Can you have brain uploading without having solved the binding problem?

Sort of a jumping-off point from my last question, I speak of the "binding problem" that currently plagues neuroscience and cognitive studies, and which plays a large role in debating AI and whole brain emulation. It has its own wikipedia article, but for those looking for a shorter summation, the binding problem can be split into roughly two separate, smaller problems. The first is the segregation problem, which is the question of exactly how the brain can process sensory stimuli and segregate it into separate objects (i.e. "there is a blue square and a yellow circle" instead of "there is a blue circle and a yellow square" or "there is a square, a circle, the color blue, and the color yellow" etc.). The second is the combination problem, which deals with how the brain combines all of these background elements, abstractions and emotional features into one single, distinct experience (or more simply, how input is transformed into conscious qualia).

Now my question is, could a society still perform high-resolution scans that copy a person's mind to a computational substrate as data if they still haven't figured out how to solve the binding problem? Could you have a world where human brains can be copied and reproduced down to the most minute detail, but they aren't able to experience or even simulate consciousness unless their neural patterns are printed onto a "blank" organic human brain rather than emulated on a computer? Or does the technology required to perform these high-fidelity scans which enable resurrective immortality via mind-cloning also necessitate that a society have solved the binding problem?

posted about 7 years ago

Z.Schroeder‭

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