Transhumanist Memory Uploading Through the Lens of McConnell’s Experiments
Introduction:
In the 1950s, American biologist and psychologist James McConnell conducted an experiment to explore how flatworms were able to receive memory through planarian cannibalism. In this experiment, he first trained a group of flatworms to learn and move around the maze while measuring the time they took. Then, he chopped the flatworms into pieces and fed them to another group of flatworms, which were able to learn more thoroughly about the maze than any other group of flatworms that weren’t fed the learned flatworms. Although he proclaimed that his own experiments were successful, McConnell’s work was dismissed by the scientific community and gradually faded away. However, under the rising tide of Transhumanism and Technological Singularity, the fascinating idea of …show more content…
The Transhumanist Memory Uploading theory suggests that uploading human memory into computer medium can help human attain immortality and acquire unlimited processing power. However, whether if the personal identity will stay consistent after memory uploading is still an undecipherable enigma. In order to better understand the nuances within the Transhumanist memory uploading controversies, it is best for us to utilize McConnell’s case, which has been thoroughly studied by numerous scholars such as Collins and Pinch, as an analytical tool. Through the lens of McConnell’s experiments, one can infer that the theory of Transhumanist Memory Uploading is significantly popularized by the legitimacy Ray Kurzweil, one of the main contributors of this theory, embraces in the technological community and that when a theory is undeterminable through scientific methods, the
Introduction:
In the 1950s, American biologist and psychologist James McConnell conducted an experiment to explore how flatworms were able to receive memory through planarian cannibalism. In this experiment, he first trained a group of flatworms to learn and move around the maze while measuring the time they took. Then, he chopped the flatworms into pieces and fed them to another group of flatworms, which were able to learn more thoroughly about the maze than any other group of flatworms that weren’t fed the learned flatworms. Although he proclaimed that his own experiments were successful, McConnell’s work was dismissed by the scientific community and gradually faded away. However, under the rising tide of Transhumanism and Technological Singularity, the fascinating idea of …show more content…
The Transhumanist Memory Uploading theory suggests that uploading human memory into computer medium can help human attain immortality and acquire unlimited processing power. However, whether if the personal identity will stay consistent after memory uploading is still an undecipherable enigma. In order to better understand the nuances within the Transhumanist memory uploading controversies, it is best for us to utilize McConnell’s case, which has been thoroughly studied by numerous scholars such as Collins and Pinch, as an analytical tool. Through the lens of McConnell’s experiments, one can infer that the theory of Transhumanist Memory Uploading is significantly popularized by the legitimacy Ray Kurzweil, one of the main contributors of this theory, embraces in the technological community and that when a theory is undeterminable through scientific methods, the