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

technologyreview.com

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

#231

Post by taneq »

Izkata wrote: post #150
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…

My favourite: > Altman tells MIT Technology Review he’s pretty sure minds will be digitized in his lifetime. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” he says. It's like the cloud is _still_ just a pseudo-magical place [0] we just need to get access to, then all our dreams can come true. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digimon

> It's like the cloud is _still_ just a pseudo-magical place

Like Tahiti. It's a magical place.

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

#232

Post by prepend »

notahacker wrote: post #204
prepend wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current trends show a stabilizing population around 11 billion just after 2100. Income inequality and “expensive” are not exclusive. If the median income is $1B in current dollars with lots of zettanaires (10^21 vs 10^9 for bikkionaires) you will have high income inequality but still have plenty with few things expensive. Income inequality, with no other info, is not necessarily bad. https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Publi…

The population won't stabilize around 11 billion in the unlikely event that affordable solutions to significantly extend life exist, never mind the technology to resurrect the dead from stored brains...

That’s a good point. But it will stabilize at a higher point. Life extension means fewer children. Just like urbanization means fewer children.

The trend is that as societies become more organized, there are fewer kids.

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

#233

Post by Veedrac »

noetic_techy wrote: post #107

This is going to sound a bit out there, but what if your brain is simply an antenna for your consciousness to come through from wherever. Has anyone actually tried to boot up an artificial brain derived from a real organism? I'd like to see a proof of concept that your brain IS indeed the seat of your consciousness, and not just a fancy quantum antenna.

The trivial dismissal of most of these problems is to realize that whatever features we have must have evolved, and it would be a statistical miracle for the substrate that evolution discovered to just happen to be uniquely capable of dualism.

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

#234

Post by notahacker »

sowbug wrote: post #166
jjr8 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, interesting. Assuming resurrecting you was easier than picking your brain, there would be the problem of you lying, both when you died and after you were brought back to life. How would they deal with that? I guess they could just kill you again. But would the threat of that happening in the future deter you from lying at time of death, when you have nothing else to lose? It seems like there would need to be sys…

You're describing public-key cryptography. Sign a message to prove you know a private key that also authorizes the release of funds. This happens to be exactly the functionality of Bitcoin. It is debatable whether known public-key cryptography systems will survive attack for the amount of time under discussion here. I suspect the hack will be to extract the secret from the brain being resurrected, recover the funds,…

A future in which adequately restoring the running processes of the 100 billion neurons of a partly-deteriorated human brain shorn of its body is less difficult than cracking early 2000s public key cryptography sounds like a future sufficiently unlikely to discount when making future plans...

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

#235

Post by noetic_techy »

tbabb wrote: post #211
noetic_techy wrote: post #107

This is going to sound a bit out there, but what if your brain is simply an antenna for your consciousness to come through from wherever. Has anyone actually tried to boot up an artificial brain derived from a real organism? I'd like to see a proof of concept that your brain IS indeed the seat of your consciousness, and not just a fancy quantum antenna.

We know all the matter that the brain is made out of, and we know what interactions are possible with that matter, because we've done extensive experiments with particle accelerators. If there were something that affected baryonic matter besides the four fundamental forces, we would know about it. In other words, we know with certainty that there is no physical mechanism by which some "external consciousness" could i…

Maybe you don't need to make as grand a leap outside of mainstream physics as you think:

https://phys.org/news/2014-01-discovery-quantum-vibrations-m...

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

#237

Post by noetic_techy »

Erlangolem wrote: post #133
noetic_techy wrote: post #107

This is going to sound a bit out there, but what if your brain is simply an antenna for your consciousness to come through from wherever. Has anyone actually tried to boot up an artificial brain derived from a real organism? I'd like to see a proof of concept that your brain IS indeed the seat of your consciousness, and not just a fancy quantum antenna.

It’s called dualism, and you’re basically proposing a soul in 21st century language. Like a soul, it’s not testable, and lacks any evidence in favor of it, while requiring a new set of assumptions which cannot be tested. You’re also proposing some kind of new physics, which again, is somehow complementary to and yet hidden from current current theories.

No new physics may be necessary:

https://phys.org/news/2014-01-discovery-quantum-vibrations-m...

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

#238

Post by dingo_bat »

deegles wrote: post #190
bulletsvshumans wrote: post #151

If folks really want to make sure they come back from the dead, they might also think about setting up proper incentives for performing the potentially highly laborious process that resurrection might entail even 100+ years from now. It might be helpful to place a sort of back-to-life bounty on yourself, to be held in escrow, and only to be paid out upon successful resurrection. The bigger the bounty, the higher your…

Memorize a private key to a Crypto wallet and transfer all of your assets to it in the days leading up to uploading? And of course let everyone know that's the case beforehand!

Why would people 200 years into the future believe your assertion?

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

#239

Post by [deleted] »

matte_black wrote: post #163
noetic_techy wrote: post #107

This is going to sound a bit out there, but what if your brain is simply an antenna for your consciousness to come through from wherever. Has anyone actually tried to boot up an artificial brain derived from a real organism? I'd like to see a proof of concept that your brain IS indeed the seat of your consciousness, and not just a fancy quantum antenna.

If you've ever suffered from Depersonalization/Derealization disorder, it will become very clear that your mind and your consciousness are not the same thing at all . DP/DR is quite possibly the worst mental disorder you can ever fall into. It is the feeling where you are convinced everything around you is not real, you see people you know, you know they are significant, but they just feel like actors in a show and y…

[deleted]

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

#240

Post by matte_black »

blt wrote: post #193
matte_black wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've ever suffered from Depersonalization/Derealization disorder, it will become very clear that your mind and your consciousness are not the same thing at all . DP/DR is quite possibly the worst mental disorder you can ever fall into. It is the feeling where you are convinced everything around you is not real, you see people you know, you know they are significant, but they just feel like actors in a show and y…

Any links to interesting sources about this?

Read the subreddit for DP/DR victims. Many tortured souls there.
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