I think part of the difference is that I’m considering the uploading process; it seems to me that you’re skipping past it, which amounts to assuming it works perfectly.
Consider the upload of Bob the volunteer. The idea that software = Bob is based on the idea that Bob’s connectome of roughly 100 trillion synapses is accurately captured by the upload process. It seems fairly obvious to me that this process will not capture every single synapse with no errors (at least in early versions). It will miss a percentage and probably also invent some that meat-Bob doesn’t have.
This raises the question of how good a copy is good enough. If brains are chaotic, and I would expect them to be, even small error rates would have large consequences for the output of the simulation. In short, I would expect that for semi-realistic upload accuracy (whatever that means in this context), simulated Bob wouldn’t think or behave much like actual Bob.
I certainly agree that brains are complicated.
I think part of the difference is that I’m considering the uploading process; it seems to me that you’re skipping past it, which amounts to assuming it works perfectly.
Consider the upload of Bob the volunteer. The idea that software = Bob is based on the idea that Bob’s connectome of roughly 100 trillion synapses is accurately captured by the upload process. It seems fairly obvious to me that this process will not capture every single synapse with no errors (at least in early versions). It will miss a percentage and probably also invent some that meat-Bob doesn’t have.
This raises the question of how good a copy is good enough. If brains are chaotic, and I would expect them to be, even small error rates would have large consequences for the output of the simulation. In short, I would expect that for semi-realistic upload accuracy (whatever that means in this context), simulated Bob wouldn’t think or behave much like actual Bob.