X-Message-Number: 33438
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From: Gerald Monroe <>
Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2011 12:13:33 -0600
Subject: Re: CryoNet #33428 - #33434
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Jens Rabis : Here's what I think you are getting at. I'm just guessing, due
to the poor translation, but you're reminding me of another issue.
As we know from experience, most human memory is "recognition". Most of our
memories as human beings are vague enough that we cannot directly recall
them - we have to be exposed to some trigger and we remember pieces of the
past. A reasonable assumption is that this is true at the hardware level :
the reason our memories are like that is because the brain doesn't have
enough capacity (due to noise) to accurately store most of our memories
directly, indstead storing them implicitly.
Well, the freezing process and the illness months prior to death is going to
do considerable damage to our memories. We can only hope that current
freezing techniques save enough for revival to be worthwhile. In any case,
it would probably help the entities restoring us if they had some reference
points - videos and photographs and journals of events we were at and
thoughts that we experienced. This very well might be a key - if the
entities restoring us could locate a specific event's actual neural traces
in our brains, they could possibly more accurately decode the patterns our
specific brain uses to store information, and solve for unknown variables
more accurately.
To show what I mean, let's talk a little math. Suppose that experience X
causes one particular synapse of many to be updated and now it has a firing
potential contribution of 0.2. (on a scale of 0 to 1, with 1 being a 100%
chance that the target neuron will fire if the neuron supplying this
particular synapse with an AP. a 0.2 means 20%). Experience X was a very
strong memory - perhaps a key event during your wedding - and over time the
memory is accessed multiple times, causing the brain to somehow reinforce
the structure holding the memory. Anyways, the patient becomes ill, dies,
and is cryopreserved under average conditions for the present day. All this
trauma, including the freezing, has damaged the structure holding the
memory. A super-intelligent entity in the future analyzes the atomic
mapping of that synapse and calculates a firing potential contribution of
0.1 based upon this entity's vast knowledge of neuroscience.
Well, now the being putting you back together is going to get it wrong.
If the entity has no way of correcting for unknown damage, the final result
won't be pretty. But suppose it has a videodisc, stored in the salt mines
for a few hundred years, of that same wedding. And somehow the entity can
isolate the actual mapping of the event to a section of neural tissue and
figures out what the firing potential of that specific neuron SHOULD be if
it's storing that particular bit of data. Just a linear equation here A*b =
C, or 0.2 * b = 0.1. b = 0.5, so the entity knows that neurons in this
region need their firing potentials boosted by 2. And it uses that as a
clue for other regions of the brain.
Please realize : the true complexity would be immense. It would be many
equations interacting, with many unknown variables. The math for this may
not have even been invented yet - but even though I cannot describe the
math, I can say that more information always helps. The entity would need
the kind of brain power to look at 7 * 10^14 synapses to do this kind of
analysis, and would almost certainly have to be sentient. This is one of
the reasons I am in favor of 'electronic uploads' - because if the humans of
300 years from now are no more intelligent than those of us today, they will
not be able to bring back patients cryopreserved with significant damage.
But if you took a brilliant scientist or engineer, cryopreserved under
near-perfect conditions with future advances in the technology, and made an
electronic analogue of this person, said person could probably solve many of
these difficult problems aided by millions or billions of times the brain
performance of a human alive today.
But what it comes to is : in theory, you should journal as much of your life
as possible. Save as many photos and videos as you can, and so on. That
stuff needs to be saved on media that will survive for centuries and given
to the cryonics provider on a routine basis for long term storage. To be
honest, I am not doing this and I don't know if I ever will make the time to
do so. This is more of an "in theory, you should avoid all trans-fats" kind
of message.
Gerald
Monroe
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