for quantifying interesting information with a robust scoping system so that it can keep on top of it's own personal priorities... which are mutable themselves.
I love the idea, why not include humans as well? it would be simple enough to setup a system like Devtome where humans contribute their knowledge to a database and make it searchable and reconfigurable by both humans and A.I. with the right tagging system a dynamic association system can emerge.
Bigger geekgasm.
I wonder though if maybe we - and by we I mean scientists that aren't us per se - are working on AI and BMI backwards and instead of trying to put brains on chips or the block chain it might be easier and more probable to put the blockchain in the brain, adapt the brain itself to a blockchain esque function.
The idea of mind uploading is incredibly cool in concept but either they're describing it incorrectly or they're going about it incorrectly because the mind isn't a thing that has tangible properties that can be digitized or moved. Thoughts, feelings, desires, ideas, emotions, actions, are all end results of brain activity. There is nothing causal in a thought or feeling or emotion (and it irks the hell out of me when people go "he makes me happy" or "she made me mad" because we don't cause these end results in one another, there's no mechanism in a feeling or thought or desire to manipulate the recipient or perceiver). It begins and ends with the brain. Anything we feel, think, say or do is a direct end result of our brain and how we interpret what we've perceived, and the reaction/response is rooted in our own paradigm - our collection of perceptions and understanding of our environments and our places in it. Our own brains "make" us mad or happy, but we blame it on other people. If it was possible for us to cause states in others, the world would be markedly different than this one. We wouldn't need self help stuff and there wouldn't be a seduction market because we could just 'make' someone dig us and 'make' someone hate someone else.
I like to look at the paradigm as the equivalent of our own customized user's manual. Anything we perceive that's compatible with what's been established and accepted by us as true will be accepted. Anything that's incompatible will result in an endless debate that goes nowhere. It's why people at odds can't ever find common ground.
Anyway, since it's all end result and intangible, there's no possible way to move or upload a 'mind'...mind is the end result of brain behavior/functioning so unless it's just an inaccurate way of talking about it and they're doing something else, mind uploading isn't going to happen because it can't happen.
My understanding of what they're looking to do, with regard for AI and digitizing "mind" is actually that in learning the brain behavior/functioning and modifying it to a digital format which is then a mirror copy of our brain's activity that cause these end results we can find a better substrate to hold it, move it, download it into some other form - all that is largely doable and then gives rise to the big paranoid question of "is it us or a copy of us or something else"?
Adding to the problem in the example above using the blockchain as a memory store, what sort of interface would be required? How would it likely need to work to store it from the brain to blockchain?
It seems to me it'd be easier to figure out a way to modify our brains to work in concert with the blockchain or blockchain like in a figurative sense than literally. Or, at the very least, figure out a way to use the brain power as the processing power for AI.
Damn, I love the future. I love this topic, I love AI, bitcoin, BMI - all of it. I hope I am still around when these problems are solved and the first technologies erupt.
