From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Feb 23 2000 - 15:59:40 MST
I get the impression that Billy Brown is talking about post-Singularity
entities, while Eugene Leitl is talking about _Nanomedicine_. These are
radically different levels of technology. By way of making the point
(rather than suggesting technologies to bet your life on):
1) I've seen, oh, at least three different proposals for
femtotechnology, which is to say machines built on the scale of nucleons
rather than atoms. Given that kind of 'tech, it would be easy enough to
read out the position of every single atom in the frozen brain.
2) The space of possible human minds is much smaller than the space of
possible brains. Given enough intelligence, it would be possible to
distinguish plausible reconstructions from implausible ones.
So yeah, under those circumstances, I think the grain size preserved by
dropping your head in a bucket of liquid nitrogen contains all the
relevant information about the brain, as I said before in greater
detail. Whether you can get that information back out using
micron-scale robots following a blind reconstructive pattern is another issue.
It's worth remembering that the design for a six-degrees-of-freedom
manipulator specified in _Nanosystems_ would have been about 4 million
atoms in size, while the actual atomic-scale specification worked out by
Drexler seven years later contained only 2,596 atoms(*). So one might
justifiably expect that the devices described in _Nanosystems_ or
_Nanomedicine_ are the nanotechnological equivalent of vacuum tubes...
(*) http://www.imm.org/Parts/Parts2.html
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html
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