[ExI] Natasha​ Uploading and the New York Times ​

[John Clark]

On Sun, Oct 11, 2015 at 8:23 PM, Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com>
wrote:

​> ​
> I haven't followed the research closely, but I'd still like to see a
> higher animal -- an adult mammal would be my gold standard -- recovered
> with intact memories from cryopreservation


​I would love to see that too but I don't think I will until Nanotechnology
arrives, and by then cryopreservation would no longer be necessary, death
could be avoided without it. Ironically on the day that cryopreservation is
proved beyond any doubt to work will be the very same day it
becomes obsolete.

 John K Clark





On Sun, Oct 11, 2015 at 8:03 AM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> > In the September Cryonics magazine there is a very interesting report on
> the
> > research Natasha Vita-More did on the retention on long term memories of
> > nematode worms even after they've been cooled to liquid nitrogen
> temperatures.
> > So Natasha might want to write a letter to the New York Times
> > (letters at nytimes.com) in response to a very negative uploading and
> Cryonics
> > article in todays times:
> >
> >
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opinion/sunday/will-you-ever-be-able-to-upload-your-brain.html?ref=opinion
>
>
> It seems to me that Miller's argument is just a vast argument from
> incredulity because there's so much unknown about brain functioning and the
> whole thing looks really really really complicated.
>
> > In particular Miller says:
> >
> > "Our best current theories of how we store new memories without
> overwriting
> > old ones suggest that each synapse needs to continually reintegrate its
> past
> > experience (the patterns of activity in neuron A and neuron B) to
> determine
> > how fixed or changeable it will be in response to the next new
> experience.
> > Take away this synapse-by-synapse malleability, current theory suggests,
> > and either our memories would quickly disappear or we would have great
> > difficulty forming new ones."
> >
> > And:
> >
> > "It will almost certainly be a very long time before we can hope to
> preserve a
> > brain in sufficient detail and for sufficient time that some
> civilization much
> > farther in the future, perhaps thousands or even millions of years from
> now,
> > might have the technological capacity to “upload” and recreate that
> individual’s
> > mind."
>
> There might be other hurdles, even ones that make uploading (and
> downloading) impossible, but much of this seems overly pessimistic in terms
> of how long it will take to either successfully achieve this or find out
> there's some fundamental issue with doing it.
>
> > Natasha's experimental results would seem to flat out contradict
> > Miller's hypothesis, unless human nerve cells are fundamentally
> > different from the nerve cells of other animals, and I don't know of
> > any scientist who believes that.
>
> I haven't followed the research closely, but I'd still like to see a
> higher animal -- an adult mammal would be my gold standard -- recovered
> with intact memories from cryopreservation. What is the state of the art
> here? (Too lazy to google at this point.:)
>
> Regards,
>
> Dan
>   Sample my Kindle books via:
> http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ust/e/B00J6HPX8M/
>
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>
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