Originally Posted by
@nthony
Well I believe that for all intents and purposes the human brain is a machine, albeit a highly complex though ineffecient biological one. A computer (also a machine, which can be further reduced to a set of algorithms) today has a very ennumerable set of inputs, and thus the algorithms it employs to handle these inputs have heuristics that can also be logically ennumerated, making the outputs largely predictable. In contrast, a human brain has an incredibly large and complex set of inputs which, as of current cannot be ennumerated and thus a complete set of heuristics or algorithms for the brain are not yet known, making outputs anticipatable at best, but can never yet be fully predicted.
At the moment, the state of computers, AI and the set of inputs they can compute is barely able to approach that of lab mice, let alone humans. Input from sensory nerves such as optical, motor, and auditory common to even the most primitive of animals/mammals still greatly overshadow in number the amount of input a computer may receive at a time from its inputs such as its network and user. Even if all inputs from a mammal such as a mouse were to be replicated and fed into a computer, and a "mouse algorithm" existed that computed the appropriate output for each set of inputs, our technology today is not advanced enough to compute these outputs in an appropriate amount of time (even half the time of that mammal's natural brain).
As for true brain-computer interfacing, I would imagine that given about 200-400 more years of analysis, neuro-biological scientists and engineers will have discovered the role and function of every synaptic network in the brain and body and the sources of inputs for each network of each nerve in the brain, as well as what is needed to simulate them and how. Following this, what I like to call a "Synaptic Interface" will be developed, a device which splices inputs to major neural networks between their original sources of input and fabricated/emulated/foreign sources. This will give us the ability to interface directly with the brain, but before we will be able to employ this technology we will need to know how the brain stores its information and how to stimulate in such a way as to retrieve and/or supply information from/to it. This will be a task once again for neuro-biological scientists, and Computer and Informatic Engineers to figure out a way to relate the standard information format of the time to that of the our brain's (note that information of the future may not necessarily be binary).
Once a safe and proper translation method has been developed and worked into the design of the Synaptic Interface, assuming that every bit of information wanting to be expressed to the brain can be expressed in the standard information format of the time, we will be able to effectively interface directly with the brain. This will have marked a huge step in development such that any further hurdles in communication will probably be able to be overcome by brain modification. For example, multiple Synaptic Interfaces can be installed to facilitate higher transfer speeds of information (of course there would need to be checks and balances to prevent interference and accessing of networks at the same time (mutex's anyone?)). As another example, the capacity of the brain may be expanded by inserting a Synpatic Interface into the neural-network responsible for memory retrieval that is instead connected to a storage device. The possibilities are endless, which leads me to the next point.
As I mentioned previously, from its function, form, and previous discoveries, I think it is concludable that (even though today it may be better than a computer) the human brain is ineffecient for its weight-to-size ratio, as is agreeable with many discoveries in biology that biological structures in general tend to lack effeciency (i.e. there are many components in biological structures that have little or no practical function or are grossly under- or over-sized, etc). Based on this, it is forseeable that as in the scenerio described above, people will slowly replace parts of their brain with more effecient and capable implementations. It is then not unfathomable to imagine a "human" without a "human brain", a human who has been completely digitized (not necessarily binary though) so as to increase his/her ("its" see below as to why) overall effeciency and capabilites.
Why did I use "it" above? Well in tandum and perhaps well before all of the aforementioned developments in brain interfacing, we will have done so already with the body (as the body is an infinitely less complex structure). Even today, there are machines capable of emulating human body parts (albeit poorly), so it is reasonable to forsee that in the future very little to none of our bodies may still be composed of organic (weak/ineffecient) materials. Thus, if you have a "body" and a brain that are no longer "human", are you still really "human"?. From here on, the line has been "fuzzed".
I won't complete the rest of my theories here otherwise it will quickly become a t;dr if it is not already... but suffice to say from this, you may see where I draw the conclusion that in the distant future the existance of humanity will be as a single entity:
If everyone is digitized, their representative information can be transfered across networks and submitted to a globally accessible repertoire; thus everyone will be able to acquire everyone else's information. To minimize dispersion across individuals, a "collective" will be maintained that is the representation of all information known by the entirety of humanity. Since the only thing that makes us definatively unique is the information we posess, if everyone has access to this collective, everyone will have access to everyone else's information, resulting in esentially a large amount of copies of the same individual. It follows then that for effeciency, you will only need the one copy: the singular collective consciousness of humanity.