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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”

#71

Post by perl4ever »

tlb wrote: post #17
prepend wrote: post #8

“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 sup…

There's no chance of you getting to see a "super-interesting future". This comment is as weird to me as confusing a book on Relativity with Einstein. If you had a terminal disease, and a twin, would you expect to wake up in the body of your twin after death?

Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#72

Post by coldacid »

omegaworks wrote: post #53

Michael Hendricks' take is the best: > “Burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems?” Hendricks told me this week after reviewing Nectome’s website. “I hope future people are appalled that in the 21st century, the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever on the backs of their desc…

On the upside, it's not like they'll need physical bodies for their immortality. Just a quantum mainframe with an unlimited power supply.

Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#73

Post by Balgair »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #67
kaizendad wrote: post #28

Seems like a big bet on the concept that the physical structure of the brain preserves enough information to resurrect a consciousness. If electrical transmissions are at all required, then this would render a brain nothing more than an amusing curio. Although, given that their target market is already those planning to be euthanized, I suppose the tradeoff of one's brain being an amusing curio vs. one's brain being…

>If electrical transmissions are at all required, then this would render a brain nothing more than an amusing curio. That fact that people sometimes survive lightning strikes and epileptic fits suggests that normal brain activity can be restarted after a disruption.

The current research in Neuro is that a memory a synaptic condition, in that some synapse is structured in some way in relation to other neurons. There are W-many GABA receptors and X-many vesicles, Y-many AMPA receptors and Z-many neurotransmitters. Each receptor is in some state of flux in terms of it's age and other chemical modifiers on the protein. The synapse itself is tethered in some way and has structural proteins in it (not all of which are known these days). The astrocytes and glia that surround each synapse are also modifying the region, including some uptake/downtake of receptors and neurotransmitter vesicles (cool, very recent stuff). Additionally, the cells themselves are regulating the synapses in relation to the other synapses in the cell and the extra-cellular environment. Note: not all neurons 'fire' via synapses, some are just directly attached to a cell's soma (main cell body where the nucleus is). It's Bio, everything is crazy.

Still, that synapse is thought to be the main modification area of neuronal firing, in that it acts like a classical memristor. So, though electrical activity is not required and lightning/shocks can be sustained (by some miracle), the 'self'/mind is the network of the synapses (GIANT caveats apply here). Also, even under heavy anesthesia, the neurons are firing and active, jsut not coherently.

If you can preserve the synaptic weights, their dynamics, and their network, you should be able to reconstruct the 'mind' of another person. However, that is one instant in time and space. You'd need to know where pretty much every ion was and it's momentum, and I'm pretty sure that's impossible (Heisenberg and all that jazz).

Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#74

Post by rdiddly »

PeanutNore wrote: post #42

“Burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems?” Hendricks told me this week after reviewing Nectome’s website. “I hope future people are appalled that in the 21st century, the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever on the backs of their descendants. I mean, it’s a joke, right? Th…

I imagine archaeologists of the future will talk condescendingly about us the same way we talk about the ancient Egyptians and their quaint belief that things they did to the body would have some kind of effect in the afterlife.

Nonetheless, here in our time, it brilliantly crosses/combines...

funeral services, a highly lucrative field

scifi, including all its expansiveness

the desperate compensatory technological hubris of people who know deep down that the world is quietly going down the shitter

and/or narcissism (on which nobody ever went broke)

Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#75

Post by cwkoss »

PeanutNore wrote: post #42

“Burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems?” Hendricks told me this week after reviewing Nectome’s website. “I hope future people are appalled that in the 21st century, the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever on the backs of their descendants. I mean, it’s a joke, right? Th…

Anyone who is cryopreserved, but is viewed as a villian in the zeitgeist of the future, could end up being booted up into a personal hell for the amusement/vindictiveness of future people.

If a 'Hitler' VM was publicly available online, how many people would torture it? What are the ethics around torturing virtual consciousnesses of evil people?

Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#76

Post by johntb86 »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #67
kaizendad wrote: post #28

Seems like a big bet on the concept that the physical structure of the brain preserves enough information to resurrect a consciousness. If electrical transmissions are at all required, then this would render a brain nothing more than an amusing curio. Although, given that their target market is already those planning to be euthanized, I suppose the tradeoff of one's brain being an amusing curio vs. one's brain being…

>If electrical transmissions are at all required, then this would render a brain nothing more than an amusing curio. That fact that people sometimes survive lightning strikes and epileptic fits suggests that normal brain activity can be restarted after a disruption.

Another example is people undergoing deep hypothermic circulatory arrest, where they can only start surgery after an EEG showing no neural activity (electrocerebral silence).

Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#77

Post by ImSkeptical »

dontreact wrote: post #5

Reconstructing 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?

I have thought about building a project that would try to maintain wealth after my death. I imagine the components of this as being...

1. Logic to accumulate wealth. This would need an API to create and manage an investment account for stocks, bonds, crypto, whatever. It analyses current and historical data for a time, then makes investment decisions based on minimizing risks and long term gains.

2. A reproduction module. This would be responsible for finding a freelance programmer to produce new versions of each module keeping the system current. This would need methods like findReliableFreelancer or provideSpec runTests and issuePayment.

3. Cloning. Like the Reproduction module, but this will be done entirely with the system's own code and not recruiting a new developer. E.g. create a new AWS account, get a new host, copy your modules, get it running, do the sanity checks, provide it seed money.

4. Orchestration. The various hosts running this code would need to communicate, reporting their existence, the money they have available, etc. If the system winds up having some purpose (e.g. convincing someone to restore me after death) then orchestration might come up. Otherwise this could be used to limit reproduction, stop sharing resources with bad actors, and share resources with good actors. This would also need to track which systems we were already running on (e.g. if we are currently 80% on AWS we should direct expansion towards Digital Ocean, or future equivalents, try to expand into different languages, countries, and planets).

I imagine kicking the project off a decade or two before my anticipated death in order to work out kinks and to hopefully live long enough to verify it will actually work and grow in real life conditions.

After my death, I imagine it running for centuries, slowly accumulating more and more wealth. Perhaps disbursing some amount every decade if I could think of a way to track descendents. Maybe asking people to restore me from cryo freezing. Maybe just creating a legal puzzle for folks 500 years from now, when they have to unwind what might be a multibillion dollar fortune belonging to someone long gone.

Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#78

Post by cityofdelusion »

perl4ever wrote: post #71
tlb wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sup…

There's no chance of you getting to see a "super-interesting future". This comment is as weird to me as confusing a book on Relativity with Einstein. If you had a terminal disease, and a twin, would you expect to wake up in the body of your twin after death?

A twin does not have a shared memory history with yourself, though. I don't think its a stretch to say that two brains with the same memories are in fact, the same person identity-wise. It is why we are considered the same person after having a seizure, or falling asleep, or waking from a coma (or any other consciousness-halting event).

We're even more liberal with the concept of identity in society -- consider that I share nearly nothing (physical or memory) with 1-day old me, yet we are considered the same person.

Re: A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

#79

Post by [deleted] »

cwkoss wrote: post #75
PeanutNore wrote: post #42

“Burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems?” Hendricks told me this week after reviewing Nectome’s website. “I hope future people are appalled that in the 21st century, the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever on the backs of their descendants. I mean, it’s a joke, right? Th…

Anyone who is cryopreserved, but is viewed as a villian in the zeitgeist of the future, could end up being booted up into a personal hell for the amusement/vindictiveness of future people. If a 'Hitler' VM was publicly available online, how many people would torture it? What are the ethics around torturing virtual consciousnesses of evil people?

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