X-Message-Number: 1770
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 93 11:47:56 CST
From: Brian Wowk <>
Subject: CRYONICS Uploading

        It's interesting that Raymond Kurzweil has discovered uploading, 
but like Michael O'Neil I think his timescales are way off.
 
        I'm a great fan of Moore's Law (exponential increases in 
computing power with time), and I think that optimism in this area is 
well justified since we are still far from the physical limits of 
computer miniaturization.  Increasing parallelism alone will be 
sufficient to support Moore's Law indefinitely.
 
        However, Kurzweil, like most "uploaders" knows more about 
computers than about medical imaging or neurobiology.  There are 
fundamental physical obstacles of dose and scanning time that prohibit 
x-ray CT from ever achieving micron resolution of an intact human brain.  
(This question was beaten to death on the net last year.)  Things are 
not quite so bad for MRI, but they are not good either.  Over the last 
decade MRI engineers have lowered the noise in the electronics to the 
point where the limiting noise source in MRI is now Johnson noise (or 
thermal noise) in the patient.  Even if a surface coil is used to limit 
reception to the brain, the signal from a single cell deep inside the 
brain will be swamped by noise from the rest of the brain.  (Yes, MR 
images of single cells have been obtained, but that is because the cell-
sized coil is placed right next to the cell being imaged.)
 
        In short, there is no foreseeable means to read out memories 
from a human brain non-invasively.  This job will require sophisticated 
nanomachines ("mature nanotechnology"), and is therefore at least 50 
years away from being doable.
 
        It's nice to see such vision and optimism in the computer 
science community, but we have to figure out how to redirect this 
enthusiasm back to the only real-world prospect of high-tech longevity: 
cryonics.  This might not be as easy as one might think.  Several years 
ago I was floored when I read what Hans Moravec thought about cryonics 
when asked in Omni magazine.  He essentially said that cryonics was "too 
crude" to interest him, and that he was much more fascinated by the 
prospects of hyper-advanced technology reconstructing a deceased 
person's identity from clues left in the world around them.  (Of course, 
he is contradicting himself: What better clue could a "deceased" person 
leave as to their identity than their brain!)
 
        After reading Hans Moravec, the quintessential uploader, dismiss 
cryonics as too crude, I really don't know what to think about uploaders 
anymore.  Most of them will probably die along with the rest of the 
mundane crowd, with great irony, from lack of vision.                    
 
                                                --- Brian Wowk

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