[ExI] Mind Uploading: is it still me?

[John Clark]

On Thu, Dec 25, 2025 at 9:56 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:


> * >> There's no reason that shouldn't be possible because both uploading
>> and downloading rely on the same fundamental technology, the ability to
>> place atoms where you want them to go.*
>
>

* >For 'marketing' purposes (or PR purposes, at least), I can see the
> logic. However, I doubt that a full mastery of nanotech will be necessary
> to do uploading, I'd think that something less than that would be used
> first.*
>

*Without Drexler style Nanotechnology uploading would be difficult but
perhaps not impossible, maybe something like the BigBrain Project, only
more-so. In 2013 a human brain was embedded in paraffin wax and then a
diamond saw sliced the brain into 7404 slices, each slice was stained to
bring out the details and then extremely high resolution photographs of
each slice were taken. It took several years to digitally align the images,
repair the tairs and remove the distortions, but eventually they were able
to make a 3-D model of the brain with a resolution of only 20 micrometers,
that's about 50 times the resolution you can get with an MRI machine (a
human hair is about 100 micrometers thick). But 20 is almost certainly not
good enough for an upload.*

*In 2024 researchers at Harvard and Google sliced one cubic millimeter of a
human brain into 5019 slices and then used an electron microscope to take
photographs of each slice, they then used the resulting 1.4 petabytes
(1,400 trillion bytes) of data to construct a 3-D model of that cubic
millimeter. They got a X-Y resolution of 4 nanometers (a DNA molecule is
2.5 nanometers thick) but the Z resolution(thickness) was only 30
nanometers. That probably would be good enough resolution for an upload but
unfortunately it was just for one cubic millimeter, the average human brain
contains about 1,400,000 cubic millimeters.*

*> aldehyde-stabilised cryopreservation sounds the most robust,*


*I strongly agree! When it comes to preserving information
aldehyde-stabilised cryopreservation is much better than standard
cryopreservation. Other than PR considerations I can't think of any reason
why ALCOR doesn't use it, or at least offer it as an option. *


* John K Clark*


>
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