[extropy-chat] Cryonics and uploading

[Bret Kulakovich]

What a nice thread! Here's my two kopeks worth.

Lets jump forward and assume perfects - we quantum entangle a brain  
into a cubic 20cm box. It is a perfect and exact copy. Good job!

But even though it is a duplicate of the original, it is not the  
original, no matter how perfect. The mind/body problem holds  
generally that monists hold conscience as an electro-chemical event,  
the body and mind are inseparable. Dualists hold that the mind/body  
are separate and discreet, perhaps a body/soul or body/spirit is  
going on, and they are distinct.

You can see one lends itself immediately to the possibility of  
cryonics, and the other to uploading. Sure they can each lean in one  
direction or the other...

What is happening behind my eyes right now - can I move it? Or am I  
dead when the destructive upload occurs, with a perfect simulacra of  
me advancing on the next clock cycle in software?


Until we get that one singular thing to work (or, alternately, those  
two things =) ) then we can't make the call.




On Jan 26, 2006, at 4:50 AM, Robert Bradbury wrote:

> 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
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