X-Message-Number: 32861
References: <>
From: Gerald Monroe <>
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2010 04:37:24 -0500
Subject: Re: CryoNet #32857 - #32860

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One comment on the debate over uploading.  I agree entirely with Keith's
premise that a person could be uploaded in a smooth and reversible manner
and thus it's philosophically impractical to say the uploaded personality is
not the same being.  However, Keith's comment "it's only a slight upgrade of
what's needed to get you back from the frozen state" brings to mind other
consequences.  One complication of philosophical discussions of cryonics is
that if one has the technology to rebuild a person from scanning their
frozen remains, one could readily make multiple copies of that person.  If,
in the future, a particular copy were killed, the other instances of that
person would continue.  The problem with copies is twofold : how do you know
if you're the original and what good does a copy do if "you" are the
instance who is killed.  However, again, technology has a solution to this.
 With another upgrade of the original nanotechnology needed to bring back
the frozen dead one could build systems that would allow you to synchronize
multiple instances of a person.   The human brain uses a system of memory
consolidation that could be hijacked so that once a day during sleep, or in
near realtime, one could be synchronized with the long term memories of the
other instances of yourself.

The ability to synchronize would let you solve other problems, such as
possible future overpopulation.  You could merge together excess instances
of a personality this way, or possibly merge different human individuals
together as well, with minimal loss of information.

So, who's working on the molecular manufacturing needed to get this ball
rolling?  If it's not possible to develop molecular manufacturing with the
current state of technology, what industry is working on a commercial
product that is closest?  I was thinking that the companies making DNA
sequencing and editing equipment might be the closest.

One final comment : death is a relative thing.  There's roughly 100 billion
neurons in the brain, and an average of 7000 synapses per neuron.  Assuming
you'd need 256 digital bits to represent accurately the state and position
of each synapse (just a WAG, but it's a decent amount of precision) then a
brain is about 25,000 petabytes of data.  All lost to this world upon death
as we know it today.  Think about the ways that humans have tried to
preserve something of themselves in the past : through reproduction (each
offspring is a couple gigabytes of DNA information), through writings (could
fit a an author's lifetime works in a couple hundred megs), through art,
etc.  None of it comes within orders of magnitude of the complexity of a
living human's personality and memories.

If cryonics works, and you awaken to discover yourself running on a computer
a million times faster than your brain ever was, with all of your memories
faithfully recovered and present, do you really have much to complain about?

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