[ExI] Mind Uploading: is it still me?

[John Clark]

On Sat, Dec 27, 2025 at 6:07 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:


> *>>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.*
>
>
> * > On the surface, this sounds quite discouraging,*
>


*It would be very difficult but such a scaling up would not be
unprecedented. In August 1942 only one microgram of the element Plutonium
had been made, but by August 1945 hundreds of kilograms of Plutonium had
been manufactured (and by 1994  111.4 tons had been produced); of course it
required a gargantuan factory in Hanford Washington, and $2 billion in
1940s dollars, to do so.  *

> * > The x-y resolution mentioned was overkill, by at least 10 times, and
> the z resolution less so, but still probably higher than necessary. Let's
> say it was just about right, though. That means approx. 14 trillion bytes
> for 1 cubic mm.*
>

*I think you could get by with a much much smaller file size because for an
upload it doesn't matter what a neuron looks like, what matters is what
other neurons it is connected to, which can be described by a list, and how
that neuron response to signals received from those other neurons, which
can be described by a matrix. An AI would be able to deduce those numbers
from the neuron's appearance and save those numbers and discard the now
irrelevant image information.  *

*And I know for a fact that most people have been vastly overemphasizing
the complexity of the brain. We know the upper bound of how much
information would be required to construct a human brain at the time of
birth, and it's not very large. DNA also places an upper bound on how
complex a seed AI would have to be. In the entire human genome there are
only 3 billion base pairs. There are 4 bases, so each base can represent
2 bits, there are 8 bits per byte, so that comes out to 750 meg. Just 750
meg, that's about the same amount of information as an old CD disk could
hold when they first came out 40 years ago! *

And that's for an entire human body, only about a third of that 750 meg has
anything to do with the brain. And even the stuff that is about the brain,
most of it has nothing to do with intelligence, it's just information about
metabolism that any cell needs in order to stay alive. And the 750 meg
isn't even efficiently coded, there is *a ridiculous amount of redundancy*
in the human genome.

And then there is this:

*Only 8.2% of our DNA is functional*
<https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-07-25-82-our-dna-%E2%80%98functional%E2%80%99>

*And yet that tiny amount of information was enough to reshape the surface
of a planet, and enough to make an intelligence that was smarter than
itself. Of course I've been talking about the amount of information
required to make a newborn baby, I haven't mentioned the all important
memory information. Computer scientist  Hans Moravec estimated that an
adult human has between 1 and 10 TB of memory information. My new iPhone
has 2 TB of memory capacity. *

*> Another factor will be the time needed to scan an entire brain. And
> there's also the problem of the scanning method dumping heat into the
> tissue surrounding the area being scanned, potentially messing up the
> structure and chemical environment.*


*That wouldn't be a problem if the brain was at the temperature of liquid
nitrogen and Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation was used. I'll be damned
if I can understand why the hell ALCOR doesn't offer it! *

*John K Clark*



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