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

Post by paulcole » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 8:20 PM UTC

acrefoot wrote: post #18

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’…

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…

Post by sulam » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 8:20 PM UTC

sulam wrote: post #91

sarabande wrote: post #6

In 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 feels straightforward to me. The you that is now, pre-preservation, will be dead. The you that is then, post-restoration, will be alive and believe and behave as if they are you. It's convenient that this process (as described) kills you, because that simplifies things quite a lot. Scanning is more complicated, and I suspect if technology ever arrives that allows for it we will treat such scans as "heirs of the…

Post by Spivak » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 8:24 PM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #90

doorbumper wrote: post #83

It seems interesting from the perspective of the customer, but the really interesting thing is that if this succeeds, they will have access to brain imaging data that no one else has. You can't normally get such detailed scans of a human brain, because it requires the human to die. It's a business model that allows them to accelerate the pace of research without the human rights violations that come from human experi…

It's unclear to me how the euthanized brain donors "win" in the absence of proof that memories can be recovered.

Post by doorbumper » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 8:25 PM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #90

doorbumper wrote: post #83

It seems interesting from the perspective of the customer, but the really interesting thing is that if this succeeds, they will have access to brain imaging data that no one else has. You can't normally get such detailed scans of a human brain, because it requires the human to die. It's a business model that allows them to accelerate the pace of research without the human rights violations that come from human experi…

It's unclear to me how the euthanized brain donors "win" in the absence of proof that memories can be recovered.

Post by debrisapron » Tue, Mar 13, 2018, 8:28 PM UTC