Yeah, right.
Wouldn’t be surprised if Peter Thiel puts money into this, though.
The promise of “preservation today, resurrection tomorrow” always rings hollow when the people doing the preserving don’t understand the underlying mechanisms involved.
We look at the ancient Egyptians and think of how naive they were in discarding the brains of the people they hoped would be reanimated one day. We look at the cryonics proponents of the 1960s and think of how naive they were in freezing people solid, thus destroying every single cell in the body at the microscopic level. Who knows what levels of naïveté future generations will mock this effort for.
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Good Lord.
Even if this were to work (which it won’t), why can’t these fools comprehend that creating a simulacrumnof yourself is NOT THE SAME AS PRESERVING YOURSELF? A NEW, IDENTICAL ENTITY IS STILL, BY DEFINITION, A DIFFERENT ENTITY!
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It’s going to be pretty much like this anyway:
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If completely successful, the result would be one dead idiot and another duplicate idiot taking its place — it’s a net loss for everyone involved.
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That presumes that the “connectome” is the brain, essentially - that it contains all the information needed to reconstruct the person’s mind. Except we know that’s not true - it’s only a part (and we’re not even clear how significant a part). So it may not be 100% wrong, but it’s not any part right.
And in this case, the information isn’t still (all) there, so…
Also, we know enough to mock them for naïveté now.
I’ve seen some people recognize that, but are doing the preservation for loved ones - not seemingly realizing that those loved ones will be long dead before any kind of mind duplication process becomes remotely feasible (if ever).
I guess it’s all an attempted act of altruism for one’s future duplicate…
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“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.”
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Oh, oh! Just hear me out here. I’ve got an even better business plan! No freezing or preservation crap needed. Here it is: you come visit me every week and give me some cold hard cash. You profess to believe wholeheartedly in an idea, and you agree to say a few things here and there when I ask you to. You agree to be nice to people and that sort of thing. Presto! After you die you will, despite all appearances, live forever in bliss!
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Me, five years ago, when the Brain Preservation Prize first showed up:
The well-intentioned people at the Brain Preservation Foundation appear to be computer engineers rather than neuroscientists and thus they have seriously underestimated the difficulty of the task, such as has NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE in the history of Artificial Intelligence.
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They have obviously been reading a lot of Cory’s Walkaway
Also, the dynamic behavior of the brain may be just as important as the final static state, so it may not be possible to bring the person back at the end of the day.
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And look how well that turned out:
‘What happened to her?’
‘She died, of course, in the process of being scanned. The destructive mapping was so swift that half her brain was still functioning normally while the other half was torn apart’
‘I’m sorry - even though I know she volunteered for it.’
‘Don’t be. She was actually one of the lucky ones. Do you know the story, Ana?’
'I’m not from around here. ’
‘No; that was what I heard - that you were a soldier once, and that something terrible happened to you. Well, let me tell you this much. The scannings were all successful. The problem lay in the software which was supposed to execute the scanned information; to allow the alphas to evolve forward in time and experience awareness, emotion, memory - everything that makes us human. It worked well enough until the last of the Eighty had been scanned, a year after the first. But then strange pathologies began to emerge amongst the early volunteers. They crashed irrecoverably, or locked themselves in infinite loops.’
(TIL: spoiler blur doesn’t work on multiline edits, only line by line 
)
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Do you want the good news first or the bad news first?
Uh… good news?
The good news is we’re going to kill you.
Jesus Christ! If that’s the good news, what’s the bad news?
We’re going to charge you a lot of money in advance.
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We all know that the future will be just full of people willing to provide obsolete connectomes with free computronium and remedial acculturation; rather than making copies to be subjected to rigorous archeological scrutiny or used to control trash mobs in their MMORPGs; right?
Right?
Ok, can I at least have a mouth for screaming?
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Yeah, what they want to do may not even be theoretically possible; certainly what’s going on in the brain bio-chemically is important, and that’s not information they can capture, or are even considering.
What’s hilarious is, having failed to learn the lessons of monstrously underestimating the difficulty of problems in AI, all these computer scientists are taking on other fields like this and longevity research, where they’re doing the same thing, but also failing to understand the science of the new field, too. I often think, “Why don’t you stick to just being incompetent in your own field?”
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Username checks out
“When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.” - Isaac Asimov
We’re not at “spherical earth” level yet. But we’re not as wrong as the Egyptians, either.
@Fef The part where it is physical nonsense, because identical configurations of matter and energy don’t have distinct identities, and if they did we’d get different results than we do from basic quantum mechanical phenomena?
If you actually had enough information to recreate a living brain (which this start-up doesn’t, but which anyone capable of making a precise digital simulacrum would), then it would necessarily be you. If you made two, or if you were alive throughout the process, there would be no fact of the matter as to which was “original.” There is also, by the way, no fact of the matter as to whether you are made of the “same atoms” as you were on nanosecond ago, and they’re definitely not in the same configuration.
So go ahead and tell me, precisely, what the difference is, and where the line lies, and why, as to what type and degree of change would make “you” into “not you.”
You now owe Harlan Ellison two dollars.
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From seeing the photo with the article I have one practical question: Does anyone sell caramels in the shape of brains? Like decent caramels, but brain-shaped.
I’m finding gummy brains, of course, and these chocolate brains filled with marshmallow (others with Oreos, hmm), but so far no solid caramels:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/578777414/brain-chocolate-covered-marshmallow10?ref=shop_home_active_12
There’s a one-pound chocolate brain, tho:
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In other news, I propose to take the circuit diagram of a RAM chip, ignore the specific electronic role of the individual junctions, and thereby reconstruct the programs that were stored on it.
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