I guess that's one way of managing customer expectation.
Getting to non-fatal is just a future implementation detail
It’s a feature not a bug.
A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”
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Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”
#12In the case when you die, but your brain still exists, and it starts processing it again in a new host (computer or organic), isn't that not you anymore? Why would my former self want that? Is this a solved philosophical problem for which literature exists?
I feel the same way. There's a scene in the book Old Man's War by John Scalzi which drives this point home in a way that has really stuck with me.
Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”
#13Reconstructing a human in silico from a dead brain is likely to be a very expensive process. Why would anyone in the future be interested in going through with it for any more than a few select old brains when there will be plenty of dead brains to go around at that time?
Kindness. It's an endangered species nowadays but it used to increase with time and wealth, and perhaps when wealth rises again the trend will return.
Or I'll do it myself if I can.
Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”
#14Reconstructing a human in silico from a dead brain is likely to be a very expensive process. Why would anyone in the future be interested in going through with it for any more than a few select old brains when there will be plenty of dead brains to go around at that time?
You memorize the bitcoin private key before preservation. In a way that requires consciousness to reconstruct. Public key verifies the value and there’s a smart contract with some percentage to the successful recoverer. Depending on the recoverer’s profit margin they will restore whenever there’s enough value to make it worthwhile. Whether bitcoin will exist and whether it will appreciate is a different story. But as…
Then they threaten to resurrect you 1000x and torture each of your resurrected selves for 1000 years unless you tell them the private key.
Roko's basilisk meets bitcoin.
Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”
#15I'm not sure I'd want to be the one to test the MVP.
Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”
#16In the case when you die, but your brain still exists, and it starts processing it again in a new host (computer or organic), isn't that not you anymore? Why would my former self want that? Is this a solved philosophical problem for which literature exists?
If you want to get into some of the literature around mind uploading, I'd start with some of Daniel Dennett's work such as "Consciousness Explained". If you think that it's possible for a computer program to have its own sense of self, then it's interesting to think about what it would feel like for that program to be stopped, copied to a new computer, and then started again. There's definitely a lot of literature and debate around these issues!
Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”
#17“What if we told you we can backup your mind?” ...and never restore it. As someone who has lived through many backup formats that stop being supported, don’t work, or decay with time this seems monumentally stupid as anything other than basic research. I applaud their goal, digital sentience, but sorry for any of their customers. They need a pitch that works on the recently dead (eg, current cryo companies) as I don’…
What probability of restoration would be high enough to consider it? The future timelines in which restoration does happen are probably extremely interesting to be part of, given how far tech would have progressed. (There are lots of sucky future timelines too, say with nuclear holocausts, where you'd be unlikely to be restored.)
No: 100% chance of death.
Yes: 100-X% chance of death, X% chance of getting to see a super-interesting future.
For me, X wouldn't have to be very high to make it worth trying.
Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”
#18“What if we told you we can backup your mind?” ...and never restore it. As someone who has lived through many backup formats that stop being supported, don’t work, or decay with time this seems monumentally stupid as anything other than basic research. I applaud their goal, digital sentience, but sorry for any of their customers. They need a pitch that works on the recently dead (eg, current cryo companies) as I don’…
Backup is a misnomer here--it's a fixation of the biological tissues. So the format for preservation matches the structure of the original neural tissue down do the nanometer scale, which is a format nature has deemed appropriate to stabilize on the time scales we care about.
I agree that there's research to be done, which is why we're not offering a product at this time, and may not for years.
I would say that even more research needs to be done for any hope of a protocol that preserves synaptic details in postmortem cases hours after death (as many cryonics companies seem to be peddling). If you're saying "recently" to mean <20 minutes after death, that complicates the distribution enormously, but it's not outside the realm of what Nectome may develop later.
Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”
#19In the case when you die, but your brain still exists, and it starts processing it again in a new host (computer or organic), isn't that not you anymore? Why would my former self want that? Is this a solved philosophical problem for which literature exists?
This question descends from an ancient philosophical question; see the Ship of Theseus[0].
CGP Grey has a good look at the question wrt Star Trek teleportation[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus [1] https://youtu.be/nQHBAdShgYI
Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”
#20Reconstructing a human in silico from a dead brain is likely to be a very expensive process. Why would anyone in the future be interested in going through with it for any more than a few select old brains when there will be plenty of dead brains to go around at that time?
>likely to be a very expensive process.
Obviously it's a huge punt with no guarantee of success, but I would think that in a future that supports such a procedure, the concept of "expensive" won't exist to the same degree as it does now.