RESHARED POST FROM VICTORIA ROSE

Victoria Rose originally shared this post:

I brought this up with +Daniel Estrada after he shared an article and I felt like bringing it up into a discussion of its own.

There’s talk going on about “digitizing a person” from what I’ve been seeing on a lot of different websites. The argument is that humans are producing their ideas using computers, and that eventually, the machine will simply be a practically immortal representation of that human. But there’s one thing that just keeps bugging me that might void the idea altogether.

Is it really possible to fully capture a person and especially their ideas? In reality, an idea isn’t just a single entity on its own – it involves many subsets of thoughts. You can say that you “captured an idea” by making a person write a novel or a song, but it’s likely that they had so many things that they also wanted to do with it.

For example, if you’re writing on the income inequality issue of the United States, it’s likely that you start off with, “There’s income equality.” Now go on into why there’s income inequality. More than likely, your brain is about to branch off into 1) gender, 2) race, 3) corporations, 4) taxes, or 5) corruption, and often you’ll have a revelation from one point to another. “But wait, you can’t just jump topics! That’s not proper writing! People will toss your book right out the window!” And you’ll have to re-organize your writing to adapt to that. Therefore, you’re not really capturing the true essence of your idea – because the idea itself WAS that stream of thought that led to that revelation, including the revelation itself.

And then, when you get into a topic such as, say, corporations, and you go on and on about it, you might not have enough room in the book for it. Now you’re essentially rambling, and you’ve gone in-depth as to the history and loopholes they use. Again, if you cut yourself off, you’re not fully representing your ideas. If you start a new book, you’re not fully representing your ideas. The second that you take the words you’ve put on paper or in the word processor and start to reorganize it, you’re not fully representing your ideas.

The question becomes, is it possible for a machine to properly, exactly replicate the spontaneous, unusual human thought process that defines us? Because if so, that’s how we “become machines.” But that means that the machines would have to work with every little distraction and learning that we’ve had our entire lives. They would have to be as irrational and spontaneous as a human.