From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Aug 11 1999 - 21:07:13 MDT
> Spike Jones <spike66@ibm.net> wrote:
> John, this is not the answer to your question, but I did get a paradigm
> shift from talking to Eric Drexler. I confessed to him that I found the
> whole notion of cryonics most distasteful, and that I was willing to try
> *anything* including caloric restriction, giving up masturbation, *anything*,
> in order to live long enough to upload without having to take the ol'
> cold bath. His point was, the only other two options to cryonics
> currently is to be incinerated or devoured by microbes. Ill take...
> nitrogen for 500 please Alex.
For the record book, did Eric first present this pardigm at Extro3
or at the 1998 Foresight Institute Senior Associates gathering?
I seem to remember it being part of the discussion regarding the first
presentation of the Crit software, but my memory is fuzzy and I'm
unsure of when this occured.
I will freely admit to "borrowing" Eric's comments in my discussions
of this material.
> Nowthen, with current thinking, there is a good chance that one would
> need to be frozen *anyway*, in order to be uploaded. Or, not so?
No, absolutely not. You "probably" do not need to be frozen (or dead) to
be copied/uploaded. However, the degree to which your brain is "active"
during the upload, will certainly "blur" the quality of the copy.
> Seems conceptually easier for nanoprobes to measure the positions
> of each neuron, and the... [what?] of each synapse, in order to map
> the brain into a machine, if the brain is not moving while the process
> is taking place. Or is this in line with current thinking?
You simply must read Nanomedicine for us to have a good discussion
about this. It is fairly clear that (a) nanobots can map the
location and strength of the synapses, (b) can do real time monitoring
of the neuronal firing noninvasively (by monitoring power dissipation
at the 1 mK level), and (c) can outmessage this information in real
time (though it may require a not-invisible fiber optic bundle).
What isn't clear to me at this time is whether or not additional
cooling capacity would be needed in the brain to handle the power
requirements for this monitoring/outmessaging, or whether the
network installation could potentially disrupt normal brain
functioning (though I would believe we could recover from this
if it is done gradually).
Robert
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