I think they don’t transmit the actual molecules as matter-via-radio, but rather they transmit the pattern, which is then reassembled with local molecules. Similar to how replicators have a store of molecules to combine.
IIRC that’s what blew up the status quo in Diamond Age, a kid copying himself.
No, that was Calvin & Hobbes.
Forget neural-patterning-immortality-for nerds; we might as well be banging rocks together when it comes to handling routine malfunctions in mostly, but not entirely, well functioning organic brains.
Chatter about the imminent understanding of the brain from us is about as plausible as listening to the guy who discovered that mixing copper and tin yields something interesting rhapsodizing about the imminent future of nanite assemblers and self-assembling microstructures.
A lot of EU neuroscientists were unimpressed when Markram convinced the funding bodies to put all the money into his Human Brain simulation project, which is working about as well as his Frontiers open-access publishing MLM, i.e. a debacle.
Contrary to public assumptions that the HBP would generate knowledge about how the brain works, the project is turning into an expensive database-management project with a hunt for new computing architectures.
Sometimes the signal bounces back, and hilarity ensues.
No you wouldn’t. You’d boast incessantly about your digitally simulated tomatoes till they all EMP’d themselves 
(or hired jacked up teenage Russian VXers to give them simulated fungus gnats. MWUHAHAHAAAAAAAAA!!!)
Or, y’know… it already happened.
She should probably learn the difference between downloading and uploading first. Baby steps, you know.
If you think that nobody notices that about Star Trek transporters, then you really haven’t been paying attention.
Meanwhile, I won’t take you up on your kind offer right now, as I haven’t finished with this body yet. But keep your copy on file, in case I have a stroke, or some misguided philanthropist kills me. Then you can argue with my copy about whether or not he’s “the same” as the “original”.
This is me first thing every morning.
Seriously, give it a read. It won’t take long.
There was a Star Trek answer to this. See…
The volume of data in every atom of a person being transported is so vast that it could not practically be stored and duplicated. You have to have a live back-to-back deconstruction and reconstruction, and you only get one copy if it works.
The point about simulating intelligence at the neuron level is quite a different thing. We might be able to make something that behaves in an intelligent way. If we can do that, then we will probably be able to copy that intelligence to another machine. But unpicking a soft, trained system is fiendishly difficult. Even tiny ones are pretty mysterious. See…
I never thought I’d write this sentence, as I really enjoyed The Mind’s I when I read it years ago along with some other Dennett books. But…in this case he is simply wrong as a matter of physical reality. The idea that one of the people is a copy and one the original depends on some kind of concept of identity continuity through particular atoms and molecules.
Unfortunately the idea of “particular atoms and molecules” is physical nonsense. There is no such thing. Identical atoms are fundamentally indistinguishable in principle, this is an observed and well understood physical fact. If for example you say the sentence “suppose I switched around all the carbon atoms in one body for those in the other” this is exactly the same even in principle as saying “nothing happened.” Philosophy doesn’t enter into it.
There is no copy. There are two originals. If there is to be a meaningful concept of personal identity, it has to relate to pattern of information or matter, which can in principle be instantiated more than once.
“I thought you said you could just read his brain electronically.”
“Oh yes,but we’d have to get it out first.”
“It’s got to be prepared.”
“Treated.”
“Diced.”
FWIW, people don’t know much about simulating trees either, or any number of other complex processes. Many have been happy with extremely reductive models of the universe over the past few centuries. Maybe when the model is supposed to run one’s personality will get some of the stragglers over such notions of what passes for sufficient understanding.
I love computer engineering and cognitive science, but I don’t find the current state of brain simulation to be a very pressing problem. It’s like saying: “You know, I am probably not capable of doing the most difficult thing I can think of…” It is really a fairly arbitrary and quite difficult goal to measure work against.
The point about the Human Brain Project is that the faint possibility of meaningful brain simulation was never more than a secondary benefit.
It was nominally about neuroscience, but the applications and the subsequent rationales describe it as a convenient way of turning a billion dollars of research funding into corporate welfare for the supercomputer industry. Hence the annoyance among neuroscientists.
If no god plays dice with the universe, then no scientist plays dice with my brain!
Sounds like I’ll need to make some time to read the linked article. In the abstract what you are saying reminds me of the so-called “AI bubble” where lots of great research and technology came out of it, but it couldn’t overcome lots of misleading hype.
Until we understand about “mind” we aren’t going to copy it.
That’s pretty good, thanks!
