X-Message-Number: 19678
Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2002 09:19:37 -0400
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: CryoNet #19672 - #19676

About brain readers and storage on CDs:

To read brains AND understand what you have read requires much more
knowledge of how brains work than we now have. It's also true that
storage would take much more knowledge. 

Again, if the purpose of a brain reader is to simply give a copy
of someone's brain, not only the appearance under one or another
form of light or radiation, but also the chemistry would have to be
worked out and stored IN DETAIL. This would take much more than the
capacity of current CDs because, after all, the copy will in a 
sense contain far more information than would really be needed to
recreate the person --- except for the small problem that we do
not presently know just what part of the information in the copy
is needed and what part is not.

We won't have those abilities without a great deal more research
(and the technology involved in doing it at a finer scale than
we now can). As a way of preserving oneself as in cryonics, it
just doesn't look like a successful strategy for anyone with a 
currently normal lifespan.

I actually believe that SOMEDAY we will come to have that necessary
knowledge, and with it the ability to do such things as those
described. But right now that knowledge and ability does not
exist, and anyone looking at brains in seriousness would agree.
And yes, someday such methods will substitute for those we
now use ... though knowing human beings, such a method might well
still be called "cryonics".

		Best wishes and long long life to all who read this,

Thomas Donaldson

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