[extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?.

[Damien Broderick]

At 05:06 PM 4/30/2007 -0400, John K Clark wrote:

>Damien, can you explain why it's physically impossible, can you explain why
>intelligently designed Nanotechnology would be unable to make a duplicate of
>you when random mutation and very stupid natural selection obviously has
>managed to bring you into existence?

You left out "decades of extremely detailed interaction with a Vastly 
complex environment, plus stochastic changes to body/brain." These 
factors combined produced the sorry specimen writing this email, and 
would never be able to replicate it unaided.

>Why does randomness and stupidity beat
>intelligence?

In the general sense, because they had 4 billion years and a whole 
planet of competing organisms to work with. In the specific sense, 
they can't--as argued above.

And I thought the claim was that a perfect copy could be contrived 
and swapped in instantaneously. Nano couldn't do that. I suppose some 
as yet unknown form of machine-implemented magic field resonance 
might do it. I have grown a bit impatient with thought experiments 
based on [what seem to us in our present partial knowledge of the 
universe] extreme improbabilities or such absurdities as "if god can 
do X, then..."

Damien Broderick