Microbots individually controlled + Here Be Dragons + Against Transhumanism

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Microbots individually controlled using magnetic fields
http://www.kurzweilai.net/microbots-indi...tic-fields

EXCERPT: Purdue University researchers have developed a method to use magnetic fields to independently control individual microrobots operating within groups. [...] Possible uses include additive manufacturing, cell sorting, cell manipulation, and cancer cell detection...

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Here Be Dragons
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/01/he...agons.html

EXCERPT: In his new book Here Be Dragons: Science, technology, and the future of humanity, Olle Haggstrom mostly discusses abstract and philosophical issues. But at one point in the book he engages the more specific forecasts I discuss in my upcoming book. So let me quote him and offer a few responses...

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Against Transhumanism – the e-book
http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=1772

EXCERPT: As an experiment, I’ve brought together a number of the pieces I’ve written here and elsewhere about molecular nanotechnology, mind-uploading, and the origins and wider implications of transhumanism, to make, after some light editing, a 54-page e-book with the title “Against Transhumanism: the delusion of technological transcendence”.

It can be downloaded as a PDF here: http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/wp...sm_1.0.pdf

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"Against Transhumanism – the e-book
http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=1772"


It's unclear how the mind could successfully be uploaded without more detail than commonly given in the transhumanism community. What would be needed to recreate the mind of a person is a physical system that would be able to accurately simulate the total effects of the brain it is copied after.  Then mind uploading might be possible.  If just the simulated brain system is built without the mind uploading, the new person would be a computerized clone without the feeling of being the prior person.  If the mind could also be uploaded, then the clone would feel to be the original person.  However, the old person would not feel as though being the new person, yet could still identify with the new person on an intellectual level.

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Some might contend that our own "Ship of Theseus" circumstance or even something like the spacetime consequence [below] already make us into a sequence of gradually modified clones that merely imagine themselves as being the same identity or individual due to the handed-down memory. However, in the former the body is never replaced wholly in one sudden moment (the "replicants" are interwoven into each other over the weeks, months, years that cells / atoms are replaced). And as "block" itself suggests, in the latter there are ontological relationships binding each version of the body together (as evidenced by the so-called "flow of changes" or transitions of consciousness from one brain state to the next).

Horowitz, Arshansky, & Elitzur: "It seems that Einstein's view of the life of an individual was as follows. If the difference between past, present, and the future is an illusion, i.e., the four-dimensional spacetime is a 'block Universe' without motion or change, then each individual is a collection of a myriad of selves, distributed along his history, each occurrence persisting on the world line, experiencing indefinitely the particular event of that moment. Each of these momentary persons, according to our experience, would possess memory of the previous ones, and would therefore believe himself identical with them; yet they would all exist separately, as single pictures in a film. Placing the past, present, and future on the same footing this way, destroys the notion of the unity of the self, rendering it a mere illusion as well." --On the Two Aspects of Time: The Distinction and Its Implications