[extropy-chat] Cryonics and uploading

[Robert Bradbury]

On 1/26/06, Giu1i0 Pri5c0 <pgptag at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...Ettinger about uploading a couple of years ago, but he did not seem to
> view it as an option. ...  but also because he does not think the copy
> would be a continuation of the original (the identity problem).

A copy is a copy is a copy!   Commands like COPY (DOS) or cp (UNIX)
would not be of questionable use if they did not create an *exact* copy.
People who are "rational thinkers" should confront this head on and get the
people who hold the "its not the original" position and force them to explain
precisely *why* the copy is not the original.  This goes back to the points
Sam Harris has made about the need for the religious moderates to confront the
religious conservatives who can offer no hard evidence for most of
their positions.

You have to nail such people down to *precisely* how much information loss
they are willing to tolerate (this gets into discussions about how
many cells the
brain loses each day or how many are lost after a minor stroke or how many are
lost if you hold your breath to the point of becoming unconscious,
etc.) and relate
it to things similar areas that they can easily understand, e.g. the
difference between
PNG and JPEG images or WAV and MP3 sound.  This then leads into a discussion
as to *where* in the brain the information the *useful* information is
stored.  For those
people who want to be recreated down to the level of specific atomic
isotopes for
each atom in the brain (or body) I fear they may be looking at a long
long time on ice.

> I don't see why not, and would sign up for uploading immediately if
> there were providers offering brain scans of sufficient resolution,
> but also this is quite far (20 years is my best case estimate, but
> please correct me if I am wrong).

The problem *isn't* the resolution. You could do atomic scale
resolution scans now.
I believe methods have even been developed to do less than atomic diameter
measurements.  The problem is the parallelism requirements and readout time.
If one had the resources to setup the lab you could start uploading someone now.
Without the parallelism improvements the process would probably take
many thousands
of years.  The real problem is that you couldn't "run" them yet
because we don't know
how to run a human data copy with simulated inputs and outputs.  You
also couldn't
rebuild an identical biological copy (yet).

Robert