X-Message-Number: 32861 References: <> From: Gerald Monroe <> Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2010 04:37:24 -0500 Subject: Re: CryoNet #32857 - #32860 --0016e64bba347dfebe0490fe21b0 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? --0016e64bba347dfebe0490fe21b0 Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=32861