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Name

The website and the project name - Vita Sine Fine - means "life without end" in Latin. Pronounced as "Vee-tah See-neh Fee-neh." The shorter name is Vita Si Fi, easier to pronounce ("Vee-tah Sai Fai") and partially a nod to science fiction.

 

Technical Details

Vita Sine Fine is a system consisting of two components.

The first one is this website which is essentially a database developed with the purpose to hold people’s profiles reflecting all the events of their personal and professional life. (At some point in the future it will be replaced with a more convenient device capable to read the whole contents of your brain: for example, you put on a helmet and dump your memories onto a hard drive.)

Even though this website may look like another social network at a glance, the ultimate goal is quite different. Like in a social network, you create your profile and then start adding to it news, thoughts, pictures, etc., - whatever is important to you. However the main goal is not sharing it with your friends (even though you can do so), but instead creating a full description of your life.

The system is anonymous by default. You don’t need to give your name or anything else that could connect "the real you" to the information you upload onto the system. In the end, a central storage facility can be used as a backup and only if you choose so. Instead, a personal home storage should be used. But for now, this website is the only way to get the system going.

Some people already have online journals, blogs, accounts in social networks. If such accounts are abandoned, they drift in time into the past, slowly turning into white noise. Who would ever read them, if new blog posts are constantly being added? And then - a website is reorganized and those old accounts are removed for good. So if someone (you) already have an account in a social network, it might be a good idea to duplicate the most essential records in the Vita Si Fi database. Maybe even links will suffice.

The more information Vita Si Fi has, the easier it will be to recreate your personality. Will it still be you? This question is closely related to the Ship of Theseus paradox discussed by Socrates, Heraclitus and Plato, as well as other philosophers. You can think it over yourself; it's a good mental exercise. For our purposes we can just admit that every night as we fall asleep, our feelings turn off, and we basically die until dawn. The next morning we come back to life with all the memories restored and sorted out as before. It means that if an avatar’s artificial brain is loaded with the information from your profile, the avatar will essentially become you. Of course it’s an oversimplified description of the process. A lot of technical and philosophical problems need to be resolved before the system will become as common as a home computer or refrigerator.

The second component is a distributed neural network running on dedicated servers and constantly evolving with the final goal to reproduce a human brain simulator. Once this goal is reached (hopefully in not too distant future), the profiles from the website can be superimposed over the generic neural network thus producing a complete consciousness backup system for any individual.

Since each person's brain wiring is essentially the same, and we all differ in unique memories and character traits, one generic personality is created and then those unique memories are superimposed over it.

Currently the simulator is configured as client-server architecture capable to support a distributed neural network with up to and over 100 billion neurons. This number is five times greater than the number of neurons in a human brain cortex. Even though the number is impressive, the neural network now supports only random connection between neurons, and thus does not have a trace of intelligence. The process that would help organize the network is power-consuming and lengthy, but in initial tests it shows moderately promising results.

The approach that Vita Si Fi takes in neural network development is unique and has never been tried before. It may succeed or it may fail. But even if there is only one chance in a billion that the technology would work, it's well worth a try. And no matter what, your information will stay on the website for as long as you want. Sooner or later, one approach or another, the technology will finally be developed.

 

Connection Between the Components

This part currently does not exist and can only be developed after the second component - the neural network - would be sufficiently advanced. However the brief description is as follows. Since the memories in the network are kept as a huge array of each neuron's weight and activation function coefficients, the information from the database is converted to this type of array and then superimposed over an existing generic network. Again, none of this currently exists, and as such is a subject for the future research and development work.

 

Other Uses

It will be possible to reconstruct a personality of someone already passed away, provided that there are diaries left. For example it will be relatively easy to bring back to life writers, philosophers, scientists, since their work still exists, and so it's possible to deduce their personality traits and the train of thought.

Also, it will be possible to bring back to life individuals who did not leave any records or books, but when the people who knew them will collectively create a profile of such a person.

Unfortunately it's impossible to recreate people long gone, since no memories left, so all information about them is lost, except maybe bits and pieces like date of birth, occupation, etc.

 

Conclusion

It's understandable that all of the above may sound far-fetched and even preposterous, but if you think how much intellectual resources are being spent for questionable and destructive purposes (e.g. weapons' development) then Vita Si Fi would be looking quite sane and logical.

Do you want to be a statist and passively observe how your body ages, your brain slowly but surely forgets memories until they are gone, or do you want to take a proactive role and save your memories - and thus personality - for the future?

You don’t have to disappear forever from the face of the earth. So take the first step, create your profile and begin adding information to it. After all it's simply a very interesting experiment. Join in!