Transfer of Personality to Synthetic Human ("mind uploading") and the Social Construction of Identity

Humans have long wondered whether they can survive the death of their physical bodies. Some people now look to technology as a means by which this might occur, using terms such 'whole brain emulation', 'mind uploading', and 'substrate independent minds' to describe a set of hypothetical procedures for transferring or emulating the functioning of a human mind on a synthetic substrate. There has been much debate about the philosophical implications of such procedures for personal survival. Most participants to that debate assume that the continuation of identity is an objective fact that can be revealed by scientific enquiry or rational debate. We bring into this debate a perspective that has so far been neglected: that personal identities are in large part social constructs. Consequently, to enable a particular identity to survive the transference process, it is not sufficient to settle age-old philosophical questions about the nature of identity. It is also necessary to maintain certain networks of interaction between the synthetic person and its social environment, and sustain a collective belief in the persistence of identity. We defend this position by using the example of the Dalai Lama in Tibetan Buddhist tradition and identify technological procedures that could increase the credibility of personal continuity between biological and artificial substrates

Management of object-oriented action-based distributed programs

Phd ThesisThis thesis addresses the problem of managing the runtime behaviour of distributed programs. The thesis of this work is that management is fundamentally an information processing activity and that the object model, as applied to actionbased distributed systems and database systems, is an appropriate representation of the management information. In this approach, the basic concepts of classes, objects, relationships, and atomic transition systems are used to form object models of distributed programs. Distributed programs are collections of objects whose methods are structured using atomic actions, i.e., atomic transactions. Object models are formed of two submodels, each representing a fundamental aspect of a distributed program. The structural submodel represents a static perspective of the distributed program, and the control submodel represents a dynamic perspective of it. Structural models represent the program's objects, classes and their relationships. Control models represent the program's object states, events, guards and actions-a transition system. Resolution of queries on the distributed program's object model enable the management system to control certain activities of distributed programs. At a different level of abstraction, the distributed program can be seen as a reactive system where two subprograms interact: an application program and a management program; they interact only through sensors and actuators. Sensors are methods used to probe an object's state and actuators are methods used to change an object's state. The management program is capable to prod the application program into action by activating sensors and actuators available at the interface of the application program. Actions are determined by management policies that are encoded in the management program. This way of structuring the management system encourages a clear modularization of application and management distributed programs, allowing better separation of concerns. Managemental concerns can be dealt with by the management program, functional concerns can be assigned to the application program. The object-oriented action-based computational model adopted by the management system provides a natural framework for the implementation of faulttolerant distributed programs. Object orientation provides modularity and extensibility through object encapsulation. Atomic actions guarantee the consistency of the objects of the distributed program despite concurrency and failures. Replication of the distributed program provides increased fault-tolerance by guaranteeing the consistent progress of the computation, even though some of the replicated objects can fail. A prototype management system based on the management theory proposed above has been implemented atop Arjuna; an object-oriented programming system which provides a set of tools for constructing fault-tolerant distributed programs. The management system is composed of two subsystems: Stabilis, a management system for structural information, and Vigil, a management system for control information. Example applications have been implemented to illustrate the use of the management system and gather experimental evidence to give support to the thesis.CNPq (Consellho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnol6gico, Brazil): BROADCAST (Basic Research On Advanced Distributed Computing: from Algorithms to SysTems)

AMaχoS—Abstract Machine for Xcerpt

Web query languages promise convenient and efficient access to Web data such as XML, RDF, or Topic Maps. Xcerpt is one such Web query language with strong emphasis on novel high-level constructs for effective and convenient query authoring, particularly tailored to versatile access to data in different Web formats such as XML or RDF. However, so far it lacks an efficient implementation to supplement the convenient language features. AMaχoS is an abstract machine implementation for Xcerpt that aims at efficiency and ease of deployment. It strictly separates compilation and execution of queries: Queries are compiled once to abstract machine code that consists in (1) a code segment with instructions for evaluating each rule and (2) a hint segment that provides the abstract machine with optimization hints derived by the query compilation. This article summarizes the motivation and principles behind AMaχoS and discusses how its current architecture realizes these principles

50 years of isolation

The traditional means for isolating applications from each other is via the use of operating system provided “process” abstraction facilities. However, as applications now consist of multiple fine-grained components, the traditional process abstraction model is proving to be insufficient in ensuring this isolation. Statistics indicate that a high percentage of software failure occurs due to propagation of component failures. These observations are further bolstered by the attempts by modern Internet browser application developers, for example, to adopt multi-process architectures in order to increase robustness. Therefore, a fresh look at the available options for isolating program components is necessary and this paper provides an overview of previous and current research on the area

Design, Implementation and Experiments for Moving Target Defense Framework

The traditional defensive security strategy for distributed systems employs well-established defensive techniques such as; redundancy/replications, firewalls, and encryption to prevent attackers from taking control of the system. However, given sufficient time and resources, all these methods can be defeated, especially when dealing with sophisticated attacks from advanced adversaries that leverage zero-day exploits

Self-stabilization Overhead: an Experimental Case Study on Coded Atomic Storage

Shared memory emulation can be used as a fault-tolerant and highly available distributed storage solution or as a low-level synchronization primitive. Attiya, Bar-Noy, and Dolev were the first to propose a single-writer, multi-reader linearizable register emulation where the register is replicated to all servers. Recently, Cadambe et al. proposed the Coded Atomic Storage (CAS) algorithm, which uses erasure coding for achieving data redundancy with much lower communication cost than previous algorithmic solutions. Although CAS can tolerate server crashes, it was not designed to recover from unexpected, transient faults, without the need of external (human) intervention. In this respect, Dolev, Petig, and Schiller have recently developed a self-stabilizing version of CAS, which we call CASSS. As one would expect, self-stabilization does not come as a free lunch; it introduces, mainly, communication overhead for detecting inconsistencies and stale information. So, one would wonder whether the overhead introduced by self-stabilization would nullify the gain of erasure coding. To answer this question, we have implemented and experimentally evaluated the CASSS algorithm on PlanetLab; a planetary scale distributed infrastructure. The evaluation shows that our implementation of CASSS scales very well in terms of the number of servers, the number of concurrent clients, as well as the size of the replicated object. More importantly, it shows (a) to have only a constant overhead compared to the traditional CAS algorithm (which we also implement) and (b) the recovery period (after the last occurrence of a transient fault) is as fast as a few client (read/write) operations. Our results suggest that CASSS does not significantly impact efficiency while dealing with automatic recovery from transient faults and bounded size of needed resources

Integration, management and communication of heterogeneous design resources with WWW technologies

Recently, advanced information technologies have opened new pos-sibilities for collaborative designs. In this paper, a Web-based collaborative de-sign environment is proposed, where heterogeneous design applications can be integrated with a common interface, managed dynamically for publishing and searching, and communicated with each other for integrated multi-objective de-sign. The CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is employed as an implementation tool to enable integration and communication of design application programs; and the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is used as a common data descriptive language for data exchange between heterogeneous applications and for resource description and recording. This paper also intro-duces the implementation of the system and the encapsulating issues of existing legacy applications. At last, an example of gear design based on the system is il-lustrated to identify the methods and procedure developed by this research

Distributed Processes, Distributed Cognizers and Collaborative Cognition

Cognition is thinking; it feels like something to think, and only those who can feel can think. There are also things that thinkers can do. We know neither how thinkers can think nor how they are able do what they can do. We are waiting for cognitive science to discover how. Cognitive science does this by testing hypotheses about what processes can generate what doing (“know-how”) This is called the Turing Test. It cannot test whether a process can generate feeling, hence thinking -- only whether it can generate doing. The processes that generate thinking and know-how are “distributed” within the heads of thinkers, but not across thinkers’ heads. Hence there is no such thing as distributed cognition, only collaborative cognition. Email and the Web have spawned a new form of collaborative cognition that draws upon individual brains’ real-time interactive potential in ways that were not possible in oral, written or print interactions